Hoarding - Analysis Paralysis

 Before I went to Mexico, and that was when I was young; more than 10 years ago. I had one or two good years in my career, and probably I moved from being on the lowest rung to the next lowest rung. But I felt that I was stuck, like I had nowhere to go. I saw my supervisors take on work that I was unwilling or reluctant to do: budgets, organizing, bossing people around. I met a financial advisor around this time, and for some reason, I never wanted to go and do the things that they advised me to take a look at.

The pragmatic part of my brain is underdeveloped. Some people have blind spots. Mine is that I don’t really want to have anything to do with planning or looking far ahead in life. I could overcome that, but something drastic would have to happen. If somebody held my feet to the fire in order to be better at that, I might have done it. If you want to learn a new skill in life, the best time is to do it when you are young, and your brain is at your finest.

There were times I remember: I didn’t want to take up leadership positions in my ECAs. I didn’t want to do my homework. I didn’t want to organize myself. When I went to university, I didn’t want to do the engineering modules. I didn’t want to get my act together and do projects. Maybe I opted for the easier option all of the time. I preferred to defer decisions. I preferred to open possibilities rather than to close them. Maybe I couldn’t stand that all the time that I spent doing this, I couldn’t do that at the same time.

It was the same thing in school: I refused to nail down whether I was a literary writer, a mathematician or a musician. Perhaps I was too privileged that I managed to get away with that, whereas these days a talented person would be forced to choose a direction in life a little sooner.

But time passes on, and you're forced to take sides and choose.

I remember fondly one of the days which I marked down as the beginning of my adolescence, and possibly the end of my tweens. I had 2 terrible years in my tweens. Those were growing pains, but there was one day that provided glimpses into my future and pointed me to a few happier directions: music and drama. That day, I was driving in a nearby city – call it Americano – and I saw a few adolescents dating and realized it was also another Valentine’s Day, that reminded me of that other day. But this time the message was more somber. I think that would be the day that I would mark out as the official start of my midlife crisis, or maybe my midlife. It was becoming more and more apparent that my IT career was stalling.

And I would have an epiphany. I had quite a few epiphanies when I was younger: they got rarer when I got older. I was sitting in one of the eateries that I had had visited a few years before, and it occurred to me: you are a hoarder. I was hoarding things, mainly compact disks. But I was also a hoarder of memories. I could generalize the concept of hoarding to an anti-pattern where I was getting blocked because I was biting off more than I could chew. I was buying more music than I could ever listen to. I was spending too much time on consuming music but not making it. I was opening more doors than I could walk through. There wasn’t a balance between my dreaming of things to do, and doing the actual execution whereby things could happen.

I would have to change my way of life, my way of thinking. Things would have to take on a sharper focus. The idea that really made an impression on me was that from now on, my horizons would be shrinking. It was an inversion of that earlier Valentine’s day, when it seemed that the dominant message was that my horizons would be expanding. This was about the “remains of the day” mode. About a butler squandering his life so far, but still having hope that he would make the best of what's left. That we don't have the luxury of time, or wondering if things were going to work out, but there would be a balance between trying to figure things out and making things work in practice. There would be less analysis paralysis in the future.

And this journey hasn't been smooth. If you're a reader of this blog, and I know there are very few readers, you'd know that I've been a spectacularly unfocused person. One of the biggest mistakes is not really knowing what I want. Of course there is a process of wandering around and trying to find your bearings, but after that, there has to be more focus and more doing. Closing things out... making things happen. Maybe I had the time and energy when I was younger to just indulge in doing whatever I wanted. Maybe it was just more fun to be dreaming of things, rather than to see what was actually in front of me. Maybe there was this illusion of infinite potential and infinite possibilities.

And then life becomes quite difficult, because I know that on some things, I cannot be trusting my instincts and doing the things I enjoy. It's a very hard lesson to learn, that achievement comes from the things that I do not enjoy.

A few years ago, I was staring at the abyss. Somebody commented to me once: you're running out of runway. The runway is some things that you were endowed with, to help you get your feet off the ground. But this allowance is finite. You'll make the best of that allowance to bootstrap you to get yourself off the ground. And then the people who were supposed to help you get on with it will be gone, and then you're on your own.

I don't know if I should learn to take greater happiness and pride when I get things done. I don't know if chilling out and relaxing are just too fun for me.