I believe clarity of thought is by far the most critical aspect of living a happy life. However it is phenomenally scarce and increasingly hard to attain. Why?
One of the most powerful currencies of our day is attention. Social media companies, advertisers, publishers, news outlets, and pretty much everyone and everything is trying to steal a piece of your attention. If you pay attention to it, you share it, you and your friends see ads, and so you make them money. In their capitalistic pursuit of growth via scale, they end up impacting your life. This is incredibly dangerous because what you pay attention to directly dictates what you think and inturn who you become.
As we increasingly advance as a society, we start optimizing requisite parts of our life that take less time and less effort. Washing clothes, procuring and cooking food, accessing information, transport, and communicating family and friends are just a subset of key tasks that now require 10x - 100x less time and effort to fulfill. This means that almost everyone has experienced a significant increase in their amount of free time but an equally significant decrease in the quantity of hard tasks that make you feel accomplished. This is dangerous.
Human beings are not particularly well-adept at structuring free time. Some studies even show that too much free-time can lead to lower subjective well-being. This is attributed to spending less time on productive activities and more on the “cheap dopamine” activities. Mindlessly browsing social media, binging netflix, constantly ordering in food, among many others. Not only do we feel bad immediately after wasting our time but we become desensitized to the work it actually takes to feel good. This is a topic you’ll hear me write about consistently. The importance of overcoming pain and hardship on a consistent basis. But I bring this up because these activities are addictive, steal away your attention, and clutter up you mind. And I am taking back control.
Even after just a few short weeks of keeping this in mind, I’ve experienced a heightened clarity of mind and even a higher sense of self-efficacy. Simply by auditing my focus. One my revelations in this period has been the impact blogs like Linus’ has had on me. I’ve been deeply inspired by many blogs that teach me how to think, interface with the world, and feel about certain things.
I selfishly believe that I can also offer a sliver of clarify and inspiration to others. This blog is an attempt at sharing my insights, thoughts, and battles that I feel people can benefit from. In what I hope becomes a consistent stream of clarity, I will share with you the experiences that this particular Venezuelan immigrant uncovers in his sampling of the world.