For most of my life, writing things down was a way for me to understand things better. But as I became more and more sleep-deprived, as my body changed, I found it harder and harder to write. The massive adventure ahead of me of pregnancy, giving birth, becoming a mother—it was daunting. It was no small fact that my identity, life, and known world would be subject to massive upheaval. I didn’t know how to make sense of it. I felt lost and insecure.

Pregnancy: I wanted to understand it. I wanted to catalog it. I wanted to explain it, tell the stories of pregnancy. Yet all I could write were the worst clichés, and then wincing, knowing that that wasn’t it. How could I go through something so deeply human and yet struggle for words to explain it?

I decided to use my friend’s Clarity Card process2 as a structured way to journal towards the end of my pregnancy. The method is simple and beautiful, and I ended up in tears just by having this as a guide. Below, I’ll walk you through the four-step process he outlines — and how I used it to chart out ideas, insights, and clear perspectives on being pregnant. Plus, I’ll include some of my original notes from when I wrote this out when I was eight months pregnant. It helped me.

A 4-Step Guided Framework for Journaling and Gaining Clarity

Much like Julia Cameron writes about in The Artist’s Way, just getting pen on paper and making a list can be an extraordinary way to dive into your mind. The mind, I’ve learned, is an incredible tool that can be cued with phrases and questions. All you have to do is let your mind respond to the questions you put forth.3

Here’s how I did it:

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For too many years, one of the last things on my list was taking care of myself. If I even made the list. To be honest, it never crossed my mind to put myself on this list as a consideration — I jus…

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Here’s what I tell people when they ask me what to expect if they’re trying to build a business AND a family at the same ti…

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When I search for images of leaders, executives, bosses, and founders, the pages of results are quite dismal. I did a screenshot series back in 2021, which is still relevant today, because these images are what LLM (large language models) are learning from.

Here’s what a quick search of UnSplash ga…

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• One was breastfeeding her baby while talking about her seed funding round.

• Another was leading a 40-person company, but wondering how to keep…

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This piece was originally published in July 2024.

I don’t think I was prepared for how exhausting and lonely parenting can be in the modern world. Despite having active young kids and constantly taking them places, I still find myself longing for time to myself. Time to think, and time to talk to other adult humans about things beyond parenting. But the dishes keep spinning and the laundry keeps crashing and the days all run into each other in one giant blur.

We’ve talked before about how exhausting and lonely parenting can be in the modern world. But it’s not just parenting—it’s modern life. I think many of us are far too lonely and disconnected. There’s a real hunger for community, for depth, for true connection. It’s only when I step out of the extreme workaholism of modern parenting and take a break—when I go camping, when I get into nature, or when I finally take that day off I’ve been meaning to take for ages—that’s when I realize just how bare-bones and lonely parts of everyday life can become.

We’re not meant to carry all of this burden in siloed houses so far apart from each other. The nuclear family is too small. (There, I said it.) Marriage isn’t really working. We can begin to drown inside of it, and forget that all of these fights—the fights over the cooking and the cleaning and the work and the children—are really about something else entirely.

Kurt Vonnegut, an American writer, humorist, and the author of fourteen books, speaks to the depth of loneliness that so many people feel and why we’re really fighting with each other. In the essay collection “If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?” Vonnegut shares sharp, precise notes on why it’s too much—and what we can do about it.

What we’re really fighting about, he argues, is that we don’t have enough people.

“Only two major subjects remain to be covered: loneliness and boredom. No matter what age any of us is now, we are going to be bored and lonely during what remains of our lives. We are so lonely because we don’t have enough friends and relatives. Human beings are supposed to live in stable, like-minded, extended families of fifty people or more.” — Kurt Vonnegut

We need other people.

We need fifty other people. Or more.

One person cannot be everything and everyone for another person. Our partner cannot be our therapist and our confidante and our bowling pal and our reading group and our cooking group. It’s impossible to be all of this to each other.

A marriage is not enough. A friend is not enough.

We need more people.

Do you have fifty people?

Vonnegut goes on to talk about marriage, and why marriage isn’t falling apart because marriage is wrong, but because our families are too small.

