You can pick and choose to do anything you like on any day of your life. If you think about it hard enough, you really can. You get to choose at any moment what you wish to learn. It may take time, but time is all that it will take. And that time is going to pass you by anyway. Might as well conquer some new skills than squander it in sloth.
Now, there are many ways that can lead you to experiencing an existential crisis, by choosing to operate in a mode of living without conscious consideration or thoughtful effort, not planning to live life more deliberately, therefore moving unconsciously through life in the wrong direction, and without the awareness that each day you send yourself the wrong way.
These people seem to live in a permanent state of slumber, an almost blind while awake state of being, sleepwalking throughout their entire life. The one thing that never fails, however, is what creates the conditions that cause a loss in fear of failure, seeking out the experience that brings about all sorts of fulfillment.
And one of many ways to achieve that is by wandering off to get lost in the library. Down time should not always be idle. Although many choose to play it this way and therefore miss the point, wasting their time skimming and scrolling passively through their life. But down time is best for getting down to become creative and active, for serious work time in the process.
You need to go out of your way to make optimal experiences occur. They don’t just happen. Even the process of continuing the process, deliberate steps of action must be taken in order to prepare for the task of being ready to begin taking action.
This, for me, is ritualistic, but probably also extremely autistic. You need headphones, phone, books, pens, highlighters, rulers, and coffee, all lined up on the desk and ready to go. I also bring my own cup and coffee from home to the library with me.
Then I must journal for 10-15 minutes. I need to know what the plan is here. I need to see what we’re at. I need to review what happened yesterday. I need to plan to see if we can find a better way today. I need to log any progress that was made and where and when what happened. I also need to note where I’m failing and therefore need to focus on improving next, where and how I will be able to do so.
Then I need to set my priorities for today. What is the aim of today? What is the aim of this deliberate practice session? And after having gone over many thoughts and caught up on the events of the past 24-hours of life and my pictures are now also handwritten too, I can finally begin to continue the process, having finished that part of it which now allows you to begin again.
All thoughts must be committed to paper, first, before even thinking about going on the computer. There is sometimes this pre-work process that you must do by hand before beginning to operate the machine. By the time you reach for the screen, you have everything on paper ready to re-write.
So thoughts get scribbled then organized later and arranged into making sense. And this process will allow the initial words handwritten to become far more elaborated during the course of each rework. It’s not uncommon to have several duplicates edited and re-edited before finally having the shit first draft ready.
Each day you should have a plan, but you need not always do the same things on the same days, as change is inevitable and your plans will be thwarted from time to time by externals out of your control. However it is within your control to manage these obstacles to ensure that whatever constraints are forced upon your time, better creativity emerges as a result. You must have a strict routine and cultivate an extremely disciplined structure for your day each day so you know what to do with yourself and what the upcoming plan is to do next with yourself.
It may never be as simple as you want it to be. You might not always get to do whatever you want all of the time. That’s not reality. Not everyone can do whatever they want just by want. But it is up to you to create the conditions that allow for what you want to make happen. And while you may have many months of struggle, even years, keep concentrated at all times imposing these structured routine disciplined activities purposefully aimed through a self directed practice towards a single goal that opens the window of possibility allowing you the freedom and flexibility to move in whichever direction you wish to choose.
And that is not something that will ever just happen either, but rather conditions you have to make by a very specific way you choose to navigate the system. For if it were that simple, there would be no need for alcohol and other drugs to temporarily alleviate these conditions of people lacking purpose outside the job.
If you want everything to work out, then I’m afraid the onus is on you to make it all work out. Think strongly, and act accordingly regarding your own situation. The power is in you to treat and lift yourself out of your predicament, if only you would care enough to make yourself do the hard work to improve and fix your self.
There is no shortage of books on the problems you seek to solve within yourself, and everything you need solved already does exist. Therefore if you do not know how, then the problem is this, that you do not know yet, and are therefore in serious need of an education. Not an explanation.
