I encounter countless people every day who are older than 30 years but behave like  22–25 years old. “Why is that”, I wondered. “Am I in the wrong circle?” I questioned. Possibly, but I used to feel like they all were very intelligent just a few years ago when I was under 22 years old.

I started analysing the behaviours of my peers on social media, as they were the ones who were transitioning through this age along with me. I noticed one polarising behaviour. It is learning.

Learning

Almost all of us were in forced environments called schools and universities until 22–25 years of age. In those places, you are forced to study new things, regardless of your interest, unless you drop out. But as soon as they left those environments and moved to work life, almost all of them stopped learning anything new. Work, partying, sleeping, and "travelling for Instagram" is all what they all did. Whereas, me and a handful of my peers started pursuing some hobbies related to art, sports, and even started their own businesses. Theses are the activities which force you to keep learning and keep exploring.

And when I look back at the lives of most of the people in their 40s, 50s or older, they were all same; education until 22-25, then got married. Learned some new things because children are a massive responsibility, but that’s it. The mindset of those 22-year-olds just got more and more rigid, and complacency striped them away of any passion for learning.

Past is gone, future will never come.

I’ve noticed all the people who stopped learning after 25 years of age, keep repeating the same old stories from their teenage years, high school and university days. They have turned into living ghosts as the stories of their lives stopped progressing.

So, what’s the solution? No, this isn’t a post to help those people. I don’t even know how to get them out of these stale lives which they don’t even realise that they are living. Instead, this post is for you who are under 30 or anyone older who is ready to experiment with their lives. For you to realise that whatever you are doing right now is all that matters. Daydreaming about the future and reminiscing past in positive or negative way won’t benefit your future. It is just stripping away all the precious time that you have in this blip in the timeline of the universe called life. So, fill every moment with something engaging. Start with one hobby and go deep into it, and the rest will follow.

Once you start improving yourself in every aspect, you start doing plenty of new things, and meeting new people. Sooner rather than later you are too occupied with everything, so much so that when something demands more time you simply don't have any wiggle room left.

People will come and go

Some people might interact with you during the sliver of time that you can manage to take to go out. They'll be intrigued by your lifestyle and all the wealth of knowledge that you might have accrued on your journey. They will want to meet you again as soon as they could, but will be absolutely annoyed by the amount of time that you allocate to all of your activities, but hardly any time to socialise. People will come and go, don't try to make them stay. They will stay only if they find excitement and interesting moments from your presence, unless they commit to stay for the boring aspects of life don’t mind their absence. One of the clear ways to getting rid of the problem of not having enough time for socialisation is to merge social time and activity time. So, go ahead and invite them to be part of your awesome daily activities whether it is working out, your art session, photo walk, a golf game, or whatever that you do to make your life more fun for yourself. If they are ready to be a part of that life, they will step up, otherwise don't let people distract you from your routine.

Hobbies are like people

I picked up too many hobbies, and I was trying to juggle through every hobby every day. It was fun initially when I had to allocate a bit of time, but as some of those started demanding more time, it became a job to juggle through them and allocating time to each one. I couldn’t possibly give more than half an hour to guitar, then an hour to work out, an hour to cooking, and a couple of hours to golf in a single day without feeling burnt out. I would, in fact, end up resisting those activities eventually. Trying to optimise your time to its best is good for computers, not for humans. Whatever hobbies you have and are trying to focus on, some will eventually start demanding more time. Not because they require more time but because you see yourself exploring them more, don't set out to keep every hobby in your arsenal. Whatever is vanishing away, let it vanish. I’m clearly more focused on golf, and writing to do them and excel at them. I don’t really see them as career paths but another aspect of my life where I’m wonderful at or maybe not wonderful at, but my creative mind wants to spend a lot of time. Whereas when it comes to classical guitar, I’m satisfied with learning one or two pieces a year and eventually having a repertoire of the total number of years I’ve played.

Desire is a tricky thing to understand. You need to think hard about the desires. There are desires for which you can be patient because those are your true desires, and you can work for the long haul to get them. And then there are desires which are simply impulses.

Discard your impulsive desires. And try to satisfy your actual desires as fast as possible.

The impulsive desires diverge. True desires converge.

As soon as you satisfy your impulsive desire, you'll want more things. You'll want to upgrade all the aspects of your life, at least to a point that you have spent equivalent money in all the aspects. You won't really appreciate the things you have, instead will have the itch to chase anything and everything that you find. It’s the curse to your life. Because once you have an impulsive desire on your mind, you can’t certainly see anything clearly. Your work suffers, you are mentally present in any conversation, and even if you are, then you try to drift the conversations towards those impulsive desires.

