This is a note to myself about how to prioritize wisely. Or perhaps, it is an effort to commit to text a healthy mindset for myself. I have been trying to get into this mindset over a timeframe of some years now. I am making some progress, but it’s slow and not without setbacks. You can read it if you’d like, but this is my own advice for me. It may not apply to you.
Optimizing for mental health is the goal
When all the things that I must do have been done, I should consciously choose what to do next. It is way too easy to just let the world happen and end up doomscrolling or refreshing news sites in many 3-minute time slots during the day. I have come to realize that this is a choice that optimizes for the wrong things. Reading and re-reading news or letting YouTube consume my time makes me profoundly unhappy and unfulfilled.
It is better to be bored for 3 minutes than to risk losing 30 minutes to the rectangle of doom in my pocket. The rectangle of doom can easily stretch 3 minutes into 30 minutes before I notice.
I feel much better about myself when I create, learn, play, or educate, than when I passively consume. Habitually reaching for my phone is bad for me. I think I’m just quickly checking the news, but what I’m doing is that I’m killing time. Time is a finite resource every day, so this is unwise. I have too little time, not too much.
When I do not create, learn, play, or educate, I feel unfulfilled and unhappy. Therefore, those activities are not optional.
It is not sustainable to choose the things that make me unhappy. There is no such thing as not choosing. Passively consuming whatever’s on the phone is a choice. It just comes deceptively easy, so it doesn’t seem like one.
Content that is safe for consumption
Reading a book is a form of entertainment that does me no harm and often does the opposite. Watching a good movie in good company is often time well spent. Watching an episode of a TV show is fine if I know someone I can talk about it with. Building a lego kit is time well spent. Watching educational, long-form YouTube videos is often enjoyable and deeply fascinating. Watching conference presentations is interesting. Reading long-form technical blog posts is interesting. There are many forms of content that I can consume.
Here are some heuristics that are helpful for me to identify content that is good for me:
- It will require some effort from me to consume it.
- I am likely to want to discuss it with someone or write about it, or perhaps consume it together with someone.
- I can probably not fit it into 30 seconds or a minute.
- I can consume it while doing something else, like cooking or commuting, so it doesn’t displace any other activity that is more rewarding.
If the opposite for any of these points is true, it is probably not good for me. It is better to be bored and appreciate that time is moving slowly. Far too often, time just disappears, and I have nothing to show for it.
Choosing effort
The process of creating is highly enjoyable to me. The result matters less than the process. Choosing to create will often lead me to consume content that is good for me. I often need to learn new things as part of creating something. I highly enjoy learning new things, mastering something new makes me feel good about myself.
It would be a great outcome if I created something that was interesting or useful to other people. But it is not crucial. I have a need to create, or it will impact my mental wellbeing and happiness. It is not harmful to other people to create something that isn’t useful or interesting. But it is harmful for me to not make things. This justifies making even useless things.
If I am not in a creative mood, that’s fine. It probably means I’m empty for the time being.
Filling the time with reading and re-reading news or watching YouTube shorts does not refill my creative energy. It’s a trap. It’s not what I need when I’m unable to create.
It is better to do something that requires effort but does not consume creative energy. Put on some music and get ahead of my chores. Go for a walk, work out. Research something fascinating about a different country, philosophy, or the universe. Call someone I haven’t spoken to in a while. Schedule a lunch with a former colleague or friend. I have never once regretted phoning a friend or former colleague, or setting up a lunch. There has been exactly one instance in my life where I’ve regretted going on a walk. That’s much higher than a 99% success rate. Hanging out with people is nearly always rewarding, even when it is draining.
These things all take some effort but are very rewarding. I don’t know why I would ever expect good outcomes for no effort?
Enabling good things
It is fine for me to spend money on building good habits or enabling creativity. Spending money to get time is fine. When I feel bad about this, it has no basis in rationality. I am lucky that I can make these choices. It helps nobody when I don’t. I should never feel bad about purchasing a book that can help me learn something new.
If renting a slightly bigger server enables me to have bigger ambitions and ideas for my hobby programming, that is money well spent. Experience tells me that I will go for more walks and pay much more attention to nature for a while after having bought a new camera lens. This is a behavioral pattern I have that I know how to use for good, and it is okay to use it too. I don’t believe that buying the thing gives me happiness. It only makes sense to do this when I know that the purchase will unlock activity that is good. I am right more often than not, perhaps erring on the side of caution too much. I could bear to invest more in enabling the behaviors I want.
It is also okay to build things myself instead of purchasing, even if it does not financially make sense to spend the time. Sure, I can probably get a managed kubernetes service almost for free, but tinkering with systemd and podman is fun. The tinkering is the goal, the outcome is less important.
Why is it hard?
I’ve written a lot about what I want to be like now. I wouldn’t be doing that if I had already gotten there. Nothing of what I’ve written here is a surprising revelation to me. From that I conclude that I know what is right, and yet, I often choose wrong. Why?
There are many brilliant people who earn their living making people more capable of, and addicted to escaping their immediate reality using their doom rectangle. There are also some people who seem hellbent on making sure that there is terrible, depressing, horrifying news just a short headline away every single day. There’s little I can do about that, so that’s simply an excuse and not worth dwelling on.
There’s a structural issue with my everyday schedule. There are many more minutes spread out across 3-minute slots throughout the day, than there are minutes in 30-minute slots that could be used for something that takes more effort. Maybe it would help me to try to use the 3-minute slots on productive chores to free up larger segments of time later? That could help, but this problem isn’t going to go away entirely.
It is challenging to balance things. I must be a good role model and show my son that as an adult, I am responsible for doing the things that make me healthy and the best version of myself. I do not want him to grow up and think that a father’s place is to put everyone else first all the time. But it is simultaneously almost always right to put my son’s needs over my own. This is one of many reasons why I get a lot of 3-minute slots. As he grows older, I think this will probably become easier. We’re already capable of doing a lot more creative things together than just a few years ago. He is talking about wanting to make a game together. That would make me overjoyed, I think.
But most of all, it takes a lot of discipline to break habits. The path of least resistance constantly leads in the wrong direction. There are so many opportunities to choose wrong. The consequence is often to go down a vicious circle of feeling bad and exhausted about having chosen wrong in the first place. This ends up with me using the rectangle of doom to sedate myself. But the right choice is to accept the loss, move on, and do better next time. This kills less time in total, and time is finite.