Jailbreak. What are the things that I haven’t done, that I want to do? What are the things that I couldn’t do before, that I want to do? What are the ways in which I am limiting myself, my thinking, without even realising it?
I suppose the place to start with this is patterns and habits. It’s 12:28AM now. I slept at 430am last night. I want to start making it a habit to sleep and wake earlier. Or I say I do. That was a concern when I had to go to work. But I don’t have to go to work any more. Should I just give up and be a night owl instead? But I don’t like it all that much if I’m not actually being productive; ie it doesn’t make sense to me to stay up late playing video games. But that’s not what’s happening right now! Right now I’m writing, and I’m happy to keep going as long as the writing is decent.
What else? I think the first principle here I should use is – rather than try to think my way to these answers, I should experiment my way to them. Because my thinking itself is symptomatic of the worldview I have. Experiments, on the other hand, yield experiences that I will then have to process and make sense of – and sometimes experience gives you something that you simply have to reckon with. What are some experiences that I’ve had that have forced me to rethink and revisit things? Or simply some unsettling, surprising, different experiences?
Here’s what I know.
Waking up early is a wonderful experience. Especially if you wake up before the sun rises, before the world wakes up, and you get yourself a coffee and you get to really slowly “come into the world”. I don’t do this a lot, I think, because deciding to go to bed early always feels a bit… like suicide…?
Conversations with friends are always a pleasure. When I’m living inside my own bubble for too long, I start to forget that other people exist – with different experiences, different priorities. I find myself thinking that this is actually one of the most interesting and important things to do, particularly as you get older and get more life experience. When you’re really young, I think this stuff doesn’t matter all that much, because you’re mostly going to be meeting other young people, and young people who go to school all more or less have mostly similar experiences. (They do have different experiences at home, but usually kids aren’t great at talking about this, and tend to end up associating with other kids from similar backgrounds, kids who are most like themselves).
Meditation, or meditative deep-breathing, is a fantastic practice. It calms the mind. Here is where I usually say “I don’t do it enough”, but I am choosing to let that go now. I do it when I want to do it. There have been times when doing it would probably have been helpful, when I was too distracted or overwhelmed to realize how distracted and overwhelmed I was.
I am happy every single time I have travelled. It forces me to see new things with new eyes, and I am always grateful for the experience. I do not travel enough. There are many places on this planet that I would like to go to in my hopefully long lifetime. Lots of people I would like to meet. Lots of food I would like to try.
Exercise – having your heart beat really hard, and your whole body just pounding. I have written multiple times about how good this feeling is, and I should maybe do a sort of compendium/overview post of all the times I’ve felt like this. Remember, post-workout endorphins are basically legal/free opioids. I believe.
Reading what you’re genuinely interested in. I walked over to my bookshelf earlier this afternoon and was surprised to find that none of the books in my bookshelf were particularly interesting to me in the moment. I found myself thinking I’d love to read me some Ta Nehesi-Coates, or Trevor Noah’s biography, or some history. And hey, I’d like to read my own autobiography. So maybe I should spend a few vomits doing that. Hell, I could spend a hundred vomits doing that. One about GameFAQs. One about SOFT. It will be good practice for talking about events, not just ideas. Yes, this is what I’m going to do with my subsequent vomits, I think.
That’s my challenge right now. I need to move faster through my todo list items and be much, much quicker to delete things that I no longer find interesting or relevant. It’s like that bookshelf moment again. I know what I would rather be reading. What would I most like to be watching on TV? Who would I most like to be meeting IRL? I need to revisit all of these questions and not feel compelled to follow up on past ideas simply because they’re there.
Jailbreak. How do we do it? Usually I’d say, first we have to define the jail. But in this case, the tools of definition are themselves the jailer’s tools. So in this case I think we just have to get as weird as we can, as random as we can, as quickly as we can. Violate our own patterns and see what happens.
We should definitely be meeting and talking to more people. Thinking new thoughts. Going to new places. Shake things up. What’s something that you’ve always wanted to do that you haven’t? There are bars and pubs near my house that I haven’t been to yet, that I feel like I ought to have gone to by now. I should make a separate list of all of the things I feel like I ought to have done by now, and then consider doing them. Also, home improvement. My home still feels like a halfway house and this will not stand. And now… I gotta go to bed.