October Wrap-Up
I definitely overdid it this month with the ~15 hours per week of classes, but those are mercifully ending in November. The reason I took so many is that I wanted to force myself out of the house so I'd stop stewing on all my problems, and they did help with that. Being so busy also helped me identify what is most important to me to fit into my schedule, so it was a worthwhile experiment.
From Depression to Burn-Out
I feel like the depression has improved enough that I would now classify it as burn-out/exhaustion instead, which is a huge improvement. I'm currently now trying to balance doing enough that I am properly stimulated without running out of energy, and this is a careful balance to maintain.
One problem I'm running into is that I'm usually doing things late into the evening because that's when I'm free, and so my schedule normally looks like leaving the house from 4pm-9pm. The problem with this is that when I come home, I'm still overstimulated from whatever I was doing, and so now I'm having trouble falling asleep and staying asleep. I even tried simply staring at the wall for an hour before going to bed yesterday in the hopes it would quiet my mind, but it didn't work. And now this is causing me to be so tired I have trouble focusing until about noon the next day.
Actually, one symptom of depression is constantly having this negative monologue running inside your head 24/7, and I definitely have this problem, and it gets worse when I overfill my schedule. My inner work currently is focused on trying to get my brain's inner critic to please shut up. There's a specific type of meditation that's supposed to help with this, called zazen, which is where you simply sit with your eyes open and watch the thoughts come into your brain without holding onto them. I have done this a bit, and it does help, but it's also extremely boring, so it's hard to want to set aside time to do it. So what I'm working on instead is trying to substitute the negative monologue with a neutral/more realistic one, as well as journaling to get it all out of my head and then trying to remind myself what I'm feeling isn't the same thing as what's actually happening.
Cal Newport's Deep Life Stack and lifestyle design
I tried doing some reverse fish bone exercise for lifestyle design. These helped a lot with forcing me to think about what I'm doing and why, but then I ran into the problem where my life is too unorganized and I'm too behind on some major tasks that the reverse fish bones were too much detail for what I currently need.
So instead, I have started to implement
Cal Newport's Deep Life Stack, which I'm finding more directly actionable. Now, fair disclaimer, I try to be somewhat careful with Cal Newport because I think he basically just teaches you to be a better knowledge worker salaryman, but at the same time, this is also the advice I need right now, so I'm going to implement it.
His stack has four components: discipline, value, control, and vision. The idea behind this is that it's hard to make major adjustments to your life unless you're on top of the smaller things, which is a problem I'm currently running into. So each of these steps is designed to lead you down the path toward more control over how you spend your time.
"Discipline" is about building the right mindset, "value" is about developing a reason for doing what you're doing, "control" is about managing your obligations so they don't consume your entire life, and "vision" is about making more significant overhauls in your lifestyle. In this video, he suggests you spend four months going through the whole process, with spending two weeks on discipline, four weeks on values, four weeks on control, and six weeks on vision.
So I'm going to attempt to follow this for the next four months, and I will report here how the experiment goes.
Discipline
Newport has you do two things for discipline: one, pick three keystone habits. He suggests one professional, one personal, and one health-related. These are things you should do everyday, so they should be non-trivial but also tractable. Then the second thing you should do is write out a list of your current obligations and goals and keep a copy on your desk or elsewhere where you can see it everyday.
The three habits I'm choosing are:
1. An hour of continuous, undistracted coding on weekdays and an hour of continuous, undistracted fiction writing on weekends (my professional goal).
2. Study Russian for 30 min per day (my personal goal).
3. Do at least 1 intentional session of exercise per day. This will be my heavier workouts on gym days, but on off-days/recovery days, I will instead do yoga or stretching at home.
And then my broader goals/commitments are:
1. Work - Be engaged enough at work and don't view slacking off as much as possible as the end goal.
2. Writing - Work on my urban fantasy novel. (I'm putting historical fiction on the back burner because it required too much research for the amount of time I currently have)
3. Learn - Study Russian and update my programming skills so I can find a better job.
4. Curtail - Continue to attempt to liberate myself from the damned internet addiction. (This is so much easier said than done)
5. Exercise - Run twice a week, lift weights twice a week, and try to fit in more exercise classes at the rec center so I can actually do the exercises right.
6. Diet - Cook meals at home, mostly vegetables and protein, and try to lose 20lbs.
7. Social - Keeping up with social relationships and activities.
8. Invest - Keep up with tracking expenses and decluttering/prepping the house to sell.
I'm going to attempt to do this for two weeks and will report back how it went.
Social Stuff
I'm trying to balance the reality of living in a bad environment for social connection with putting myself out there continuously so I don't go insane from working from home, while also setting aside time to get the house up for sell this spring. Since most of the classes ended, my current social environments are:
1. Russian class
2. Volunteering to teach ESL at the library
3. In-person writing group
4. DnD group
These are the routine things I'm doing. I'm going to try to fit in some more experimental, one-off, meetup experiences in between this so I can keep broadening my horizons. Also there's a tennis club by my house I might join for the sports experience, but I'm waiting on that because I feel like I'm already doing too much.
I've noticed a mistake I'm making is that I'm good at putting myself out there and talking to people, but I'm bad at getting people's phone numbers and scheduling things outside of meetup. Part of the problem here is living too damned far from everything such that I'd be driving 30 min to get coffee with someone, but also some of it is also an internal hangup from how I was raised. (You're basically taught in Mormonism that the outside world is evil and you should just hang out with only your immediate family/church 24/7, so actually doing the work to maintain relationships and realizing I'm allowed/responsible for showing interest in other people is a bit of a struggle). Again, trying to balance moving forward here with conserving my energy for more high-impact things, like moving.
Work
I'm treating work as if I need to stay here for at least five more years. The reason I'm doing this is that I'm saving up extra money to basically rent a nice apartment at this point, and also it's better mentally if I think of my career as something I'm actually doing rather than something I'm actually avoiding. This is opening up ideas inside my head of jobs I might actually not hate.
I have two networking conferences scheduled to attend in November, and my goal is to get a more tech or academic job where I'm going to have a higher caliber of coworker, thereby improving my personal network. I see myself eventually moving to either a FAANG job, start up, or academic institution. I'm going to take my time here and be picky so that I don't keep falling into these low-effort jobs out of desperation to get out of bad situations, which is a pattern that's plagued my career.
The risk I run with this plan is that I might just turn into a better salaryman instead of getting out of work, but I'm going to attempt to avoid this by making sure I always have my own goals for any given job instead of simply adopting their goals for me as my life goals. So the attitude here is "does this role fit into my life system?" and not "yessir I'll drink the kool-aid" or "I hate work so I'm going to watch YouTube."