Hi. I haven’t posted anything here for about nine months now. Oops. Life has gotten really busy and, as the human I am, totally dropped the ball on my writing/blogging practice. And that’s totally okay.
That’s right, it’s totally okay. I’m probably more so telling myself than I’m telling you. There’s so much hustle mentality in today’s culture, especially in corporate America, where we’re taught that the best thing you can do is to grind super hard to reach your goals. And while I don’t think working hard is a bad thing, I think we’re often too hard on ourselves for not operating at 100% peak efficiency all the time. At least I know I am. I’ll beat myself up when I’ve had a productive day, and then I spend hours playing video games, or scrolling through cat videos and memes. Shit, I could have been meditating for all that time, or learning something new! What a waste. I’m never playing video games again.
I actually did try that last part, never playing video games again. I told myself I wasn’t going to play video games or look at memes or do anything that was a “waste of time.” This year, I’ve committed to a lot of new things, including massage therapy school, Wim Hof facilitator training, relatefulness facilitator training, and playing on a club ultimate frisbee team, so my time was going to be super limited. And ultimate frisbee is fun, so some of my commitments can be my stress outlets too, right? For a while, I really was in peak efficiency mode. I was learning and growing a lot in so many different areas, and my progress was incredibly rapid. My health, emotional capacity, communication skills, and physical fitness were just a few parts of myself that were on a wild upward trajectory. For a while, it seemed like this was the way to be.
And you probably already saw this coming, but after a few months, I crashed so fucking hard. It was exhausting to keep that up all the time. I got so sick of learning things that I just couldn’t do it anymore, even if it was a topic that I was passionately interested in. I binged so hard playing video games and scrolling through my phone, sometimes staying up past 4am. Even sleep felt like another “productive” thing to do, and I was so fed up with trying to be productive all the time. God damnit, I’m sick of this shit, and I need a break, even if that means staying up so late that I’m not functional the next day. I don’t care, I’m going to do it. Fuck it all to hell.
Binging on screens would continue for a while, until I became too disgusted with myself. What the fuck am I doing? I didn’t leave my good tech job to sit around and be a slob. Time to get my shit together. Let’s completely ditch the screens and focus on productivity again.
And so the cycle goes as it repeats itself… I’d be hyper efficient for a while, burn out, binge, then swear off all “time wasters” when I felt too gross just existing. I would go through this cycle over and over again, and it became a recurring pattern. After experiencing the same thing multiple times, I realized that I was just going to be stuck in the cycle unless I tried something different. I didn’t have what it takes to just be 100% efficient all the time, and I was only lying to myself each time I told myself that I’d “never play video games or scroll through my phone again.”
So, the next time I found myself in the binge part of the cycle, I decided to keep the time wasters available, even when I hit the point of feeling extremely disgusted with myself. I’d go back to productivity, but have the option to play games or look at cats or scroll through memes regularly. Instead of being hyper productive, I’d balance my productivity with downtime to relax. Everything in moderation – seems obvious, right?
While I wish this was the happy ending, moderation is still fucking hard. I still get caught in spending way too much time dicking around, which is why I tried abstinence in the first place. That being said, I’m not excessively binging anymore. I feel more rested and ready to go when I’m learning and exploring my passions. While I still struggle to find the right balance of grinding and playing, I’ve found that purely grinding isn’t the answer that works for me. It may be different for you and it may be different for others. It will probably change over time for each of us, and we’ll never find the perfect strategy that lasts forever. It’s a wild goose chase that’s actually worth engaging in, even if you never catch the goose.
And that’s part of the journey too – continuing to figure shit out as we go along in life, even though we’ll never have everything figured out. Even if we figure something out, it’ll probably uncover some new things that we don’t know, or it may only be a temporary solution. There’s a great humility that comes with this, but there’s a relief that comes with it too. We don’t have to be perfect because it’s impossible to be perfect. When we’re able to accept that reality, then we’re able to give ourselves more grace. It’s okay when we fuck up that big presentation at work, it’s okay when we’re super awkward around our crush, and it’s okay that I didn’t write in this blog for nine months. When we combine our ambition and passion with our acceptance of our imperfections and inefficiencies, that’s where the gold lies. Aristole once said that every virtue is a balance between two extremes, and that is true here as well. We can continue to look for the sweet spot between being a slob and a perfectionist, and at the same time, not be too hard on ourselves when we inevitably can’t find the exact balance.
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