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A Break is a New Start

  • Writer: Aidan J
    Aidan J
  • Feb 6, 2019
  • 3 min read

Thanks Arrested Development. I can't wait to embark on my new beginning! (If you don't get it, break it into syllables.)

I do nothing way too often. What I do at any given moment in time is purely a waste. Everyday, I am on my phone for at least two hours, and 80% of the time I am swiping between different apps. I would much rather watch a movie, play a game, learn a new song, or meet up with friends, but I’m stuck doing nothing.


I am more productive attending school than I am relaxing breaks, where “productive” means doing things that makes me happy. I still might watch television for an hour a day, while talking with friends outside of school for another two hours, but the bulk of my day is full of nothing. Right now, I feel like I’m just repeating myself, stuck in an endless repetition of nothing.


I just graduated from high school. I am not attending for the rest of the school year, but technically I will go back to graduate at a ceremony at the end of May. This means that I will not have anything required of me between February 1 and September 1, roughly. That’s eight months of freedom. I don’t know if I like that, though.


</start tangent>


Freedom is not an absolute that is always good. Sure, I would rather be able to choose when I will go to bed, or what I will eat, but granting freedoms for people to choose the wrong thing to do is evil in my view. It’s like a post made by Glenn Howerton, also known as Dennis Reynolds from Always Sunny in Philadelphia, that gained traction on twitter recently. On June 16, 2015, Howerton tweeted for support against a law that would mandate all persons who attend school in California to get vaccinated. The issue for him was not that people should not vaccinate their kids—thankfully—but, instead, an appeal to a freedom of choice. In current year 2019, his most recent post on his Instagram is captioned, “This flu is trying to kill me,” doing a lot of damage to the healthy adult male’s body. Suggesting, perhaps, that the flu would kill a weaker human being, like maybe a child that attends primary school unvaccinated.



Of course, mandatory vaccinations for children and flu vaccines are quite different, so these comparisons are not equal. But this insignificant moment on social media can show us that we make erroneous value judgements all the time, and so maybe you could understand that this freedom is not much of a blessing.


</end tangent>


How do I stop myself from doing nothing? Well, I have found plenty of suggestions on the internet. I’ve been told to start doing whatever needs to be done, and then it flows quite easily. Writing this blog post, though, tells me that it can also be hard to continue to work after I start. I’ve also read that, if I had higher self-control, then I would not procrastinate as often. Thanks Google, that really helps me out.


The idea that seems the most helpful is the Pomodoro technique, which involves making time intervals for working with quick breaks in between them, culminating in a longer break after four intervals were completed. It’s making a schedule that accommodates fun activities into the work day, and I have heard that it truly works. Unfortunately, when I wanted to try this technique before, I ended up procrastinating getting started. I can't deal with schedules (uploading a blog post every Tuesday!).


Pomodoro is Italian for tomato! Just like how mozzarella is Italian for delicious!

As I continue to reflect upon my procrastination of fun activities, I realize that I have done all these fun activities before. I want to play Metroid Prime, sure, but I’ve already played old games on the GameCube before, and even more broadly, I’ve played dozens of single-player games. I went to hang out with friends that I have known for the past eight years or more. I want to watch movies in the same house as I have lived for my entire life. I want to learn a new song on the piano, which I have played for over half of my life.


Maybe, I need to find something new to do. Maybe, when I struggle to do something, it’s because I don’t enjoy doing the something. That sounds pretty convincing. When we self-sabotage ourselves so that we don’t have fun, then, we are not stopping ourselves from having fun, but rather protecting ourselves from finding out we need to change more about our lives.


 
 
 

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