The title of this article sounds like something coming out of a Jordan Peterson book, and rightfully so. I read his book, "12 Rules for Life" twice now, and I'm planning on reading it again in the near future. So I probably got my inspiration from there.
But while the title makes you think about a topic (or more) often approached by him, I assure you that I'm only talking about my personal experience here. It would be unfair for me to talk too much about something I didn't experience myself.
It's been around two weeks since I started writing and posting for Hive. Writing is obviously not the only activity I do. A lot of my time, way more than writing actually, is spent on learning. I watch around two or three videos about Computer Science every day, and then I spend several hours reading, partly from books that I have, and partly articles that I find online.
Before starting to do all that however, I spent several months doing pretty much nothing. In December 2020 I stopped going to my former job, and since then, up until around two weeks ago, I decided to take it easy and relax a bit.
Hunting for jobs was extremely hard, of course, and when I finally managed to find one, going to it was not really an option because of the pandemic. My place at the job is secured, but I can't go yet until certain restrictions are being lifted.
With that in mind, and the security of a job that I'll go to once some restrictions are being lifted, I began to slowly drift into more and more laziness. I spent most of my days watching YouTube videos for hours, maybe a movie once in a while, and playing games. Reading was more of a hobby that I did once in a while and anything else was off the table.
And while I was doing all that, I felt absolutely miserable. After working for two years at a job I hated I expected myself to enjoy a few months of laziness until I can start working again, but while the first month and maybe even part of the second one was enjoyable, the ones that followed were a nightmare.
I was quite depressed most of my time, having a hard time even getting out of bed, despite sleeping for 10+ hours, I stopped doing any kind of exercise, and instead I just sat in my chair for 16+ hours, and I just wasted the majority of my time.
To be honest with you, I don't exactly know what specific thing motivated me to start working again. Maybe it was a book that I read, or multiple ones. Or maybe it was the need to get some money. But I eventually decided to begin writing one or two articles a week, and then slowly started writing more and more until I recently began doing it daily once again, just like I was doing it the first time I was freelancing.
And since then, I've been doing a lot better. I don't experience any depressive moments, I don't feel like a complete failure, quite the opposite actually, I feel really happy with the progress I'm making, and my days are overall a lot better than before. I'm reading more, I'm moving more, and I'm making more progress overall.
I noticed this kind of behavior in other people as well, the closes ones being my parents. My mother recently retired, but has been home, without a job, for quite a while, and she's been complaining about how horribly boring it is since almost the beginning. My father had some free days recently and stayed home, also noticing how boring it was, because it rained and he had nothing to do other than to sleep and relax on the couch.
Both of them are more and more miserable with each day in which they do nothing. My mother only feels better when she's working in the garden, and my father only feels better when he goes to work, despite the fact that he constantly mentions how much he hates it and how tired he is of it.
I'm starting to realize now that working on something you don't particularly like is better than not doing anything at all.
There are, however, people who can do nothing but play games for hours and hours every single day and still feel great. What about those?
Well, I think that in a way, if what you do is really important to you, if you think about what you do as some sort of productive activity, and if you feel like you're making progress, then doing something unproductive to others, such as playing games, might give you the same feeling I get when I write and publish an article.
I've been there as well. When I was young I used to really care about the video games I was playing, and I considered them a priority. Whenever I found a MMORPG that I really liked I spent hours and hours in it trying to develop my character and get better gear. And I felt like I was making real progress despite the fact that I wasn't doing anything productive outside the game.
It was the fact that I considered the game so important that gave me that sense of "accomplishment" after 10 hours of playing.
Nowadays I enjoy games, but not as much as before. After playing so much, and so many titles, I began to slowly get bored of a lot of games, not because I don't enjoy gaming any more, it's still my biggest pass time and hobby, but because they kind of became similar to one another. Not every game that gets out innovates or adds something extremely new and different compared to older games. And since I played those older games, the new ones don't impress me that much.
And just like that, games became less important to me, and spending hours and hours into them became a pass time, not a priority. And the more I did it, the more miserable I felt. The only way I managed to get over it was by starting to work and trying to make progress in an area I actually cared about, such as writing and reading.
Sadly I am not as smart or as well read as other people who study this kind of behavior on a daily basis, so I can't really writean article that will blow your mind, filled with scientific data that proves my point beyond doubt.
However, I can tell you from experience - laziness is a road to a personal hell. It can bring misery into your life, and make you feel completely useless.
Working on the other hand, and learning, moving forward, intellectually or in an area you care about, can be your salvation. It can motivate you to do more, it can give meaning to each and every one of your days, and it can make you go to bed with a sense of fulfillment.
So, if you're miserable and you don't know why, if you're having a hard time figuring out what you want to do with your time, and if you feel depressed without exactly having a particular reason to, you can try to fix the problem by starting to be a bit more productive every day.
Do something you like that you also consider important, something that will make you feel like you're making real progress when you're working on it. It can be writing, it can be drawing, coding, building things, reading books, whatever makes you feel good. If you don't know what matters to you, and you don't have something that you feel like doing, then begin searching. You can literally make a goal out of watching a tutorial on something new every day, until you find something that interests you, at least temporarily.
It might not be the magic cure you've been hoping to get, but it might be just what you need to help you get out of the bed every day with a bit more excitement.