The Couch: A Look at Human Lifestyle

Tempting Sofa

I might not be posting anything anytime soon after this article as my studies started this week. (Whoohoo!) It already feels like I am behind! Now I quickly need to get this topic off my mind in order to focus. Focus comes from self-discipline, which is partly what this article is about. All right, enough advertising. Hope you enjoy my latest idea.

Introduction

Often one might notice people striving towards a goal, or living a healthy lifestyle, but as soon as they reach their aim, they abandon the good habits and relax in the comfort of it. For example, a person being fit and healthy in high school gets fat the moment they start earning their own money. Another person’s dream was to get married, and the moment they cross that milestone they start behaving in a very different manner towards their partner.

What happened? Why did it happen?

I call this idea The Couch.

How Does It Happen?

Path To Couch

Consider that we are all walking along a path. This is the path of human life. We could reach two types of milestones on this journey: one of comfort and one of a challenge. Comfort represents life’s luxuries, such as your first income or a raise. Challenges represent problems, especially those seeming too big to overcome.

This is where the couch comes in. It tempts us to sit down and rest when we are not yet tired. If we fail to overcome these milestones, whether by relaxing in comfort or defeated by our challenges, we end up sitting down on the couch (hypothetically speaking). This poisonous state of rest is the danger zone that keeps us from progressing on the road of life.

Many people might still be aware of this and attempt to get up. They would try to move one, but many times all they end up doing is walking right around it and then sit back down again. Once they enter this cycle they rarely move on without a huge amount of effort or help from some external motivator.

What the Couch Is Not

The couch is not a bed. A bed is a well-determined state or rest. You sleep totally; maybe a little lazy over weekends, but then you get up and go through your regular daily activities.

With the couch, you are neither sleeping nor awake. You are in some undefined state in between. It is like watching too much television: it makes procrastination feels good. This state of neither good nor bad is the main reason for the lack of motivation to change our behaviour.

To give another example, this is probably why people find it so hard to stop smoking, even once they know it is bad for their health. It feels good and they do not see any immediate damage done by it, so there is no threat to make them change.

They Come In Different Sizes

There is not a single path passing along a single couch, rather many different paths representing different areas of our lives, and many types of couches appearing on all of them. There are smaller ones, which you can easily get up from if you tried. The medium sized ones require a lot of effort to get up from, and you have to keep yourself in check for a few months in order not to sit right back down again. The big couches are almost impossible to move away from without additional help.

The longer you sit on a couch the more hard-wired it becomes in your brain and the harder it gets to move on. Self-control is in my opinion the biggest challenge any human being could possibly face. One can enforce self-control by healthy habits and routines, but then you must be aware that it becomes easy to overindulge once we break away from these routine. Overindulgence is an enjoyable form of self-abuse, coming from excuses like “well I am on holiday”. Urges have consequences, and we should prepare ahead [1].

Observations and Tips

Before people reach the couch it would seem like they are living towards a goal, but because this goal is not concrete, not written down or well thought about, it quickly fades away over time. Enjoying every moment of life is important, but one must never do so without any concern for the future or in ignorance of the past.

Some people live in denial. I have personally heard people say that they hate something, but once the wheel of fortune turns in their favour they immediately become what they once despised. I think they actually envied it, hating not having it.

Do you think this is ironic? To be able to pretend is uniquely human [2]. No man can lie like the man lying to himself.

One thing that I learned over the last year is to stop thinking about what you should be doing, how long it is supposed to take, how nice it would be once it is done, and just do what you are supposed to be doing.  That is right, stop idle planning and JUST DO IT.

NOW!

Resources

1. I read this tip in a 1Time airplane magazine.
2. This is from an article in Scientific American, comparing human two-year-olds with monkeys.

What makes time tick?

[I wrote this article over a year ago, 16-Nov-2007 to be exact, and originally published it on my facebook account.  I decided to publish it again on this blog because I really like the message.]

