Note to self 14.08.23

Lights out Alice!

It is so funny that I writing down the thoughts being dictated by my brain to remind myself of the good things I have or the path that I am on or how it is all going to be okay regardless of it actually being okay given the propensity for my brain to forget the plan it itself created for me just a few hours or days ago to tackle the very situation we had found ourselves then in. Basically, these are my thoughts written down to reassure myself of there being a plan, which was itself created by my brain in response to this very same panic faced a few days ago. Kudos, shit-head.

The very desire to be successful in public drives most of capitalism, corporate culture and the need to grow, earn degrees, change jobs or chase a higher CTC. Corporate does not want you to bring your creativity to the table. It does not want you to bring your A-game everyday to work. It wants you to just do the job assigned. No questions raised. No thinking outside of the box. No questioning the JD or its relevance. Just do it. Think within it.

Life outside of academics has been a daily brain drain game. Not that academics wasn't constricted in its own right. But there I had the ability to be an outlier, to chase the things worth chasing, to claim the moral high ground of wanting knowledge, a journey so pure that very few would dare ask you the reason why that was essential even though deep down you knew that it wasn't the pure search for knowledge, but the sin of chasing attention that led you here. However, somewhere down the line, I started liking the journey and the discipline it demanded of me. I loved the fact that there was a sea out there that I could never traverse fully, a sea of opportunities or an ocean of hopelessness, depending on the day and our approach. Since my time with academics was un-constricted, in the sense that I did not depend on it for feeding me, I could dally with it on my terms and set the pace of how I wanted things to go and simply reject the pieces that did not fit. This should be a grim reminder that it is not all rosy but exactly like a summer fling. There was no expectation and I did not do anything responsible or mature.

Long story short though...TO MY IDIOT BRAIN:

• You need to decide what you want to pursue (everything is NOT an option, don't do it)
• Do you want to chase promotions or start figuring out what you want to learn, even if it does not give you any monetary return?
• Do you want to rely on your laurels and live in denial about the fact that you are slipping and just finding some external reasons and circumstance to blame it on?
• You don't follow through on your ideas!
• You are breaking your good habits and building bad short term pleasure seeking dopamine infusing habits (case in point: preferring gym over calisthenics just because shape is better even though it has a negative cardio and endurance impact)
• You are again getting drawn into people and their opinion and slowly transitioning to do things that people (external and irrelevant) find appealing and not doing things that you actually like!!! What a shitter...snap out of it...stop doing things for attention or glory or a positive feedback...DO THINGS BECAUSE YOU WANT TO...because you have that drive inside of you!

Anyways, I think I have repeated this numerous times yet I do not seem to get it...so I will keep reminding myself. Thanks for listening as always Alice!