Where is the better future?
- Journal Of Flow
- Jul 8, 2018
- 2 min read
One of the hardest self-assessments is that of the hic-et-nunc’s situation. It sounds simple and straightforward but demanding in all aspects. Tricky as it can be, I broke it down in 3 simple layers: Physiological, Cognitive (getting there, there is a ton of plans to deconstruct the concepts) and Behavioral.
I started on the physiological bit a half a year ago. It’s a little early to make progress report but I could say that 12 years off the writing pen required a lot more weaning off of the following:
smoking
snacking
social media
other mindless consumption
It took days of insomnia (which almost never happens) breaking the nicotine habit. Some nights are worth it as the stewing of brainwaves bore fruit the next day. Some just gave me the usual side effects of broken speech and clumsy mistakes at work. It’s only been a few weeks and while my lungs are filled up with grateful oxygen, my mouth is in Sahara of craving.
It costs almost a couple of months spending alone time (5% spent with colleagues), avoiding meet-ups with friends or late-night out intoxication to arrive at some grip of how much debt of self-love there is. As a result, opportunities to meet friends I haven’t seen years arose. Even met a decade-young girl who reminded me of my 24-year-old self. Both served good and bad sources of reflections.
I had to spend hours of deep and scarring self-interrogation – realizing I am only scratching the surface of this ambiguous sense of self’s truest form is buried in all that years of passive consumption. Mobile screen time had to be reduced to phone calls, messaging applications and batch email mark-as-read ticking. Imagine converting the countless hours of online browsing into deep plowing introspection. Biggest lesson: the smartphone is so essential, yet so hollowing.
These are merely minuscule steps with probably little to no correlation with anything productive.
Increments, increments.
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