The story goes something like this:
This period is unusually demanding, but it is temporary. When this phase passes — when the project delivers, when the company reaches the next milestone, when the situation stabilises — things will be different. The relationships will receive proper attention. The body will be properly tended. The inner life will be given the space it has been waiting for. This is what the current pace is for.
You have been telling some version of this story for longer than the specific current phase has been in progress. The phase has changed. The story has remained structurally identical. Each iteration of the story is locally convincing. The pattern, observed from sufficient distance, reveals that the story is not a description of a temporary condition — it is the permanent justification for a permanent condition.
The Yoga Sutras distinguish between Pramana — valid knowledge, direct perception of what is actually the case — and Viparyaya, false knowledge, the mistaking of a constructed perception for reality. The narrative about why the current pace is necessary and temporary is a candidate for the Viparyaya category. Not because it contains no truth — the demands are real, the necessity has genuine elements. But because it is systematically organised to prevent the direct perception of the pattern that the demands have settled into permanently.
Viktor Frankl, in the camps, observed that the prisoners who did not survive were often the ones whose story about their situation required the situation to change in a specific way — who had made their survival contingent on a particular external development. The ones who survived had updated their story to accommodate the reality rather than requiring the reality to accommodate their story. He was not describing passive acceptance. He was describing the specific cognitive flexibility that reality requires and that the defended narrative prevents. The story that insists the current conditions are temporary when they have been permanent for years is the defended narrative — and the defence costs exactly the clarity that the situation requires.
Three questions that cut through the narrative with the precision of Pramana:
How long have you been living at the current pace? Not the current phase — the underlying pace. The honest answer almost never matches the story's claim of temporariness.
What specifically will be different when the phase passes? Not generally different — specifically. Name the changes. If the answer is vague, the story is vague and is functioning as justification rather than description.
What would need to be true for the current pace to be permanently unsustainable rather than temporarily demanding? Answer this honestly. If the conditions that would make it permanently unsustainable are already present — the story is the only thing preventing that recognition.
The story is not your enemy. It has been doing protective work. The question is whether the protection is now costing more than the thing being protected.