I’ve been thinking about optimizing my life, as I often do. But to figure out how to properly optimize my life, I’ve needed to narrow down the things I want to dedicate myself to. It’s common for people to bounce from activity to activity aimlessly. We’re constantly searching for games to play and prizes to win, but we often quit these pursuits before they yield fruit.
I’ve been stuck in this pattern of aimless seeking for multiple decades. While there are a handful of pursuits that I’ve stuck with, I’ve still been unable to commit to a single thing; but I’ve made progress. Now, writing is my main vehicle of creativity. I write for my job, I write for my mental health, I write for others, and I write for myself. I write. And it’s cool. But I still wouldn’t say I’m living optimally.
For me, living optimally would mean I’m spending the largest amount of time possible in a flow state. After all, when you’re in a flow state, that’s when your desires disintegrate and you’re living in the moment. It’s ecstasy, feeling that feeling of effortless creation.
But I find that I get distracted along the way. I can’t write every second of every day. That’s obvious. To try and do so would burn myself out; then I wouldn’t like writing at all. It would be counterproductive. But the thing is I spend a good amount of time each day doing things that don’t contribute to the realization of my higher self.
For example, I play a lot of Chess, and I watch a lot of YouTube videos. While there are times when I can get into a state of flow from Chess, there’s a point where I overdo it. I acknowledge to myself that I’m not playing for fun, I’m playing to distract myself from other things. Maybe I’m running away from emotions I haven’t processed or from deadlines that I know I should be working on.
Chess has become a trap because I overindulge in it. Learning moderation is an essential skill that everyone needs to learn. It’s something that I feel I learn on a new level each passing year.
You can overindulge in anything, and that’s my specialty. As a kid, I’d overdo it in video games; as a young adult, I’d overdo it with drugs; and now I overdo it with Chess. So I’d say I’m making progress.
Sometimes it feels draining to have to learn the same lesson over and over again, but I understand that’s life. You learn, you regress, you learn the same lesson again, you regress, maybe you learn two powerful lessons in a row and then regress some more. It’s cyclical.
Is there a way to break out of the cycle? No. But if you accept the cycle then you can live peacefully both during the highs and the lows.
That’s why I’m trying to optimize my decision-making process. If I have a personal manual of how I should act at any given moment and learn how to exert my will to make those decisions by default, I’ll be free.
So today, I had a back-and-forth with myself. My friends are playing a new fighting game: Multiversus. Essentially, it’s a clone of the popular Nintendo game “Super Smash Bros.” I haven’t played games seriously in a long time, but recently I’ve been feeling unfulfilled, and today was a particularly tough day for me.
I was holed up in my room, writing blog posts about grief for my job, feeling like I wasn’t doing anything of value. Between writing posts, I was browsing YouTube, but I found myself urging the videos that I was watching to go faster. I was doing this common thing I do where, from start to finish, I watch a video thinking about the thing that I need to be doing next. It’s torturous. But I do it anyway. (Why? I think it’s because I want to escape from my work, so I watch videos for a quick dopamine release.)
So after this day full of low-vibration activities, I thought that it might be fun to try out Multiversus, which would give me an excuse to achieve flow state in a video game with my friends (Most of my first childhood experiences with flow came from video games). But as I walked to the store to buy a controller for my laptop, my mind shifted.
The sun was bright and sunny, breath air flowed into my nostrils, I felt that unique type of freedom that comes from walking down a familiar route. It’s an in-between state of consciousness, like when you’re laying down and aren’t quite dreaming yet — but are just starting to loosen your grasp on reality.
In that state of mind, I realized that, while there were plenty of justifications for me to get that controller, it also wasn’t the highest decision I could make. While I enjoy playing video games here and there, I don’t need video games to bring me happiness. In fact, to invest in another game would be to further distract me from my core passions.
So I turned 180 degrees at the street corner of my nearest Target and fast-walked home, back to my laptop. Because I felt inspired. I felt my creative juices could be used for anything at that moment — so why not redirect my energy toward my core passion of writing?
It isn’t that there’s anything wrong with playing games; it’s just that I’m trying to focus on a couple of different pursuits at the expense of everything else to see how far I can take them. I suspect that the more you narrow your focus, the more fruits there will be of your labor.
It’s like how to become a great boxer, you have to spend every waking moment training, eating right and sleeping right in order to get the edge you need over your opponent. You need ruthless dedication to your sport to be recognized as one of the greats. If you’re too dispersed between a handful of hobbies, you’ll never become great at a single one.
And in the past, once I started walking to that Target to buy a controller, I would have fully committed. Even if I had second thoughts walking into Target or felt disappointed in myself for wanting to purchase something that I knew would just be another distraction for myself, I’d consider the transaction a done deal the moment I stepped out the door of my apartment.
Now, however, I’m trying to take full control of my life. If I initially decide to do something that’s bad for me in the long-run, but I realize that there’s a different decision I could make that would have a positive impact on my life, I’m not going to act like I can’t reverse my initial decision. The fact is that we always have the power to change the trajectory of our lives.
For example, I used to be psychologically addicted to smoking marijuana. Marijuana isn’t a substance that triggers physical addictions in you, but I definitely wanted to quit but felt that I couldn’t. And I remember at one point, I was trying to quit, but I had a lapse of judgment. I felt like it was inevitable that I was going to smoke that night, so I rifled through my closet to retrieve my baggy of weed and packed my vaporizer, preparing to take a hit.
I knew that I didn’t want the hit. I knew I didn’t really want to be high. I knew that, in the long run, it’d be better for me if I quit. But I had already packed the bowl, so I had already lost. I took an inhale of marijuana, and a wave of regret washed over me.
But it’s never too late to change the trajectory of your life. At that moment, I went to my backyard and smashed my vaporizer to pieces and then threw the pieces away; then I took my baggie of marijuana and dumped it in the trash. In this situation, even after I already made the move to get high, I reclaimed my power as an individual by destroying the source of my bad habit.
And this is something that I try to practice every day, but on a microscale. If I find myself about to make a negative decision, I stop. I think about what the higher decision would be toward fulfilling my purpose. And I choose to do that instead.