Whereas, as soon as you satisfy your true desire, you'll feel relaxed, you'll feel satisfied. True desires will make you do things that you've never done before, will make you socialise with the kind of people you never socialised before with. You will have to become a different person and a better person to be able to achieve your true desires. True desires make you focused on one thing for a long period of time. Once I satisfied my desire of owning an iPhone, the idea of which I started thinking about two years ago, I didn't really feel the urge to buy something else the next day. I started desiring a watch because I've been reading about watches since a couple of years. Now that I’ve purchased it, I just desire a life where I can sustain golfing, regular upgrades of the equipment, can eat delectable food every day, and publish books. To satisfy that, I have to become a person who has at least half a million-dollar business running. I've to learn to build a polished tech product. I mean, I’m a good developer, but thinking about the product from a customer’s perspective, doing product management, setting deadlines, and making a few potential customers to try this out for their workflow are new to me. They won’t necessarily be difficult, but they sure are daunting, and can hinder you from achieving true desires.

Fulfilling true desire, grows future desires in value

If you are really fulfilling true desires, your next true desire will be bigger and harder to get, whether you talk about monetarily or spiritually.

When it is about materialistic desires, people just want to upgrade everything that they use, unto the lifestyle that their income can afford them. But when you truly care about something and have mental clarity, even something like desiring a luxury watch can make you do incredible things. Because if you really have gained clarity, then you won’t just want to save up and buy the watch. You’d want to increase the value of your time such that the watch can be bought with the least amount of work done. You wouldn’t want to spend three months of income on a watch. Likewise, you’d want to increase the value of your time, so that you can buy a luxury watch with income from three, four, or maybe five days of work. Once you get that, you might want something else, but this time it’ll be much more valuable thing. And going to that level you’ll have to become a better person. You’ll have to evolve.

Countless people are living without meaning in their lives, just wandering, and going through every day activities without any purpose. They don’t know how to switch from a job which has become toxic. Frustrated with their partners but won’t do anything about it because the overthinking has put them in utter distress. Whenever they get to any solution to a problem in their mind, they tend to circle back to the starting question because they overestimated the number of contexts your memory can hold at a time.

Solution is writing. You just need to start writing every day. In fact, I would suggest you need to write every passing thought which ends up drifting you away from the present.

What to write?

It could be as basic as just writing a sentence or two about how does that thought makes you feel. I’m not kidding, just open up a Word document, and put today’s date on top, and give your thought a title. Maybe it is how you want your daily routine to be, so, just say “daily routine”. And start writing why do you want to change it, what changes do you want to make, how are those changes beneficial, and how much effort will it take?

Not only writing thoughts down gets you to conclusions faster, but also it creates a log of your thought process in certain point of your life to get to that particular decision. You don’t have to be right. You just need to be aware of your actions, and more importantly, the thoughts that lead to those actions.

Why did I start writing?

I started writing in April 2020 after I lost the job due to the acquisition of the startup by a unicorn. Before that, I used to write some gibberish in a random note-taking app, but that’s it. After the job loss, I started writing journal entries every day. I used to outline my day at the end of it. “How I felt during the day?”, “What did I accomplish that day?”, or “Any specific bad or good events of the day which stole the majority of my time actually or just mentally” used to go in that outline. Then I used to do as retrospective in the end of the outline. For example, what did I do which can be improved tomorrow, or any good thing that I did for which I need to give myself a token of appreciation.

Writing helps me get out of overthinking. No doubt I’m thinking a lot when I’m writing down my thoughts, but there is no repetition of thoughts or incessantly going on a loop over some issue in life. It lightens up my mind from constant thinking. Sure, there is a practice called “noting” which I actively try to practice and just observe the thoughts come and go. And I try my best to let one timer thoughts pass away, but as soon as I see a reoccurrence of a thought, I know there will be overthinking succeeding it. That too for days.

Thoughts are emails of your brain

Writing is like going through your email inbox and marking emails as done. The ones you know are spam, mark them as spam. The ones are important should be flagged or segregated in a separate folder. Thoughts are the same constant stream of emails in your brain triggered by external sources. If you let those spam or advertisement emails to hold your attention then you are doomed, but if you can filter them out in proper directories then voilà! You have an empty and more manageable inbox.

In the days when whole world was following some sort of a religion and believed in some sort of a god, every person had an end goal. There has always been some sort of afterlife concept in most religions where they have to answer the god(s) after their death. It is like writing a title of the blog or a book first and trying to align the story of your book to that title. Here are the bad deeds, and here are the good deeds; if you do good you'll go to heaven otherwise to hell. Everyone believed that idea and tried to be as good as possible. For some, the definition of good or bad deeds were loose so, they did bad deeds thinking they are good for their own, own clan or their own regime but they all worshiped some god or the other.

