[828] No Solution

This promises to be extra mundane and redundant. I wouldn't read it.

For quite some time, I've described variations on my “perfect day.” It's the flow from one form of indulgence to the next, be it work I consider meaningful, or the time and mental space to engage in something as deeply as it requires. I don't want to casually know my instruments, I want to play the most difficult riffs. When I was able to do so, I was spending minimum 8 hours a day. When you read a great work, you need time to put it down and pick it back up again while retaining the thoughts it conjured. When you go to build, you need to strike while the weather and help are on hand, so as not to continually push things back into the “forever one day” pile.

To be clear, I think it is impossible to achieve this flow with any degree of “regular work.” I think binding yourself to the construct of 9-to-5 is simply not how conscious experience functions. I get inspired at night. I'm awake at night. I carry a lot of the drama and nonsense, not so much in the form of internalizing it, but in that I have mirror-neurons, of my day-to-day. My experience is highjacked and apologized for. It's my job to “cope” and exhibit the mature detached stoicism to the degree I'm able. While you're working on all that, you're not dreaming about the circle of fifths.

I return often to my sense of “pragmatism.” I'm a normal kid brought up in a normal way. My deviations have come at great struggle and sacrifice. I've garnered a degree of anxiety and weird personality things that come along with feeling like the loneliest person on the planet. I'm reciting “in 3 months, in 6 paychecks, in just a few more hours” constantly. Like in 3 months I'll have a giant home edition and not be wishing for the space to have ten thousand more books and a shipping line.
You always need that thing to strive for. There always has to be more to accomplish. This is not a kind of personality flaw as it's sometimes described. There's “workaholics” who are doing everything in their power to remove themselves from otherwise psychological torture, and there's people perpetually able to recognize and consider what more can be contributed to the suring-up of the bases at-large and interpersonally.

I don't know if it's been a terribly longstanding feeling, but I feel like I'm being left behind. This sounds weird. By who? By what? I think time more broadly? It's still angsty 15-year old me writing with barely improved sentence structure and grammar. I'm still not a millionaire. I still don't have my working culture meant to churn out the kind of example I thought was as desperately required then as it is now. I've been idling in the parking lot. I've been paying homage to the “used to” in blogs. I'm not forcefully transcribing the anxiety of not feeling useful or worthwhile.

Has tempered enthusiasm won? Have I learned patience? Am I broken, and barley able to conceive of myself as such but through a depression-adjacent fog? That seems more than over-selling it. While there's something to be said of little things you might do to speak to the whole adding up over time, I'm the type that requires something big. I need to see the earth move. I need to feel the instant relief of the drain coming unclogged. Little things feel like a mockery. Even a shake up in your disposition. If I got the chance to draw out those reluctantly accepting faces during an interview to run the show at work, that might last me a week in commentary and speculation alone.

Not too long ago I wished I could fast-forward time. A day job will do that. The next 3 months will be over tomorrow and be the longest period of my life. The last year and a half has felt like an eternity. Having debt will add to the weight. Every day for 3 months I have to watch myself creep closer to the big shifts I might start to be able to make. Not talk about paying the bills a year in advance, have it done, and breath in that moment...every day...for the next year. Load my car up with the wood for my home addition. Click order on a boat-load of crap from Amazon. Buy up lot after lot of books and follow in the first footsteps of Amazon.

I really want another job. I don't just want to replace the one I have (moreso, I'd rather improve the one I have) I want to show that I've set another target that I'm capable of blowing out of the water. 3 months? Why not a month and a half? Why not work that job and make it to the gym, and figure out an eating situation that doesn't suggest low-key decadence? The will is definitely still there, but the bump against reality, the time constraint, and mental exhaustion cannot be denied. I did not respect them as variables in my vision of the future. I never got old or tied to this much crap I don't care about in the visions.

The trap then really is debt. I've been poor. Poor you can try to play things in the short term. Debt means someone's coming after you in a more aggressive way. Without debt, I could do that nonsense part-time thing, eat light, and poke my head into things in a more free to read and inquire sort of way. I don't need money to disassemble the broken truck engine. I'd barely need money to drive around picking up scrap metal in the truck. Hell, I was literally paying my rent donating plasma. I need to not get trapped. It seems like leeway, but it's truly a psychological trap. If I'm not actively working on or with whatever the reason I've gone into debt, it's a net psychological loss.

So some of the stuck is circumstantially justified. I am stuck paying off debt. That's 3 months of this job no matter what, or stuck that much longer if I quit or get fired for something dumb. As long as that remains the main focus, spending money here and there for progress on other things perpetuates the stuckness. Do I want that much more work done on the bathroom right now? It's caused me nothing but strife, so is hot water really worth feeling stuck for three and a half months? Not really. So I should accept my frozen ass and be thankful the toilet still basically flushes, and keep showering at Planet Fitness. I'm not obligated to make my builder guy feel like we're still on good terms by throwing him work he won't do in a timeframe that contributes to me feeling good anyway.

I killed the professional designation on Amazon for selling books, so I'm in no rush to figure out their stupid excel sheets for book listings. I bought more bricks to aide in keeping my shoes dry when walking across the land – affordable, achievable, practical. I'm in the middle of like 3 books I could just bother to focus on and complete, as well as could find audiobook copies. I could just sit and play videogames for a minute. I have a dozen I haven't even opened. 3 months in videogame time is like 10 minutes. There's ways to continue with aspects of my perfect flowy days without mocking it.

I need to remain “here.” I spend an incredible amount of unproductive time in the future. I don't allow myself room to breath, sleep, or enjoy unless I'm in good company, which is an incredibly small amount of my time. God forbid I actually surround myself with my people. I doubt I'd ever find the time to write about nothing again.