It has been over four months since I had written my last blog article and for that, I sincerely apologize to my readers, yes, all five of them. Although I would like you to believe that it was because I was busy, the only real reason explaining my discontinuity is that I was lazy. Yet, in these four months, I had traveled across countries, lost 7 kgs through diet and exercise, worked in three separate internships, played legitimate cricket matches, completed an online course on Vaishnavism, and, became the best football player I have ever been in my life so far. So, where was the part where I was lazy?
The laziness was only when it came to writing the blog, and of course, writing my exams, a few of which I ended up postponing. So why can't that just be called a 'creative block' instead of 'laziness'? That was because I actually did have many ideas to write about. I had still read around 3-4 books on which I could have written a few articles. When it came to my exams, I was able to study, but I wasn't able to write them. I came to understand that the human mind has a limit under which your mind will be able to process on "auto-pilot" and beyond the said limit, the person would have to actually stress their mind to achieve their task, whether it is finding solutions, creating content, or even writing exams. This limit varies from person to person. Let's call this limit, "the line of discomfort". So, in effect, this disease of laziness was purely my mind not being able to concentrate, think hard enough, and, stress beyond my limit of what I am comfortable with, in order to write a blog post. I would like to call this disease my 'mental sloth'.
This doesn't necessarily mean that I didn't lie on my couch eating chips, sleep for 10 hours a day, and scroll through my phone without any purpose, like everybody else during lockdown, because I did all of that to quite some acclaim. But the only reason why I am addressing my 'mental sloth' as the real issue is that while lying down on my bed scrolling through my phone if I had to run fast to the grocery shop, I would be able to get up and leave within seconds. In the same position, if I had to suddenly solve a difficult math problem or write a blogpost, there was no way my mind would have allowed me to break the line of discomfort and do it.
What's interesting is that I experience the sensitivity of the line of discomfort a number of times everyday and without even me noticing, my mind automatically pushes my conscious to the comfort zone which is well under the said limit. For example, there's a handle in Twitter called "@thekaipullai" who posts a lot of great and easily understandable long threads on economics, businesses, bureaucracy, and more. While it is my personal ambition to be at least one-tenth as smart and communicative as that person behind the handle, currently, I am not even able to comfortably read his threads because while reading, my line of discomfort is on the verge of getting violated and every time that limit is nearly being reached, I automatically close my phone and do something else. Yes, that is only when I actually close my phone.
My mind not only pushes me to that comfort zone but also gives me an assurance that I will be able to read that thread later or write that article later. This is what we like to address as procrastination. In the context of my blog, I always felt completing Ponniyin Selvan was one of my best achievements and the article on Ponniyin Selvan I had written is my best article in this blog to date. Hence, for the blog to be a successful one, I should either take all the time I need and write articles like the Ponniyin Selvan one, or I should constantly write something or the other irrespective of quality just to keep the blog active. While procrastinating, my mind always convinces me that I am choosing the first option i.e., quality over quantity, and thus, compromising on frequency.
And this comfort zone is only at its peak when I am engaging in my everyday addictions in the form of my phone and social media where I comfortably take in all the meaningless drivel churned out through these sources because they basically provide a metaphorical couch, TV, and chips packet for my mind to just lie down and not work. And the worst part is this state of mind need not have anything to do with how physically active I am.
This realization coupled with the urge to fill something in my blog made me read an okayish book called "Addiction, Procrastination, and Laziness: A Proactive Guide to the Psychology of Motivation" which I didn't finish but gave me enough spark to complete the one article I was struggling to write. Drawing a little inspiration from that book, I have touched upon all the three topics mentioned in the title of the book in this post. While concluding this article, I can say that at this moment, I have successfully broken that line of discomfort for the time being. This was because I made myself uncomfortable by telling myself that if I did not complete this piece before I sleep, this article will never see the light of day. It is possible that my next article will only months from now because I realize that breaking this line of discomfort is an everyday battle and an average person like me ends up losing to his mind more often than not. But, the only way you can even see a possibility of winning that battle is by depriving yourself of mental comfort whenever you need to break the line to get a job done.
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