Did you ever wonder why time passes so quickly when you are enjoying yourself?  Why does water never boil when you are staring at it?  More importantly, have you ever came to the end of a year and wonder what you did during the past year?  What happened to the time?

I noticed something interesting by comparing these last two years.  This past year went by at an amazing speed.  It still feels like yesterday when I started with my new job in March.  The previous year, on the other hand, felt like a decade.  This is not because I was bored; in fact, I probably had many more activities that year than this.

So, what is the difference?

Where did I miss out?

As I pondered over these questions, I thought of all the things I did over these two years.  What I noticed was that two years ago I had a certain event that was a highlight of every week.  My whole week would build up towards that certain activity.  This year, however, the time just seemed to pass by.  Sure, I still had fun activities every week, like my rock climbing, but somehow each moment simply dragged on into the next.

This year I also spent most of the time wondering what happened to my time.  I noticed that I spend many more hours at work and in traffic.  This is something that I plan to change in the near future.  I no longer see the point in working overtime.  It is a fact that I am far less original and inventive when overworked and tired, but that is a completely different topic altogether.

What is the point of this?

Why would I even write this if it feels like I have no time to begin with?

I am still putting together all the pieces, but it seems like one must make time count.  In a world where everyone believes time is money, I must stop and quote what I heard from a certain Jean Symons: “Love is time”.  Find what you love in life and dedicate your time to it.  I believe you will surely reap the rewards.

Quotes

Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t
own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep
it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it
you can never get it back.
– Harvey MacKay

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
– Douglas Adams  (I couldn’t resist…)

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of.
– Benjamin Franklin

My history is like a long dark tunnel with a few lighthouses of significant events on the way.
– The Textures of Silence, (my own translation)
(Thus, if you do not add the significance of passion, love, or any other strong emotion into these moments, your whole life falls into a series of events simply flowing into one another.  Then, when you look back on a year, all you see is a dark tunnel).

Limiting Your Struggles

All of us have days where our frustrations and struggles completely break our spirits. It is days like that when I begin to wonder why I did not rather become something like a Latin dance instructor. Whatever job you have, there is always some cause of frustration, and in this article I will be taking a closer look to a possible cause of this irritation.

Adding Up

Let me divide it into two sides. The first side we will label “A” and call it struggling. Struggling is something that you do that wastes time, and it becomes frustrating because the more time you spend on it the more you get the feeling that you are not getting anywhere. The frustration is magnified as it usually is something that should just work. An example would be a broken computer software installer. You need to get it working, but you cannot find out why it will not do so. The effect is usually increased by lack of knowledge and tediousness of the process.

On the other side, which we will label “B”, we have challenges. A challenge is something (usually) difficult that you need to overcome, but you are to some extend in control of what is happening and understand and see the progress. An example would be a mathematician solving a mathematical challenge. Usually, as with “A”, it is also something that you need to get done, but is sometimes also done out of sheer enjoyment.

A challenge might seem like a struggle, but it is not. The difference is that when you solve a challenge you feel good about it, but even when you eventually complete the struggle you will still want to throw your PC out of the window because of how stupid it all is.

Now we have two sides of a scale, measured by time and energy invested. The amount that side “B”, the challenges, outweighs side “A”, the struggles, is the amount of job satisfaction that the person perceives. On the other hand, when the first side “A”, the struggles, outweighs side “B”, the challenges, then it will lead to major frustrations, boredom, or even motivation to start looking for a new job.

Balancing Out

It is interesting that these two sides are very much the same. The only real difference is how it is perceived. Further, because different people have different interests, one person’s struggle is sometimes another person’s challenge. To use my example from earlier, the very mathematical problem that is a wonderful challenge for a logical person with mathematical interests will at the same time be an absolute frustration for someone else with no mathematical sense or interest.

As this is not an ideal world we sometimes need to do other people’s unfinished jobs. We need patience for this, but always remember to balance it off with something challenging or fun to maintain a healthy balance. Yes, force yourself to do so. When you notice the warning signs, immediately stop what you are doing for a while, before it is too late.