It was actually through journaling that I realized it’s time to start a blog. Journaling can be a bit of a mess, in that it’s a combination of here’s what I did today and here’s what I plan to do and here are my thoughts on life. It’s that last category that I decided I should start taking public, in the hope that people can tell me how I’m doing it all wrong. Of course, this blog will seem a bit meandering while I try to find its true purpose (and will probably continue to seem meandering, because that’s how I roll), but at least at the outset I’m thinking that really what it’s about is how to go about living life from the perspective of someone who’s just trying to figure it out for himself.
Productivity
Who isn’t a productivity junkie anymore? Why do we want to do so much work, anyway? Is it that we think by doing more work now, we’ll somehow have less work later and perhaps this will give us extra time to spend with the family or make the world a better place?
We like to think our intentions are in the right place, but I’ll come out and say it: my intentions are not in the right place. I try to maximize productivity because I’m absolutely awful with the way I spend my free time, and as a result it feels like I never have any free time. I work hard to be efficient with my work, but working hard just breeds more work. I then go home tired after a highly productive and full eight-hour day only to do a cursory job powering through my household obligations and then waste some hours on the couch, half watching TV and half mindlessly browsing reddit. After all, I’ve earned it, right?
As mentioned in my first post, this is something that I’m going to try to fix. I acknowledge that I’ve been going about it all wrong. I’ve known this for years. But by documenting my recovery, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to create a path that others might be able to follow, and that I might be able to follow. So long as thoughts of increasing my satisfaction just bounce around in my head, these thoughts will remain ephemeral, only cropping up from time to time to assuage my guilt and then vanish upon waking the next day. I’m not a unique snowflake, and I’m sure this happens to everyone. My attempt at a solution is to blog it. I’m going to start by clarifying the things I believe I’m doing right and then go into the things I’m doing wrong (and this is just barely scratching the surface).
Things that work
Journaling
This is something that I don’t think receives enough credit. I began journaling because I realized that my ability to remember events is absolutely garbage. If someone were to ask me the chronological order of events in my 30-some years on this planet, I might get the order right some of the time if those events were separated by years. But most of the time I’d be hard-pressed to even remember such an event happened much less when it happened, unless the event were significant enough to change my life.
This realization made me sad, but it’s merely the reason I began journaling. What I discovered from journaling was actually a lot more. I realized that there was actually this sort of other, more fully-fledged, person inside of me that had the capacity to build long and complicated thoughts. These thoughts can never be fully realized when they’re just sitting in your head. You think George R. R. Martin had a fully-realized world before he sat down to pen A Song of Ice and Fire? I bet he had nothing more than a fleeting sense that he wanted to write some sort of fantasy before he actually began penning the thing.
Task management
This is really just a corollary to the above in that it’s just another form of day-to-day documentation, but as an adult it’s incredible just how much crap we have to manage. I think that most of the time we deal with these things by just forgetting about them and then later picking up the pieces.
So we deal with having a lot of stuff to do by letting this stuff breed more stuff. How about we just nip that whole process in the bud and write it down? There are probably a lot of good ways to do this, but what I use is a sort of modified version of GTD (Getting Things Done). The 80/20 of this method is that you need to find a way to document the things you have to do the moment you realize you have to do them, and store those documents in such a way that it’s easily accessible (the takeaway might be different for other people, but after using the method for a long time I think this is the real crux of it — the rest of it can be mutated to some degree based on person preferences). It becomes sort of second-nature, and I highly recommend reading up on GTD. I’ll go into more detail about my process in later posts.
Waking up early
I haven’t figured out whether or not this is a universal trait of those who are happy and successful (whatever that word may mean to you), but I know for me it makes all the difference. I will probably delve into more reasons why this works so well later on when I find the opportunity research it, but I have a hunch that it’s a lot to do with mindset. If you get up to do things while others are asleep and while the world is still shut down, you will be free of distraction and you will be free of the detritus that accumulates over the course of the day. Are you telling me that at midnight you’re not actually up binge watching some TV show or stressing out while you get stomped by kids half your age in Overwatch? Nothing good happens at 2 AM, so you should be sleeping.
Quitting social networking
I gave this up long ago. It’s so far removed from my life at this point that I don’t have a lot to say about it, but I do have a memory of it making me feel miserable. Make yourself a person that’s capable of your own thoughts, and be able to express yourself fully with the people that actually matter to you. Do not obsess over the trivialities of some stranger who happens to be listed as your “friend,” and stop chasing that desire to be “liked.” That stuff is nonsense.
Things that don’t work
Video gaming
As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been gaming online since long before it was mainstream and it’s been a mainstay in my life. It’s my primary vice. Games are engineered to hit almost all of what it takes to keep us sucked in. First, they’re immediately satisfying: with just a few clicks of the button you’re transported away to a world that’s designed to keep you fully engaged. They appeal to the competitive side of you as well, and I’m competitive to a fault (which is a negative trait that only gets further honed by gaming). They’re also perfectly constructed to keep you chasing that carrot on a stick.
I have a hunch that most of my anxieties are caused by the effects of gaming over long periods of my life. Like most things, moderation is key. But for some people moderation isn’t really an option. An alcoholic won’t drink in moderation.
Browsing the web
The web has changed dramatically, and what we have now is mostly aggregators such as reddit. You might bump into interesting things there, but unless you’re disciplined enough to dig into the ideas and read the articles, you’re truly spreading yourself too thinly. If you’re like most people, you’re probably scanning headlines and then reading the top replies so that you know how you’re supposed to think or feel. Then you’ll end up forgetting it all anyway once you move onto the next thing.
We need to learn how to read slowly and deeply, and find long-form journalism that appeals to us and stick with it. Better yet, we need to determine our interests and then read books on them. Without being careful, the web is nothing but a series of dopamine hits and you could literally burn hours and gain nothing from it. This is a struggle for me, and I constantly drift back into lazy reading online, so I’m working on techniques to combat this.
Conclusion
There’s a general theme to the things that don’t work, and I probably don’t need to continue listing them. I have a lot to say on these things and I’ll talk in more detail about how they apply to my own life, but in the end I think what we want is to allow ourselves to be bored. It’s really not the worst thing in the world when you have to sit in one place in complete silence. Actually, it might literally be the best thing in the world.
The Simple Coder 