2024-05-08 | 09:55:19 AM
Heeeeeey. I’m coding right now and tracking it using Toggl so I’ll come back here later to dump my thoughts. For now please go to dev-2024-05-08.
2024-05-08 | 02:35:18 PM
Heya! It’s been a while. It’s now 02:35:25 PM, which is very much unusual since I usually look forward to doing this writing thing immediately as I wake up. However, today’s been different. I woke up late 😂 and did stuff last night that I probably shouldn’t have done as I went to bed. I went to bed not to rest, but to research on digital minimalism. It’s nice that I did that, but I woke up regretting it since it kinda made me groggy because I didn’t immediately sleep as I felt sleepy.
I rewatched quit social media from Cal Newport and it pretty much had the same effect as it had on me the first time. I ended up thinking and reflecting about my social media use, which I long have cut from my life almost completely. There have been countless times that I wanted to quit it, yet I have always come back to it like I didn’t even quit at all.
And a lot of the time that I’m in this repetitive cycle, I can’t help but think of myself as some sort of person without integrity. That I can’t do the stuff I tell myself to do. Yet, at the same time, I feel like it’s all the more important that I be kind to myself because it’s not really my fault that I’m getting addicted to these platforms. As a matter of fact, had I not been aware of the nuanced information that I could know about the dangers of social media (how they manipulate us, trick us, and even bring us into a very dark place — like depression), I wouldn’t even know that I’d already been in a very, very bad place.
And it’s interesting that I write this, since as I said, I almost always have always gone back to it before. But now, I truly, truly think it’s different. More than ever, I’m starting to understand that my time is never really coming back anymore. Just my recent exposure to the hospital made me think about my life a lot. Not just my health, but my whole freakin’ life. My time, my future, and everything else. I went home from the ER that night thinking, “Fuck, this could be one of my last days.” Thankfully, the stuff I had at the time weren’t life-threatening. Despite this, however, it got me thinking about the nature of my life so far. Whenever I look at other people, they seem to have achieved more in life than I ever have. They seem to have achieved, at an age younger than me, something I couldn’t see myself doing. And whenever I looked at the people I admired, I see multitudes of my potential manifested in other people. All the things I could be, if only I put in the effort:
A very short list of the people I admire
- Dr. Peter Attia, MD:
An hour into reading the book and this dude has been a surgeon (well, that ultimately didn’t turn out to be something he would pursue, but he at least trained for it by becoming a resident at Stanford!), someone who “…swum from Catalina to LA a few years earlier” and who did exactly that again, and now someone who studied applied math and mechanical engineering in college, who also happened to have planned on pursuing a PhD in aerospace engineering!
Link to original- Cal Newport
- Joe Rogan
- And a lot more!
If I had enough patience to extend this list, I could do it the entire day. I admire so many people for so many different reasons. And I think it’s really just because of this:
They possess a quality I wish I had.
It never really occurred to me until recently that being disciplined is extremely hard. I was just detailing to my girlfriend a while ago the process of Jocko Willink’s daily ritual to post his watch on Instagram. When he posted his watch, it always had 3:00 AM or 4:00 AM written on it. If he doesn’t post his watch, he posts what he calls an aftermath of his workout session — of course, still around the same time of dawn.
Every time I saw an image posted by Jocko Willink, it always nudged me into thinking, “I can do what he does. I just choose not to.”
I choose to live the easier live. Each time I see his watch, I get reminded that I’m living a life without structure, at the very least. Without intention. Without discipline. I just… go through the motions.
Still, I urge myself not to get discouraged by this, as I think it’s never too late to start. This might sound cliche but the best we can do to move forward is to act — and act now. In and of itself, this journaling thing I’m doing is something I have veered away from for months. Other than really tough personal challenges, I briefly went over why I quit journaling for a while here — something about the complexity of having to re-adjust my process due to the recent changes in Obsidian, which barred me from integrating the tool properly into my life.
I really like this video made by Jocko Willink called “GOOD.” Nowadays it’s one of those things that keep me going. I need not explain it here, as the way he explains why the word “good” is an art in and of itself that I think everyone should witness.
Sooo, yeah. Back to doing the things I should be doing today. I’ll see this journal again later, should my need for it arise.
2024-05-08 | 06:46:19 PM
Today...
It was today when I felt it. Just a while ago. I’d rather not think about it, but… when will it fade? It felt familiar, like she was someone I’d long known. Was it her hair, or her arms, or her hands, or her complexion? I’m not so sure. I see her, though she doesn’t see me. Is it real, or is it not? Is it even there?
I want it out of my life. I want it gone. Or was it just my thoughts? Should I have just shrugged it off, like it hadn’t made me want to bash my head against the wall for the majority of the time that I was in the elevator?
Whatever this is, I have a Spotify playlist for it. Bold as it may be, it’s my best attempt at giving this feeling a form, and I hope you would appreciate it.
It’s been a while since I felt it. I don’t know what it is, but the closest sensible thing I could attribute to it is limerence.