Public Opinion Is Not the Arbiter of Truth

 

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

When I was maybe ten years old, Shasta ran a curious marketing campaign. One can of Root Beer and one of Cream Soda, along with a coupon, were delivered to every doorstep that subscribed to the Deseret News. That was it — no strings, no explanation. Just two sugary gifts waiting in the shade of a screen door (or hanging on a fence post).

You would have thought a soda truck had spilled its carefully bagged treasure across the suburbs.

One of my friends had an idea. What if we just… took the sodas, and not just ours, but everyone’s? We didn’t frame it as stealing — even though that’s what it was — we were just going on a soda run.

Porch after porch, house after house, we gathered up cans like scavenger hunters on a fizzy quest for childhood glory. I don’t remember how many homes we hit. 20? 30?

We drank some of it, laughed until our sides hurt, and then, naturally, we decided to have a “soda fight” in the side yard of our house. We shook up the cans as violently as we could, popped them open just enough to produce a stream of soda, and sprayed each other with the full force of carbonation and sugary soda stickiness.

Our joy was short-lived.

Some of our ill-gotten soda ended up on the side of my house — dripping down the siding into the raspberry bushes growing there. My dad happened to come out, saw the mess, and put an immediate end to our little escapades. We were given a hose and some rags to clean the house — what we could reach — and the assignment to go back to every home we’d “borrowed” soda from, knock on the door, and apologize.

That part wasn’t fun.

It’s my earliest memory of being seen as something I had done rather than who I was. Honestly, I was a rule-follower, especially at that age. I was a “good kid” with a strong conscience. Generally, I wanted to do what was right, but that day, what I wanted more was to be included. The mischief, I suppose, was like this invisible badge of cool.

It’s funny how some experiences serve to define us more than we could realize or appreciate in the moment.

Turns out, I’ve been chasing applause for a long time. Even when no one’s clapping.

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from measuring your life based on public perception. For so many adults, it creeps in, disguised as responsibility, excellence, or growth. It’s constantly whispering, Will they like this? Will they approve? Will this be good enough? Sometimes the “they” is clients. Sometimes it’s family. Sometimes it’s the echo of an old teacher or a younger version of myself who had very specific ideas about what success was supposed to look like.

Public approval is something I’ve been working to pull away from, but even as I’ve been writing over the last 60 days, I find myself fighting the urge to bend toward what might resonate; second-guessing sentences that feel true but might not land well. It’s a weird tension between honesty and performance.

Of course, it’s not just about writing or business — though for me, that’s where it tends to show up most.

Most of the time, it shows up when I hesitate to say what I really think to someone, because it might make them uncomfortable. It also shows up when I delay changing something — even when I know it’s right — because I’m afraid of what it might signal. Worst of all, it shows up when I keep doing something I no longer believe in because walking away would look and feel like failure.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to show up as competent and strong. As insightful, reliable, and useful.

More and more, though, I’m coming to the realization that the voice I need to listen to isn’t the crowd. It’s in me.

I’ve published pieces that got almost no reaction, but when I’ve gone back and reread them — sometimes years later — I’ve thought, that was the right thing to say.

Lately, I’ve started questioning whether every project is worth saying yes to. I want to work with people who genuinely value what I bring, not just fill my calendar. I’m learning to say no to those who once held power over my work, and yes to things that won’t pay me a dime but feel rooted in the person I’m trying to become.

Not because I’m noble. But because I’m tired of handing over the wheel. I want to make choices that come from clarity — not pressure, noise, or the need to be liked.

Public opinion and the opinion of those in power over our lives can often be loud. It’s dressed up in notifications, (polite) feedback, and “how things are usually done.” Sometimes, it’s dressed up as “only an idiot would do it that way.”

If you’re resonating with any of this, I wrote a book you might appreciate.

It’s called You Don’t Have to Escape to Be Free — a collection of honest reflections about identity, meaning, and building a life you don’t want to run away from.

You can check it out here: https://books.by/aaronpace

Those voices, those opinions, are not the arbiters of truth. They don’t know who I am when the noise stops. They don’t know what I’m building. They don’t sit across the dinner table from my wife. They don’t hear the voice of one of my kids when they say, “Thanks for being there.”