They all had an end goal "To be in good books of their god".

Advent of Science

Or should I say the death of god. As soon as science started to gain popularity and reached masses through its own child called "industrialisation", it started killing god for people. God is a philosophical idea to answer the questions for which we humans don't have an answer. And that idea started dying.

Now, people didn't really want to go to a gurudwara, church, mosque or other religious places. It all started becoming meaningless. And because now you don't have the idea of god embedded, the only thing making you abide to good and bad deeds is law enforcement. For a religion, a bad deed has a pretty low threshold like not helping an old person cross the road. But for law, if you didn't do it, then it doesn't really do any harm to you and you didn't commit any crime in the eyes of law enforcement. But for the believers of god that is just moving the needle in direction of hell instead of heaven. The threshold for calling something a "bad deed" is very high for law enforcement. So, if you don't believe in a god and don't have any personal morals, you can live your life without doing anything good and no one would blink an eye.

Depression rises with the fall of meaning

For me depression started to be a part of my life when I entered work life and the structure of school and university went away. The god has been non existent for me since years, so there was no end goal, and there was nothing that kept me going. It's the structure that I created after I joined the gym which made me want to start enjoying dopamine hit that I was getting by doing activities. So, I made a lot of things a part of my life like playing guitar, cooking, golf, and blogging. Now, that I had a life packed with activities which I thoroughly enjoyed, I again started asking question "what is the meaning of life?" Well, this time even though I didn't have god, but I did have structure back in life along with a longing to get better in all of those activities that I've made a part of my life.

God is not coming back

Trying to get back to conventional god is futile. It is hard to believe into something if you stopped believing because of the lack of proof and logic. I'll be an egoistic athiest if I say that being part of religious charity work, and attending the congregations won't add structure to your life. Sure, you can feed people in need as part of Sikh NGOs like Khalsa Aid even in deadliest of situations. Even though you don't believe in god, it'll add meaning and purpose to your life. But that might confine you to the activities that the particular religion performs.

I'm the god of my life

That sounds so full of ego. So, hear me out. As I mentioned earlier that God is a philosophical idea to answer the questions for which we humans don't have an answer. For some people, it is the idea which answers their question for how the world works or it came to existence. For me, god is the entity who will look at my life and will be evaluating at the end of it. I really don't care what others will think of my life, it's me who is going to look back at my life and see does it make me smile or does it make me grine at what all I did in my life. There is no fear of punishment but there is a fear of disappointment. I might not have a predictable death, but whenever I die I would have evaluated my life maybe a day, week, a month or an year ago at very least because reminiscing and recollecting the learnings from past life and continuously narrating the story of your life from new perspectives is what gives meaning to my life. And boy do I want an absolutely ravishing story. It doesn't have to be exciting but I do want it to make me feel that it was worth living.

To the people who are contemplating whether your life is worth living or not you can only tell after going through life, by adding structure, and  by pushing yourself when you feel plateaued. Just thinking that there is no meaning and taking your life away is not an answer to anything, it is the easiest bail out.

If you don't believe that your parenting was flawed, your parents didn't demonstrate any flaws and you are perfect the way you are, then I wish I could be jealous of you but to be honest I feel sorry for you that you haven't faced the reality yet.

Anyway, my idea is to parent yourself first before you start parenting your future kids so that you can minimise the negatives that you would pass on. It is better to sharpen the knife before chopping stuff rather than dealing with a blunt one which won't only do the job poorly but also can injure you.

Build a core foundation of your life

I've decided that health is my utmost priority. It is a conscious decision keeping my future in mind where I simply want to be healthy. Being healthy gives you the freedom to enjoy physical activities along with your family even later in life. So, spending on gym membership, healthy good quality groceries or whey protein is something where I don't restrict myself to splurge on. Getting cooking equipement so that whole process is enjoyable, again, I don't restrict myself. And gym apparels, utility shoes like Nike Metcon, I don't restrict myself from buying, because going through the parenting process of myself I understand the need and utility of those things. This is one thing, regardless of how low or high my earnings get I won't shy away from. This is the backbone of my life.

