The Man Who Only Fished and Never Catched

Another day skunked on the water. Not the smelly animal kind of skunking. That would at least be a great story to tell when you got home. No, this skunking is the embarrassing kind. No fish caught all day. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

How are you going to explain this to your wife? Your kids aren’t going to brag about this to their friends. You will go down in family lore as “the man who only fished and never catched.”

As you chuck all your gear in the back of your truck, the voice gets louder.

“This wasn’t even fun.”

“I wasted a good afternoon. Manager Mike was right I should have made more client calls.”

“I am such a bad fisherman. I don’t even like this.”

Afternoon’s like this begin to make you question why you take time to do stuff for yourself at all. That inner critic chops at you like a busy beaver making an ever larger dam, creating a pond of expectations you could never swim across.

You get home and face your wife and kids, who clearly could care less about your misfortune on the water. But somehow that doesn’t stop you from feeding those fears of future family lore. Then we pop open our favorite social media app to see the endless doom loop filled with fish bigger than we’ve ever caught. Even that video of a 4 year old landing a 5lb bass shows up, just to nail the coffin a little tighter.

It is wild what one afternoon of fishing can do to the psyche of a man. But to put this on the fishing would not be fair. The fishing was great. It was the expectations that sucked.

Somewhere along the way we trained ourselves to have big expectations. “Dream big,” they say. And then @fish_hunter_8845732 (sorry if this is your handle) posts some massive fish caught out of a drainage ditch, seeding further doubt into the narrative of “I should be able to do that.”

You are facing an uphill battle. Standing in the way are years of dreaming of that big fish that will make you happy, or the new reel that will make all the tangles go away. When you put those expectations on a pedestal, you will never be satisfied.

Somewhere along the way, “you and I were trained to be dissatisfied with ourselves.” (quote by Anthony De Mello)

#ThisIsAboutFishing #ThisIsNotAboutFishing