I used to really dislike washing dishes. I would leave them in the sink, and they would feel overwhelming when I finally had to do them at the end of the day. Then I would hate doing them even more, because all I associate with washing dishes is that overwhelm.
That negative association with overwhelm and fatigue applies not only to washing dishes, but also to most chores or difficult tasks in life. I think being able to endure that discomfort when doing unpleasant things is a learnable skill and can be practised, but I didn’t learn it as a child, so as an adult I just got easily overwhelmed with everything. Having undiagnosed neurodivergence probably didn’t help.
But some time in the past couple of years I had learnt that in order to avoid procrastination we have to develop empathy for our future selves. Yes by putting off the dishes I am avoiding that discomfort for as long as I can, but I am adding to the suffering of my future self. It took a while – I started by seeing washing dishes as a game, or I put on music to make it more tolerable, eventually I stopped finding it a chore. I now wash dishes with a neutral state, and I no longer find it dreadful. Times like this I find the plasticity of the brain very fascinating.
I still find other things dreadful and overwhelming. I have “doom piles” accumulated in many places, and I find them impossible to sort and organise. These days I try to work on them in small doses, but I am not sure when will I ever get through them.
I think a lot of it is a self-regulation issue. People like me have never learnt to regulate ourselves, so we have very limited capacity to endure the unpleasant feelings that come with difficulties, slowness and boredom. Maybe enduring slowness and boredom is arguably the same thing. We get bored because it is slow. I had a lot of trouble with slowness in particularly: I couldn’t tolerate activities that required a lot of waiting – even yoga – I would get really upset when people were late, waiting for buses would drive me nuts, etc.
Social media and smart phones made it a lot of worse. Since we could keep scrolling for entertainment why would we read a book? Learning to draw seemed awful. I lost my ability to listen to music without doing anything else. As a child I used to be delighted even if I visited the same stationery shop every day, now I am perpetually bored even the plethora of shops in Singapore. I keep getting reminded of the reddit comment about novelty and the drug addict.
Though I’ve been reading a lot for the past 10-15 years, there was probably a decade or so in my life when I didn’t read a single book. Reading was a skill I had to pick up and get used to again. And till today it is still something I have to be very deliberate and intentional about. On many days it seems really difficult to slow down my brain enough to sit still and read paragraphs of linear black and white text. I mean, isn’t it more interesting to look at pictures on reddit?
If I didn’t deliberately set a routine to write every sunday, this would be totally something I would easily give up. Writing takes considerable focus. I was never very good at focusing except for periods of hyperfocus, but with existential depression and fatigue, doomscrolling simply seems more accessible than to sit for hours trying to access my subconscious, and then translating those thoughts into something comprehensible.
For many years of my life, the first thing I did in the morning was to consume the internet. When I was much younger it was probably yahoo, then design portals, livejournal, rss, twitter, and finally reddit.
It took me a long while, but I finally broke the habit on 11th October 2021, opting to write morning pages instead. Now, it feels like I have been writing morning pages since forever, but it has only been roughly threeish years.
I still scroll reddit a lot for the rest of the day though. Once in a while I get a gem like the story I shared above on novelty, and I love threads like these – they really add to my life so it is not without merit. I use it to “rest” after doing difficult tasks, but it slowly seeps more of my mental energy away. After “resting”, I find it difficult to embark any task that require a reservoir of mental energy. Our brains can only have so many dopamine hits before it gets worn out, and my eyes are exceptionally sensitive to light.
For a long while now also because of chronic health issues, I have lost the capacity to do anything that requires long periods of focused attention. Meditators will know that attention is something that can be cultivated with practice. I know people who have similarly lost the ability to read books because they are so used to to short-form content available on the internet. But most of the time skills can be picked up again.
As someone with adhd I feel like having focused attention for long periods of time is something so unattainable to me – especially now – because it is something I have not experienced for a long time, if ever. There are also a lot of life skills that I didn’t manage to pick up as a child, so they feel practically impossible.
But I look back at my life for the past few years and I know I have become a radically different person from the person I was for most of my life. So who is to say if enough time is given, what is possible? We don’t notice small changes taking place within us, and when we’re finally ready to act, it feels like a huge leap.
Yesterday, I resolved to have a “no reddit during day time” day. I wanted to see what else I would do instead. So I ended up working on my sketch book, and I read a book. Strangely by the time I allowed myself to chill with reddit, it felt uninteresting. I thought it would be difficult for me to cope, but it was not.
Though it felt like a radical act and a huge leap, it has been probably stewing on my mind for a very long time. This sort of internal change is very fascinating to me. What does it take to get from merely having an idea, to mulling about the impossibility for eons, before acting on it? And how much does it take from the first act for it to become so ingrained that we no longer think much of it?
I don’t know if I can keep up with my “no reddit” days, especially if I am experiencing stressful times. But I would like to try. I don’t know if I am being too unrealistic and nostalgic, but I miss the child in me that was contented with merely books and music, and looked forward to visiting the same stationery shop every day. There was no internet (at least for me) back then, and it didn’t feel unbearable. I am not one of those people who aspire to go off the grid or cut myself off from social media, but I would like it to not take such a huge chunk of my life. It is not because I believe it to be unhealthy per se, but I am curious about the side of myself that would emerge out of this, because I have been so reliant on it for so long.
I think it is important to continually seek inner-enrichment, because when the self changes, the spectrum of future possibilities widens. To me, that is the point of living: to use our selves as a vehicle to experience as much life as possible.