The day/night cycle, the turn of seasons over the year, getting excited about something new and tossing that thing into the rubbish bin. We’re surrounded by cycles and we’re operating on a cyclical demeanour, until we realize we’re running around the same behavioural patterns of the humanity itself.
It’s easy to be philosophical about this, I think every one of us just took a moment at some point in life and started to ponder on why we make the same mistakes over and again.
It’s the human nature to do this and I’m seeing it in the things that interest me. You can see it in the structure of the site, you can see it by analyzing my RSS feed. If I was an idiot believing all the enabling shit the internet spews, I could self-diagnose with ADD or whatever mental disease is the current fad. But I don’t, because at the end of the day, I understand that I’m just a human being. I’m very passionate about one thing today, only to forget it exists for the following eight months. We’re humans living in a mostly-digital world where we’re bombarded with thousands of little pieces of informations each day, with social media “helping” us microdosing dopamine. And it’s okay to feel tired, and it’s normal to feel overwhelmed. You’re not mentally ill, you’re just stuck in a bad cycle. A cycle which you can break. Which you must break.
I can take photographs of records and prepare 20 posts in my “records” section, and also not touch a vinyl record for months at a time. It’s not that I hate them, but I understand that time is limited during the day, and sometimes 16 hours of uptime cannot fill some really time-consuming activities (even if they’re not very intense from an intellectual point of view).
It’s probably the reason why I don’t have a /now/ page, like many bloggers nicely have, and it’s because it would be chaotic as my days are. In broad strokes, my day is comprised by a combination of three, four, sometimes eight, sometimes one, maybe two, never none from this list:
- Work
- Work on my portfolio
- Listen to records, maybe even take some photos and write about them
- Write on the blog generally
- Talk on the phone
- Chat on IRC with nice people
- Interact on various forums
- Tinkering with old computers
- Tinkering with old phones
- Tinkering with old game consoles
- Applying for jobs
- Thinking of the next fun thing to code
- Scouring through my library and making mixes for the Music Hour*
- Craft something (I want to save the aforementioned mixes onto minidiscs, I just didn’t find the time to do that)
- Play World of Warcraft
- Play on the Xbox
- Play on the Steamdeck
- Play some Diablo 2 on the Nintendo Switch, so I’m not fully overwhelmed with guilt about spending a ton of money on it and not use it
- Clean my house
- Clean myself
- Read the magazines about old cars that I bought like 2 weeks ago and are still sealed.
- Read the comic book collection I got from East-European Comic-Con I think in 2016
- Cook something
- Eat something
- Go for a walk
and probably a few more
Eventually, I’ll run through the whole list and find myself doing something again, over and over.
But what’s important is to always mix stuff around, have fun, and never settle. If you don’t enjoy something, move to the next great thing, or you’re going to find yourself stuck in a loop. And you’re not Bill Murray in The Groundhog Day. Hell, you’re not Bill Murray in Zombieland either.
So what’s the solution? Is there one? Of course there is, silly. You need to break the cycle. You need to stop being toxic to yourself. Add diversity to your life. If it’s not sleep and it’s not work (and sometimes not even work), every thing that you spend more than four hours a day doing is toxic for your life.
Free yourself. Break the cycle.
