I used to hate the word "productive"
It always felt overly capitalistic. Maybe it was poisoned by the millennial blogs and self help tutorials that I shovel into my eyeballs every time I feel lost - but it never occurred to me that productivity was a path towards happiness. It always felt like an impediment.
Ironically enough, it was the name I chose for my blog. I complained about that fact every chance I got, making sure to distance myself from the dirty word most associate with money. Funny thing that happens when you disassociate from a word, you begin to drift towards its opposite. Especially when being unproductive is already a path of least resistance.
The last time I wrote in here was February of 2020. If I had to guess, it's the longest stretch I've gone since starting. Not a huge deal, since this is hardly a money printer, but it's still a good indicator of how I've been. I've been, for lack of a better word, lazy. And it hasn't been great.
Maybe distracted is a better word. Or procrastinating. Or on an endless loop of inspiration and apathy, picking up new ventures or projects and allowing them to crumble just as quickly as they started. With an outsiders eye, there's no doubt a justification to this . "You're in your 20's! You're supposed to try things! This is the time to figure yourself out!" Often enough I've been able to accept that, to forgive my long streaks of undisciplined creative work or, sadly, my day job. But after a certain point excuses don't feel good. I lack a steady stream of inspiration, a way to foster and regenerate my internal passion. All of this staying at home, consuming videos upon videos, one tv show after the next, more ice cream and veggie straws (a sneaky way to make potato chips) than I ever had before - It's just not a life. It feels more like an endless cope than a journey to discover myself.
My latest kick has been venturing into personal finance. Budgeting, investing, saving goals, early retirement plans. I feel a minor identity crisis from this sudden joy, since I've never been one to think about my future in such a fiscally minded way. There's a trickiness to what I'm about to write. One, because I don't even know how I feel about this. And two, I'm starting to realize a part of myself that might be different than what I tell myself. How do I explain this...
I've always been a very safe kid. When I was between the ages of 5 and 9, all of my friends were climbing trees and skateboarding, I was looking for quiet hobbies like video games or comedy albums that I would recite as accurately as possible. I liked pitching in baseball, I liked catching grapes in my mouth from long distances. I learned to juggle as a teen, something I try again every few months just to make sure I "still got it".
Certain skills I learned far too late. Riding my bike when I was nine. My nephews can do it now, and they're 2 and 3. I tied my own shoes starting at age 9 as well. I guess around that time my parents realized how weird of a child they had on their hands.
I was good at school, I asked a girl out in 4th(?) grade, I wrote my own jokes, I did standup for the first time at age 17, smoked weed at age 15 (sorry parents), graduated high school and went on to college, lost a lot of friends in 7th grade because they were smoking pot too early, had a girlfriend in 8th grade, quit sports to join theater, became a top smash bros player in town. I don't know when my childhood ended and my adult life began to take shape. I'm not sure where to look to guidance on my current life, to take a guess on my true identity, to start dedicating time and resources towards projects that I can actually stick to in the long run.
Sometimes I feel like I'm trying to build a cannon. Something that, when finished, I can use to launch myself into the life I dreamed of. The problem is that I keep changing my mind on the direction, so I keep making different calculations on the wind and direction and angle. Eventually I stop building the cannon altogether, and I just end up in the grass with a bunch of useless numbers and papers, before giving up and watching a minecraft tutorial on Youtube.
It's hard to stay focused on these things. It's hard to build discipline when I'm still figuring out my direction. It's impossible to predict headwinds when I'm not even in the air yet. And it's even harder when I have extroverted needs that have been completely suffocated by this pandemic.
So maybe I should stop hating the word "productive" I like being productive. Writing this felt productive, and it feels good. I should start hating the word "directionless." It's not that I don't have directions, I just haven't chosen one quite yet. I'm not lost, I'm looking for a place to launch.
