Nothing teaches self discipline better than owning your own business.
I’ve always been a light sleeper, and yesterday was a particularly good day in terms of getting stuff done. Which means, inevitably, that my brain is chattering away and that results in, you guessed it, poor sleep the next day.
Worker burnout is a serious problem that our toxic-Capitalist social model generates at an alarming rate. We’ve been trained since childhood that our only worth is in what we can “produce” and nothing more. And of course that “production” is always to benefit something that we ourselves don’t own, but merely power. We are grist for the mill, to be worked until our usefulness is spent.
So I try to go a bit easy on myself on days like this when I’m obviously not going to be at my peak performance. I will, until my dying day, believe that we can do better; that it is possible to have a society that values people and cares for their needs, instead of just using them for machine fuel. The now tedious “culture war” really does come down to this: What do you think a society is for, ultimately?
But for now we are caught in the gears of the machine, like Charlie Chaplain in Modern Times. I still have to stoke the bellows on The Puppet Forge, no matter how I’ve slept. But I can choose to be a good boss to myself. I know I’m not going to get as much done today as yesterday, and that’s ok. It’ll all work out. Let things find a flow state. Slow progress is still progress.
The unique thing is this actually matters in my line of work. Everything I build is, in some way, a reflection of some bit of my psyche or something I want to express. Your mental and emotional state really does get reflected in your builds. This is their (to use a nebulous and unscientific term) “energy”. So don’t push it. Put love in, get love out.
And now, speaking of coffee, mine’s ready. I wish you a completely frivolous and unproductive day.