Off to a football game and to the stat of a football weekend. I’m spending a bit of time thinking about this process of a week that I tend to go through and it makes me feel like there is so much of my time that is utterly wasted. Like completely wasted on meaninglessness. On games that I’ve already played and beaten but continue for the sake of spending time and getting some brief dopamine hit from winning again somehow. It feels like the dopamine hit I get from listening to a dang ASMR video or completing a story is the same. Story leaves me with a lasting bit of myself. The ASMR is low hanging fruit. Both are guaranteed fixes. The game definitely isn’t. I might lose… I have been losing and I feel no sense of accomplishment when it happens. Instead I dig in and play more and more and more and continue not to win in search of that simple high. The high doesn’t get better. It just takes longer. At this point I could have written a whole damn story. This is how I am trying to recode my brain.
I need to teach myself to balance easy dopamine with the harder to reach dopamine that comes from doing good work. I need to be smart about the easy hits and be smart about devoting more time to the ones that actually make my life better. It is a tricky bit of recoding that needs doing in my life, because I am wasting time and wasting years feeling burned out and non-productive. Every good writer I came up with is doing better than I am, which is a sign that I wasn’t ready to be on their level. This is why I am not. I can get on their level. I can get to the place where I feel good about the work I am doing and I am writing at a pace and level that makes me feel less like an imposter and more like someone who has the right to tell students what could work for them.
Some Thoughts:
- Meeting the kid’s college coach tonight. I guess he’s stopping through on the way to UTEP? Seems oddly late for someone who has a game in El Paso tomorrow night. I think I’ll tune in for that one and see what this son of mine is getting into.
- I also plan on watching Drake. I want to see them do well. I really did like those kids.
- Of course, UNI is the core watch for tomorrow.