2026-01-18: Fear or Love

I wake up Restless, Irritable, Discontent -- thinking about myself, lamenting about what I don't want to do, pacing back and forth in my Thought Prison. It fills me to the brim with dread and (surprisingly) does not actually change my reality!

I think that either I'm running away from my life or settling into my life. Dramatic, I know. Maybe one day I'll find a way to do both at the same time. When I am running away from my life, I'm in delusion and fear. I am not grounded in What Is, I'm drowning in What I Want (or Don't Want) to Be.

When I am settle into What Is, I can make decisions and take actions from a place of love and faith in what the day has in store for me. I can suspend my disbelief, that it'll be a painful day, and turn my attitude towards what could go right instead of what will go wrong. It takes just as much energy (if not less) to wish for the best instead of preparing for the worst.

2026-01-17: "Protect me from what I want"

I'm reading this book called "The expulsion of the other" by Byung-Chul Han -- TLDR; the digital warps all aspects of life (which are mostly digital) into "known" experiences and we no longer have a tolerance for the "unknown" (called the Other).

I just finished a chapter called "Alienation", comparing Marx's theory of alienation to modern neoliberal equivalent: self-alienation. The author compares Marxist theory of capitalism, where workers are exploited by those who control the means of production, to neoliberalism in the digital age, where we voluntarily exploit ourselves under the guise of freedom and self-actualization: "I plunge into work euphorically until I finally collapse. I realize myself to death. I optimize myself to death," which he follows with the quote:

"Protect me from what I want"

So much of my time doesn't feel like my own. I wake up dreadfully thinking about what I don't want to do, and as a result I feel like my Act of Agency is to "steal back" my free time to prove to myself that it's my life and I chose this. And surprisingly, when I treat my life like a prison, I feel trapped inside of it. But I don't want to exist in a compulsion to escape from myself in a futile effort to rebel against... myself.

What I "want", aka the ways I want to escape from my life, are irrepairably misaligned with what I actually want to experience in my life. So to "protect me from what I want," I am trying to practice the art of doing what I need to do before what I WANT to do. And I'm learning that I can only figure out what I actually want when I'm with friends, in community, and surrounded by love. "I can't, but we can." :)