Do something that gets your soul excited

I've incorporated guitar in my life and playing a musical instrument has been so good and soulful for me that it is an absolute game changer. I started with an electric guitar, and then I got a classical guitar. I love to play classical guitar as I love its sound but also it is more readily available to play, as I have to disassemble the whole setup of electric guitar after every session. It is kind of a one time purchase and I can enjoy it even when I have everything going against me. COVID lockdowns? Doesn't matter, I can learn and play on it, and spend hours on this soulful activity. It can be any form of art for you. And best part is you don't have to be great. Just keep learning and keep improving.

Not everyone need to have it but...

The leisure sport. I believe it is great to have a sport that you play. I chose golf as that was one which fit my lifestyle. I don't really have to be dependant on another person and I can enjoy myself if I want to, but also can also play along with someone if I desire. It is expensive but once you have learned to play it, well you have learned it, after that it's just the green fees and equipment cost, on which you can put a pause if you are going through difficult times. It gets you out of your mundane social circle of family and colleagues for atleast a handful of times a month.

You should let your desires unleash

Watches! I love watches I've been wearing them since I was a kid. Now I save like 2-3% of my income for a watch fund. Whatever spendings I've to do I do it from that fund. That saving percentage  remains same no matter my income. That is something which is emotional, luxury and just something which I want to have rather than I need to have. This is where my materialistic desires lie. I know this will be controversial to say that instead of getting rid of your desires, I'm suggesting you to embrace them. Well, I want to talk more about it, but later.

You know a lot of times we are just bored and trying to get dopamine as easily as possible. There is simply no way that we can be productive in that moment. It is excruciatingly hard. We open up a tab on a web browser and enter amazon.com. And boom! There's that shiny new iPad glaring at you, asking you to click on the "Buy Now" button, but wait you are sensible and you want to make responsible financial decisions. So, you start going through various blogs, you go through tonnes of YouTube videos which start to justify your biases. Not just that, it also implants a seed in your mind of the potential of that device which you will never utilize but you'll surely get convinced that you are the target market. YOU are the person whom Apple had in mind while developing that product. YOU are mistaken. YOU are chasing dopamine. YOU are overwhelming yourself with what you could've done otherwise.

Either you don't have alternate option or your alternate option is overwhelming

What is the other thing that you can do but feels impossible? Is it writing a blog? Is it starting to go to gym? Is it learning a musical instrument? The option could be anything but if you'll keep assigning yourself a big unachievable goal then it will be inevitable for you to fallback to shopping, binge watching or binge eating to get the dopamine. And if you literally don't have any other option for your free time, you better be enjoying meditation for hours or you are set for a recursive pattern of conspicous consumption.

Make thing that you want to do so easy that you cannot not do it. Break those tasks to such miniscule levels that you cannot not do it.

But when to buy?

You should buy it when you can link a single task that you will do with that gadget, that accessory, whatever that thing is. So, lately I have been writing blog posts on some website called stoichuman.com. Sometimes, even while doing some mindless social media scrolling I felte the urge to write on my regular iPad. I would've wanted to write about some idea that I had in my mind but picking up my laptop felt too much of a task and typing long form content on iPad 6th gen without keyboard was so painful that it felt impossible. So, I went ahead and bought a device which is for consumption but as soon as I want it to be, it can turn into a productivity machine. The iPad pro 11 is bigger but still compact to carry around and the magic keyboard case gives me same keyboard as Macbooks which I love.

It has been 10 days since I purchased it and it has absolutely promoted me to write more. Now, whenever I have some idea in my mind, I just write it down using the magic keyboard. Weirdly enough my social media consumption has reduced, I'm unable to point out exactly why but maybe because I'm writing more. I've also started podcasting again as now, I don't have to have a phone and smaller ipad for recording and reading the script. Now, I can have everything in this iPad Pro and it has awesome mics which helps a lot.

Nevermind, I don't want this post to turn into an iPad Pro review but the crux of the whole situation is that I attached one task to this iPad and allowed myself to purchase. That task I was already doing but it was not best done on the older iPad and Macbook combo. If you can't really justify the purchase like this then either you lack the motivation to do the task that you want to do, so, start doing the task with whatever resources you have and upgrade as soon as you feel the need; or you just want to buy the thing because you want others to associate you with that object. That you'll realise the moment you have ended the chase.

Whenever someone asks questions about your hobby, art or work, try to be as abstract and witty as possible. It should only be after certain type of questions you should be opening up with actual answers when they have proved their credibility for their curiosity. Let me explain.

People want to chat just to kill some time, but let me tell you one thing if you don't already know; conversations can be extremely exhausting. If it's a short one, you want it to be light hearted and humourous as it leaves a good impression because how you made them feel. You won't be able to add depth to a conversation in a short time, humour can make the other person to want to come and talk to you again for longer. If it is a longer conversation, make sure the person who is trying to take advice from you have proved the credibility that they will act on the advice, otherwise you are just wasting your time speaking to a dead wall.