“Marriage is collapsing because our families are too small. A man cannot be a whole society to a woman, and a woman cannot be a whole society to a man. We try, but it is scarcely surprising that so many of us go to pieces.” — Kurt Vonnegut

So, he recommends, “everybody here [should] join all sorts of organizations, no matter how ridiculous, simply to get more people in his or her life. If does not matter much if all the other members are morons. Quantities of relatives of any sort are what we need.” And the cause of fights in marriage? It turns out, he surmises, “what they’re really yelling at each other about is loneliness.”

“What they’re really saying is, ‘You’re not enough people.’”

We are born into our immediate families. These families have gotten smaller and smaller over the last century, and farther apart. Many of us are just starting our own immediate families now.

But we don’t get told to invest as much time in developing our communities, being active socially, or building the networks we need beyond the structure of family or work. Your job is not your family. Your job is not your community. It is a component—but it is not the entirety.

We need warm-blooded people, to mix and mingle with, to be in the presence of. They do not have to be perfect people. They do not have to have all the same ideas and opinions as you. It does not matter much if all the other members are morons, he says. Find what they are good at—perhaps they are good at cooking food, or repairing faucets, or teaching your kid how to play an instrument or a sport.

We need a bunch of people. More than most of us have.

In a second speech, he goes on to elaborate on knowing the secrets to what women and men want. It’s remarkably similar to his story above:

“I know what women want. Women want a whole lot of people to talk to. And what do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything.”

And men? “Men want a lot of pals.”

Obviously I don’t agree with the simplicity of men and women being entirely different (nor do I believe that marriage is just about a man and a woman) — but the underlying point rings true: as people, we want other people to hang out with. We need other people to be around, to check in with, and to talk to.

“[We] want a whole lot of people to talk to. And what do [we] want to talk about? [We] want to talk about everything.”

Content is not community.

At night, the loneliness inside all of us conspires to bring us to our tiny slot machines, those little window boxes of Internet access. Whether it’s the phone or the pad or the wall screen, we scroll through TikTok and Instagram and Messages trying to find the closeness we crave. What we want is so powerful: we want laughter and connection and human touch and art and magic.

But what we get from tiny screens is not enough. He warns against trying to find community inside the screens. “Don’t try to make yourself an extended family out of ghosts on the Internet. Get yourself a Harley and join the Hell’s Angels instead.”

“I hope you know that television and computers are no more your friends, and no more increasers of your brainpower, than slot machines. All they want is for you to sit still and buy all kinds of junk, and play the stock market as though it were a game of blackjack.”

We need, he writes, warm-hearted people. “And only well-informed, warm-hearted people can teach others things they’ll always remember and love. Computers and TV don’t do that. A computer teaches a child what a computer can become. An educated human being teaches a child what a child can become.”

Consumption is not community.

There is a difference between consumption and connection. Scrolling through an algorithmic feed and leaving comments on posts is not deep enough for connection. It is info-tainment, entertainment, and communi-tain-ment (is that a thing?). It is Community-Lite.

We need more time in conversation, where the words tumble out and spill onto the table. Where we let each other ramble and discover. Where we wander and pause and pick back up again.

We need more creators and keepers of local community. We’ve forgotten how important this work is for each other, and Vonnegut, in a commencement speech, reminds people that while there may be “a handful of celebrities” from your graduating classes, the majority of people will find themselves “building or strengthening your communities.”

And this is the point that is so important I highlighted it and underlined it:

“Please love that destiny, if it turns out to be yours—for communities are all that’s substantial about the world.” — Kurt Vonnegut

It’s up to us to reach out, meet as many people as possible, and build our extended families, our communities, and our loose ties. These are the ties that hold up the human ecosystem, and they are so fragile and precarious for so many of us right now.

When I am the happiest in my life, it’s when I’m surrounded not just by high-quality soul sisters and friends who I love spending time with, but also by neighbors I wave to on a daily basis. It’s knowing the names of the local business owners, and chatting with neighbors in the street. This is one of the reasons why I’ve prioritized joining communities throughout my life. Online, offline, local, distant—I want the breadth and the depth. I don’t want to live alone, and I can’t pretend my family is enough. I want to be vibrant, connected, and communal.

And it’s even harder when you’re overwhelmed by the load of parenting and the slam of long work hours. In the early days, I had to challenge myself to get out and find ways to connect. I browsed the local bulletin boards, and I read up on what the local library had on offer. The community college has regular classes, and I did a six-week drumming circle and tried the salsa club, as well. Now I see many of these people regularly at the local coffee shop and we bump into each other at the library and yoga studios.

