Since my goal is to eliminate ugly things:
- No Youtube. Youtube, overall, is a great tool and I love it. But every time I want to take care of the cleanliness of my mindscape, I include Youtube in the list of “to eliminate” things, mainly because I cannot block the comments section in a reliable way.
- No Discord. I only use Discord for work. Presently, something work-related that I hate occurs through Discord. I will not use Discord anymore though. LOL. I am a freelancer. If you want my attention, you gotta pay me, even for one second. And presently, they’re not paying me for checking Discord, specifically. I am not tolerating stupidity anymore. I don’t care if that company burns down. It will give me great joy. (Now, if I hate them so much, why do I keep working with them? Because the actual work itself is really mindless and I love that. This mindlessness is also why my not checking Discord doesn’t affect the actual work. I’m not advocating “Let’s all quit jobs we hate and set fire on the houses of idiots.” I’m saying, I will not do anything that does not give me some form of return, be it monetary, emotional, intellectual, whatever. And if there is a negative return? I will eliminate them.)
- No over-meditating. I use the term “meditation” for convenience’s sake. The term has been abused as much as the words spirituality, religion, and science. When I say “meditation,” it means that I take some time to disconnect from the sensory world to return to everything that is through awareness. Overdoing this can be a crutch. It’s like running away to a vacation destination because one cannot handle one’s life. Twice a day seems ideal: once in the morning, once in the evening.
This alone will probably free up an hour or so of my time every day, at the purely external, measurable level. Plus, it will result in unmeasurable gains: higher happiness level, improved health, better sleep, better appetite, so on and so forth.
Because I live in 21-day chunks, for now the goal is to do this for 21 days. Usually, the benefits stay long after the 21 days; it’s just that “I gotta stick to this routine for the rest of my life without fail” is less effective than “I’m just gonna do this for 21 days.” Decreasing pressure removes the focus from the obsession of “getting it right” to the actual improvement in life.