As you saw, I’ve skipped posting for about a week or so.
I decided to face it and come clean with all that’s been going on in my mind.
Disclaimer: This post won’t teach you anything technical, it’s more of a trial through failure and how to grow from botched experiences, though that’s up to the person who failed.
I was escaping the reality.
As I told you, my goal for the near future was to improve my studies (Anki and more serious study) and improve my mental conditioning (Meditation and banishing).
I made some calculations on the time needed to finish the studies I need, and it was a lot.
I needed to create 200~ anki cards a day, and learn the same number, every day, for a year. Then, slowly taper off to 100~ a day for the second year.
It wasn’t bad in theory, however, reality hit me.
First day, I learned 216 cards and created 196, so far so good. And, it only took me about 6 pomodoro blocks to do that.
Not a crazy amount of time, even for someone who has other things in their life.
Let alone a person who decided to sacrifice social life to have more energy (I know it sounds so cruel and so wrong to talk so diminutively about myself, and this another issue with my mentality and self-talk.)
Anyway, the rest of the day I was kinda happy. I met my daily goal and that was exhilarating.
However, it was quite tiring. I couldn’t focus much, after those six pomodoro blocks were over, and had to take a nap as soon as I went back home from the library.
Mind you, I’d slept for more than right hours the day before, and that’s usually enough sleep time for when I’m doing my daily loser routing of doom scrolling, masturbating and what not.
In short, my brain was through into the battlefield, a place that’s completely unfamiliar. It felt tired of the new expectations.
The problem happened the days after, when the anki reviews started happening.
At first it was a 100, then 200, until it reached 300 reviews a day.
Thing is, I’m quite fast when doing reviews (I use un add-on that uses urgency to help you focus). I reached a PB speed of 4.5 seconds per Anki cards when they’re all review cards, and 6 seconds per cards when half were reviews and half were new.
So, to review 300 cards, it took me just a little less than 25 minutes.
Up until now, it was all fine and dandy, however, the review blocks drained me.
A LOT.
Whenever I finished the reviews, I’d feel like an impossible fog was taking over my mind. I could push through it, but my learning efficiency drops a ton.
It becomes apparent when I try to tackle other content of similar difficulty when I’m not as tired, which I can deal with in half the time I do when the brain fog is there.
Still, I pushed through, believing in myself, and I gave myself longer breaks every 4 pomodoro blocks.
However, this is where another problem happened. During the 5 minute breaks, I could let my brain rest without it straying away from the current quest.
During the larger breaks of 15 minutes, I felt my brain disconnect.
As if it no longer had to keep playing the role of learning. So, going back to the task drained me a lot.
Still, I persevered, thinking ‘this is where the extra energy I saved from sacrificing other energy draining parts of my life comes into play!’
I could do it for about 3 weeks, but without a doubt, my performance dropped a little every day.
I even reached a point where doing the reviews and writing 50 Anki cards was more than expected.
So, where does this leave us?
A plan that’s too ambitious, yet out of touch with reality and personal capacities.
The inability to tell when I desperately need to rest for the day, before it becomes an extensive problem that affects my long term performance.
My tendency to escape ordeals, reinforced by easy access to internet, games, and social media.
All in all, just like any type of utter failure in life, it’s not because of one single aspect.
Now that we’re done with the bad side, here’s the good!
This ended up being my best academic performance in a test in three years. Equivalent to about C+
Some of you might laugh about this.
I used to be a straight A student without even studying or doing homework, a gifted genius if you will.
And now, I’m just a depressed burnt out person who knows too much for his own good without the little touch if recklessness and stupidity needed to make use of any of the knowledge he hoards.
I can see how my thinking hurts my situation even more, and that’s at least a good sign.
Maybe I’ll improve, but only if I stop being a perfectionist who lacks the ability to support those stupid ideal performances.
I need to come to terms with the fact that even though I’m more intelligent than average, I have many shortcomings (that can be worked on), and that my capacity is held down by my lack of solid studying systems.
Is it the fault of my teachers for not giving me challenging subjects to engage my brain when it was looking for stimulating knowledge? No.
It’s all on me. If there’s anything that I can do, is that I can walk back up, analyse what went wrong, and fix a little bit until it’s big enough to make a change.
This last failure was too much, by the way, that I even though of ending things (yes, really. For the last couple of years, I’d been dealing with victim mentality and escaping the reality of my mediocrity) and also of becoming a full time shut in.
However, after playing games and novels for a while, I noticed something.
The usual popular games weren’t fun at all.
Whenever I tried to look up some new games to obsess over in attempts to escape the reality that I uncovered, I found a pattern.
I looked for Open-world RPGs that had customisability, freedom, and a meaningful outcome for the protagonist, who just so happens to be an underdog.
I really liked such a narrative, and after deliberating for a while, I found that this whole time, I’d been looking for me.
The real life me.
I wanted a game with a MC who was just like me (a loser if you will, but I’d rather not talk about myself with such derogatory terms unless necessary. They tend to stick), with an obvious purpose and a clear path to progression.
I wanted to believe that I could succeed, even though my (limited) real life attempts at progression were fruitless by my impossible standards.
Video games scratched that itch. Something like Palworld where you start with noting and become a machine gun wielding warlord was appealing.
It gave me the possibility of effortless progress, which was good in a way, a light at the end of the tunnel, but it being effortless broke the immersion and reinforced my perfectionism, that I can really win without any hard work or changing my mental programming.
So, I always cranked up the difficulty, and would enjoy it when the character dies while trying his hardest.
To me, that was the symbol of a true hero. Exactly what I wanted to be, someone who could stand back up no matter how life hits him, and puts out the performance of his dreams as if he’s never been slapped in the face before.
Sometimes, the hero isn’t the person who saves the day.
The hero is the person that when the odds are stacked against him, he still smiles and does the best job he can with his possible tools.
Yet, I didn’t want to be a hero. I wanted to be free.
So, to define a free person, it’s the person who can’t see failure. Only fun!
I wish I could go back in time, and help my younger self out. Tell him that he doesn’t need to be an inhumane school prodigy just to appease his parents, that he can talk to girls just like anyone else, that he doesn’t need some stupid moral highgrounds and perfect outward persona at 10 years old just because this helped his parents brag, but in reality stunted his growth.
I believe the acquired part of my personality mainly happened because of the lack of unconditional love in my formative years. And my inherent personality traits are the culmination of my ancestors history of doing their best to survive unfavorable odds.
This post was just a rant, so here’s a nugget of wisdom if you reached this part.
You are the universe.