Why is it so hard for me to just sleep early? I keep thinking that night time is for… something. What is night time for? Night time is private time, night time is personal time, the witching hour when the world goes away and leaves me alone. Night time is when I get to be myself. Maybe that’s what I’m subconsciously afraid of sacrificing if I sleep early. I get worried that I won’t have any time to myself. I need to learn to trust myself. I need to learn to earn my own trust. And earning my own trust means promising myself that I will have time to myself, even if it’s not at night. I’m not a child anymore. I’m not a salaried employee anymore. I am the only person responsible for myself now. I’m married, so I have a wife in the picture, but we are each ultimately individuals who are capable of making our own decisions and are willing to support each other on our respective quests and journeys. My wife will be okay with me sleeping early, with me taking time for myself, as long as I am clear that she is also a priority for me, that our marriage is also important to me, and that we will get quality time together.
So we get around to dealing with schedules. I’ve been afraid of schedules for as long as I can remember. I hated timetables as a child, I hated going to school, waking up in the morning, bedtime, lunchtime, any sort of designated time. I have to teach myself that what I hated wasn’t the very idea of scheduling, but what those schedules represented – other people having power over me, controlling me, regulating me.
What I need to see is… I’ve said this before… in the absence of self-regulation, I am being regulated by my appetites. I am being regulated by my impulses. In the absence of a self-directed schedule, all time becomes scheduled as “do whatever fuckall” time, which is not actually a great time for longer than a certain period. (A few days most of the time, a few weeks after a long period of work or school or some other regulated period of time). It’s now been a few weeks since I had any sort of official or proper schedule. And so I’ve been running on my old “you’re free to do fuckall” schedule, which I last used when I was about 21 years old – staying up late on the internet, just generally flaffing about. That was also more or less what I did when I was about 17 or 18, hanging out with friends after school, drinking milo and smoking cigarettes.
I am here now. I am at the stage of my life that I was always hoping for when I was a child. This is it. I have “arrived”. Of course, now that I’m here I can see all sorts of things down the road that I didn’t even think to consider when I was a child. When I was a child I just wanted to escape from child-jail. I have escaped now, mostly (though some old habits still remain and need dismantling). Now that I’m in the free world, there are new concerns. New challenges. This is okay. This is good. I am stronger psychologically and emotionally than I’ve ever been. Physically, in pretty decent shape – I’m going to start working out again and get into the best shape of my life. I have that opportunity now. I no longer need to worry about external deadlines that I did not choose. I have more freedom now than I’ve ever had. It’s still not “perfect freedom” – I still have financial concerns, I worry about my parents, my siblings, and hypothetical kids I don’t have. But it’s a lot of freedom, relative to anything I’ve known before this.
I underestimate and undervalue my freedom. I would like to change this. I would like to estimate and value my freedom properly. How do you do that? I think you have to start from first principles. What are your options? What can you do? Pretend that anything is possible, everything is permissible, everything is achievable. Start there. Start making a list of things of fantasies, wishes. (I find myself thinking now that now would be a good time to re-read Ray Dalio’s principles.) The important thing about this process is that you don’t preemptively censor things that seem crazy or outrageous. Just list all of them out. Do them privately, even more privately than in this word vomit. Do it with the absolute sense that nobody is ever allowed to look at them except yourself. Once you have listed the most extreme things, break them down into projects. What is the path from where I am to there? What are the intermediate states along those paths, and which of those are achievable given my current level of freedom?
The important thing is to balance the vision – which should be lofty, inspiring, exciting, crazy – with concrete, achievable action in the immediate and near term. I am free to complete this word vomit project and it would feel great to do it. What does that look like? How quickly can I do it? This is the second vomit that I’m writing and publishing today. I have 290 word vomits left to go. What’s the maximum number that I can do in a day? The most I’ve done in a day is somewhere between 10 and 15, I believe. I would like to write the memoirs of my life. How much can I do? There’s the upper limit and the lower limit. I’m doing 2 vomits today. Can I do another one when I get home from some errands later? Can I do 3 in a day? I’ve done that before, but can I do it again? Can I do 4 the next day? How quickly can I get to a cadence that achieves 1,000? And once that’s done, what’s next? What essays could/should I be publishing in the public domain?
It’s time to start thinking and executing on this.