These days, the truth doesn’t earn much applause, but it does hold.

I haven’t stopped caring what people think. I still want to be respected and heard. It still stings when I make something that doesn’t connect the way I hoped it would. But I’m slowly, steadily learning to give less weight to those things.

If it’s honest, aligned with what matters to me, and helps me live with integrity — even when no one sees, maybe especially when no one sees — then that’s the measure I want to use.

The soda fight was fun, but I don’t need another one of those. I don’t need to engage in anything noisy or messy just to feel like I belong. I don’t need twenty stolen cans to prove I’m worthy of joy. I just need to tell the truth. Even if no one claps. Even if nobody sees it.

I need to keep building a life that fits — not one that looks good from the street.

And that is enough.

Bravery in the Mundane

 

Photo by Daeva miles on Unsplash

Our youngest daughter was away from home at a youth camp recently. While she was gone, my wife decided to clean her room. At one point, I walked past the doorway, door wide open, and had to do a double take.

The room looked… like new. Honestly, like someone had staged it for a real estate listing or something. The bed was made with precision. All the clothes were folded. I could actually see the floor. Where makeup and personal care products had once littered the top of the desk — now, nothing. No towers of dirty clothes. No mismatched socks stuffed in corners. Even the mirror in the corner sparkled with the kind of clean that shows you just how tired you look by 5:30 pm.

I stood there for a second and thought, “Did our daughter move and I didn’t know it? Maybe a portal opened up to an alternate dimension.”

If you know my youngest daughter, you know she’s wildly creative. She sings like an angel and can draw incredibly — though she hardly ever draws. And, like most wildly creative people, her brain and mess-making abilities move a lot faster than a broom.

She’s my youngest daughter, and I love her. I also rarely go into her room unless it’s absolutely necessary. The mess, to her, is background noise. She doesn’t have any problem pushing aside a pile of clothes on her bed to sleep. To me, though, it’s one more mental tab left open when my brain already has 55 tabs open. My mind is governed by chaos, so order in my physical world isn’t just a preference. It’s a requirement.

When I saw her room that day, I knew what it had cost my wife to make it look that way.

This wasn’t some chore my wife had to do. Our youngest daughter is approaching 18 and is definitely capable of taking care of her space. But my wife did it anyway — spent the better part of the day dragging laundry baskets up and down the stairs, shuffling furniture, sorting bits and baubles from each other, and scrubbing whatever substance was stuck to the corner of the window trim. No one asked her to. She just did it.

And when she was done, only two people on the whole planet acknowledged her efforts: me and our daughter.

My wife doesn’t really do social media much. She didn’t take before-and- after pictures with a “Look what I did” caption. Nobody applauded her efforts. I’m a spreadsheet guy, but I didn’t make a chart showing hours spent, steps taken, or shirts folded.

In the end, it was just two people who recognized what had been offered: care, in the form of some elbow grease.

It got me thinking.

So much of life is like that. Most of it, in fact. You dive into something — cleaning, paying the bills, driving to a game, making someone’s lunch, taking a call, wiping down counters or bottoms — without fanfare or the guarantee of thanks at all. You do it, not because it’s dramatic or impressive, but because something in most people says: this matters, even if no one sees it.

I like to think of this as a quiet kind of bravery.

It’s not the kind that ends up on the ten o’clock news. It’s also not the kind that gets quoted on Instagram over a breathtaking picture. I’m talking about the kind of bravery that chooses small, consistent action over self-congratulatory burnout.

Sometimes bravery looks like saying no to a good opportunity because you’d rather wash the dishes than summon the energy for one more social event. Sometimes it’s choosing a walk with your spouse over another late night hunched at the laptop. Or letting a notification go unanswered so you can keep a promise to a child — a story before bed. It takes nerve to stop proving and start paying attention. To do what’s right in front of you — quietly, consistently, imperfectly.

We live most of our lives in the mundane. I’ve driven to my office so many times that I sometimes forget the drive happened at all. It’s like my brain files those hours under “unremarkable” and moves on. But something has shifted lately. Writing every day, and sitting with these old thoughts that have become new, has slowed time down in a strange way. I’m noticing more. Remembering more. The texture of the ordinary days isn’t blurring together as much.

