I’ve felt oddly motivated this morning, which is entirely out of character for me. I blame all the coffee I’ve been drinking recently. Of course, feeling motivated and translating that into action are two dramatically different things. The latter being the real challenge for me. As I write this, the new school year has been in session for a week and a half and I’m enjoying the Labor Day weekend. Three days is a good amount of time to be off, much more than that and I find myself growing restless yet again. Ironic when you consider how little I manage to accomplish most of the time.
This intransigent inaction has plagued me for years, but has certainly grown worse with my burgeoning depression. I’ve found myself struggling to handle the most basic of daily tasks and the negative feedback loop this causes has not gone unnoticed. It’s not a lack of energy, I get my ass out of bed and go to work every day. I never fail to drag myself to one or more coffee shops in my free time either. So what’s the fucking problem? I could chalk it up to my shitty brain, but that feels like a cop out. This is a failure of will, a problem of philosophy. I’ve lost my way and I need to find a new path, even if that necessitates blazing a new trail.
When I let my perception zoom out a bit and I see things on a slightly longer scale, I will say that things have been improving somewhat recently. I credit a lot of this with simply being back at work and more fully occupied on a daily basis. Granted, this does have the side effect of leaving me horribly exhausted, at least at first, but I’ve been adjusting to the new schedule quite admirably this year. From this lofty vantage point I see that much of my unhappiness comes from idleness and a lack of purpose. I enjoy getting shit done, I just often don’t know what to do.
I always have vague notions of what drives me, but it’s hard putting those thoughts into actionable goals. Losing weight, becoming financially independent, starting a business, making new connections with people… these are all desirable, but non-specific. I’m a huge fan of systems and planning, yet I rarely put that into action in my own life. Part of this is due to my chaotic living situation, but there’s rarely a single cause for most challenging problems. Sometimes it doesn’t matter where you start trying to fix things, so long as you get that momentum going.
Things at home would be vastly improved by moving to a larger place. I have been reluctant to rent a new place because I want to house-hack. I’ve been reluctant to buy because I haven’t seen any ideal properties on the MLS. I haven’t looked off-market because I’m afraid of being rejected. It’s an endless chain of excuses that needs to stop now. I recognize that I will not pull this off perfectly and I will make mistakes, but that is the cost of growth. Safety breeds stagnation and misery, my life right now is a testament to that.
I recently quipped that there are no books titled, “How to Start a Business When You Kind of Want to Die.” While this is a technically true statement, it’s really just another excuse. The obsession with happiness in our culture is apparently not a worldwide trend. Most people don’t focus nearly as much on happiness as we do in the West, and the US in particular. That’s not to say that wanting to die and merely being unhappy are the same thing, but they are related. Obviously I don’t actually want to die, but I am extremely unhappy most of the time. What I often don’t consider is, if I’m going to be unhappy regardless of whether I achieve my goals, wouldn’t it be better to get the goals done and give myself less to be unhappy about? This is assuming that achieving my goals in and of itself won’t impact my happiness, which I strongly suspect is not the case.
There are certain habits I’ve built and ways in which I’ve become very complacent and comfortable in my life. Most of these are not particularly healthy or productive, which wouldn’t be a problem if I had other habits that served to counteract their negative influence. I suspect it might be necessary to burn the proverbial ships and reduce the places for me to retreat as I try to forge ahead. I’m particularly thinking about coffee shops I frequent solely for the people I hope to see there.
There are other ways in which I can try to improve accountability. I’ve been using the app stickK to varying degrees of success in my weight-loss efforts. I think I probably would do well to make other measurable goals and use the app to make myself accountable for achieving them. I imagine this would be well-suited to exercise and business goals in particular. Most of this depends upon mapping out my intentions and creating realistic action plans to follow. There’s no good reason for me to be unable to reach my goals, I’m perfectly competent and they are both realistic and attainable.
As I sit here, even trying to list all the shit I need to do feels somewhat overwhelming, but I need to start getting at it. A bit here and a bit there is better than letting things continue to pile up. As I grow emboldened by the progress, I can also be planning my larger strategies. All I’m hoping for right now is a slightly more purposeful life, doing things with a bit of intention rather than stumbling around aimlessly in the dark. Accomplishing even that much will set me apart from most people.
