Identifying the inner sloth

It has been a little or seven months for myself in this pandemic situation. While life and society adjusted and slowly resumed, have you moved with life, or have you been simply following it along?

To be honest, I fall into the latter. Overall my current circumstances have been pretty good. I was not negatively affected to a drastic degree. Having adjusted well to this new era my natural tendencies have been towards comfort.

To the point of coasting.

That has been counterintuitive to how I should be living my life.

Let’s take inventory of usual routine:

Wake up - Check
Exercise - Check
Meditate - Check
Ruminate on my readings - Check
Fend of the procrastination sloth - Check
Start the work day - Check
Restrain the demon of attention and quick dopamine release - Check
Occasional break - Check
End work day - Check
Short unwind, nightly prep - Check
Motivate the beast within for nightly errands and other appointments - Check

Rinse and repeat

Being highly regimented person I have structured my life to essentially run on auto-pilot. That can be a good or bad thing. On one hand I don’t need to make many extra decisions. Therefore not expending unnecessary effort and energy. With that extra time an energy I could be directing it to something else.

However, I find myself leaning towards the path of least resistance. That speaks to presently being a rookie Stoic practitioner. :^)

Pain avoidant and suffering avoidant. 7 months into the pandemic and I’m coasting. It is part of my human nature.

Recently I caught up with some old friends. They too had some adjustment pains in this strange time but from what I can see they’ve accomplished a fair bit of things in this time. Immediately I can feel the subconscious back of my mind stray to thoughts of measurement between the use of my time and situation to theirs. Seeing their visible progress in wealth and experience building I was overjoyed for their success but couldn’t help but think that I should have done more with myself.

I must attribute the successes of my peers to the risks and out of the norm things that they have done. Especially with all the behind the scenes work they have to put in that. The successes we see from others are never achieved overnight, that accomplishment is from a continual process of highly focused attention that they never bring up. Props to them.

I know one thing about me, I’m very good running with problems when they are given to me. I am definitely better as an engineer fed tasks to do, over looking for problems on my own. Extrapolating that out generally: I do things only when they become urgent or when someone asks of me. To which I’ll put my utmost attention and focus on it.

Many times I remind myself of Jordan Peterson’s rules, especially rule 4: “Compare yourself with who you were yesterday, not with who someone else is today”. I know the principles but clearly fail to live up to it.

This may be unfair to me, the mind is can veer into vicious cycles of negative and extreme thinking. It could very well be honing on all my negative experiences and failures over the course of the year and neglecting any successes and accomplishments. That is where one must challenge their thoughts with exercises such as Stoic journalling, meditating and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy comes in. It’s rare that the topic of failures, anxieties, worries and negative thoughts arise over casual catch-up conversation with friends. Part of the reason is that for the most part, most people probably act like me.

Our natural state of being is towards a consistent normal. Therefore interesting memories/moments to bring up are often dichotic. Ofcourse, the postiive ones to share, the negative ones held in.

So we see here that I’m pretty open in sharing my inadequacies. My intent with exposing my shortcomings is to highlight that it’s okay to feel this way at times but not okay to complain absent of fixing the situation. At some level I just have to shut out my negative train of thoughts and continue doing what I’m doing.

At least celebrating the successes with my friends ignites the fire within me to question my own way of life - Figuring out what are things that I could be doing over subsistence and procrastination.