You need to live a boring life

2.3 gigabytes in one month, that's how bored out of my mind I was.

Every day I was switching from one game to another, trying to find something that was worth my time. 

6 months go by and there I am waiting for the next big game to finally finish downloading.

Played it for 2 hours - deleted it. 

Why was my life like this? 

Why was everything dull and boring? 

These same questions haunted me for months, and I became resentful. 

It was quarantine and I had no way to entertain myself. 

I was annoyed at the fact that while everyone had a passion they were pursuing, I was lost trying to find a small hit of dopamine from the internet. 

My day to day life looked the same. I would get up, do my school work, and then spend the rest of the day trying to entertain myself.

I became so unattached from life. And that's how it was for the majority, a complete dissatisfaction towards life. 

Your Obsession

The problem stems from the obsession to find control in your surroundings. The problem stems from the obsession to find clarity in your goals. 

None of us wants to live with the anticipation of not knowing what will happen tomorrow, we constantly make estimations about our actions, feelings and desires.

And it all stems from one root fear - the fear of what is unknown. 

The impact that the unknown has on us is greater than the triumph we feel with success and even greater than the instability we feel in face of failure. 

The unknown simply exists, there is no measure by which you can track it.

But why does any of this matter? 

Well because dissatisfaction is a normal stage of life that you and the countless generations that come after you will have to face. 

This isn’t quite a problem you can fix but you can utilize it for certain aspects of your life. 

A Boring Life

Zooming In/Out

Life has its ups and down, however we neglect these periods of our lives when everything stops.

 There are no celebrations or periods of grief - everything feels the same. We can only continue living as a hope to reach the next period.  

The easiest way to fix this problem is zooming out on life. Once you zoom out you can see everything that's ahead of you and everything that has already passed.

 Look into your past and predict your future.

 What ups and downs have you faced in your life? What ups and downs do you think you will face in the next 5 years?

 Just because nothing is happening at the moment doesn’t mean nothing will happen ever again. 

By zooming out you become more aware of the possibilities you may face as a reflection of the events you’ve already faced. 

But that's only one piece of the puzzle. 

You can zoom out as much as you would like, but you’ll find fulfillment without zooming in. The mediation of both will keep you fulfilled with clarity that you are moving in the right direction. 

Zooming in means participating in the flow state when it comes to your daily tasks. 

You must always be completely engrossed in the work you do. You must always limit your field of view. 

The more you try to wander the less you will get done. 

To be able to find clarity and fulfillment you need to be able to zoom out on your past and future while zooming in to your present day. Use both diligently for their respective purposes.

Being a Scientist

 All of this comes from deep experimentation. Live like a scientist - make everything an elaborate experiment.

Because that's how life truly is, you won’t know what you enjoy doing until you come across it once. 

You won’t know what food you enjoy eating until you taste it for the first time. 

It's the same with clarity and fulfillment. You won’t know what fulfills you until you try everything that doesn’t. 

Everyday should be a new project with a new hypothesis - what are you testing out today?

 Ask yourself this question as soon as you wake up, and don’t sleep until it's answered. The easiest way to answer this question is by observing everything. 

When you start observing everything, you slowly peel the layers of society. You begin to notice things you’ve noticed. You begin asking more questions. You finally start feeling the sparks of curiosity that society extinguished decades ago. 

Everything has a purpose, every single thing! That also means you have to have a purpose - even if you don’t realize it yet. 

With your new found purpose, every action is backed with something great. 

Now what?

How do you maintain it  over long stretches of time? 

If you look at the greatest entrepreneurs and investors, you’ll see how long they have been in the game - doing focused work every single day and decades. 

How do they do it? 

They’ve mastered the art of mediating between zooming out in the long term and zooming in for the short term. Every single one has a big goal that fuels their daily actions. 

Elon Musk has had the big goal of colonizing Mars since he sold PayPal. 

Just like that every entrepreneur has something big they want but they’re also able to understand what they need to do daily to get that big goal. 

If you’re able to cut through the noise, mediate between long/short term goals, and put an overarching purpose behind each action - you’ll never worry about one dull day ever again.

Hope you enjoyed reading this one.

Talk to you soon

Jay

P.S. Check out my last newsletter edition here, where I talked about the creator sequence