#anything that explicitly signals you're an adult works for me

[therhythmafterthesummer]

man... the fact that i have to say this every other day is getting old.

if you start following me and you have a legitimate looking blog, but you don't have any indication of being an adult in your bio/pinned i'll soft block you. if you keep following me after that without adding that age indicator i'll end up just straight up blocking you. which really sucks for both of us.

[cfs-yogi]

I've been doing a qi gong routine, mostly in my head with bits of physical movements as I am able, not every day but reasonably often.

Anyways. Today's was nice in that I got a view of fluffy clouds. I also found it hard to stay focused because I had multiple insights as I went.

The second was about boredom, that boredom indicates a need, like thirst or the feeling of needing to use the bathroom, and the need that boredom signals is a need for challenge, to do something that is hard for you or that you could improve at. (I am bouncing off that post about the difference between distracting yourself from boredom, where the boredom comes back full force ones the distraction is removed, and sating the boredom, where the boredom stays away for a bit when you're done.) And I got this really intense flash of anger, because no one told me, I am learning so many things as an adult -- I'm over 40 ffs -- that no one ever told me and it feels like someone should have told me. Boredom means you need enrichment, something equivalent to a toy to chase for cats or frozen pumpkins or a tire swing for zoo animals. It's not something to be driven away with a wide enough range of distractions, it's not a sign it's time to fall as deeply into a video game as possible, it means you are missing a specific kind of "interesting" or "hard" that you need. It is a psychological hunger.

(Another thing I wish I had been told is any useful advice at all about how to get yourself to do things that you don't want to do. Basically all I got as a kid was "well you have to do it whether you like it or not," an attitude that has not served me particularly well in life. Compared to things like "if it's scary, you can get better at facing scary things by facing it" or "sometimes unpleasant things feel better if you think about how it benefits you or makes you a better person to do the thing". Granted I did pick up on "sometimes you can pair a thing you like with the thing you don't like", aka the spoon full of sugar approach.)

The earlier one had to do with happiness. I'd been fairly spiritually inclined as a teen and young adult (well, I still am) and definitely picked up on the idea that happiness doesn't come from having stuff or looking attractive or being popular. But none of that was really a challenge for me anyways, and what I don't think I got explicitly told is that happiness does not come from what you do either. There aren't intrinsically fun things you can do and intrinsically unpleasant things. Anything can feel good with the right mental framing, or at least can make you feel good about yourself for having done it anyways.

I don't know, maybe that seems obvious. But it's breaking my brain right now. I got too much work put on me in high school, and I got overly attached to having time free to do literally anything I felt like in the moment as a result, even though I've known for a long time that having long stretches of just doing whatever I feel like moment to moment does not reliably make me feel good and actually tends to make me feel worse than having work or school, unless it's for a limited period of time during a vacation or holiday.

Which makes sense if there's something about intentional effort that's sort of like, I don't know, protein? An emotional macronutrient, something you need a lot of, that should exist in balance with the macronutrient you get from leisure time. (Which probably has fuckall to do with paid work or doing what you're "supposed to" be doing. And does not necessarily have to be high spoons, like I said I got this insight doing mental qi gong, I wasn't moving and wasn't even concentrating especially hard.)