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I’m living every day like it’s my last, and I do NOT recommend it (self.casualconversation)

submitted 1 week ago by sprigatito_bread to c/[email protected]

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To my brain, nothing is worth pursuing or trying. “How can you guarantee that you’ll be alive to finish anything you start?” My brain asks. And it’s right. I can never make that guarantee.

It directs me to spoil myself with instant gratification because it knows I will still be alive to experience it. There’s no risk of working towards nothing. Don’t make goals. Don’t take risks. Embrace mediocrity. Do the bare minimum needed to survive. That way, you will never be disappointed.

I’m so tired of thinking like this. It started when I got a serious chronic illness that couldn’t be diagnosed. I always manage to survive for longer than I predict, and then I look back and notice that I have done nothing for the last 3 years.

I hope that I don’t continue to make the same mistake in response to Current Events™. I’m sure that falling for it again would be helpful to the exact people I really don’t want to be helping.

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[–] sprigatito_bread 5 points 1 week ago

Thanks! Though it’s worth noting that I tend to exaggerate. During that 3-year period, I actually did do some long-term projects and kept my attention on them; I just wasn’t satisfied with the overall impact of them on my life because I was playing things way too safe.

This post is basically me taking a common self-defeating pattern I exhibit and calling it out as silly, perhaps to better help me recognize and challenge it within myself. It is one of the final things holding me back from ditching the dopamine machine and returning to the real world.

I was doing good for the past couple of days, but recently, I had a relapse. My brain’s excuse was: “If you go cold turkey, you might never get to experience these feelings ever again, since you could die before forming the relationship required to feel them legitimately.”

It sounded compelling on its face, but then I realized that all of the time I spend indulging myself in various ways eliminates time that I could be spending on pursuing real connections. Using technology to partially fill the void was consuming all of the time that I could have spent actually filling said void. That’s what inspired me to make this post—recognizing just how counterproductive that mentality really was.