This article resonates with me, but I don't think it would have when I was in my twenties. It's the kind of thing you come to realize after longer years as an adult and you see patterns play out in radically different life contexts, and then you start to grok who you really are in ways that aren't available when you've been an adult for less time then you were a child.
What I've learned about procrastination and escapism is that a lot of it is driven by neurotic feedback loops involving some meta-narrative I have about myself. But narratives are not reality, and while I'm busy overthinking those things I'm no use to myself or anyone else. Some of these tendencies are hard-wired in me, but by recognizing the pattern I can nudge myself back towards the present moment in which I am not perfect, but occasionally do good things.
Realizing I'd sat there doing essentially nothing for years out of fear of making the wrong choices was a huge wakeup call. It turns out most choices don't generate much inertia: you can always change course.
You only get so much time. Inertia from decision paralysis grows exponentially the longer it goes on. But you get a lot of time. The brain struggles to grasp it. If you're 55, you could have as many years left as I've had in total, and I figured out in my 30s what most people only figure out on their deathbed.
The best time to make a call is now. My call was to focus on music around 2017, and the last 5 years have seen more progress than the 15 before it. I was doing CI/CD on my life without even realizing it with similar results. As with software development, there are mistakes, but I'm practiced at and confident with fixing them and getting on with it.
Don't be like this person. Literally, throw away all the video game machines you own and take an extremely long walk in Tibet if needed. This is a cautionary signal. If you relate to this, you're going to throw your life away.
I was responding to a sub-thread but it got deleted before I could finish. This is what I think about this:
Someone said:
>> it could be hurtful to people to attempt to archive by getting sucked into cycles of attempting to break a neurological predisposition
That's rather well put.
From the outside, some people are an abyss, permanently dominated by this type of cyclical thinking, in which getting out of the abyss creates new and interesting forms of drama. And the attraction of that gravity well to newbs who haven't e.g. been long-term alcoholics or locked up for suicidal tendencies, is precisely the fact that it gives one a temporary satisfaction (even worse, maybe, a way of lording it over others) of having addressed a particular neurotic trait, while substituting a load of other negative traits in exchange.
Nothing good ever comes out of the speech where one has repressed a particular neurosis by coming to terms with it in some crystalline fashion. It's a speech either designed to scam others, or to scam oneself.
So, in plain English, what you're saying is to not obsess over fixing neuroses because it's an addiction in itself that leads to other negative traits?
> by coming to terms with it in some crystalline fashion
I’m not sure I get you. There are certainly ingenious speeches but there are genuine ones, too (probably not speeches but genuine acceptance). See “Radical Acceptu” by Tara Brach.
No, that's just called learning how to socialize when you're semi-autistic. It's not and shouldn't be a rallying cry for people who can't/never get their shit together.
You're reading a lot into my comment that has nothing to do with what I'm saying, and you're doing an obscene amount of reductive generalization of "people who can't get their shit together". FWIW I am very successful personally and professionally, I was just trying to be honest that my internal landscape is not always perfect and it turns out that's not a showstopper or something I need to beat myself up about.
If you feel that's empowering losers or whatever, feel free to continue your judgement of them. I am not here to tell anyone what will work for them, we're all individuals so YMMV.
"No" - the parent poster's obsession with their own neuroses which drive feedback loops toward overthinking their own (previously mentioned) neuroses, are not a sample from which the parent can draw conclusions, even if those conclusions encourage them to be a bit less neurotic. Self-analysis is great, but when it becomes a form of auto-immune disorder, the entire vehicle - where self-analysis becomes central to one's understanding of self - needs to be jettisoned, because it's fucking selfish, childish and stupid.
What I've learned about procrastination and escapism is that a lot of it is driven by neurotic feedback loops involving some meta-narrative I have about myself. But narratives are not reality, and while I'm busy overthinking those things I'm no use to myself or anyone else. Some of these tendencies are hard-wired in me, but by recognizing the pattern I can nudge myself back towards the present moment in which I am not perfect, but occasionally do good things.