Following plans vs. obsessions / my new learning topic: existentialism
I’m going to keep it short and real… Although I was ambitiously disciplined about how I want to spend my time, I did not really stick to my agenda. According to my daily time tracking, I spent only around 25 hours, including weekends (!) doing what I had planned on doing this week, including my Notion design project and my theatre review. This is not great.
What happened? I got very distracted. Last weekend, my personal life exploded, which led to an emotional turmoil that lasted 3 days. I spent hours in bed, then fanatically created a 24 page document, and filled half of a dense book that I never planned on reading with annotations. I felt like I couldn’t have done anything else, let alone sitting myself down to follow my plans. I gained peace of mind to focus on Wednesday, but a lot of bad habits that were acquired during the beginning of the week persisted. I consistently overslept and struggled to stay off of my phone during focus blocks.
Additionally, I was distracted by all the performing art campus groups’ auditions. I auditioned for 2 A Capella groups, went to 2 intense dance workshops, extensively researched all theatre groups on campus, and is considering whether I want to stay on the Cal Figure Skating competition team. It didn’t feel right to suppress my desires to complete a few more design iterations given how genuinely excited I was about performing and auditioning.
So when should we adhere to plans and when it’s ok to be spontaneous? All things considered, I was very productive because I was fully absorbed whenever I was working. I was able to be fanatic because I let myself do whatever I felt like doing at the moment, regardless of my plans. **Obsessions are powerful, but obsessions often seem to work independently from our plans, if not strictly around our plans.** If I had planned to annotate the book, I would probably dread doing it thus procrastinate.
@ArtirKel suggested to create a list of things you want and need to do, and pick one thing every day based your mood. This way, one can be flexible while also get things done. I like this idea, but the freedom it provides still feels limited. Our bursts of excitement are usually completely unexpected and those spontaneous rushes of urgency to create often lead to the most productive outcome.
I wonder how we could systemize both obsessive passions and personal discipline, if that’s possible at all. People don’t talk about work life balance during hackathons - they hack for 24h straight. Similarly, we don’t blame ourselves for staying up till 4 am for intimate and vulnerable conversations with friends at campfires. Many intense things happen for a good reason, and strictly sticking to the plan could ruin moments of explosive wonders.
All that being said, I am still setting goals, creating agendas, and aiming to follow my plans. I will be doing my next meta-learning sprint on philosophy, focusing on existentialism.
I chose existentialism because I want to explore the meaning, purpose, and value of human existence. I first came across existentialism during a severe depressive episode where I struggled to find a reason to continue living - when living constitute of an unbearable amount of psychological pain at the moment. Spring of this year, I spent a lot of time thinking about the layers of painful realities that we choose to ignore, the meaninglessness of civilization progression because the universe is going to end, or the fact humans don’t have an ideal of what we want to become so all progress feels directionless. I don’t hold on to the beliefs I generated when I was in a convoluted headspace, but I made a promise that I will exhaust my means of searching for meaning before I disrespect my life. Therefore, here’s my humble effort to spend more time thinking about the meaning of my existence with an intellectual, philosophical lens.
I don’t have a concrete reading list yet, but I am planning on covering Nietzsche (”God is dead”), Kierkegaard (”the crowd is untruth”), Sartre (Existentialism is a Humanism), and Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus). I will select summaries, primers, essays, novels, and even videos to consume, but the overall goal is to use these inputs to inform my own critical thinking and writing. I am excited about making some progress in overcoming my apathy.