On Activity

My computer died today.

It still works, technically, but it won't recharge. If I'm lucky I might be able to borrow somebody else's battery, use it to back up all of my important files. Otherwise it's dead. Looks like it's time to get a new computer.

I'm going to hold off as long as possible. This is going to be the first time in two years I'm not constantly wired to the internet. I'll only get small doses whenever I can get to a library or steal somebody's laptop. I think this will be good for me. Let me explain why.

We can roughly divide people's actions into high intensity and low intensity. High intensity is commonly seen as "productive". This is self improvement, working a job, doing homework. Low intensity is generally "relaxing". Meditation, watching television, playing video games, going for a walk. This is not to say that these boundaries are well-defined. Sports are high intensity relaxation, knitting is low intensity productive/relaxation, cooking can be high intensity or low depending on what you're doing, etc. Maximizing the value of your time is to walk the fine line between high intensity and low intensity activities. Too much of the former and you crash, too much of the latter and you don't burn.

But there's another side of this, a third thing you can do besides production and relaxation. That's stagnation. Time you don't spend burning or healing yourself. Time you spend eroding, slowly falling apart through complacency and lethargy. It's the dark side of relaxation. We relax to eventually work again. We stagnate to continue stagnating.

The problem is how thin the line is. A lot of things we do to relax can be easily turned into stagnation. Think about the difference between playing two games of Starcraft and playing twenty.* I definitely have a problem with this. I'm really afraid of relaxing, not because I'm some sort of working machine but because I know how easily it will turn into wasting. So I spend more time in high intensity, which leads to me crashing more often. Then I need to relax a crapton, which quickly turns into stagnation, which makes the next productive zone a little less productive... so yeah. My time schedule is completely out of whack. I need to cut my high time, boost my low time, and do away with my stagnation periods.

Where does the computer fit into all of this? Being jacked to the net makes stagnation incredibly easy. I'm sure you all know what I'm talking about. Worse, it's often high intensity. I've somehow managed to make surfing the web physically draining. Might explain why I'm so underweight. It also means that when I finally drag myself away from the internet I'm in a worse place than when I started. Surfing the web is one thing, snorting it is another. I do the latter.

That's why I think losing it will be good for me. I'm going through a detox here. Being semi-cut off from the internet should help me learn to use my time more wisely. Of course, I can't go cold turkey. There's still work and academics to worry about. But I think this will be enough.

You might call this sour grapes. I mean, I'm trying to justify why losing my computer is a good thing. I see this as optimism. If things go right I'll walk out of this a better person than I came in. I'm taking a bad situation and trying to spin it to my advantage. Isn't that what luck is? Every setback is an opportunity. Here's hoping this one pays off.