Why Are Mondays So Hard

A quiet revolt against numbness—and a reflection on the soul’s long winter

“Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.”

—Albert Camus

It’s Monday Again.

I arrive at the office at 8:50 a.m.—a bit late or maybe not.

The same corridor, the same forced smile to the receptionist, the same tug of heaviness in my chest. The air smells of my office having just been cleaned, and the first whirring of the air conditioner. The light overhead is too white, too harsh.

The office feels like a morgue of motion. Papers waiting, emails blinking, tasks lined up like body tags. I sit down in the chair that knows my back too well, the seat I’ve warmed for thirty years, and I look at the desk that knows all my moods. I open my laptop. Sales are still down. Nothing has changed over the weekend, as if the figures, like the staff, are waiting for someone else to take responsibility.

Still no urgency. Still no one from the team is stepping up—still no consequence.

And I feel it again: that familiar heat behind my ribs. Not rage exactly—more like a quiet, corrosive resentment. Not at them. Not anymore.

At me.

Because I built this, I allowed it. I tolerated the placidity, the polite excuses, the mediocrity.

I built this system, and now it imprisons me.

No, not a system. A tomb.

But tombs are for the dead. And I’m still here. So maybe it’s worse than a tomb. Perhaps it’s a museum—a slow, dull exhibit of a man who once believed in movement and fire.

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Fridays are easier. On Fridays, there’s possibility. A sense that the weekend might allow something different—a match of padel, a walk on empty roads, a few quiet hours by the pool, or dinner with friends.

But Mondays? I feel a quiet collapse. Not of things falling apart—but of meaning itself going silent.

Mondays are betrayal. A reminder that I am not free. That I must pick up the yoke again. That I must return to my self-made dungeon, at the bottom of a building filled with ghosts of energy that once were.

Today I asked myself, again: Why is Monday so hard?

It’s not the work. I’ve done harder work. It’s not the people—I’ve had more difficult teams. It’s the fact that I can no longer pretend I’m inspired. That whatever magic kept me going—fear, ambition, novelty—it’s evaporated.

And so I return to Camus:

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”

But I read that now and wonder—what if I’ve lived most of my life in summer?

What if the sun were money, luxury, status, leadership, the dopamine of growth?

And now?

Now the leaves are falling. The air is cold. My office echoes more than it used to.

I am in winter.

And I’m still looking for the invincible part.

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I walked to the window and stared down at two junior staff members standing by the gate, laughing. I watched the curve of their shoulders, the way their hands animated their story, and how their heads tilted back in real laughter.

They are not burdened by the weight of purpose.

They are not haunted by the emptiness of achievement.

I envied them.

But even envy felt too sharp a word. I think what I felt was longing.

A longing to return to that unthinking stage of life, when laughter wasn’t weighed down by everything it had to rise above.

Rumi came to mind:

“Don’t get lost in your pain. Know that one day your pain will become your cure.”

I wonder what Rumi would have said to me this morning.

Would he have smiled and said, Brother, go dance barefoot in the street?

Would he have sat beside me and poured tea and waited, silent, until I spoke?

Instead, I opened my journal and wrote one sentence:

“Revolt, yes. But how does one revolt when numb?”

Because numbness is not the absence of pain.

It is the pain buried so deep that even anger can’t find it.

It is winter turned inward.

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I wrote this not because I have answers—but because I believe in documenting the moments when meaning slips away, so that when it returns, we recognize it more clearly.

Camus taught that revolt is the beginning of freedom.

And today, writing this felt like a kind of revolt. A refusal to sink into numbness.

A refusal to let Mondays turn me to stone.

If you’re feeling the same—whether in your office, your home, or your heart—know that you’re not alone. Perhaps on some Mondays, all we need is to pause.

To name the ache. And to light a small candle in the dark.

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🗣️ Share With Me

What’s your “Monday”?

What’s the place or time in your week when you feel most distant from yourself?

Leave a comment—I read everything.

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