The quality of your life can be improved from within you, if only you take these necessary steps, the time to focus on the improvement of the self. Medication should never be administered nor even considered without exhausting every other option. It should always only be a last resort. As once prescribed to medication, chances are strong you also now have an addiction. Doctors don’t warn you of these things and they certainly don’t try to get you to stop taking them after far longer than necessary.
OPT OUT OF PILLS AND OPT IN FOR FLOW
There are many who are unaware of what may solve it, and somehow improve everything else too because of it. So let’s say you drink alcohol. Step one then is you must start by stopping that entirely and engage more in physical fitness. Alcohol is a depressant and may only ever lead to making bad situations far worse. Alcohol, believe it or not, is the most harmful drug that exists causing more damage to the user with the most damage to those closest to the user than any other drug. Alcohol ruins more lives each year than every other known drug. That’s not an assumption by the way. It’s a well known established scientific fact. More on that down the line. Stick with the programme and you’ll soon learn how to feel like never wanting it again either.
Although it was fun when it lasted, but fun for the same reason that it never continued. At some point, we have to take our life seriously because life is a serious matter. It can’t always be fun and games. You need to get really serious about your education and make extreme efforts to involve yourself when it comes to matters of your own future. Because the next 20-years will see rapid unemployment within the technology industry. Anyone who only uses computers rather than teaching them might want to start thinking about doing something else. Not want. Need.
A BETTER PLAN FOR LIVING A LIFE WORTH LIVING
So, let’s say we start you with day one in maximal physical exertion. Because the mind can only work as well as the body can perform. If you don’t get active with the body, then the mind won’t ever reach its peak state of functioning optimally, and therefore you won’t be able to reach this neurochemical state that could very easily solve your condition.
And so, physical exercise must become a part of your creative task. This is critical. You must practice endurance sports bordering on the religious until you finally experience why endurance exercise is not a chore but an extraordinary pleasure. For if you don’t then you are missing out on one of life’s greatest pleasures and the neurochemical positive releases that alters your brain you make naturally occur, if you choose instead to neglect physical endurance activities.
You simply can not know what’s possible unless you start by doing what used to be impossible.
Then read or write or both on another day, or the same day, as the physical endurance performance activity will incrementally elevate your mind and mental muscle allowing you to access higher dimensions of consciousness unlocking a wider range of creativity.
On the following days after that, seek more physical exertion activity and/or active recovery. Then set aside a number of hours each month to look back over and review the past month. Note what small significant changes of progress you have made and notice what has positively occurred in the past month.
Now, see to it that you continue to repeat these scheduled activities consistently in the following month and you will begin to notice a pattern emerge here over time. All these good habits practiced deliberately over many months and then years you will start to notice a major change at least once every year, or more. But the real shift doesn’t come until Year-10. Now you are able to see massive gains from all this time being engaged with the process. Then rapid alterations to your thinking and cognition will start to become intuitively grasped tacit knowledge.
Continue this cycle of achieving optimal experiences and you will ignite a chain reaction of never ending increasing positive changes in your brain’s development. Then at the end of each year, take significant time out to examine the past 12-months. You will be amazed to notice how all this deliberate practice is now leading to qualitative changes in your mind.
And after having gone through this review of the past collections of ideas gathered through deliberate physical and mental efforts expended over many years, start to improve upon them and aim higher still again, increasing the complexity by adding more difficulty to the foray.
KEEP TRYING TO MAKE YOUR PROBLEMS HARDER TO SOLVE
There are other matters not mentioned here that you cannot and should not ignore, and that’s living your life around all of these actions. You need to have a reason to act in a hurry and you should treat these matters with a sense of urgency, as if it is a matter of life and death.
Choose though to not let things bother you whilst involved with this self work. You need to be able to eliminate and abolish all matters of concern when focused thinking time is now. That means nothing has the power to break your concentration. You must not let yourself think about or be concerned regarding anything other than the task at hand until that is achieved, first.
