I feel like I need a change of everything (do you get it?)
I do. I am in one of those moments myself, have been for the better part of the year. Nearly everything about me is in a process of revision.
'working on oneself' is such a western thing to do.
that's a good insight. The capitalist idea of "self improvement" is one that I fell trap to and then shed not too long ago. Right now, as I'm starting to develop an interest in indian (sorry, bharati) philosophy, a different kind of work suggests itself, one that, for starters, does away with the idea of a 'Self'.
but I also feel like i'm trying to cultivate boredom to some extent.
'cultivating boredom' is such an underrated concept these days. Today, we try to fight boredom with all our might. Ironically, some of our attempts to shut it out, such as scrolling through tiktok, end up being a sort of self-reinforcing form of boredom: At some point it becomes boring af, but your brain just can't seem to let it go!
Cultivating actual boredom, on the other hand, is a very nice thing to do, for it (in my experience, at least,) prompts you to do *something*. The key is not to escape that boredom through easy routes, like the aforementioned tiktok.
Case in point: I have stopped browsing most sites I used to visit, partly because they were doing me no good. Now I have a handful of sites I still visit (in principle, just two of them, one being the midnight pub, in practice, a couple more), which are quite 'slow', which has meant that I now open a web browser and it's quite boring. It always was, only I could go to a number of sites and distract myself from that boredom by looking for something worthwhile --there was hardly anything. Now I just shut it off after a while, do something else.
Sometimes, there's really nothing to fix, only anxiety in comparison to the world around you.
I try to harness that anxiety, or at least to alleviate it by trying to address the object of that anxiety. I don't ignore it enough. I've been trying to relax a bit and do something less 'productive' such as reading fiction or playing videogames. In the end, whatever I tried to do to be 'productive' ended up being counterproductive, most of the time!
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I hope you find your point of balance, meawhile...
~bartender, some hot chocolate, please. Dark, if you don't mind.
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