Tag: evaluation

059b – weekly updates and open questions

Last week was a busy week. It was a decent week, though. Lots of ups and downs— but lots of rich moments and experiences, so that’s been nice. A good amount of movement on small tasks and things I’ve been wanting to do for a while now, so that feels great. 

However, I’m a little tired of all evaluative aspects of my life. Or the fact that I’m approaching all aspects of my life with an evaluative lens (maybe because I feel like I need to “figure things out”). I think the most confusing part of life is work and career. I feel pulled in many directions and a part of me knows picking something can be important to “move” but part of me is also not okay with giving up certain things. 

Although I told myself last week that I’m NOT actually pulled in too many directions, ie it’s manageable if I don’t want to give up any of them yet, I think I get triggered when something new inspires me in a way that I feel like acting upon it immediately. Basically, I get triggered when something (a new piece of information, event, experience, stimulus etc) makes me question or doubt my prioritisations that I may have done. What does this mean for me? I suppose it just means that I go over why I’ve currently prioritised tasks/projects the way I have and then just trust that reasoning. And then treat new piece of stimulus as important enough to maybe “make a note of” but then not go into a reprioritisation exercise every-time I do get triggered. 

I guess there’s still a lot more scope for action over thinking on a daily basis. That’s essentially where the dissatisfaction is coming from. Even if I need to reflect or “think”, I should only be doing it in the written / journal / notes form. Thinking within my brain is definitely not helping me at all. In fact, it’s starting to become a major blocker / time-sink. 

Open Questions / Todos: 

  • Reflections on art and in what ways I like to engage, are there limits? Can I add 1-2 hours of structured learning a week so that I can make more progress on the skills I want to improve on? Should these skills only be pursued if I aim to “make” something out of them (ie a career) or can I trust that learning for the sake of learning is fine too? 
  • I’ve been thinking that I want to start looking for part-time jobs or internship opportunities probably in Jan / Feb. Does that feel okay and if not— why? 
  • I’ve been wanting to make a short trip to a hilly destination for a while now but haven’t been able to make this a priority yet.. though I’m not sure why. So yeah I suppose I should prioritise this now.

  • I’ve been giving 3-4 hours a week to volunteer work, but it’s been a bit draining and I’ve had more requests come to me. I do want to continue to do this though, so I need to figure out a way that I can plan this better so it can be a little easier on me.

015b – addiction + short posts

I want to understand what addiction is. In my previous few posts I mention how some activities might make us feel good in a potentially illusive way. Obvious examples that come to mind – mindless social media content consumption, video games that aren’t truly challenging or fun anymore but simply dopamine releases. (I’ve felt this when I was going through an online Catan addiction phase.)

I want to check whether that’s true. Are some activities simply dopamine releases? And even if they are, at what point is that okay and what point do they become addictions? I want to find this out so I can review my current addictions and maybe do something about them.

So a quick skim of some seemingly trustable sources suggests that substances or behaviors are addictive if they’re interfering with sleep or real life, taking too much time or in general creating negative feelings if withheld from the consumer. So I can say for sure that I was addicted to Catan since I remember getting pretty sad and “bored” when I wouldn’t find good company to play it with.

Now if I had to do a quick listing of what I think my current addictions are, I’d probably go with these: 

  • Sugar (since I get “real cravings” quite often, throughout the day)

  • Hot water showers (since I cannot imagine changing this without a ton of mental and physical effort)

  • Social media + engagement (Twitter is the platform I’m most “addicted” to, for the last couple months, I think)

  • Writing (or “publishing”) (I’m a little worried about this since I do find myself being distracted from work due to this, almost as if I’m chasing a “high”. I “dislike research” but I’m also doing quick skims and reads, barely enough to be able to reference them, barely enough to get something out everyday)
    • I did a quick “can writing addiction be a thing” and it looks like it’s almost a laughable idea? So, uh, probably my anxious little mind scaring me off of everything.

  • Caffeine – I don’t think I’m as addicted as I used to be until a few months ago, but I know for sure there’s something here since I keep saying that I’m only addicted to the thought / idea of a “tasty beverage” but I haven’t yet found anything without caffeine that works well enough.  

I think these are mostly it. I don’t think I need to be working on any of these at the moment, since I am currently working on reducing some of my “constraints”. Most of them are related to body dysmorphia and exposure therapy, and it makes sense that I come back to that now that I’ve decided to value my time again. 

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I don’t think short essays should be this short. I feel like this was barely anything worth putting out into public, but I know I have space for a short post so I’ll probably end up doing it anyway. I think, so far, I’ve been posting mostly “notes”y writing, and that’s fine since that’s what I started with. But I think it might be nice to consider investing a bit more time in connecting notes, ideas, observations and maybe making stories out of them? Or maybe starting to think about the value in it for a reader? I know I’m cheating (a lot) by adding information that’s not truly relevant to the topic I originally started writing about, but I also think that’s okay since that’s probably a sign of something else. I think the information I’m receiving here is that I don’t fully believe in a “purely quantitative” goal. I just borrowed a goal that someone else had for themselves since it felt like a nice goal to follow. But if I’m still not feeling good enough about “just putting some words” on a page then it definitely means that I need to reevaluate why I’m following this goal.

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References: 

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