DEVELOP THE HABIT OF LETTING BAD THINGS HAPPEN
Why? Because if there is nothing you can currently do in the moment to fix the problem then there is also no point in concerning yourself regarding matters which cannot be solved until the point of which they can be solved.
You need to be able to prioritize your list of problems and solving creative issues, as creative time is limited and precious. Learn then to let everything else fall to the side and take a back seat whilst you are locked inside this state working under time constraints.
It is vital that nothing and no one can have your attention during these moments of deep sustained focus. Otherwise your attention will be divided and therefore your ability fragmented.
If you have no ability to do anything in the moment when unintentional bad things happen, there is no point consuming yourself with a problem that no matter how much energy you expend into worrying about it, cannot and will not solve it. Reserve this energy and aim it towards productive matters.
If the problem you can see is solvable, but weeks, months or even years away from being solved, then you must learn how to put matters out of your mind and to keep your head in the work. Do not be bothered in order to not let externals affect your work.
In other words, never trouble yourself with worrying about things that worrying won’t do anything to solve. Let problems be as they may and only let yourself begin to think about them when the time is right to solve them. Free your mind for the purpose of other tasks that rely on the intense focus on all of your attention.
All these things mentioned so far are only in relation to all the work in and around working. They do not even bring into question all the other things you must do during life and living between the work and earning. You still have everything else in and around life that you must still always do each day. So all these efforts we are talking about here are extras in addition which are to be deliberately expended on your own accord.
You must make extreme demands from yourself until nothing ever feels like a chore but every activity is embedded into the fabric of living. As it is these in-between moments when we are actually living that ultimately what brings about an interesting life.
If you don’t have much to do then you also don’t have much to say. And if you do not have much to do or say then what the fuck are you actually doing? I could take a guess. Gossiping.
Therefore it is up to you how you give your own life a sense of meaning and purpose by knowing exactly what to do with it and for the rest of it. And for those who do not know what to do, they spend theirs in waste watching others because they don’t know what to do with themselves. Hence how gossip exists. With nothing else to do and no one else around to talk to and the person whom we like to and only talk about, who am I?
This need of constant distraction in order to fill empty voids is suitable for staving off inner emptiness. So it’s easy to understand why from another’s perspective as these are the same types who know not what to do with themselves or even know who they are. And so what good is it to concern yourself regarding people who know not what to do or who they are. It’s a vicious cycle. If one is not careful to guard their attention with their life, then they may well acheive producing depression.
Distractions are used as a means to try and escape boredom and anxiety. Yet if one spends too much time trying to alleviate these conditions solely from distractions alone, then one may enter into a state of deep depression, or worse, existential dread may set in. This rule applies also to people who have no purpose and spend more of their time engaged with pointless gossip, the ultimate sign of people who have nothing better to do with their lives.
THE ONLY WAY THROUGH IS YOU
The only way out is by what you choose to let in. For one who does not have meaningful goals and always seeking new challenges on the horizon, deliberately sought out intrinsically for their own sake in order to carry on the continuity of optimal this experience, creating inner harmony within the self, then another day goes by forfeiting the chance to have lived better.
It is now high time for you to reverse this path if the one you are on is simply following others. Not actually having a lot to say does somehow paradoxically say quite a lot. You need to be able to carve out your own niche. You need to be able to control your attention each day and focus it in a direction that not only improves you but makes you ‘feel better’. Having a sense of appreciation for the here and now, learning to experience each day as if it were your last, as one day, it will be.
Prioritize your life then now in such a fashion to ensure you are not neglecting anything important or spending too much time focused on the wrong things. You are lucky to already have everything you do. And one day, all of it will be taken away from you in a moment for eternity. You can’t sit around and wait for life to happen. It is on you and within your own power to go and make your life happen. Go out of your way to create these experiences.