I realised that people who have excelled to a certain extent try to publish their thoughts in one way communication medium like books or blogposts, where they don't have to repeat things again and again. And if the writer finds some intriguing thoughts of others in online comments or forums related to the published content, they can simply reply there, without having to talk about the story over and over.

But then there are those individuals who never thought about publishing their thoughts in such a medium, and they are around you with all the wealth of knowledge, but here's the catch, they won't bring their guards down and start answering your questions and try to have a conversation with you. They realise the value of their time, and also that most of the population is fickle. It is useless to advice a fickle person because they might ask some surface level questions while trying to gain something from your knowledge, but because of lack of serious curiosity, they won't be able to go deeper and they won't be able to utilise that knowledge, if they even try to do so.

More knowledge will knock at your door if you start utilizing the knowledge that you currently have and act upon it. I've witnessed it countless times at gym, golf, cooking, and at work. If I am dedicated and trying to progress towards my goal, the results start building a credibility around you. A lot of times, you don't even have to go to people to ask for help, they will come upto you and would want to share their knowledge. Everyone wants to change the world. Some people want to do it per person basis, some do it on large scale. The more learned you are the more you want to filter people who are serious about your activity.

And now that I've progressed a lot in some of my hobbies and work, I try to keep my mouth shut, and I've stopped giving advice to anyone and everyone, unless I see someone actually trying, and showing results regardless of how big they are. Most people won't act on your valuable advice because they might not value it.

I've worn watches since I was a kid. I used to have uber cheap watches initially. Then I got introduced to 10 dollar watches, and then spent a long time with by 30 dollar Fastrack watch. I wore very minimal looking watches. No, I'm not talking Bauhaus design. Watches have been a good conversation piece. I used to get compliments on the choice of my watches.

When my 30$ watch got its coating off of its brass case, and I realised that I need a stainless steel watch, I started looking for nice looking and quality watches under 200$. I started getting introduced to Seikos and Tissots. It didn't limit to that, I started watching videos of all the high horology watches. I liked the idea of not having to change the battery, but because I was not sure if I would be able to handle an automatic and live with it, I just wanted to get the cheapest good looking watch from Seiko. So I ended up with SNKA05K1. And guess what? When I recieved it, I fell in love. I could see the imperfections, but being able to see the movement and the balance spring unwinding was beautiful moment regardless of how industrial Seiko's 7S26 looked. The dial it has and how it plays with light is just that watch punching way above its price bracket. That was the moment when I decided that I'm gonna start saving about 80$ a month for my next watch, and whenever I'll find a new piece that is in the budget of that fund, I'll get it.

That Seiko has gone with to every place, with every human I went out with. It has been part of evey convestaion of mine. Every nicks and scratches remind me of some memory or the other.

Oris Big Crown Pointer Date 80th anniversary

After about one year of owning that Seiko, I saw the photos of that beautiful 80th anniversary edition of Oris Big Crown Pointer Date in bronze case and green dial. That looked absolutely immaculate. No, it wasn't the first luxury Swiss watch I saw, I had already seen watches much more expensive. But the combination of coin edged bezel with cathedral hands and most importantly the pointer date functionality, it became the watch that I wanted next. By 2020 I had enough funds to get that watch, but pandemic happened, and during lockdown I stopped wearing watch. I didn't feel the need at all.

After about 8 months, yeap I started going out after 8 months of first lockdown, I started learning how to play golf. And boy, when I saw my Seiko in the bright sunlight after so long, with the gorgeous blue sunburst dial, I fell in love with it even deeper. I didn't care about getting another watch. But after few months. I started realising the shortcomings of this watch. Primary one is bracelet, it has integrated one, and that too not with solid links.

And I had already started falling in love with the romantic idea of having a timepiece which can survive with you gathering the scars and telling a story about you, like a tiny little encrypted journal of your life that only you can decrypt.

When my birthday came in 2021, I went to Seiko store and saw their alpinist reissues, which also had cathedral hands, looked fabulous, and costed one third the price of Oris, I was about to make an impulse purchase, but I stopped because of two reasons. One being the thickness of Seiko alpinist and second being that I was settling for something which in my mind felt like a homage of my actual desire.

So, just because I wanted absolute value for my money, I started cheating. I started looking for all the watches in its price range and a bracked above. After looking at 200+ watches and the 80th anniversary edition Oris, which I didn't quite like on the wrist, I got introduced to same Oris Big Crown Pointer Date but in oxblood dial and steel case. Oh Boy! That was it. I just had to get it. I went for a Goa trip with my Seiko, and as soon as I arrived, I called the AD to reserve it, and picked up the next day to mark my 25th year of life, and for achieving my financial goal which I would like to keep private for now.

