I never thought this would happen to me…
I went on a 2 week road trip recently in my 4Runner. It was incredible. Skiing, exploring, working from coffee shops. It was really challenging though, but it felt good and exciting. I felt like I was valuing my attention better, not wasting time scrolling social media, valuing which YouTube videos I was watching. This was very different from how I was spending my time in my apartment, frequently reaching for my phone for something to do, sitting on the couch for hours scrolling social media and watching random YouTube videos. This trip felt like progress, it felt like a big step in the right direction for me.
But when I got back everything changed… (or maybe didn’t change, based on how you look at it)
I had maybe a couple days in the same mindset as on the road, but it only took a couple days before I was literally right back to the same habits – reaching for my phone, sitting on the couch scrolling social media, twiddling my thumbs.
I don’t like apartment life.
Part of me hesitates at that claim, because living in an apartment is nice. Cooking is easy, you have a bathroom and a shower right at your fingertips, and a nice warm bed waiting for you every single nice. Oh, and AC and heating. Everything is controlled, everything is consistent. Living in an apartment is nice, it’s so easy to just coast, but man, it’s too nice…
I’m starting to really internalize the idea of seeking out discomfort, challenge, and how comfort affects you. At a higher level, I’ve realized that I don’t want comfort right now. Maybe if my work and my hobbies had more challenge, more chaos, more discomfort, then living in apartment would balance all that out, but that’s unfortunately not the case…
I want more challenge, more chaos to contend with. I want to progress, to grow, to learn. Doing those in a comforting environment is a lot harder than I expected it would be.
Maybe the answer is that I just “need more self-discipline,” but I’m not sure that’s the case. Yes, I could 100% have more self-discipline. That being said, I’ll easily spend hours in a coffee shop on a Saturday morning working on things I’m interested in. With work taking up the majority of my days and being somewhat tied to my apartment, I feel restricted. It feels like trying to swim upstream.
What if I just got out of the stream and moved to a different stream that pushed me in the direction I want to go?
Big changes are coming…