The original version of this post first appeared May 13, 2026 on the Faithful on the Clock Substack.
Have you ever been too close to something to deal with it well or have clarity about it?
As a writer, that’s often my everyday experience. I work and work and work on manuscripts, and somewhere along the line, I’ve been over the content so many times I stop seeing what needs fixing. This is what authors and editors know as text blindness. The only way to keep going is to stop for a while and get some distance between myself and the text so I can look at it with fresh eyes again later.
We can become blind in our larger careers in much the same way.
For years, I was so focused on making my writing career work against all odds — so driven to communicate something meaningful — that I couldn’t see how my massive workweeks were influencing my family. I thought I was offering them something good through the work — better overall stability and protection through financial security. The intent wasn’t bad, but the impacts were.
Work from home from Giphy, edited by Wanda Thibodeaux
Sometimes, it’s not even our relationship with other people that suffers because we don’t step back.
Sometimes, it’s our relationship to ourselves. We spend so much time on the clock that we don’t go out and explore other avenues of who we are, and our understanding of everything God made us to be gets cut off at the knees.
Ben Stiller, Zoolander from Giphy
Sometimes, it’s our relationship to the world. Doing the same thing day in and day out, we don’t diagnose any other problems but the one we’re already committed to solving — a spiderweb of issues and opportunities simply doesn’t exist. Like all the people floating around their spaceship paying attention only to the screens in front of them in the film Wall-e, we’re oblivious to anything outside our norms.
Sometimes, it’s our relationship to God. We convince ourselves so hard that our job equals our worth, that we have to work on our own for security, or that the business is our calling that we don’t stop to even ask God if we’re right. We start worshipping our own autonomy and ability to know, rather than trusting and conversing with Him in real time.
The only fix for this blindness is the same as with my content. We have to step away from the work and see what’s around it.
Music: For My Good, AFTR — Epidemic Pro License
Clips: Canva Pro License
This doesn’t mean you quit your job, go off the grid, and live in a yurt somewhere subsisting primarily on cheese. It just means that you establish and enforce clear boundaries that allow you to maintain a big-picture perspective, and to decide with intentionality which values direct your behaviors.
You turn off the notifications.
You’re clear with the boss when you see scope creep.
You don’t automatically say yes.
We all like to believe that we already see clearly and are intelligent enough to move in the right direction. But as the Dunning-Kruger study shows, we don’t know what we don’t know.
Instead of assessing the building of your life from the porch, get yourself out into the street. What you see might change your orientation completely for the better.
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