January

Deadlines long overdue, the nadir of my grades, no personal projects in the past year, a stale mind floating on the river of time, and a general feeling of distrust emanating from those around me; all of them: indicators that I had simply stopped trying.

I have also realized that in order to solve my problems, I needed to stop and think about them before acting:

• Usually the first solution that comes to mind will only work short term; in this case, the short term solution was to force myself to use a task system. I used:
• tasks.org,
• taskwarrior
• Emacs Orgmode
• at least 10 productivity Obsidian plugins

Many hours were spent, many lapses were had, and nothing was solved. I recently had some quiet time in which I had the following realization: instead of trying to solve the problems directly, I should instead focus on cultivating habits that let me achieve what I want to achieve.

July

I have largely diverged from my original plan in January. Most of my semester was an absolute train wreck. I took some time for myself during the last weeks of may and the first weeks of June to get back on track on organizing things.

I recently watched the movie Perfect Days. A movie about a Japanese janitor going through his days, genuinely experiencing his life. The idea, to me, that this movie tries to convey is that you don’t have to do anything in particular to actually say that a day was “perfect”. Instead of idealizing my daily experience and striving to achieve “the perfect schedule” or “the perfect day” I should instead reflect on what I actually enjoy doing and what it is that I’m doing. A “perfect day” is not achievable, striving for a perfect day will only make you feel dejected. Striving has been what has ultimately lead me down a road against myself.

While surfing, once you’re off the board, you are powerless. You can’t see anything, lest you want sandy saltwater in your eyes. You don’t know which way is up and all you can do is surrender yourself to the waves and wait until it’s calm enough to stand back up and get back on the surfboard. It’s genuinely a bad experience some times.

This is how it feels to live each day unprepared, not having any intention behind the things I do. OH, I guess we’re doing X now, I guess we’re doing Y now. No control over what I was doing or how or why. The differences between a psychological zombie and what I was doing are not too great. Taking each problem on one step at a time, doing the bare minimum to scrape by. I would do my tasks as late as possible. At least the floor and the desk were clean… for a while. I had lost control over my own life. Things would simply happen to me and I would just bare witness to the things that were happening. As if I was playing a third person videogame but I had no access to the controller except during short bursts of time. The neurotic nature of living this way had taken a large toll on me and I burned out almost constantly. My original insight was to just live a simpler life.

Maybe I just need to do less things?

And, this is partially true… Wanting to learn Japanese, various programming languages, do exercise, have good grades, participate in many extracurricular university-adjacent communities and learn new hobbies was just way too much. It’s way too much for anyone. In a situation like this, doing less things would obviously lead to less stress and therefore some decrease in neuroticism.

The issue here is that the list of things I set out to do at the start was not a random list of things. They were all specifically chosen because they mattered to me so much I was willing to do anything possible to do all of them at once. Losing any of them would make me feel inadequate, weak and somewhat cowardly. Doing less things left a pit of greed in my stomach. But, is there any other way out here? No, the answer is no.

I simply must accept the fact that there are 24 hours every day. I cannot live as if those 24 hours are expendable and I cannot live as if there are more than 24 hours. Consequently, I must accept that in this situation I will feel greed.

The only way to fight greed is with gratefulness. So my insight afterwards was to: instead of looking at the things I’m not doing; I had to instead look at the things I was doing. Makes sense right? When the glass is half empty, look at it as if it were half full. In this case, I needed to seriously look at the few things that I was now doing and find purpose in those things instead.

This lead me to my final realization. The protagonist of Perfect Days doesn’t have to do this whole mental gymnastics just to go through his days. It seems very organic and normal.

Why does he collect plants?

• Because he’s a photographer.

Why does he listen to cassette tapes in his car?

• Because he simply likes to do that.

Why does he read books right before going to sleep?

• Because he likes to read.

This is in contrast to me:

Why do I use YouTube so much?

• Because… I want to educate myself? No, that can’t be it… Because I want to know about what’s happening around the world? Still not it, I don’t really care about things other than what’s currently happening in my immediate community. There is no good reason here.

Why do I practice Japanese?

• Because I’ve already invested so much time into it? But, that’s a sunken cost fallacy.

Why do I participate in extra-curricular activities?

• Because I already said I was going to do them? That’s just the sunken cost fallacy again.

The reality is that there are very few things that I actually have to do. My health is important, my grades are important and my family is important. So therefore, the things I do in my day are geared towards these. First, observing what there is to do, participating in these things mindfully and keeping my focus on one thing at a time.