Tension between rest, fulfillment, and identity

When I told my therapist that I fear I have gotten lazy he immediately pulled the accusation apart. No, no, I'm not lazy! I'm actually a hard worker that is hyper-focused on the wrong thing: leisure.

For the past handful of years I have worked hard on leisure. Recently there has been a lot of emphasis in building up my home to be a sanctuary that I never have to leave. I also sought out a new job that paid more with more work-life balance. All my hard work is to enable different ways of being able to sit around doing little.

No in-depth psychological analysis needed here for why I have such a push-pull dynamic with work and rest. As a child I spent a disproportionate amount of time working than my peers, only to escape to the internet when I could. As a 20-something I spent a disproportionate amount of time working than my peers, only to escape to the internet when I could. This hard-work-then-escape cycle has been my entire life.

In 2019 however there was never an escape. Only work. It literally took a global pandemic a year later to cut me loose and give me room to breathe. I went from having no time to having all the time in the world.

With no structure the pendulum swung hard into the opposite direction. Yes, I accomplished a lot over the past handful of years, but that is colored by way more leisure than hard work. How much more could I have accomplished by now if I worked harder?

There is an invisible battle every time I want to do anything now. I can talk myself out of anything. It isn't hurting anything to let dishes sit in the sink another day, right? My hobbies don't matter so why should I work on them? It is so much easier to do nothing.

When people say "call of the void" it is death-centric, but it isn't inaccurate to say that I get a similar feeling about any of my labors. None of it matters so why not do the easy things that also don't matter? Shut down. Escape. TV, video games, get high, get drunk, consume, void out your thoughts and desires. Rest myself to death.

Hikikomori (random guy pictured above) is the label appended to Japanese who withdraw from work and society at large. A couple different decisions and I may have ended up the same way. You would find me buried under bottles of Coke, Reese's wrappers, piles of cigarettes, and a controller in my hand. No work. No friends. No responsibilities. What a life! The call of the hikikomori void is strong.

It sounds great for a second anyway. I'm not built in a way to seriously consider it. I need to feel that things matter. My work needs to be fulfilling. My rest needs to be fulfilling.

I can be so much more. That's what actually haunts me. Something stronger than the call of the void calls out to me. There's so much to create, so much to experience, so much labor, so much fulfillment.

I read Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz in a time when I wasn't ready for it so sorry ahead of time for the upcoming bastardization. Maltz writes about how he—a plastic surgeon—would often find that his patients' bodily woes wouldn't be satisfied post-op. Turns out a new nose won't fix how you see yourself.

Maltz found that he had to cure that negative view of their self. Going above and beyond on his Hippocratic Oath, this surgeon dove deep into the analysis of how people view themselves and what they want. His discovery is cliche at first: you must have a clear image of what you want and who you want to be. It is the art of "self-concepting."

The interesting tidbits are about how self-concepts need to be heavily internalized and worked. It isn't enough to know what you want or who you want to be. You have to visualize it. Consistently. Daily. You must put in the mental reps of visualizing it. Your brain can't tell the difference between a vivid imagined experience and real one, so the idea is to hack it with intentional simulations.

Then comes the secondary discovery of Psycho-Cybernetics. With an idealized self-concept you will gravitate toward it. He uses a metaphor of a self-guided missile seeking a target. If you have a proper target [your self-concept] then the missile [your mind and body] will course-correct to strike the target successfully.

Visualize both your self-concept and how you will meet those targets. The more times you do it the more data your brain will have. If nothing else you won't have the anxiety of doing something different because to your brain/body you have already done it many times.

My takeaway of all of this is that my therapist was right. Surprise, surprise. There was a time when I desperately imagined a life of leisure. I created a button that fires a missile at leisure and never stopped pressing the button.

I have been very successful in getting what I wanted when I was 15 and 25. Those versions of me are dead now. I'm almost 35 and don't need this leisure anymore.

For years I've been toiling away on systems for achieving goals and determining what you want. What I have underestimated is the importance of self-concepting. I know what I want, but I don't know who I want to be. Who am I now? Who is Grey in 5 years? I can't describe who I am or who I want to be with any succinct clarity.

"I'm someone who has a clean house" is something I have been saying in my head recently. It feels so dumb. Yeah, of course I logically want a clean house but did I really want it? My identity of leisure wins every time against my identity of someone with a clean house.

Already I have seen results and they feel sustainable. Telling myself who I actually want to be has cut through a lot of resistance. I can't let the dishes sit an extra day when "I'm someone who has a clean house."

Per Psycho-Cybernetics, if I imagined doing the dishes before doing the dishes would that make it easier as well? If I internally simulated doing the dishes 1000 times would I ever care about doing the dishes again? That's a fun thing to experiment with.

This is all the boring slog of self-improvement. The invisible neurotic work that has to be done to be who you want to be and achieve what you want. Influencers make it seem easy which is half the reason I write about this stuff. In actuality it is so insanely mundane that it feels stupid yet necessary. We must focus on the stupid necessary so that the stupid unnecessary doesn't rule our lives.

We're all slaves to an invisible script that takes meticulous attention to start seeing the shape of. Make the script known, rewrite it, recite it. All there is and all we are is the script.