Procrastinating again…at this rate I’ll become a master blogger if it becomes my go-to aversion activity. Spent the entire day and the entire night yesterday banging my head against a wall in Illustrator, DaVinci and Squarespace, so pretty efficient compared to my normal level of frustration in just one software.
I have to keep reminding myself that the things I want to change are just there for me to change; it will be uncomfortable and the results will not be immediately apparent, but it really is as simple as that. Basically I need to be a bit more strict with myself when it comes to time management, hence the really productive sitting here, sipping coffee, and waiting till tonight to work on anything. Well, that is kind of the issue - what I need to do is just call it a night when I get home later and get my ass out of bed.
I’m feeling strangely ambivalent about my progress on being on track right now- feeling stuck in lazy habits and not being able to focus…at least that is the narrative I live in for myself, but Joe asked me last night after his first dayjob shift in a while: “how do you go to work every day?” which challenged the notion that I’m being lazy… I definitely have habits, some less productive than others, but it did give me a jolt of pride that, at least from the outside it appears that i am in fact focused, hard-working, and girded by good habits lol. I felt a few things about that, but mostly that I should probably be A) easier on myself about having energy, time, and mental space to finish anything creative when I have a full-time job, but also B) I’m glad I figured out the emotional accounting I needed to do in order to make a possibly soul-draining-day-job-experience not just bearable, but feel beneficial and necessary. Because my entire world for years was - I hate this job, I wish I had time and energy to do something else, but in my free time I will just react to my job to decompress, and then do it again the next day. This is how resentful, broken shells of people are created, when they get trapped in an endless loop of working too much to work on anything else. Which leads to a solution that is at once very obvious but also painfully hidden in plain sight.
Becuase your are bitter and resentful about working, the obvious choice seems like the least intuitive, desirable solution possible. It is this. You work more. You do your 40-50-60-70 hours a week with all of the things you’ve become accustomed to, and more or less trapped into doing, and then you spend MORE time working on something just for you. You are upset and drained becuase your job requires you to get up too early and you never have enough time to sleep. And it pushes you physically, so you are tired and find it difficult to summon energy for basic tasks at home or outside of work. You don’t make enough money, so you have to pick up extra shifts and spend more time invested in a place/structure/business/group of people you do not care about.
There are a few key points here, but mostly this all comes back to how you feel. Physical and mental exhaustion is real, and you can’t just think it away, but ultimately it is how we feel about how we feel that drains us of energy. There are studies on this, and I’m sure most people can relate anecdotally, but the Huberman Lab podcast mentions an experiment where rats were rewarded positively for excercising and eventually didn’t need external motivators for the benefits and positive feedback of healthy physical activity to take over; adversely though, a seperate group of rats were forced into physical activity by the actions of another rat and had no control over their excercise. These rats became stressed, unhealthy, and more prone to disease.
The take away here is that this is a perfect example of why the solution to this trap; rat, human or otherwise, is a good application of the fight fire with fire methodology. Instead of treating all work as categorically bad and undesirable because of the resentment and distaste for the current work at hand, therefore reacting with “empty” time, or a lack of activity when free time is available, instead I find that spending energy, effort and doing things that engage interest in my free time increases my energy, and improves my mental and physical health. Here, to illustrate:
(Work too much for others on their clock) + (avoid working/strenuous activity for myself or others during free time) = resentment, degenerating life status.
The build up in negative feeling, lack of energy, resentment and frustration is due to a lack of balance, not really due to “too much work.” It definitely isn’t a popular opinion right now, but I don’t think people should be finding ways to avoid work, or work less, just avoiding work that doesn’t build them towards a version of themselves that they want.
(Work too much for others on their clock) + (seek to balance with a comparable amount of energy spent on personal goals and investment) = evening out the scale, creating opportunity to remove oneself from the hamster wheel, and giving you something you want even in the midst of engaging in undesirable employment conditions.
This is all to say, I am grateful I have at least a few things I can turn to, to keep me feeling in control and having a unique, personal connection to the world around me. Another tidbit from the Huberman Lab podcast that stuck out to me was that to experience a healthy life, one of the major factors is agency. We need, absolutely need, to feel that our choices matter and that we can affect our lives and others in a deliberate and intentional way. Even at the smallest micro-scale this feeling is imperative in fostering a strong sense of well-being. So make choices for yourself, for right now, and for the future. Invest a little time each day for something that may not matter to anybody else but you, but you are going to have to live the rest of your life committing time for other people’s investments. We all have to deal with that in some way, but the better and more prolific you become at investing in yourself, you diminsh the likelihood, need and payoff in investing your time for others, at least when it comes to earning a living.
It may be inadvisable to veer down this tangent but oh well…
It is very trendy to blanket-statement bash everybody and anybody who is wealthy and has more money than you, or more opportunity and success than you, but how is it different than most expressions of envy for anything? You wish you had what they have, you feel bad you don’t, and it makes you feel better and is less energy to talk down to them. Less energy than to do what they’re doing. Of ocurse, many people who have wealth are garbage people. Many broke people are terrible as well. We tend to think that having wealth and the opportunity that it provides should hold people to a higher moral standard, merely for the fact that they can positively affect more people with their wealth, than most others can. Most people who discuss the ultra wealthy in moral and ethical terms seem to me in some way wrapped up in a disgust/envy paradigm that has to do with more personal issues. Conflating a persons wealth with their moral aptitude seems like a clear failure of judgement and just problematic from every perspective. This tangent is leading to a point I promise. If we could see without judgement, or clearly without our own envy and jealousy in the way, I believe the truth would be much more apparent to people than it is. While I believe people should strive to better themselves and the world around them, I am trying to illustrate a different point here.
Completely separate from their social philosophy, ethical standards, moral values or general beliefs, and ignoring the trust-fund or generational wealth argument, I belief that most people who are in a place of financial control over their lives, or live in an environment of abundance, are doing so because they are good at investing their energy into themselves and what they stand for. Clearly we can all find examples of people who do this in a destructive, selfish or callous manner. But this activity is not destructive, selfish or callous by nature - again, it is imperative that we find a way to create a life for ourselves that gives us agency, allows intentional choice and has space for us to build something for ourselves, even if only a molehill. Some people are vehemntly opposed to “merely” building a molehill and overacheive. Some people don’t mind the size of theur hill, they just focus on making it the best they can, and over the years, even a hill can become a mountain. The point I’m trying to make is that regardless of peoples, motivation, or actual personal beliefs, the real constant that matters that gets people to that place is just persistently creating their own life. Whether for good or for ill, the successful ones are the ones that are really good at finding the time, energy, and reasons ( whatever they may be) to building something for themselves. I’m just trying to keep building too.
Z