Screen addiction and short hits of distractions might make you feel good in the moment, but it will never lead to qualitatively positive changes in your brain’s neurochemistry. In fact, too much numbing of the mind will only alter your life backwards, sending your mind, and mental state, in a downwards direction. If you want to experience a better quality of living then you better start changing the channel of contents you let inside your mind and life. And more importantly, the way you engage with your life to achieve this altered state which will ultimately changes you.
HAVE MANY DIFFERENT INTERESTS
And always be engaged due to having these intense interests. Once you finally understand and experience this euphoric high that can only arise in these moments of complete absorption, deeply focused on the task at hand, hours of concentration in isolation, allowing time for these skills to be acquired to alter the existing neurochemistry of your brain. These hours of sustained practice, deliberately focused on the task at hand, what is better than the side effect of this highly charged, energetic, hypnotic hyperfocused euphoric state, without actually taking drugs?
The whole point in any of this even being possible and certainly the experience of feeling failure as impossible, is in fact the reason for seeking it all out in the first place.
Because you want a better solution.
Because you want a better life.
Because you want optimal experiences.
Because you have a mind and wish to explore it, from having experienced and therefore felt there is this other way to operate and live your life by which is far more enjoyable and much more productive that doesn’t rely on drugs, alcohol and other distractive addictions to experience a higher quality life.
That in fact it’s the simplest things that make life feel richer. A much happier life can be lived more happily without things many need to lean on as a crutch to try and avoid what is all of our deadly inescapable realities: one day, you are going to be dead.
And yet that feeling derived from an improved mind can easily be felt through your own intentions, physical and mental actions. Getting lost in stacks of books seems to bring it on quite well too. And somehow even the smell of hundreds of book papers seems to have a strange effect on my brain being surrounded by the smell of so much knowledge does keep one awake at night having these exhilarating experiences.
FINDING FLOW: ON DEEPER IMMERSION [THE LOCKED DOOR]
The whole point of tunnel vision I think is experiencing that high which is like going over a bridge in a car as a child, feeling that rush of excitement riding out the waves of the energetic flow, a purely hypnotic altered state on par to people who would need to a take a cocktail of drugs (that would kill them) in order just to get those same brain chemicals to release into the bloodstream, but without having to take any drugs at all to achieve that.
As unlike drugs that only ever bring you down, these optimal experiences will only ever elevate you up. They are always positive experiences and all naturally occurring chemicals released that fluid the brain allowing you to experience extraordinary well-being.
If only more knew how to accomplish this state from within, depression would find it very hard to exist. Hence the reason why I feel so compelled to continue my work on this. Because that seems perhaps one of the more positive goals to focus working on and supporting: helping people know how to live a happy life.
I’m not saying this will definitely work for you. But I am saying it definitely did work for me, and so it’s worth trying. But even if all else fails, fuck it. It still works for me and is much fun to do it all.
KEEP FINDING YOUR WAY BACK IN
Demands will be made on your time, constraints imposed from outside circumstances that are out of your control. But do not sit around and just wait hoping that something good may eventually come your way, but learn to dance with creative constraints.
As it’s inside this ebb and flow of our everyday life, just going about our ‘normal’ day fueled by the desire to work hard backed by an ambition to also want to achieve extraordinary challenges that will naturally enrich the quality of your experience, the way you choose to interact with the physical world around you.
USE YOUR BODY AND MIND WITH PURPOSE
You need to be out in the real world, off and away from the screen and doing many physical activities that require using your mind with much effort, struggle and difficulty. So that when you come back, you return to the task better than you were before.
Experience is what enables you to get good. So be out in the physical world living an interesting life attaining these experiences often. Otherwise you won’t have anything interesting to say.
And this can take on various forms from off screens and into the library to off screens and into the gym or hitting the road for 15-miles. But it’s you who must find your own way into producing these immeasurable and pleasurable states as accomplishing doing so produces extraordinary benefits for your mind.
Deliberately then keep going out of your own way to find extremely challenging acts to perform and achieve. Get into this habit of make a lifetime habit. Show me something better and I’ll consider opting in for it. But in the meantime, stick to this as I haven’t found anything that comes even close to being better for your mind and life.
