Things I've been confused about recently


  • How busy should I be? When I first moved to Pittsburgh and started working, I didn't really know what to do with my weekday nights, but I knew that I wanted to make the most of my free time. Now, I have recurring events 3 out of 5 nights during the week (improv class, therapy, and Chinese tutoring), and I usually have some other type of appointment or performance a day out of most weeks. As I've started trying to establish a workout routine and meet up with more people outside of work, I wonder what the right balance between scheduling things, leaving room for spontaneity, alone time, and personal work time (doing chores, personal errands, etc.) is.

  • Senses of self that are Not Helpful:

    • A fungible being/a worker

    • A person completing a list of tasks every day

    • Input/output machine where the output is how something makes me feel

    • Positivity generator

  • Looking to the past as a reminder of what kinds of ways of being are possible, while not being constrained by/stuck in it

  • What do you do/what can you do when you realize that you're not living mindfully?

  • Consumerist/materialist/convenience-oriented desires vs. minimalism/sustainability. How can I use money to counteract the negative effects that working has had on me? Is it even right to ask that question?

  • Performativity

Comments

  1. A helpful reframing of consumerism | Julia's BlogNovember 29, 2019 at 6:17 AM

    […] I mentioned in my previous blog post, I’ve been grappling a bit with consumerism and my place in the capitalist economy. One […]

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On binge eating and yin-yang energies

tw: mentions of disordered eating I’ve struggled with binge eating behaviors for a long time, knowingly since I was in college, but likely for almost all of my life, unknowingly. I remember when I was a kid, my mom bought me a bag of sour gummy worms, and when we got home, she put it in a cabinet where I theoretically wouldn’t be able to access it. But one day when I was alone, I climbed on a chair to open the cabinet and ended up demolishing that bag after doing that multiple times throughout the day. That was way too many sour gummy worms for my stomach and body to handle, even as a kid! More recently, I’ve been aware of how I use binge eating to self soothe—as a type of unhealthy coping mechanism that in the process of doing it, causes other short- and long-term discomforts to arise. Notably, I feel like it will be very difficult for me to deepen my self-love and self-trust if I maintain this self-sabotaging pattern. During the February silent meditation retreat here at MAPLE, I had
Read more

The importance of small things

Image
I was reminded of how much of an impact small things can have on your life after I started using a new water bottle last week and saw my water consumption drastically increase. This lesson was one of the first things that I internalized when I started studying design (and it probably goes without saying that it’s generalizable haha)— habits , physical objects, aspects of the environment, etc. can all have seemingly disproportionate effects, and not just in an emergent/gestalt sense. For instance, there was a housing project in St. Louis known as Pruitt-Igoe that turned into a crime hotspot and was demolished around 20 years after completion, despite a ton of public enthusiasm and optimism for the plan. There were a bunch of factors that contributed to its decline, but one of the dominant ones was a design decision that had an unexpectedly large negative effect: to reduce elevator congestion, the elevators only stopped at certain floors, forcing residents to use the stairs in between c
Read more