A fond farewell to freedom

Nothing to say in particular this week. I’m dreading editing, even though every time I succeed in starting, I enter the flow state readily, really, sometimes instantly. Nonetheless I have trouble sustaining it. I have been dividing time into pomodoros, which help me to start, but cause me to stop. I managed twelve hours this week, but maybe I ought to aspire to bigger blocks of time, something like 50/10, and to aim for more, four hours per day, and structure every other hour around those four. That would make for twenty hours on the weekdays, and perhaps that volume would warrant a break at the weekend.

I’m in a strange place socially. I’m drinking little, from concern for a liver damaged by disease, treatment thereof, or just by a lifetime of irresponsibility. I’m trying to be more attentive to the circumstances and plights of others, yet usually this backfires, as, in the absence of alcohol, I want nothing so much as solitude. Most interactions appear as distractions, even as I wish to be a more inquisitive friend, I forget to question what it is I really wish for. I wish to be left alone, though when I’m alone I’m just as unhappy. Not dissatisfied by a desire for sociability, but by my own inability to progress as much as I’d like, to make tangible progress towards what is important. In other words I’m miserable to be around.

A job looms. I shall probably have to work again soon. If that happens, I hope that the change in circumstance will allow me to construct a more suitable routine, that is to say more ascetic, from which I neither deviate nor desire to. The reality is likely to be starker.

I'm Bryan Kam. I'm thinking about complexity and selfhood. Please sign up to my newsletter, follow me on Mastodon, or see more here.