If wanting to know how to live well and wanting to cultivate living your best life, then this may be the thing you never knew was possible you would also never went looking for either.
But how will I know when I’ve found it, you ask? You’ll know. You can’t experience ecstasy without knowing you are experiencing a state of ecstasy. It’s that place you go when effortless action takes over and in the proceeding hours, you are teleported into a different dimension where the rules of everyday life breakdown.
There is a guiding principle at play inside these moments where something comes from somewhere ‘outside of you’ that somehow knows and is trying its best to help get along the way you need to go. Don’t ever question this. When it arrives, it is there to assist you. Even when you feel unsure about what’s going on, don’t worry about it. ‘It’ knows and is trying to get you to the point. When that voice calls you, the voice of intuition, never ignore that voice. That’s the call. That means it’s time to go. You must always listen to that and follow it wherever it wants to take you.
When you start to notice the night give way to the day but still haven’t felt fatigue or even noticed the hours that’s gone by, experiencing time dilation when the concept of time collapses and you somehow forget yourself and enter into this unconscious ‘not thinking’ mode of experience where even all feeling of your physical self vanishes and the ego disappears, where words and ideas just flow to you, without you even feeling yourself doing it.
When you temporarily arrive into this altered state of consciousness where life becomes play but with strict rules. Rules deliberately imposed on by you so the boundaries of everyday life temporarily breakdown and disappear.
When you begin to develop the habit of doing very strange and unusual things for the first time that you yourself struggle to understand nor be able to explain how or why. This is also why many artists have a hard time looking back over their own work. Because its still foreign to them. If your work is starting to scare you, have no fear. This is a natural course in the cycle and a sign you are on the way to becoming.
WELCOME TO THE ZONE
These moments create many of life’s most significant experiences, quite literally altering the trajectory of our lives. You could say when this is happening they have finally discovered how to live deeply in the present, trying their hardest to make this their best. And yet it is precisely in these moments when our feelings of struggle and effort become effortless, performing at a peak state while somehow not even feeling ourselves at all doing it, leading to the most extraordinary experiences of our lives.
To realize that there is this whole other dimension of consciousness unknown and never discovered by many for the entirety of their lives, that changes the filter lens from how we see and feel the world in here and out there, which is never anything other than always extremely positive.
These experiences, once discovered, become so rewarding that one must go to extreme lengths in order to keep up with creating them. This experience then is how you continue pushing beyond the boundaries of your physical and mental maximums.
Once you begin this cycle, you only have to keep re-entering it over and over again and again to stay locked in this pattern of achieving the never ending expansion of your own mind. Through each episode, of flow, whilst inside these naturally occurring altered states of consciousness, one will always emerge, back into the room you could say, with a stronger self concept.
These states however will forever remain elusive and foreign to many. Unfortunately, not everyone will get the opportunity to experience this. And so, they will go to their graves without ever knowing a better way existed, having lived a life but having only achieved a semblance of real living, passing on the chance and therefore miss out on some of life’s most wonderful experiences.
It’s not something everyone can or will achieve. Some people’s personalities just aren’t cut out for this and what it takes to produce and maintain this state. As the essential elements required here is that you have to be intrinsically motivated and posses autotelic tendencies. So you have to want to read books more than watch TV. You have to desire continuous and constant challenge, always seeking difficulty for its own sake and set really hard goals that are always well beyond your present level ability.
Then you have to work really hard on them as much as you can as best as you can and during all of your free time instead of relaxing. Lazy people aren’t going to do that. Because you have to have this desire of making things harder on purpose for the purpose of achieving this purely euphoric state of enjoyment.