Getting out there and fighting the tide of overwork and the isolation of modern life is extra effort in a world of work that already wants to eat all of our available time.

But community is more important than we know.

Go find your people. (Even the doofuses.)

It will be more people than you think you need.

— Sarah K Peck

Leadership | Business | Parenting | Mindset | Humor
​Wise Women’s Council (Leadership Incubator)​
​Startup Parent (Podcast & Essays)
​Founders With Kids (Community)

PS: As an entrepreneur, I could tackle many projects, many of which are more scalable than what I’m building. But I’m focused on building community and connections. My focus is connection and intimacy (often within the niche of parent founders). It’s not an easy project, but what we’re building is working. It’s why I built The Wise Women’s Council and Founders With Kids.

THE WISE WOMEN’S COUNCIL: FALL 2025!

I run a year-long leadership program for ambitious, kind, creative women who want to live life on their own terms. We’re kicking off the next cohort of The Wise Women’s Council this October. There are pages and pages of notes from women who have been through the program — read what they have to say here.

Apply to join the next cohort!

We will need you to download an app for the school dismissal system. Please tell us how you will be getting your child to school! Here is the new driving map, which has changed from last year. If your license plate starts with the letters A through K, your new drop-off line for cars now goes behind the school and across the tennis courts. If your license plate has odd numbers, we would like you to wait on the football field. Please don’t drive too hard, we need to maintain a pristine field! Even when it’s a parking lot. Please do not drive across the basketball court as we are re-paving it and your car will probably get stuck in the fresh asphalt!

If you are sending your child on the bus, we have good news! We have enough bus drivers this year for at least half of your children! The bus will pick up your child as long as you figure out how to log into the app. This can take up to ten minutes. Do remember what color bus your child is on. **This is important.** But please also be prepared to drive them to school if we don’t have enough bus drivers! If there are no more bus drivers available that morning, you will be driving your child to school! We recommend never scheduling any meetings before 10 a.m. for ease of the drop-off transition.

Please encourage your older children to walk to school! That way we can reduce the number of cars on the tennis courts, and save space on the buses! But please be careful, as there are no sidewalks, so please teach your children how to walk in the road safely. We recommend you walk them to school wearing brightly colored vests!

Oh also, there are a few more apps you’ll need to download for music, gym, library, technology, and the use of the printer! None of the apps work together, and they are all rated 2-stars or fewer and frequently crash because we have no budget, sorry about that! Please also note that your child is limited to one sheet of paper per day!  

As you get adjusted to back-to-school systems, do note that we operate on a week that is six days long, and doesn’t match any other calendar you use! You’ll need to log into the school website so you know what day of the week it is!

Your elementary children who are ages five to seven years old can arrive at school between 8:20 a.m. and 8:35 a.m. but cannot arrive earlier than 8:15 a.m. For those of you with siblings, please note that any elementary children who are eight years and older can only arrive at school between 8:35 a.m. and 8:50 a.m. Please have them walk to school on their own if they can! But do not form a crowd outside the school for too long. Also, the staggered start is good for children! You will now get to spend an hour each day getting two children to school, which should be great quality time.

On the days that school is dismissed early at 10:45 a.m., you will get to spend two hours driving for two hours of classroom time. Don’t worry, we will feed them a snack, but please remember there is no lunch on early dismissal days! Enjoy your coffee hour And speaking of lunches, your child will get a five-digit code to access the school lunch system. Please have them memorize this code and practice punching it in.

Don’t lose the piece of paper your child came home with! It is a very tiny slip of paper, because we used one piece of paper to print them all. On this slip of paper is your secret QR code for the app. Which app? That’s a mystery, because we didn't have enough space to put it on the paper! Check your email for the instructions! They are inside of a PDF attachment on the last page! It is not searchable, so good luck! Please note that if you lose it, we can’t print it, because we only use fax machines. 

One last thing, we also need you to bring in six boxes of Kleenex, four cartons of water, and the entire aisle of school supplies from Walgreens. We also need a framed photograph of your family for your child’s cubby. And please label everything that is not permanently attached to your child! You can also label your child! If you’d like to get tattoos made of your QR code, you can apply them to your child each week. They can use them in the lunch line if they forget their unique ID number.

Good luck everyone! We’re so excited to teach your child! And don’t forget that school gets out at 2:20 p.m. for the small children and 3:05 p.m. for the older children, except Wednesdays, when school gets out at 1:40 p.m. for everyone, and we will be sending out a new driving map for Wednesday’s special pickup routine when every parent arrives at school at the same time!

