If you want to meet up with your friends, you need to terrorize them into making plans or inspire them to meet up spontaneously. Either you initiate the back and forth of text exchanges (how about April 20th at 5 pm? or April 22nd at 7 pm?), or you get blessed by the rarity of a free schedule
If you want to work on a personal project (hello Substack), you have to go through through through layers and layers of bullshit, both internal and external. Make sure you can pay the bills first. Ready yourself for the red tape of emails, logistics and bureaucracy. And even when you have the time, you have to confront the mountain of inertia that keeps yourself complacent.
It takes too much energy to do anything at all. Every time I want to do something that matters, I have to claw my way out of a self-made mountain of resistance. My muscle of navigating my own laziness is very atrophied, and I am generally averse to strength training. That’s why it can take me 2 hours to hype myself up for 30 minutes of actual work.
I don’t have the energy to come up with any foolproof solutions. I only want to name the part of myself (and probably of you) that recognizes how immensely difficult it can be to actually do the things we care about. That part of me sees something real: it’s not easy to counter inertia, and it’s too easy to die a slow death by going to work, feeling exhausted, and not doing the things that matter.
But paradoxically, when I truly acknowledge that it’s hard to get anyone to do anything at all — most of all myself — I find within myself a drive to keep going. If everything is hard, then anything I time I do anything that matters is a true gift. Even if my gift to myself is small and seems a bit lazy.
So I steal time by writing Substack posts during boring classes, come up with ways to see my friends even if I feel busy, do things that terrify me but help me grow. I ask my friends for help when I get too unmotivated. I sign up for short meditation retreats every one or two years because being forced to do things actually makes me do things.
Most of the time I waste my time, but sometimes I remember I don’t have to.
I don’t wanna be a go-getter!