I'm still honeymooning with this watch. But looking forward to engraving new memories of next phase of my life.

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.

You all know that feeling when you feel like yesterday was Sunday and today is Friday. The week passed by so fast. Or maybe last month was January and now you are celebrating Christmas already. The year passed by so fast. I've been there too. Or maybe some might even say "Last year, they were in high school, and today they are celebrating graduation of their grand children." I know, I know we all are humans, and we all will be having a similar experience when glancing over our lives because we can't really recollect all the nuances of our experiences in one go.

It is important to realise that this feeling of time flying away, is because "we are" letting time to fly away. Until you are in high school, or university, you always feel there was so much happening in your life because of sheer amount of structure around you, for example, exams, mandatory home work, mandatory activities, sports days, and what not, depending upon where you live in the world. As soon as you graduate, and get into the real world when you are not obligated to answer to your parents or teachers, and the only structure remaining in life of most people is a job. Your life starts to drift away, you work and sleep, and anticipate when you can post a TGIF (Thank God It's Friday) story on your instagram.

Boat has left the shore.

Soon enough, you get so complacent in your work life that the work life becomes your world. What used to be experiences, now turns into "I used to do this" or "I want to do  this but I don't have time" chatter.

I see so many aspirations when people talk but they are stuck. They are stuck because for the better part of their life they were used to work according to the structure which was built around them for the betterment of them. Now, again they are in a structure(job, business) but that structure is built for the betterment of its own with little consideration for the people in that structure.

There won't be "the day" when you will be able to start doing what you want to do, and soon enough you'll realize that you have turned 60. Retired, maybe a millionaire but your body can't keep up with your aspirations because you couldn't even make time for your physical fitness.

Don't let the boat drift away.

There's only one way to not let your drift away without any influence of you. You'll never have absolute control over your life and life will not go exactly how you want it to be, but to be present is always in your control. The moment you start to be more present you'll realise that you need to create your own disciplined structure. Think of it as a school timetable. YOU decide how much sleep you "need", YOU decide at what time you want to do the activity that you wanted to do. Start from making just 10 minutes of time in your day for that activity. 10 minutes is a small amount of time, but it is big enough to make you feel that you are in control of your time. You do that for few weeks, you'll want to create another 10 minutes for another new aspect of your life, while increasing time for previous activity.

That act of allocating 10 minutes of time of the day for activity that you wanted to do, initiates a snowball effect. Just make sure that in those 10 minutes you don't let any problem, any other thing or person of your life to interfere. Just be present in those 10 minutes.

Soon enough, you would want to make more time for other activities but you'll realise that you don't have any, but you'll realise how much time you waste on things like social media, so you'll start cutting down your screen time. Your priorities will start to change, you'll want to make your life more efficient for YOU, not because your boss wanted the work done on deadline. Now, you'll become a person who does things instead of being a chatter head who keeps narrating those old stories again and again.

Sooner rather than later, you'll start to value your time more than anything. And the day, you start valuing your time, your relation with life and people will change for better. I'll talk about that in next post.

Today, I want to talk about epiphany that struck me a few weeks ago at night while reading a book, and I was distracted by some thoughts. It was hard to focus on the book, but as soon as that epiphany struck me, I let every thought go, and didn't even need to "try" to focus on reading.

There are 4 levels of living life. I don't want to be too nuanced, trying to cover every exception because I feel that the readers for whom this will be helpful should just grasp these brief, and simple ideas; and think about their own life to see where they fit.

Level 1

When you are in this stage of life, you are stupid enough to not be able anticipate any kind consequence that can be from just one simple decision, and you are just not at all prepared to handle that consequence. Most people generally overcome this stage in early teenage.

Level 2

You get enough consciousness to anticipate various possibilities, but you have almost no capability to handle life. Your life goes in the way how the life wnats to go, as you can't change the direction of the sailing ship. Wherever the wind blows you go. And this the condition where you overthink everything a lot. From past experiences you are trying to simulate all kinds of scenarios in your brain for future events you think might happen. During teenage most people are afraid of either teachers, or parents, or peers/society. They don't have financial power to tackle most stupid situations, they lead themselves into. The overthinking mind make them afraid and anxious.

