Low-stakes bookend: Wednesday evening: barre or professional skills?

[oak]

Hi friends.

A bookend, as I learned back in the day at Debtors Anonymous, is communicating with one's friends before and after a difficult action required in our recovery.

Bookend 1 of 2: Wednesday early afternoon

I have anxiety, a solid 5 on a scale of 1-10 about what to do this evening:

Option 1: Go to barre class.

This would be great. In addition to the hour class, it is a half hour each way. In practice, this would occupy me from 5 to 8 pm.

Option 2: Build my professional skills, using a specific tutorial, and clean my apartment.

Like option 1, this would consume about three hours, and is probably more urgent.

Option 3: Listlessly scroll Reddit

This is how I often spend my evenings, and my life is falling apart, or at least unsustainable.

Advice welcome

Any advice/encouragement in the next four hours, before I decide at 5 pm Eastern, is welcome!

Whatever the decision, I'll update at 8 pm

[troebia]

I think it depends of the state of your living space. Cleaning up and doing minor home repairs gives me a sense of usefulness and alleviates my anxiety, don't know if you feel the same.

At least try to stay off Reddit. What is so addictive about it? Imo it can be reduced to a handful of memes or tropes that repeat in countless variations, it's like empty fluff: cute dogs/cats, wokeism/racism, funny insults and NSFW stuff. Do you ever get something useful or thought-provoking out of it?

[oak]

Friends!

It was stormy all afternoon and evening, so barre was out.

I stayed in and accomplished most of my goals: professional skills, some cleaning. I also reviewed my "why": why should I get out of bed tomorrow? Why not just give up, and give into sloth/disability/nihilism. I reviewed my reasons to live.

At least try to stay off Reddit. What is so addictive about it?

My reason, or excuse, is that it is engineered to be addictive. Doomscrolling is powerful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling

Do you ever get something useful or thought-provoking out of it?

Yes, I did, especially during the pandemic: I could observe how other people thought, and the best (or most popular) ideas migrated to the top.

But no, it wasn't worth the vast amount of hours I spent on it.

Pulling the threads together

If I want to live this meaningful life, the one I detailed above, I can’t spend four hours a day, as I have for five years (!), on Reddit.

If I had spent half that time on anything, I’d be in a much better situation now: my life would be transformed.

So, going forward I can either sit and cry and wallow about mistakes I’ve made from 2018 to 2023, or I can acknowledge I did what I did, and move on.

Friends, all this stuff is so hard: building professional skills, cleaning, and facing one’s faults.

[troebia]

My 2¢:

One small thing I do when I get up is to make my bed, and I've done it before Jordan Peterson made it into a thing. He's a clown but may be right about a few things.

I like to stick my head outside just after getting up, to taste the weather and the air. It's like feeling something bigger than us, that will be there and go on with supreme indifference.

I also have a small list of manageable non-urgent chores and often start the day with something mechanical that doesn't require too much brain power or decision making. All introspection and soul searching comes later...