Doing Difficult Things
As promised, i have published my weekly post on schedule. i might have missed a few weeks though.
i've been thinking a lot about my childhood recently. i used to be a person who genuinely pushed myself, did hard stuff. That doesn't seem to be true anymore.
There are probably a lot of reasons for this—disillusionment (note: worth a future post), failure, general lethargy, and perhaps most importantly, i'm so tired of running for so long, so hard. All of this is cool, but it doesn't change the central fact: i don't do difficult things anymore.
Sure, i do impressive things. i landed a full time job before i've passed high school. i live alone now. But none of these felt genuinely difficult to me—they were natural consequences of my (selfish?) desire to have fun and do my thing—regardless of how abnormal it feels—combined with tremendous doses of luck and the humbling generosity of certain humans.
i've become rather good at branding, i notice. i sound impressive. My writing is more polished. My actions are more sophisticated. Even my humility sounds more genuine (atleast to my ears), even though i have good evidence to believe that my egoism is reaching record levels. And that is good—branding is extremely helpful (another future post: manipulation), but focusing on branding so much has an odd result—i've stopped working on the actual substance, the real me.
None of this is to say that i regret branding—certainly not, it has brought a lot of good into my life. What i'm worried about is that i've stagnated internally.
To return to the point, i barely do anything difficult now. i can't concentrate on academics—i compulsively check Discord (at this point, it's scary), or read about irrelevant news about who's divorcing whom or Trump's latest antics, even though i actively cringe. Hell, i even clean my cupboard for hours (I thought about writing this and my body took me to wash my shoes for an hour. They're shining, yay). i can't concentrate on anything difficult, even if i like it and i feel good after doing it. i don't want to learn languages, i don't want to give talks. i don't write, even though i find few activities as rewarding as reading my own words, feeling them roll in my mouth.
Part of this is attributable to other factors, but the core factor is probably this: i'm lazy. i want cheap dopamine. So i have it—by eating, by watching movies, or pointless, stilted, conversations with friends i barely like; mindless hedonism that fails to live up to its name, consuming and consuming all day.
(Happily, the one area relatively unaffected by this seems to be my work.)
So i decided to fix it. Except there is a problem: that is difficult too.
Gym
i feel kind of bad by starting off with philosophy and now bulldozing into the most cliched topic ever, but hold on, it's not about the gym.
The gym and i do not share history. i grew up a nerd, and communal politics make an individual want to conform to some group. i did try to be part of the cool gang, but it turns out i do not enjoy cricket, and in fact positively hated spending time with stereotypically cool kids in school.
So i then veered strongly into the nerd. i abhorred spending time on my clothes and general looks. i sported glasses—the worst possible. i spent hours on Wikipedia. None of this was conscious behavior at the time—it just was "me". "me" liked mathematical equations. "me" didn't like anything remotely jock-ey.
Here's the thing—i wasn't being fake. i genuinely like Wikipedia—i still binge it, and I spent six weeks last summer playing with math. But the problem here was that, for no good reason, i strongly resisted "anti-nerd" activities, and the gym was probably near the top of the list.
But i don't play communal politics anymore. not because it hurt—no, i felt great, in a group; predictable and safe. Perhaps i should have maintained that—but nonetheless, somewhere along the road i decided that i'd like to be myself, even if the cost of that was isolation. The past few years have been a gradual celebration of mujhe, without labels. And it's been difficult—ironic, i realize, given this post—but it's also been immensely rewarding, and i don't regret it for a second. Well, i do, but i don't regret it for like a day.
Anyway, once i got over gym-bashing, i realized that i needed some physical exercise and for that, the gym was as good a place as any other. i started going to the gym on the 5th of March. i swaggered in the first day—it is a pretty place, unlike most gyms, with faux grass carpets and warm lighting—and the instructor told me to try a few exercises.
It's amazing how physically weak i am. i could barely do 15 reps of some 10 kg exercise in the third set—my arms started shivering.
I will very probably improve on that, though. The point of this post is emotional strength.
"Good" Hardship
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, they tell us. This is untrue. It can still drain you, leave you weaker.
