Confessen

Being in 20s certainly hasn’t been smooth if you’re trying to be discipline, especially in the era of doomscrolling and brainrot.

I never knew the real value of discipline until I left high school. There’s no “real” schedule anymore. Waking up at 6 a.m. was like a walk to the park, but slowly I started losing such ability. All it took was just one long holiday, and long hours of gaming. And thus, the routine was no where to be seen again.

I thought I would recover it by the time I’d enter university but no, it’s even worse. Class time in union weren’t designed to be in a “perfect” combination. Thus, I couldn’t switch back to my old morning routine during school for weekdays because each day would be unique. Getting out of bed would be different for each day, but I could still make it for class without fail. At one hand, I learned to adapt to the chaotic system, but at the same time, a small guilt started to grow inside my heart.

“Is this change good for me in the long run?”

Such thought would later haunt me for a long time.

Few months into Uni life, Covid hit everyone on the Earth without warning. Suddenly everybody stayed at home almost all the time. It happened again. Everyone had to “learn” at a virtual meeting space. But at the same time, most of us have the freedom to not focus on class and just do whatever we want. I was one of them. The attention that was supposed to be used for learning those valuable materials from the experts were spent on Genshin Impact, which conveniently launched out of nowhere and took the world by storm. The timing couldn’t be more perfect. I could still “attend” class but my heart was somewhere else.

Fast forward til graduation, I had to wait for a job. This job was promising, so I didn’t even bother to do a small contract before it. With no real tangible thing that bind me to any routine, my life was completely directionless. That time was spent fully on doomscrolling and gaming til my eyes grew tired of the blue light. Both time management and self-control for dopamine wasn’t in my book. This trend would continue for more than 1 year.

And then, the job arc began. Things started to change again. There’s a fixed schedule that I “need” to follow. I have to be present with other people in this World again to survive. For the several months, this trend would persist very strongly but my heart started to shake due to what I’ve witnessed in the real world. I thought fixed scheduled was supposed to be “fixed” and “absolute”. I thought having to work in the office meant that I have to be present at all cost. But no, there were exceptions, those were actually the common cases. I knew there were penalties for not following such things strictly, for example, a bad evaluation, but then again I learned that everything in this World is actually subjective and people can weave narratives that could make them escape such unwanted outcomes.

After witnessing such phenomenon and getting through mundane activities almost everyday for 1 year plus, the fire in my heart started to die again, and I experienced burnt out. I couldn’t get up like I used to before again, even though I had no bad sleep or anything. The discipline streak couldn’t last for so long, and I started to wonder, is discipline a human-made concept that we invented to survive, an inherent trait?

I still don’t have an answer to that question til this page is written.

Through the lens of my eyes, I observed quite a lot of people. There are people driven by ambition, but lack discipline. The opposite also exists, people with no ambition but maintain a discipline. Very rarely I see people who have both ambition and discipline, but sadly I see many with none. But perhaps my view toward such phenomenon is actually not relevant in any sense at all. It could be a byproduct of seeing tons of influential capitalistic movies, filled with ambition and glory.

Do we need discipline in the first place? Or maybe my definition of discipline is skewed. I would always associate discipline with productive activities which can increase your value as a person. Such value could be salary, social status, or other merit values. But maybe it can also be associated which something that’s non-productive.

With such idea, maybe I don’t need to be have such guilty feeling after all.