PS: The PTSA will be reaching out next week with our fundraisers and to get all of you onto a volunteer slot!

PPS: Don’t forget that Spirit Week is coming up!

— Sarah Peck

I hope you all are surviving the back-to-school era. It’s a crush of paperwork and forms and schedules and tiny details. I posted a shorter version of this on my LinkedIn page, and a teacher wrote back, “I'm a teacher and I'd like you to know that I have no idea where the piece of paper is either.” and I about died with laughter.

Please know this: I love teachers. And school. And childcare. The teachers work SO HARD. The budget is not enough. I am happy to bring the entire aisle of school supplies for you, and scavenge the free websites for new classroom bookshelves or containers. Thank you for all the work you do.

It’s the chaos of all of it that is mind-boggling. I know you get it.

You likely know this feeling. You feel it in your bones.

So what can we do about this exhaustion?

I’ll make a confession that feels strange to say, but I know is important: Once a week, I stay in bed for a late morning. Not on the weekends—those are typically filled with kids waking up too early and starting dance parties. But during the week, I give myself permission to rest. It’s hard to do, especially for someone like me, who was trained in the corporate world where productivity is the gold standard.

Hustle culture teaches us that if we’re resting, we’re ‘lazy’ or ‘underperforming.’ We’re told to maximize every hour of the day, become more efficient, and pack our mornings with multiple habits to ‘win.’

Maximize all hours of your day, productivity experts shout.

Increase your efficiency and output, systems experts tell us.

If you’re not doing 5 things in your morning routine, are you even winning?

I learned, painfully, that if you push all the time, your body will demand rest. Constantly pushing ourselves leads to burnout, illness, exhaustion, and apathy. At some point, more coffee, cold plunges, habits, or routines won’t repair the 100+ hour work weeks that people do trying to balance parenting, care taking, life, and work.

The solution is to carve out rest in more unusual ways.

Good rest is the unlock to real productivity.

Our culture doesn’t prioritize rest. It asks people to push harder, and then replaces people when they burn out. In today’s world, prioritizing rest is a radical act.

The biggest fallacy of rest is the idea that it will happen later. Only after you finish this big project will you take a vacation. The problem with this thinking is that most of the time it doesn’t work. There’s always another project or deadline. When you finally get that big break or vacation, often people get sick — it’s shown that when people push themselves too hard for too long, their bodies collapse afterwards.

Rest needs to happen every day. It’s like earning money: sure, it’s nice to think about winning the lottery, but it’s almost always a better strategy to set up an automatic savings that happens in small, regular amounts.

This is where micro-rest comes in.

Micro-rest is the small, daily practices that help us recover and sustain ourselves over the long term. These practices don’t require big chunks of time, but they add up to better long-term wellness and productivity. What does micro-rest look like?

• Stretching after back-to-back meetings

• Taking a slow morning once a week

• Doing deep exhales and stretching your eyes every couple of hours

• Setting a timer to roll your shoulders back twice a day

• Doing a quick gratitude journal in the morning

• Pausing in your car for a few minutes of silence before or after meetings

• Taking a social media or news break for the day

• Enjoying a leisurely lunch

• No-meeting Mondays

The key to micro-rest is that it’s small enough to start today. It’s the kind of rest you can stack with other habits—like stretching while waiting for your coffee to brew. Over time, these practices help you feel better immediately and leave you less exhausted at the end of the day.

The mindset shift that need to happen

The hardest part of building this practice is breaking the cycle of constant productivity. When you're in "hustle mode," the brain tells you to keep going—"Just one more thing!" But the art of micro-rest is learning to stop, even for a moment. It’s about developing the muscle of pausing and checking in with your body before pushing forward.

Constant productivity is like an invisible “Dopamine Stairmaster” that gets a reward for checking things off the list. This monster tells you not to stop. It’s this moment, when you’re in the middle of the push, that you learn to pause and say, right now, let’s take two deep breathes. Let me check in with my body. This is the key practice. For many, this “rest muscle” is atrophied and out of practice.

This isn’t easy. The first 30 days are the hardest, but micro-rest becomes more natural over time. You’ll begin to notice that these small shifts add energy back into your life, instead of draining it.

Every time you push harder, you also need to rest.