Most hard things make you feel good and in control after you're done with it—be it exams, gym goals, or even writing once a week. Sometimes, however, they leave you weaker—fragile and out of breath. i'm not sure how to precisely differentiate between these two. The first type seems to be what we commonly know as trauma—crime victims, runaways, any area where it's not just you working towards something—but your heart pushing, always pushing, against the tides of fear and despair. That tends to leave you drained emotionally, even if you have pulled off something immense.
However, the recipe for building back after traumatic hardship is probably pushing yourself to do more of the second type of hardship, the "good" kind.
Gym is good hardship. Trying to maintain rituals is surprisingly hard—and it's good hardship. Studying for the entire A Level syllabus in four subjects in four months is good hardship. i am not sure if i will be able to do any of these, but even trying is difficult.
Don't criminalize failures. Any mission is made of of two components: your work, and luck. Failures mostly happen in part due to flaws in the first component, but luck sometimes plays a huge role (in both your victory and your downfall).
You can only control the first component. So some work is better than no work, no attempt. Try to do difficult things. Even failing at them is better than not trying, because trying itself is difficult, an effort worthy of applause.
Easing Difficulty
random thoughts on making it easier to do hard things.
Change the location—i know it sounds like spritual ramblings, but this is surprisingly effective.
Over the years, consistency has been something i've always failed (but tried! and hence it's more praiseworthy than someone who cared but didn't try) at. One thing i noticed was that i was very consistent with sports—tennis, badminton, and now gym for ~2 weeks. And i'm not even good at physical activity.
i think the reason for this is that once our mind associates a certain location for a certain thing, it becomes much easier to do it. Once you get on the wheel, kinetic friction is far lower than static friction. So one idea would be to go somewhere else to build your habit.
i've stipulated one corner of my desk is another room for my studying. No studying in bed from now on. i'm also thinking of finding a pretty place (so underrated) nearby to write.
Paying does not help—at least, not as much as we'd expect it to. i used to think that paying for something makes you more consistent. Nope.
No, it's not because i'm rich or privileged, or anything like that. i once spent 40% of my savings—the then-largest expenditure i had in my life—on a course about thinking. i genuinely liked it. Yet i wasn't consistent. Months later, for tennis, which i certainly enjoy less than convoluted philosophical conversations, and which my parents paid for—i attended for almost half a year before i moved. i'm not sure why this doesn't work. Perhaps it's just me—i don't value money as much as i "should"?
Rituals probably do help—or to quote Dr. Laurie Santos, get a cue.
i can't really speak about this because it's been a long time since i've settled into a ritual. But associating it with a time or an event or anything, to be honest, works rather well.
Put up a little bracelet on your whiteboard and tell yourself when i see that, i'm gonna pick up my guitar. i'm slowly implementing other rituals too—Sunday morning writing, and journaling at 9:30 everyday (funny: journaling is one of the only things i've been consistently doing for years, and i've put approximately null intentional effort into its consistency)
Remind yourself it's okay to fail - in some cases, that you likely will fail, and in almost all cases, you will not reach your expectations.
In his excellent book, Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman points out that the reason most of us shy away from doing difficult things is the subconscious idea of finitude. So long as something is a dream, it is perfect, flawless. But once it starts forming in the real world, it has to be finite.
So things will not go according to plan. It will not be as good as you wanted it to be. That's okay. A malformed reality is far, far, better than a perfect fantasy.
It gets easier with time—or, it's not all in your head but it mostly is.
Once you get used to difficulty—it won't be a huge deal anymore. i feel this with some other negative experiences, like pain. i was at the dentist, and they kept telling me this is going to hurt! don't worry, it's only for a few minutes! can i go ahead? And i realized (a scientifically improper conclusion, but nonetheless one that's thought-provoking) that as a society we've glorified physical pain so much that even the slightest pain seems not just scary, but something unbearable.
For me, it's not a big deal—yes, i don't like it; it hurts, i cringe when it hurts, but i won't put up a fight against it.
It's the same for difficulty—once you do one or two very difficult things, doing the next thing no longer seems impossible, unbearable. it's merely sigh, okay, how do i get this done?—not aaaargh, can i do this? Also, when the going does get really tough, you can direct yourself to think about the equally tough things you've pulled off in the past.
Again—(nerd me speaks out: the coefficient of) kinetic friction is far lower than (the coefficient of) static friction.
Here's to a difficult few months!
You can bomb us, torture us, burn our districts to the ground. But just remember—fire is catching. And when we burn, you burn with us.
Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins