September 24th, 2019

Nov 14, 2020

I have so many thoughts, a lot of the time that make me wish I could freeze time and write them down in the moment. Of course, doing that isn’t actually possible, and so many thoughts end up lost to the moment they were created.

Like just now, I had a thought that I meant to write about mere moments after I thought of it, but my brain’s limited capacity meant that this thought may be lost; although it may return at some point.

I want to write. I want to create. I want to take these ideas that come through my head a transform them and polish them into something that can be seen and appreciated by someone other than me. I want to make art. I constantly have ideas for games, worlds, fantasies that I wish could be realised and they could, should I put the time into them. And therein lies the issue: time. Time is single-handedly humanity’s greatest blessing and its worst curse. The mere fact we have any time at all is incredible, but the overwhelming majority of humans spend all that time doing what exactly? What frivolous things humans tend to spend their very limited time on, only to regret it far too late. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be sitting on my deathbed regretting all the things I haven’t done. But that fear, that fear of doing something wrong haunts me every moment, even when I say it doesn’t. So often I take to those frivolous things, things that hold little meaning. Take, for example, reddit and youtube. I spend many hours a day on these websites, and for what? Little bits of dopamine injected into my brain. While these sites can offer meaningful content that has value and might be memorable for more than a week, the vast majority of the content is not. And these sites are designed to hook you and keep you there for hours on end, wasting away those precious moments of time that could be used for something far more meaningful.

This issue of meaning in activity I feel is what feeds my procrastination a large amount of the time. I don’t see the value in practicing 4 chemistry sheets, and so I fend it off by doing a task even less meaningful. And I don’t want this. I want to eliminate all the things I do that have little or no value. This is such a difficult task however, since many of those things are designed to be as engaging as possible. I don’t know what the solution is, but I hope to find it at some point.

- Josiah H.

Reflecting on this over a year later, what sticks out to me the most is how much this idea still resonates with me. I still feel like I’m doing things without meaning, and I still feel that desire to create that hasn’t been satiated. A lot of the things I’ve written to myself in the past are feelings that are much more fleeting then this one. This desire to create is still with me, and I need to act on it. What I wonder is if the creation of this blog was born specifically out of this desire.