Finding Beauty in Every Second

Over the past few years, I had been obsessed with the desire to be productive. From finishing my work on time, to getting in a workout every second day, to reading books and articles every evening, spending X time with friends and allocating Y minutes to eating, I felt happy when my life felt like a spreadsheet. It took me several years to realize I had put myself in a cage.

I started trying to create a mental model for myself just as I began my middle-school years. I was going through adolescence and those were the years in which I really began to concretize my sense of self. Who am I? Who do I want to be? How do others perceive me? These questions initially led me to build a mindset that tried to answer them in the best way possible. I’m the eldest of four brothers, and consequently received some pressure (while unintended) to always be the best I could. So I set myself to be the example to follow.

Yet as I grew older I slowly became a victim of my own mind. Whatever I would do had some conscious or subconscious end to it so that it would fit in my model, so that it would count towards a mental organizational system that made me feel like I was productive and accomplished. I would allocate my thoughts in mental buckets that I then used as life lessons that I believed made me stronger and improved who I was. I had many times in which I didn’t satisfy my daily…