Some people are so bored, a lot of them anxious, many are depressed. Yet the solution is always there and can be found inside what it is you are doing, or more importantly ‘not doing’. Too much relaxment will lead to boredom, and too much boredom will lead to depression. You have to know what to do with yourself in order to enter into these negative mind states. So what this needs you to do is:
FIND THE FLOW CHANNEL
Align your life in accordance to a lifestyle that suits and matches your temperament, personality, goals, ambitions, dreams. That enables and allows you to do all the things that actually make sense to you and make you feel good. You have to know what those things are for yourself and there is no shortage of interesting things in this world to find, learn, do and explore. To not know what to do is simply a lack using your imagination. And it those who do not understand who will also never experience it.
The real problem we have is there are actually too many interesting things we could possibly decide to invest spending our time and attention to mastering, devoting our lives to solving. The most difficult choice is choosing the best thing. When there are many seemingly possible right things you can turn to, it can be easy to turn one way to later learn it wasn’t the best way.
Hence this is why so many may end up stuck or lost experiencing a midlife crisis. Because they are just realizing now how much time of their own life has gone by and where they are is nothing like they ever envisaged themselves as being by this stage of life. All the dreams wished for that never came true. And not only have it not, they also definitely never will now. What a problem.
You might not get the chance to do it as the main thing. But no matter what external circumstances dictate upon you, always return back. Find your way back to your purpose. The reason why you decided to start in the first place. What excited you as a child? What made you look forward to growing up so one day you would finally be able to start doing it? Well, becoming the intercontinental champion at wrestlemania in a ladder match was always the dream. But its words that have taken its place now.
Dreams change over time, but what matters then is to not lose your connection to that childlike spirit, something that made you always feel excited about the future. Carve out a small number of hours each day, each week, each month, every year. Build a daily routine into a lifetime habit, and in doing so, you might just achieve what this is. Find the activities that produce it and I assure you everything will slowly, incrementally, start to improve.
But nothing will if you don’t. And the more you can achieve this state, the higher up the life ladder you go. The higher up the physical and mental landscape you will be able to see. By committing to pushing yourself really fucking hard, expecting way more from yourself than normal. Be willing to do what lazy people don’t and won’t. You’ve just got to be interested in with own life. And it baffles me seeing just how many people aren’t.
The best way to improve your situation is to make it harder. It’s inside this difficulty of working within complexity that allows new ideas and creativity to emerge, which will lead to that once was impossible into now becoming your everyday reality.
Once you set the goal of entering the 10,000 hour process and begin the next 10-years of being fully engaged with never ending challenges, you kickstart this process of never ending growth. You will start to notice yourself taking on new, strange, sometimes weird, with many unusual shapes and ideas. But after you start this process, never let it cease. And flow will arrive.
Boredom is optional. Worrying is a choice. Anxiety doesn’t help solve anything. Relaxing too much will lead to boredom. And that will lead to apathy, which will lead you to depression. Flow therefore is not only the way to handle every situation of your life, but also the best way in order to ensure living your happiest life.
Neuroscience is my next big interest, to know everything about the human brain and mind, to learn and understand more about psychiatric conditions and neurodevelopmental delays, and how to break free from the constraints of your limitations in order to excel at life and living. And given the tenuous condition of sanity and how many people are now depressed and addicted to antidepressants, it seems more important now than ever then that we learn how to think better about enriching the quality of life through various ways and strategies that make our lives better and don’t rely on drugs or doctors to fix us. We can instead simply learn to understand how neurodivergent minds work, and therefore understanding how we help more people access this psychological condition and state of mind, known as flow. And in doing so, achieve how to live the good life.
Which my assumption now is: flow is the reversal. And the cure.
I’ve taken an interest in mental illness and particularly reading books written by medical professionals and doctors. There is this whole plethora of other knowledge in another field I’m interested in learning. I’ve been practicing a form of psychology for 10-years now, and in that time developed and refined my philosophy. Now my interest is in the field of psychiatry in order to learn how to fuse these subjects together.
“Is it my imagination or have I finally found something worth living for?” – OASIS.
WELCOME TO THE FLOW CHANNEL