And in the noticing, I’m seeing how much courage it takes to build a life that I want. I’m learning to be okay with trying to build a life with my wife and kids that doesn’t impress anyone. I’m learning that life doesn’t need to scale. It just needs to hold.

I’m still working on defining what that life looks like. I’m giving myself space to acknowledge what works and what no longer serves me.

It’s a life with socks on the floor (sometimes) and laughter in the kitchen. Most importantly, though, it’s a life where the people I love keep coming home, not because it’s perfect, but because it’s safe.

That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because someone keeps showing up. Someone does the dishes when no one’s watching. Someone wipes off the mirror.

No one becomes a martyr in the mundane — and maybe that’s the point. Martyrs die for a cause. The rest of us live for one. We do the unglamorous things, not for glory, but because we want the people we love to feel steady and held.

My wife’s not a martyr in this story. She’s capable and strong, and she doesn’t clean to be a hero. She does it because she loves the people who live in this house. And because she understands something I’m still learning:

Love often looks like maintenance.

If you’re resonating with any of this, I wrote a book you might appreciate.

It’s called You Don’t Have to Escape to Be Free — a collection of honest reflections about identity, meaning, and building a life you don’t want to run away from.

You can check it out here: https://books.by/aaronpace

It looks like replacing the batteries in the smoke detector before it beeps. It looks like gassing up the car before the tank is empty. It looks like knowing your daughter probably won’t keep her room clean, but cleaning it anyway, so she remembers the people who love her.

And maybe it’s also brave to accept that your job isn’t to get credit. It’s just to keep going. To make the bed. To take the call. To fold the clothes. Not because it’s thrilling — but because it’s good.

I still think our daughter should probably clean her room more often. And she knows it. But she also knows something else. She knows we’re here. That when the weight of the world gets too loud, this house will still be standing. That she’s always welcome. That we don’t measure her worth in laundry piles or shoe placement.

She’s still learning. We all are.

That’s the whole point, I think. Not to win. Not to fix. Just to keep showing up. To keep making space. To keep choosing what matters — even when no one claps, and even when no one notices but you.

That’s bravery in the mundane.

And that is enough.

Don't Be Great. Be Consistent.

 When my two youngest boys were little, we made up a game. I can’t remember how it started, but I do remember we played it. A lot.

It was simple: we’d lay out an old exercise mat — maybe two feet by four — in the family room and line up all the Little People toys we could find. Farmers, a lion, a lamb, other animals, the three wise men, and a shepherd boy from a nativity set. Each of us would pick a character. I almost always picked the shepherd. My boys alternated between the lion and the lamb. In hindsight, that feels almost symbolic.

Once the toys were arranged, we’d take turns “bowling” our chosen figure down the mat into the lineup. The goal was to knock down as many as you could in one toss. You earned a point for each one knocked down, plus extra if your opponent’s character got knocked off the mat. When every figure had fallen, we’d set them up again. Just like bowling.

Just an old mat, some tiny plastic toys, and the three of us playing round after round.

I didn’t really enjoy the game. Honestly, it was a little boring. Crawling around on the floor for a slow-paced game of plastic-figure bowling doesn’t exactly scream good time. But I loved being with my boys. I loved that they looked forward to it — and that they knew I’d show up whenever they asked to play.

We played it for years. My youngest could barely talk when we started. He was still asking for “little lamby” long after his older brother had moved on.

And still, we played.

That’s what consistency looks like. It’s not a sprint until you’re so exhausted you can’t think straight anymore. It’s slow, steady, and just keeps showing up.

For a long time, I confused greatness with intensity. If I wasn’t pouring all my energy into something, what was the point? I chased big moments that looked impressive only because of the pressure. I thought excellence meant overextending myself until something snapped. And the worst part? I believed that breaking myself in the process made me noble.

That mindset earned me short-term praise. But over time, it made everything harder. I started resenting even the things I cared about — because I was always so tired.

