The Charade of Complacency

For the past few weeks, I have been having this feeling inside of me that I am not doing enough. I think that feeling is natural, but not to the point where it is a jungle gym in your mind. It has been controlling all my thoughts for the past 3 weeks. For me, uncertainty is a big thing in my life. I like to always have some sort of plan. I probably get that from my mom and how she was always on the go. Which I probably absorbed through osmosis. I think it is a blessing and a curse, I envy the people who are easy-going and oblivious. They arguably live happier lives, just not worrying about the future that they want to attain. If I truly think deep down where I have felt uncertain in life, it is when I leaped to move out on my own. I am in my hunter and gatherer chapter. Cooking for myself, finding people that I can call my tribe, and becoming an individual who can lead a family in the future. This is all the way to say that I have no idea what I am doing, which breeds that feeling of never doing enough. There are many days when I sit in my apartment and just say “I am doing the same thing I would be doing if I were in Michigan. Get your shit together and do something!” Then that is where the thoughts turn from positive to poison. I started to ask myself how one alchemizes those poisonous thoughts into clean drinking water. If I look back at the times when I was most uncertain in life, the things I did to bring myself out of that low is the simple things. The bricks you lay along the path. Getting up and keeping yourself honest, working out, reflecting, and reading. Recently, it has been hard for me to accept those simple things as the pedestal that poises me for a brighter future, those are the things that I have been doing that have not been the same things that have pulled me out of this mindset this time. I am sort of writing this article to think through the thoughts that come to my mind, and to find out ways to cope with these thoughts.

I am someone who struggles with crippling insufficiency. Like I have been talking to a girl recently and we have been on a few dates. I have seen her around and we get very philosophical all the time. I have noticed a few times that I am insecure when talking about things, and that insecurity causes me to feel like I am insufficient. She calls me smart, which I do not think I am. She calls me attractive, which I do not think I am. She tells me if have confidence, success, and a whole host of other things. That I feel on some level that I do not have. To me, other people have all those things that I wish to have. The constant comparison is what I am doing. I always had this false sense of success, where you must be doing something every hour of the day. It was very skewed due to the fact of social media, ironic that I have written an article on the attention decay problem. I know there is two personas and those things that people post on Instagram have some semblance of truth. More often than not, I have come to realize that they are just full of it. I guess for me the thing that I wish to have is the be able to provide experiences for my family and friends. I want to change their realities. Show them what the world has to offer. Ironic, because the thing that I want to do for my family is the thing that I am chasing. I am chasing the approval of others, fulfillment in myself and overall just being ok with me. At the core, I do not really like who I am. There is a study known as the starving rats in a tube study. In the first iteration, they have a rat in a tube, whose tail is tied to a spring. The spring is a proxy for desire. So they waft the smell of cheese in from the front and the rat pulls hard. In the second iteration, the waft of the smell of cheese is from the front, but also the smell of a cat from the back. The rat pulls the hardest. So the scientists concluded that you not only have to run from something you want but also something that you fear. I often feel like the rat in that tube running towards something I want but never seeing any progress. This is part of the process, having the impulse control to not worry about the minor squabbles and keep your eye on the prize. However long that tube runs. I think I have started to slowly accept the fact that getting sidetracked on the small pleasures is still part of improving and most important success.

Interestingly enough one of my best friends came into town and the first time I saw him he said “Dude, I have been feeling complacent recently.” It felt like the world knew I needed to have that conversation. Will (my friend who was in town) and I were just talking about that feeling. He helped me see the perspective that life is more so about the journey and collecting friends and knowledge along the way. Instead of the 30-second masquerade that you see on Instagram, where people are flexing their money and cars. I can not lie and say that I do not get envious sometimes. Those days happen way more than I would like. However, I am aware of the fact that those thoughts are bad. It makes me understand my complacency a tad more, the fact that this is what is causing it. In a way, this complacent feeling is a poison that I am girdling into a tonic.