Experiment 1
- Sometime during junior year of college, I decided that I’d be more discerning of what I liked and what I didn’t like about my life.
- I recognized that I struggled to know what I wanted.
- I had simply not had practice in knowing this, nor the tools to figure out how to put energy and action behind my desires (…I guess another way to put this would be to say that I didn’t really have good practice in exerting my own agency in a balanced manner, not a survival manner)
- It led into a deep spiral of depression. I’m not sure exactly why but it was related to the fact that I was no longer deciding to be grateful for everything as it was, which felt like a coping mechanism for being a situation that I couldn’t leave for a long time, and instead letting the emotions out to tell me what was really going on and whether or not I should change something about my life when I saw an opportunity to do so.
Experiment 2
- Sometime during my gap year after college
Experiment 3
- This gap year
- Reading 📘 Four Thousand Weeks
- Reflections on the time that I spend and how I spend it.
- How gratitude is a huge part of it
- At what point do I need to reflect? At this moment in time, probably every day, since I can afford it and the decisions that I’m making are much more numerous (though perhaps less high stakes) than they would be if I were in a slightly more structured manner of living (school or work).