Consistency, by contrast, almost feels boring. Inconsistent effort has a weird way of feeling more thrilling — until it breaks you.

Burnout doesn’t always come from working hard. It comes from working without margin, without rhythm, without breath. It comes from believing everything has to be done by me and right now. That it has to be fast and polished and worthy of a “wow.”

(Thriving on external validation is a difficult addiction to break.)

But consistency doesn’t earn wows. It builds slowly. Not through sprints, but through small, repeated steps.

Every time I played that game with my boys, I was taking one of those slow, meaningful steps.

I’ve been applying that practice to my days: showing up for a project even when progress is slow. Saying something kind even when I’m in a bad mood. Pausing before reacting. None of it is flashy. But it’s real. And it counts.

Consistency isn’t some kind of stepping stone to accomplishing something great. In a way, consistency is it’s own kind of greatness.

Most of us won’t do something in life that catches the attention of even tens of thousands. Our circles of influence will remain small. We probably won’t be remembered for our some great thing we accomplished. But we will be remembered for our steadiness. My family will. They already do.

A few weeks ago, my youngest — now far past the Little People stage — asked if I still remembered that game.

I’ve been writing through a season of rebuilding, and it led to a book I didn’t expect to write: You Don’t Have to Escape to Be Free. If you’re walking your own canyon right now and want something honest to keep you company, you can find the book here:

Aaron Pace on Books.By

What if the life you're trying to escape from is the very one you're meant to live - more fully, more honestly, and…

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Yes, I remember, and now that my family is getting older — my oldest just got married — I’m reminded about that a lot. I want to be the dad, and someday the grandpa, who still gets down on the floor to play the silly games.

That’s where I am now: still trying to rebuild a life with a bit more margin and more being true to who I was and want to be. I’m learning not to let speed and results dictate how I feel about the day. I just want to be present.

Some days, I still miss the mark. I still overextend. But I’m reminding myself that the life I want isn’t made from big moments — it’s made from small ones that play on repeat.

There’s a quote attributed to Anthony Trollope: “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules.” I’ve had enough spasmodic Hercules in me for a lifetime. I’d rather be the guy who plays the same game with a kid too young to keep score. The guy who sends the email and makes the bed and says “yes” to small, important things and “no” to the big, unimportant ones.

The guy who just keeps showing up for the right reasons.

And that is more than enough.

Stop Trying to Bounce Back

 

Photo by Andrii Zhuk on Unsplash

In 2017, I tore a tendon in my left wrist in maybe the dumbest way possible: reaching for a book on my son’s dresser. I hit the sharp corner at just the wrong angle. Other than a sharp pain that faded quickly, I didn’t realize I’d done any real damage.

The next morning, my wrist felt tight. I moved my hand in a slow, circular motion to stretch it out, and when it tilted sideways toward my elbow, something snapped — painfully — like a rubber band recoiling inside my wrist.

I couldn’t move my hand without pain. Typing hurt. Tying a tie was impossible. Every movement made it worse. Since I’m left-handed and it was my left wrist, the whole thing felt even more debilitating. To top it off, we were in the middle of selling our janitorial supply company and launching our solar business. There’s never a good time to lose the use of a limb, but this was the worst possible time for me.

Our family doctor first diagnosed the injury as a ganglion cyst. It wasn’t. Later tests confirmed a partial tendon rupture. The orthopedic surgeon advised against surgery — the tear wasn’t complete, and the risk of added complications was high. Instead, I was fitted with a brace that locked my entire lower arm in place. It ran from my fingertips to my bicep. I wore it, day and night, for six weeks. The brace hurt nearly as much as the injury did.

There are far worse injuries, many that never heal. I’m grateful mine only required six weeks in a brace and another six of therapy. Still, it taught me something I didn’t really want to learn. I was too busy to be learning life lessons.

It taught me that healing isn’t the same as bouncing back. And that sometimes what we call “resilience” is just pressure to get back to who we were before anything went wrong.

For six weeks, I typed with one hand. When I couldn’t keep up, I sat next to our office admin and dictated, line by line, what she needed to type. The reports I was working on were tied to the due diligence of the company sale, so precision mattered. I felt ridiculous and slower than I’d ever been. I was dragging the process down, and I knew it. I also watched my left arm shrink from disuse. Not that it had ever been particularly muscular, but I could see the difference — and feel it every time I tried to do something.

