When you become a grandpa, you start noticing one strange thing.
In childhood everything seemed interesting. Now whatever you do, you want to turn on YouTube in the background or stare at TikTok. What irony, oh these stupid parents with TV.
2 questions arise:
- why is everything interesting in childhood and what is this "interesting"?
- why do parents in the past and I now rarely fully immerse ourselves in the matter, and instead dumb out with videos in the background?
Interesting
When you do something in childhood, almost everything is interesting. If you do the same thing now, it's not so interesting. Same with people, in childhood the very fact of new people is interesting, now quality.
If both we and the actions are the same, what's the difference?
In the brain's reaction to these things and subsequent hormonal response.
Unfortunately, guessing what specifically will be interesting for you specifically right now is almost impossible. But from time to time in life something appears that's interesting to do.
Nothing remains except trial and error. By my observations, for 100 uninteresting things there's 1 interesting one. Well then.
Kill Time
When in childhood I googled some games on Symbian system, about one of them (like a good one) they wrote "excellent time killer". I even then thought, well yes, cool theme - someone thought how to kill time, useful.
Today I think differently. This isn't killing time, this is stealing time. Not help.
On today's YouTubes, TikToks, TVs there's a whole bunch of people trying to be useful and help you by giving you a chance to "relax" and just "kill time". Their usefulness and value is calculated with one axiom - you should have unnecessary time.
If you suddenly think you don't have such time, probably these people are getting rich dishonestly. I'll translate into simpler language: you kill time not because you want to, but because other people made a choice in favor of converting time stolen from you into their wealth. No more, no less.
So you decided to refuse time killers at least in theory. Practice will hit immediately: turns out you have free time.
You try to fill it with something useful. And here flies the second blow: useful isn't always interesting.
And since God loves the trinity, here's a bit more sadness: uninteresting pastime is more painful than simply giving your time to someone for pennies. This is a fact. More painful not like lifting 20kg instead of the usual 15, but like being born in Russia in the 90s.
What to do?
Look for Meditations
Sounds stupid, but what can you do. You yourself chose your guru for these five minutes.
Let's return to interesting. Remember that once in a hundred years something doesn't seem painfully difficult? Need to learn to cling to it.
I came to this in a strange way. One of the first steps was the meme about "shower thoughts". Turns out many people's best thoughts come in the shower.
Why? Most likely because in the shower there's physically nothing else to do. The brain is concentrated on an automated action and at this time can engage in real thinking.
The thought about whether a good person invented adding radio or a tablet to the shower cabin, because PROGRESS, I'll leave for you. You can jerk off to the inventor, you can to me, to each their own here.
In other words, in order to invent, understand, master something new, you need two steps:
- focused study of something by your "I", personality, consciousness
- unfocused attachment of these new thoughts to already formed concepts of specifically your head (your unconscious does this, while you're doing something your "I" doesn't need to spend energy on)
I call such things meditations. The ideal meditation is thinking about specifically nothing. Whoever tried knows how difficult it is to think exclusively about nothing and nothing more (thank God Russian allows this to be said)
And there turned out to be not so many such meditations in my personal life. For me it's washing dishes, vacuuming, singing, writing articles, video editing, cleaning files on the computer, learning new languages. Maybe something else, but I didn't manage to think about it.
In other words, the reader might think that writing specifically this article is an attempt to teach someone something.
It's not: the half hour I spent writing it, I didn't spend on something else. I didn't listen to someone else's opinion, didn't get distracted by dances of painted wanna-be-feminist girls and even attempts to fall asleep in our difficult times.
All this time my fingers unconsciously jumped on the keyboard (I'm not even aware of what they wrote there), and simultaneously my unconscious was realizing (thanks to Russian again) some new concept that my "I" isn't even aware of. Yet. Come back to the blog in six months, you'll find out what it was about.
Collect meditations, there aren't so many of them. Don't buy a dishwasher. This is the worst thing I can do specifically for myself. Yes, I'll free myself from the yoke of men, but will lose what there's already little of in specifically my life - opportunities to do something on autopilot so in old age I don't become buddies with Alzheimer's.