• It means unpacking the scripts that we’ve been sold about hustle culture, working overtime, and pushing harder at all costs.

• It means testing and iterating to find the ways that we can rest effectively so that our capacity actually improves.

• It also means understanding the long game, and being honest about the real consequences are when you force yourself into overdrive for too long.

Tiny micro-shifts that add up

We are humans, not machines. Rest is not a luxury, it’s a necessity. And it’s not just for founders, entrepreneurs, or high-powered execs—it’s for everyone. Parents, caregivers, and those juggling multiple roles need to build rest into their lives as a non-negotiable practice.

For me, it’s about taking one midweek morning to rest and reset. After getting the kids off to school, I jump back into bed, sip tea, and relax. It’s a simple act, but it’s my way of resisting the pressure to constantly push. Rest doesn’t have to be a luxury reserved for vacations. Through tiny—sometimes rebellious—acts, we can make it part of our daily lives.

How do you carve out moments of rest in your own schedule? What are your favorite downtime practices, especially if they go against conventional wisdom? I'd love to hear how you incorporate rest and recovery into your daily life.

— Sarah K Peck
CEO & Founder

To read more about the seven types of rest we need, and why social time, creative time, and community activities matter, check out The Seven Types of Rest We Need →

👋 I’m Sarah K Peck and I’m the founder of Startup Parent, where we think about building businesses, lives, and families differently than the norm. My motto? We don’t have to do things the way they’ve always been done. Join me if you want to imagine (and build!) better futures for work, life, and parenting — I'm on LinkedIn, Instagram, Threads, and BlueSky.

​

✍️ Essays, stories and insights on parenting and life on Substack​

👾 Founders with Kids — We help tired parents make friends. Apply here​

💜 The Wise Women’s Council, our leadership incubator​

🎧 The Startup Parent Podcast, listen everywhere.​
​

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"Mama, can I have paper so I can draw you my feelings?"

He sat down with a pen and paper. Out came the sadne…

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I’ve met all kinds of founders—solo indie builders, authors growing speaking platforms, friends launching coffee shops with babies in tow. Some are bootstrapping, some are on their third venture; others are pivoting or responding to a fast-changing market. Many are scaling…

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And when it does, things like basic words and the concept of time fly out the window. People ask what you want or need, and you stare back at them, bewildered by how they’re still standing upright. Didn’t the world just collapse?

Knowing what to say and how to hold space for people can sometimes feel impossible. It mi…

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As a mother who loves her kids and her career, she points out how there are obvious answers …

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“I feel like I’m constantly battling between the demands of my business and the never-ending needs of my family.

Even simple things like going to the gym, running errands, or meeting a friend for coffee feel impossible to ask for without feeling like I need permission. I know it sounds trivial, but there’s always a sense of disappointment or frustration from my family when I do.

How do you navigate this kind of mental and emotional tug-of-war? What’s worked for you in creating some balance without guilt or resentment? How do you make space for your own needs while still being present for your family?

Where do I start?”

When you’re a primary breadwinner AND a parent, it can feel impossible to gain traction in all areas of your life—let alone talk about finding any time for yourself! A lot of moms share the added frustration of gender norms, where they are expected to be the primary caregiver by default, where other people can come and go from the house at will, but they are always expected to run point on all things children. And dads, I want to hear about how you’ve struggled with this, or faced different gendered expectations that make this hard in more ways.

There are a lot of reasons why folks can feel like this is impossible:

• Business Demands can feel overwhelming and impossible to put down.

• Internal Self-Talk can be unrelenting and it’s hard to give yourself permission to do the things you know you need.

• Gender Norms or partnership disagreements can add complexity because you feel like a default parent, or that you have to organize and arrange with a spouse just to get any time to yourself.

I want you all to share your advice on this topic.

How have you found ways to take solo time, or carve out a tiny bit of space for yourself? Where are the biggest blockers or challenges for you (family, business, logistics, internal dialogue, or something else)?

If you’ve successfully navigated a conversation with a partner or a spouse to find ways to recharge and take space, please share what strategies you’ve used and how you’ve navigated this. People want to hear your stories!

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To stop, right?

To stop. That’s one answer.

Is there another answer? I heard this on the radio recently, and I jotted it down in my mental notebook.

Here’s the real reason that cars have brakes:

Cars have brakes so they can go fast.

Without brakes, we’d all drive very, very slowly. We would need extended space to slow down, clever wa…

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