The Sunday Jerk and the Hourglass

I knew it was happening again the moment my stomach tightened.

It was a perfect Wisconsin Sunday. The Packers were on. My kids were laughing in the other room. The kind of day you wish you could bottle up and keep forever.

And then, around 2 or 3 p.m., the shift hit.
That quiet dread that creeps in long before Monday even arrives.
The kind of dread that doesn’t make sense until you realize the average adult spends around 90,000 hours of their life at work. No wonder it feels heavy.

If you’ve ever felt it, you know the exact sensation.
It’s like an hourglass flips over somewhere inside your chest.
Grains of sand start slipping faster than you can stop them.
You want to freeze time.
You want the day to hold still.
But it won’t.

Because Monday is coming.

Back then I didn’t call it anxiety. I called it something else.
I called it becoming the “Sunday jerk.”
Shorter fuse. Less patience. More agitation.
Not because my family did anything wrong, but because I was already halfway back at work in my mind.

 Work was the thing I survived so I could get back to my real life.
That was the frame I lived in.
There was work.
And there was life.
Separate. Opposed.
And I was stuck in the middle trying to balance them like two competing forces I could never keep steady.

What I didn’t realize is that this mindset was stealing the very thing I wanted more of.
It was stealing joy from the only life I actually had.

Around that same season, I was in and out of my dad’s office constantly.
He was our CEO at the time, and I was handling big projects that needed his input.
Sometimes I’d step in early. Sometimes late.
Sometimes all throughout the day. 

And every single time I interrupted him, he’d turn toward me with a smile.
Every. Single. Time.
Not one hint of annoyance.
No “Just give me five minutes, Joe.”
No sigh.
No tension.
Just “Yeah, Joe, what can I do for you?”

One day I finally asked him about it.
I said, “Dad, how are you always that way? I know you’re busy. I know you have stress. How is it possible you never seem bothered when I barge in?”

He paused for a moment, then said something I’ll never forget…

“Some people’s mission field is across the world. Mine is right here, at Vortex. Serving you and serving these people is my mission. When you walk in this room, you’re not interrupting the work. You are the work. You’re the end, not a means to it.”

I felt that.
And to be honest, it bothered me.

Because I wasn’t like that.
I wanted to be.
I just didn’t know how.

What he modeled for me was simple but profound.
He didn’t divide his life into categories.
He didn’t treat work as a burden to escape from or a means to something better.
He understood something I hadn’t yet learned.

It’s all just life.
And the people in it are the point.

That moment with my dad was the beginning of reclaiming my 90,000 hours.
It reframed the dread.
It erased the Sunday jerk.
It replaced the slipping hourglass with something steadier, richer, more grounded.

It gave me a way to see work not as something I had to get through, but as part of the life I wanted to live.
And the key wasn’t productivity or balance or boundaries.

It was connection.
Real human connection.
The kind that makes people feel seen and valued and important.
The kind my dad lived every day.

The kind that sits at the heart of the CARE Movement. 

Because once you realize people are the end, not the interruption, everything changes.
Your 90,000 hours finally mean something.
And so does the life you build around them.