Whatever it is, it is right now.
Past is gone. Future will never come. Live in the moment or you’ll keep reciting same stories of the past that you lived in first two decades of your life.
Even before we had any streaming service available in India, I had built the whole infrastructure around downloading(questionable manner) movies, and TV shows, tracking the episode of those shows, and handling the playback across multiple devices in a similar interface as any modern streaming service would provide. It was a pretty sophisticated system for home entertainment needs. And it had to be sophisticated because it was being used by 20+ people through local network as well as internet. It was gruelling to maintain but I loved it because I enjoyed the result and also the amount of learning that was going on about every aspect of that service.
Since then I've worked on a lot of things but never realised what actually made me happy. I spent over two years, consistently performing activites like body building, cooking, playing guitar, and meditation. One thing which turned out to be common amongst all of them was, that more than the result, I enjoyed going deeper into each of those domains. Satisfying the hunger to learn was much more enjoyable for me than actually ending up achieving the goals that I set.
Craving for more knowledge isn't harmful
While diving deeper into these activities, never for once I thought that "Hey! I think this is harmful" or "Hey! This is toxic behaviour". Great things just happen. Once you start enjoying to get more knowledge, results become secondary. And surprisingly, the kind of results which you thought were great or good becomes easy to acquire. When you don't care for the result, and you stick to things for a long time, trying to improve yourself, you are able to concentrate and cherish those smaller steps even more.
Freedom is coming
I've started to feel that if I remove pressure of growing age and the need to figure out everything here and now, I can truly enjoy every aspect of life so much better. We get too anxious because of growing age, we start trying to make everything work as fast as possible whether it is a career or a relationship, but in this modern world of instant gratification we've forgotten that life isn't as short as instagram reels.
Now, I just try to treat the whole world like a sandbox where like a toddler I'm gonna explore everything that gets me interested, but like a disciplined adult I won't stop pursuing it as soon as the journey starts to get difficult. The fact that I know that the grind is what makes me happy, and nature results don't affect me, is going to help me live a liberated life. I don't know what lies ahead but living with this mindset is in my opinion will lead to exciting life regardless of what I decide to pursue in future.
That's it for this blog post and if you feel that you've something to add to this or you have a different perspective then share it and discuss it on r/StoicHuman or go to the Reddit discussion post for this blog post linked down below.
Stay healthy, Stay safe!
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