Written on 2021-09-26

I’ve been noticing a curious trend during the past 6-8 weeks: every Sunday I’ve been experiencing a mild-to-moderate depression that has manifested as a turmoil of isolation, loneliness, frustration, and unfulfillment. I’m an engineer and spend a lot of time in my head, so I have a tendency to lose touch with my body and how I’m feeling (best explained to me by Gabor Maté in this Tim Ferris podcast). To combat this, I learned a technique years ago of asking myself, “How am I feeling right now?” For the first month of this cyclical depression, the responses that came up were reiterating what I already knew: “I feel cut off from social & feminine connection,” “I feel pissed off,” “I feel frustrated,” etc. However, a new one showed up three weeks ago: “I feel trapped.”

This wasn’t necessarily surprising to me - I’m living in Mexico City with my cofounder, but I’m fairly displeased with the city on account of its air & water pollution, carb-heavy food, and ludicrous noisiness. However, we’ve built a social circle here, my cofounder has a year-long relationship with a Mexican girlfriend, we’re doing MMA classes with an excellent coach, and we’re both feeling the need for stability. The feeling is akin to being in a relationship that doesn’t excite you, but isn’t so horrible as to obviously require a breakup - i.e., purgatory. Yet… I couldn’t shake the feeling that my location wasn’t the sole cause for feeling trapped.

A quick aside: I have a system for analyzing situations that I picked up from this Youtube video where I ask myself, “What went well?” “What didn’t go well?” “Why?” and “What can I learn from it?” I have an inclination towards rumination when I’m in a negative mental state, and my instinct is to “medicate” in the same unproductive ways that I did when young: channelling my feelings into anger, listening to angry music, and binging Youtube. Work with a therapist has taught me these behaviours are band-aids that don’t actually address the underlying issues, and so I find journalling on these four questions will:

  • Draw my attention to the positive aspects that I tend to ignore when I’m feeling bad (much like gratitude journalling)
  • Dig to the root causes via the “Why?” question
  • Reorient my mind towards what I can do to change the situation which gets me out of the “helpless victim” mentality

Until today, I’d been handling the Sunday blues in my same unhealthy way with the same predictable results - change nothing and nothing will change. Today though, I applied my framework and surfaced a surprising result: the activities of my life could be grouped into “discipline/growth-oriented activities” (e.g. working on Kurtosis, working out, learning MMA, learning salsa, or reading nonfiction), “vegetative/consumption activities” (e.g. watching Youtube or movies, browsing Reddit, or scrolling Instagram), or “social energy expenditure”. Completely absent: noodling around with whatever I felt like. In short, play.

I enjoy building things, but for the past few months if I had the inclination to build it always seemed sensible to devote that energy to pushing Kurtosis forward. Our product has developed well as a result, but my life has fallen into a routine of “work on Kurtosis during the week from morning until late at night, feel drained so do something vegetative (e.g. Youtube), fall asleep late, wake up late, repeat, and occasionally visit friends or go to salsa and MMA classes.” I’d gotten so focused on forward-driving progress (and handling the resulting low-energy state with vegetating) that I’d lost doing fun, freeform things purely because I wanted to.

To test this missing-play theory, I asked myself a new question: “What do I actually want to do?” Much like the “How am I feeling?” test, an answer arose: “I want to design a future house” (a favorite pasttime of mine when young that I haven’t done in decades). I started Googling how I might do this now and found a video of an architect designing a house in Google Sketchup. The result: immediate relief. My mind began to relax into the process, slowly meandering from questions like “What would my house look like?” to “What would I want inside it?” to “How could I implement some of the things I want in Sketchup?” In a life heretofore focused on “I need to schedule X, learn Y, do Z,” I gave myself the treat of “Absolutely anything is okay.”

So here I am. I decided I would rather draw the house than try to learn Sketchup but I left my pens and paper at home, so I asked myself again, “What do I want to do?” Writing - a form of anything-goes play for me - came up, and the result is this article and a feeling of well-being that didn’t exist two hours ago. My conclusions are thus:

  • Asking “How am I feeling right now?” is a useful diagnostic tool for me, but may take several iterations
  • It is very easy to slip into an “I must always be doing X productive thing” mindset, especially when desiring to grow as quickly as possible
  • The effects of a lack of play are pernicious and difficult to identify
  • A structured approach to reflection is very useful for shocking me out of my normal pattern of dealing with negative emotions
  • It might be necessary to repeat the unhealthy pattern of dealing with negative emotions several times before I get fed up and try a more constructive approach; this is okay
  • Asking “What do I actually want to do?” can help connect me with my unstructured, playful side

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