(Hello! Did you know that this post is part of a series? Now you do!)

Generally, I like to keep busy. I have kept:

“Busy > Bored”

as a personal motto for years. That being said, it is not easy to do. Nor were the reasons I did so virtuous. Keeping busy is the only way I can the depression from truly kicking in. If I keep busy, I don’t notice how much my life sucks. Plus I have been promised for years that if I had a lot of hobbies people wouldn’t find me quite as boring as I am, although that seems to have failed as well.

The previous post blamed my job for what was going on. This time, it isn’t so simple. Thankfully, it will likely be shorter.

I have been keeping a journal for a really long time. It can be measured in decades. When I was younger, it was a lot easier to do – all I needed was to sit down with a beer and lament about my angst (fun fact – my mother recently found my old journals from way back in 2005-2008. I cannot wait to pick it up and cringe my way through reading it).

Over the past few years it has been increasingly harder to keep the habit up. I have some thoughts on why this is the case.

As you age, you get less narcissistic. You stop thinking that your problems are earth shattering, or even all that unique. You also realize that no one gives a shit about your problems except you. First, you stop sharing them with other people. That I did years ago. That was the easy part. But then, you stop sharing them even with yourself. That’s the scary part. And that is when you can’t be bothered to write anything in your journal.

Well, sort of. When I was living in China I was a whole lot more motivated to get my life in order. I was one of those productivity goons, trying to maximize my life to be the most efficient possible. My journaling often revolved around how much I got accomplished in day or within a week. I did that for a few years, until I realized that I was spending more time trying to manage my productivity than I was actually being productive.

In 2021-2022, my journal revolved around me trying to find new employment any exploring career options.

Right now, I feel like there is nothing going on in my life worth journaling about. I go from home, to work, and then back again. I leave pretty early in the morning and come back late in the evening. After dinner, I usually just pass out on the sofa before going to bed. I am not sure what I am meant to write about. I don’t have any social interactions to write about, as I did when I was a young adult. Nor would I want to write about them if I did. I am also not being productive in anyway (except for work), so that that isn’t an option either.

What do you write about when you have nothing to write about.

This blog post, I guess!

In fairness, this blog is a journal of a sort. So is my sister blog. But I do miss the time I spent sat alone with a book, writing.