Quite often I feel like I am not doing enough. Like so many other people, I feel like I should be optimizing my downtime to maximize my value as a human being. If I am not working, then I should be learning new things.
And this desire to “better” myself has caused me quite alot of grief. When I get home, I feel frustrated with house work because it is getting in the way of me learning new things. Playing with my kids feels like a chore, something I have to do before I can work on the next project.
As one might guess, this causes my family to be quite disappointed with me. Imagine waiting all day to play with your dad, and all he can say is “fine, let’s hurry up and play this game so I can do the stuff I actually want to do.” Father of the year material right there.
However, at the end of the day when I finally get a chance to “better myself” or work on a project I find that I spend most of my time procrastinating. If I was completely honest with myself I would have admitted ages ago that I don’t want to better myself, or do a project. Or at least not in the way I had in my mind.
Clarification
When I talk about bettering myself here, this is what I truly believed I was trying to attempt. Make myself more valuable, more knowledgeable, more profitable. As I found out, this was not bettering myself at all.
So, not only would I feel like everything I had to do was just getting in the way of my life progression, but I had guilt on top of that for not actually achieving anything when I finally had the chance.
One of the side effects of this need to improve all the time was to always buy learning materials that would inevitably gather digital dust. I have bought countless Humble Bundles with programming books, I have spent probably close to a thousand dollars over the years on digital subscriptions. However, it was one such subscription that ended up being the catalyst for real change.
Finish talking about my discovery of stoicism on Wondrium/The Great Courses Plus