I believed, naively, that after six weeks I’d be back to normal. But when the brace came off, my wrist was so stiff I could hardly move it. The therapy to restore motion hurt so much I found myself wanting to put the brace back on just to avoid it. More than once, I had to remind myself that the pain was part of healing. My body wasn’t resetting to its old defaults. It was learning how to work again.

I’ve been thinking about that injury lately. And thinking about the idea of “bouncing back.” It’s such a common phrase. We use it to describe business recoveries, divorce rebounds, or any time someone is “doing better.” I’ve used it for myself too — especially when I’ve tried to climb out of burnout.

And sometimes, the phrase works fine. It can be harmless, even hopeful.

But other times? It’s not.

Sometimes, “bouncing back” feels like a mandate. Like the only acceptable outcome is to rewind, get over it, and be who you were before the hard thing happened.

But what if we can’t? Or shouldn’t?

That injury slowed me down and forced me to ask for help. My son tied my ties. My wife helped me get jackets on. My coworker typed out lines of code as I dictated, character by character.

I hated it. I didn’t handle it well. I lost my temper, got impatient, and carried frustration into conversations that didn’t deserve it.

Honestly, I was scared. And tired. As I’ve said so many times in the last sixty days, I’ve tied so much of my worth to being fast, capable, and competent. This injury stripped all of that away.

Recovery was slower than I wanted. The tendon healed in the prescribed amount of time, but the strength, speed, and confidence I had before didn’t return overnight. I had to rebuild them — intentionally and slowly. And for a little while, at least, I had to question the way I’d always done things.

Even now, years later, I still remember how it felt to not be able to type a sentence without pain. That memory comes back when I’m rushing, or when I criticize myself for not moving fast enough. It reminds me that healing isn’t about returning to who we were. It’s about learning to move forward in a new way.

We love stories of resilience. The athlete who returns after an injury. The entrepreneur who recovers after a collapse. The marriage that survives a rupture. But we often skip the middle. The slow, frustrating in-between. The part where nothing is certain and everything hurts.

The idea of bouncing back makes it sound like everything should just fall back into place, pain-free and perfect.

But I don’t want to go back to who I was before. That version of me didn’t know how to rest. He avoided help, resisted grace, and mistook exhaustion for strength.

That injury taught me something I couldn’t have learned any other way. Not just about my body — but about how I see myself. I’ve punished myself over and over for needing time. I’ve failed to offer myself the grace I try to give everyone else.

It’s been almost sixty days since I started my climb through the canyon. I’m still struggling with most of the same things. I still move too fast. Still expect too much. Still fall into old patterns where I believe the goal is to “get back to normal” instead of asking what’s worth carrying forward.

Sometimes, bouncing back is the best we can do. But when it isn’t, I want to grow forward instead. Even if it’s slow. Even if it’s painful. Even if it means letting go of who I used to be — or maybe, finding again who I really was.

Because the thing that broke? It might never be the same.

That doesn’t mean I’m broken.

It means I’m healing.

And sometimes, that is enough.

The Weight of What We Carry

 

Photo by Kerensa Pickett on Unsplash

I’m not strong. Most days, my upper body strength comes from carrying the occasional bag of topsoil or all the grocery bags in one trip, not from any kind of real weight training. Almost twenty years ago now, I learned exactly how much weight I could carry, and how far I could push it.

Like most new homes, when we moved in, the backyard was a blank (well, weed-filled) slate. Years earlier, the neighbor behind us had scraped dirt from our lot onto theirs, leaving us with a two-foot dirt “wall” along the property line. Now that they had neighbors, they wanted a fence between us, but the dirt wall wasn’t stable enough to support it. It also didn’t make for great landscaping.

At the time, we didn’t have money to hire someone. We’d just welcomed our first daughter, and we were already stretching every dollar we had. So I decided to build the retaining wall myself.

