Question.
What do you look forward to the most when you wake up in the morning?
Is it work? Is it interacting with others? Time by yourself, maybe?
How many of you thought about watching TV, playing games, or any other kind of distraction? Be honest.
For some of you, there isn’t really anything fulfilling or exciting on your calendar. After all, most of us are adults with responsibilities and jobs and don’t have the luxury of living a thrill-seeking life. Having weeks that are disproportionately occupied by things we “have to do” is part of life.
Choose Your Distraction
And so, to deal with the overwhelming amount of mundane tasks and the dissatisfaction of our day to day we tend to live lives where our focus lies on distractions. We grind through the boredom of monotonous, repetitive work. We deal with unengaging and uninteresting school work just to get to the next binge; the next play session, the next fix.
I know I was living for distractions when I was working in an office years ago. Every day, all I wanted was to get things done; To run to my place of solace. Games, movies, any escapism, any entertainment were essential for me.
It didn’t help that I was single and as far away as humanly possible from my family and friends.
My apartment was my oasis of joy, my bubble where I could justify the dozens of hours of my life I gave away in exchange for a paycheck that enables my indulgences. The world outside be damned.
The Issue with Entertainment
Now, I want to clarify that there is nothing wrong with entertainment and distractions. We need to allow our brains moments of idleness, entertainment, and rest to recollect and organize our thoughts and archive everything.
However, the issue arises when we rely on our distractions to be the sole motivation to carry ourselves every day. If your only reason to wake up is to do the bare minimum you need to get to your couch to binge Netflix, there is a problem.
It is essential for our mental health to have proper balance. If you live exclusively for your distractions and merely deal with life to get by then, you should reevaluate what you are doing. You are selling a chunk of your time on this earth for a distraction to ignore what’s left of your time.
Since we frame our lives based on our past experiences and the quality of our interactions and memories, no wonder you feel miserable. Looking back and being unable to remember anything noteworthy for the last two years except the shows you binged is undoubtedly not a pleasant feeling. After all, you didn’t engage your brain in anything else.
It was that realization that made me snap out of my roots. It made me realize that I should not live for my distractions; it should be the other way around. Work should be engaging and enjoyable. Life should be so fun that you struggle to find time to give to entertainment and distraction.
Journey of Passion
I want to make sure that I don’t trivialize how challenging and complicated it can be to get to that point in your life. For most of us, finding a decently remunerated job is already extremely tough. Let alone an engaging and fun job we want to go to every day. But I didn’t get to this point in the first year of my career. It is a process and a journey that will demand a lot from you. But it is so worth it.
I no longer feel like my life is leaving me and my days are unmemorable. Every day I am fully present and engaged with what I do and the people I am with, and they feel it too, which also brings them to the present. I am full of passion for what I do, and when you are, it bleeds into every aspect of your life, giving it a pleasant tint of joy.
I hope that you can start paying attention to what you are focusing your life on and how your days go. I know there is so much out there that can touch your life like it has mine.
Stay safe; stay well.
Cover photo by Max van den Oetelaar on Unsplash