Level 3

You have enough consciousness to anticipate all kinds the possibilities and you have already been preparing for some of the outcomes that can happen in your life, but because you feel you are ready for some, you try to make yourself prepared for every possible situation that you can think of. You make your mind run like a hamster. Most people are on their own generally in this stage of life, or at least that's what they feel like. Every problem, every converstation, important past events, don't tend to leave your mind alone. You start living in "what if" world. But not just that, you start to find answer to "What should I do if this happens" for every situation that you can think of. Most people get here in their teenage or early twenties, and get stuck for lifetime. This is an extremely painful situation to be in, and you will be so accustomed to the pain that you won't realise it if you don't graduate to level 4.

"We suffer more in imagination that in reality" - SENECA

Level 4

This is the hardest one to get too. This is the ultimate enlightenment, getting confident and having the realisation that no matter how much you try you'll never be able to actually be prepared for all the situations, but you believe in yourself that whatever happens you'll be able to tackle it head on. You stop overthinking, instead let the life happen to you while you work on yourself. But you can't just pretend to be in this stage.

You might've said something like "I don't give a f***" in past, but do you really not in your head when you are alone overthinking that one negative comment about you? You do. And it's ok, main challenge is to face why you do, and to prove yourself by small but multiple achivements in life that even if what you think is a bad and unknown situation, you'll be able to tackle it. For me; I proved to myself by body building, cooking, blogging, guitar, and golf. For you; it can be totally different activities. I'll highly suggest some form of physical activity, some musical instrument, and cooking to be included in your daily life. These are the things which you can have absolute control over, and will make you psychologically stronger for bigger challenges of life when you start leveling up yourself in these daily activities.

"Either you choose your daily challenges, or life will choose on its own"

In the last decade, as I have transitioned from a school student to university graduate to a professional in tech industry, as the number of people I've interacted with increased, the level of anxiety has increased as well. All the conversations, anticipations, waiting for messages, recreating the scenarios with biases, and creating the scenarios which never happened has all been the culprit.

But are those really the causes or the symptom of something else? All the gadgets that we use to stay connected with people in all sorts of way whether calling, messaging, or by sharing memes on social media, and the fact that we can do that any time, has lead to the issues I mentioned before. Constantly spending time on social media, has been putting pressure on a lot of us to have higher expectations from our lives. We want our lives to be in a certain way, and then we try to make things happen, but if we get even a slightest hint of things going in different direction, we start getting anxious. All the interactions whether online or offline, starts to become mechanical in an attempt to steer them.

I believe that just like how addictive dopamine is, similarly anxiety is also as addictive. We, or at least I have been subconciously trying to chase anxiety because why would you not? Normal is so boring. Calm, peace, and happiness, who wants that? Fine, I'm kidding. But I was doing just that. Once I would feel that time is healing me and suddenly I would feel a void, a void "No Drama", I would text someone toxic, or share something on social media to replace that void, in the back of my mind knowing that any of those two actions are going to lead to some kind of drama.

Meditation and notifications

I have been fairly successful in last few months in curbing this need to be indulged in some sort of drama. I've been meditating for at least 10 minutes every day, try to reflect on the feeling on restlessness that feel in the moment. This has been a game changer for me. But this is not the only thing that'll cut it in today's day and age of digital media.

You need to cut down on the notifications that you recieve. Disable the notifications  from any app other than phone and messaging apps. No social media app should be able to send you any notification unless it is for your business accounts.

Apple Watch with cellular

I'm an iPhone user, so a galaxy watch would work if you are an android user. But in my experience of 3 days with apple watch, I've realised that a real smartwatch not just a fitness band, which can let you stay connected, but not let you compulsively browse social media, can allow you to cut down your smartphone usage which will reduce anxiety a lot.

One of the biggest reason of anxiety by not using iPhone for long periods of time has been "what if someone was trying to reach me in emergency?" or "did someone at office try to reach me for some critical bug while I was busy cooking a meal?" Being able to get important notifications on the wrist, and having basically a dumb phone with some smart features without the distractions of a smartphone has made me feel so free that I just don't see anything making me feel anxious anymore.

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.

A lot of times, we are so eager to get the results that we forget about the consistency and the hard work that is required. Not only do we try to search for all the possible shortcuts, but even when we are going through the process of doing something, we tend to lose the focus from the process and are mentally occupied with the anticipation of result.

Meditation is simple but not easy

First of all there is misunderstanding around meditation that you have to sit down with a blank mind, stop all the thoughts, and whenever someone tries to do that, guess what happens? Thoughts start to flow like anything. It feels like you've injected yourself with some steroid which is making a gazillion thoughts to emerge out of no where.