We contacted a local brick manufacturer to see if we could buy retaining wall bricks directly. Fortunately, the number we needed was just enough for a direct order. The bricks were monstrous — 80 pounds each, plus the capstones. When the brick company delivered them, they were afraid the weight of the pallets would crack the driveway, so they left them in the street. That meant about 150 feet between the stacks of bricks and where the wall needed to be built.

I loaded three bricks and a capstone into the wheelbarrow at a time — just about 275 pounds. Fifty-four trips in total. By the end, my arms and hands were so sore I couldn’t close my hand enough to hold a toothbrush. For days, every time I reached for something, my arms would burn and my fingers felt like they were trying to scoop through hardening molasses.

I didn’t move all those bricks because I wanted to. I never stopped to think about the muscle I might develop from the work. I did it because it needed to be done. Because I wanted my wife to see our yard as more than dirt and weeds, and for our little children to have somewhere they could play.

The same theme keeps showing up for me. Until about two months ago, I didn’t realize that a large part of me has always wanted to prove that I’m strong enough to do it all; strong enough to carry the load.

Along with that realization, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how obligation can get really heavy when you forget why you’re doing something, or when the thing you’re doing loses its meaning. Other times, though, you remember the real reason you started: not because you love moving bricks, or late-night phone calls for a client who isn’t paying you enough, or any of the other weighty, thankless tasks that come with building a life. But because of the people it’s for.

For a long time, I believed that I could only measure myself in one way: by how much I could carry. If I could handle more work, more stress, and more responsibility, it meant I was good. Worthy. And I kept telling myself the same story on repeat, without ever questioning it.

Like I said, I’m starting to wonder how true that is. Or if, maybe, there’s something to be said for carrying only the right things, not everything.

Honestly, I’m still trying to sort out the difference. My work is different now than it was back then, but the impulse is the same: to prove I can hold it all. To show I’m strong enough, even when my arms, hands, back, and heart tell me I’m not.

I haven’t thought about moving those bricks for a long time. The retaining wall has just been there — a fixture in our yard for almost twenty years. Now, though, we have a few rogue cherry trees threatening to tip over a portion of it, so I was reminded. Reminded that when I did that, I didn’t love the work. I hated it. But I loved what it made possible. It was a signal that my wife and I were building something we could be proud of. My wife loves working in the yard, but that was work she couldn’t have done. At the time — recovering from childbirth — helping wasn’t even an option for her.

Now, after all these years, I’ve had this funny realization that carrying something that heavy made me feel connected to what matters most. It’s also funny how easy it is to lose sight of that once the job’s done. I’ve spent years hauling loads that didn’t need to be mine, trying to prove something to people who probably weren’t even watching — and probably didn’t care.

Another lesson that’s started to take shape is this realization that obligation isn’t always a burden. Sometimes, it’s what’s required to build the path back to the people and places that matter most. Sometimes, the weight we carry breaks us. Sometimes, because we choose to carry it, it shapes us and makes us stronger.

P.S. If you’ve been finding these essays helpful, they’re part of a larger story. I’ve collected them — along with a few bonus pieces — into a book called You Don’t Have to Escape to Be Free: Thirty Days in the Canyon. It’s about the climb out of burnout, the quiet, persistent search for what really matters, and how we find freedom not by getting away, but by choosing to stay present and true to ourselves. You can buy a copy of my book here.

I didn’t want to build that wall. When I looked at those pallets of bricks after coming home from work, I had this kind of existential dread, knowing how hard the work would be. But I wanted what it meant more than I wanted to avoid the labor. I wanted a home that felt a little more like ours. That’s what kept me pushing that wheelbarrow back and forth until every last brick and capstone was moved.

That’s what I’m learning to hold onto today: the reminder that the work I choose to do — the work that requires something from me — isn’t about proving how much I can bear. It’s about showing up for the people I love, and for the life we’re building together.

I’m still learning to see the difference. I’m still not great at figuring out what’s worth carrying, and what can be set down or never picked up in the first place. I’m still trying to believe that my worth isn’t measured by the weight of the load.

But today, I remember that the work I choose for love — even the heaviest kind — doesn’t have to break me. It can be the very thing that brings me back to myself.

And that? That’s enough.