4/29 Journal
The fallacy of living for ends & the necessity of obscurity
Had a busy day yesterday . . . Ran out of time to post. I’ll send my journal for today (4/30) this afternoon.
The fallacy of living for ends
8:22 AM- Today is my last ever day of undergraduate work. I am not sad.
If I could do school without schoolwork, I think I wouldn’t mind staying a little longer.
You know, movies like Harry Potter wouldn’t be so entertaining if they shared the reality of the student’s lifestyles—doing homework the whole time.
I’ve talked about this with a friend before . . . How older generations have put it in our heads that college is supposed to be the best four years of our lives, and the rest of life, in short, sucks.
What a horrible thing to tell a kid. What a horrible philosophy for life.
Not only does this make a kid feel bad when he inevitably feels like college isn’t everything it was made out to be, but it compels him to loathe the future. Talk about double trouble.
Has school always been so burdensome? I struggle to believe that our parents, at least in grade school, received nearly as much homework as we did. And even if the homework hasn’t changed, something has. Something is weighing on this generation that didn’t weigh on generations previous.
You could say I’m complaining, but I don’t have much to complain about anymore, since I’m done with school. It’s just an observation that some older folk refuse to acknowledge: something has changed.
I sort of hate when people live their lives for events.
Like when people idolize vacations, or concerts, or parties . . . It’s like, bro, chillax dawg. Maybe you should go touch some grass.
I guess I realized it pretty early—the best vacation in the world won’t bring you the lasting peace you seek. I remember how aggravated I would get when I saw people who were miserable banking all their happiness points on a vacation they’d soon take.
For like a week.
Really? You’re living your life to be happy for a week or two a year? I know this is cliche, but people overlook it. So many people actually live this way.
Their life is a trudging through the week to get to the weekend. A trudging through the day so they may get to the night.
This is what school feels like.
I know I may be making a mistake by thinking that the grass is greener on the other side because I always look forward to school starting back up in August . . . But only for the sense of community that it brings.
If I can find a community without having to give my life away to be part of it, then I think it’d be objectively fair to say life may then be a little better.
That is, after all, what this is all about. Life, I mean. It’s about other people. Sure, I’m a to-myself sort of person. I need my alone time. But without other people, life is hardly worth living.
And good people too. They’re hard to come by these days, though everyone has it within themself to be good, most simply don’t have the courage.
The necessity of obscurity
8:50 AM- I’ve endured periods of not knowing what to write about. These eras are by far the most painful. I’d rather endure a breakup than obscurity.
Being unable to write is like watching something you love die. I don’t think there are many things more grueling than that feeling of helplessness.
The problem with obscurity is that people think they just need a good night’s rest to overcome these times. Sleep well, eat well, and maybe go for a walk to clear your head. That should do the trick!
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, life isn’t just a series of tricks.
We are an amalgamation of our past actions. Emphasis on the s in actions. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. And each action compounds momentum.
All the pains in the world are accumulated. Of course, there are events that make an exception to this rule, but I’m talking about essential change—as in essence. The core of the thing.
When I endure periods of obscurity, I want desperately to get closer to the thing. Maybe if I just try hard enough, I think, I will break through!
Or maybe I just need to back off a little! Maybe I just need to have fun today.
But none of these work. It will most likely be weeks, or even months, before the sought-after clarity returns.
The obscurity is an amalgamation of missteps. Days and weeks of poor nutrition, poor sleep, excessive distractions, low-quality inputs.
To reverse this process, an equal and opposite action must be taken. Most people simply (1) don’t recognize that it’s merely the way they’ve been living for however long that’s brought them to their current state, and (2) aren’t willing to actually relinquish the short-term comfort of their current routine in order to build the healthy one they need to elicit change at the core.
With all this said, part of me is also under the impression that this cycle, this fluctuation, is, like the rotation of the earth. That is—imminent and necessarily cyclical.
In all honesty, I’ve suspected myself of bipolar disorder before (LOL), but my fluctuations could also be the natural cycle of working towards things. Seasons of progress and seasons of recovery.
It just seems like these seasons affect me differently than others. Like, I’ve had to take steps back from school and sports before. There have been times when I’ve literally hated the sport I grew up loving because I got so close to it.
When I quit college soccer, for example, I had to be away for nearly 10 months before my love returned. And now, I’ve been away from my team for a month . . . I feel the tinges of love, but it’s not yet fully present.
The point is that we can’t see clearly when we get so close to something. But this presents a conundrum, doesn’t it? Isn’t life about going all in? About getting close to things?
It certainly is.
These moments of obscurity, from what I can see, then, are entirely necessary.
For a while, I’ve said we must be lost in order to be found, but I haven’t and still don’t entirely know why. I suspect it’s got something to do with the fact that we must know the bad to know the good. Something like that.
I think, too, that these eras, for some reason, act as a sort of filter. Most people simply don’t have the patience to endure seasons of obscurity. And so, they miss out on the gold rush.
It’s not even like the “industry” is filtering out the people who it thinks don’t deserve success. Put differently, it’s not an external, hand of God sort of thing. Instead, it is the process of shaping greatness.
The truly great is hardly waverable. The truly great is hardly affected by external circumstances.
Clarity and obscurity will undulate, no matter how yogic you are. It is how our subconscious makes sense of the world.
Your job is to remain persistent, taking each day as it comes. Stop running from the bad, stop craving the good. Learn what these times have to teach.
I didn’t know what to write about, and I thought it was just going to be a couple of days or a week of obscurity. This one turned out to be several weeks. And I’m still sort of coming out of it, even writing this now.
But from obscurity, this beautiful journaling process has emerged.
I may not be writing world-class posts yet, but I’m getting my words on a page every single day and sharing them with the world. As a result, my content output is literally 7x what it was before. That’s a win if you ask anybody playing the game. And it came from a period of not knowing what to do (better yet, it wouldn’t have come to fruition if I knew what to do the entire time).
We can’t control when we win or how we win. All we can control is our small decisions to keep moving forward.
We will need to make adjustments. We will mistakenly get too close to things, and feel the subsequent pain.
But we must not capitulate. Giving up is the only way to lose. Patience is one of life’s greatest virtues.