You don't have to resist your thoughts, "you have to observe them". Your thoughts aren't something in your control. Just like a flowing river, sometimes the speed of the water can be high, sometimes it can be low. You don't have any control over that. But if you let yourself drift away in that river, that is your fault.

Meditation is like sitting at the river bank with your feet dipped in the flowing water,  just observing it, and enjoying it.

You don't have to judge your thoughts. The moment you start tagging your thoughts as good or bad, that's when you start overthinking, start getting more anxious, and you start to drift away.

The moment you feel the water has started to flow swiftly, and you are about to drift away, just pull yourself out for a moment, reset the position, your senses, and just start observing again.

Being able to not resist the thoughts and letting them flow is the hardest part about meditation.

Somedays are going to be very difficult

Life happens, you might be going through the worst phase of your life, and maybe you are unable to focus on observing your behaviour, and your actions. Maybe the flow of water is so high that sitting at the river bank is not a possibility at the moment. It's ok, try to stay away, zoom out, try to observe the event with respect to grand scheme of things, take a few moments just to take a few deep breaths. And that will be more than enough on those days.

And as soon as you feel you are drifting away by overthinking, note it, bring your attention back to the actions that you can perform right now. Act on things which are in your control.

It'll take more than few months. Quite honestly, it took me a couple of years when regular meditation started paying off. It became a habit, an instinct to which I default to whenever I start overthinking, or maybe even when I want to just relax after work. Keep doing it.

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!

Follow our weekly podcast on Spotify called "Stoic Human Podcast". Also available on other platforms like Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Overcast, and more. Just search "Stoic Human Podcast".

Last year on 17th May, 2020 I started learning to play music on electric guitar. It was a squier stratocastor. And that thing just blew my mind even when I played "Am" chord. Plugged into a blackstar ID core with some overdrive, and I was on the moon. What? I'm a guitarist already? I guess not.

I started taking lessons online and practicing with discipline daily. Initially, my practice sessions every day were 15 minutes long. Any longer and it would pain so much that I sometimes thought "I'll never be able play it any good". Two months passed by, and I had developed calluses. Now, the practice sessions were ranging between one to four hours daily.

Range of music

I tried a lot of music. Modern pop on clean tone, jazz, and I love blues and practiced it a lot. I tried to play a lot of riffs from 70s- 2000s rock music. My focus was never to play them really well, it was just that I wanted the timing of chord changes to be right and wanted to play right notes most of the time. It didn't sound very good but I liked it. It was my first year, and how I generally learn things is by grasping small info of all the things I can do in any particular activity, so, that I've a birds eye view.

And that is what I was doing while learning guitar as well. I was learning how to play different type of songs, riffs, and at the same time practicing different techniques and also grasping basic to intermediate information about music theory.

Ah! The music theory

When I started to learn about music theory, CAGED system on guitar, what I realised about my guitar playing and what I want from it is that, I want to be able to go into a room or under the night sky and just play some beautiful arpeggiations. Once I got to learn basic to intermediate music theory, how scales, major, minors, dominant chords work, and their relation to different chords in a scale, I just couldn't resist myself to just spend some time with fret board and play around with different combinations of notes, finger picking patterns, and voicings of chords.

Classical music

And that was the time when some classical videos started to pop up in my youtube feed.  I was in awe when I saw Ana Vidovic playing Asturias. But when I slowed that video down and analysed it, and tried to figure out why I liked it so much. Well, it turned out classical music is what I was trying to move towards. Arpeggiating some beautiful chords, using interesting picking patterns, like tremolo and unlike most pop music, classical music on guitar feels like instrument itself is singing. It has the whole range of emotions.

So, I started practicing classical music on my stratocaster, starting with Prelude in C from Well Tempered Clavier by Bach, Lagrima by Tarrega, and then came the one which forced me to pull the trigger to buy a classical guitar, Spanish Romance.

Yamaha C40M

In no way Yamaha is sponsoring this post. I wanted to get a beginner classical guitar and heard some good things about it so, that's what I went for. And holy smoke! It not only looks beautiful but also sounds very mellow. It took me a few hours to adjust to a lighter guitar, wider neck, and nylon strings, but all thanks to more than a year of practice it didn't took me few days and neither it felt too alien.

After few hours I was playing Spanish Romance, BEAUTIFULLY. This insturment touched my heart, that I don't want to leave any musical piece in a bad state. Now, if I'm gonna practice any musical piece, I'll give it as much time it needs. Because when you play it without a lot of mistakes, the resonance chamber in a classical guitar and make it sound awesome.

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!

Follow our weekly podcast on Spotify called "Stoic Human Podcast". Also available on other platforms like Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Overcast, and more. Just search "Stoic Human Podcast".