Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:01]
A
I think I found the cure for doom scrolling. No, but seriously, I have been trying to become less addicted to my phone because I find that it makes me happier. Shocking, right? I mean, this is nothing revolutionary. We all know social media is turning our brains to mush and it's all making us really unhappy because we're comparing ourselves to people who put on a picture perfect life when in reality it could be in shambles. And. And I don't really want to be in that camp. And so what I try to do with my content, if you guys haven't noticed and you followed me for a little bit, is I either try to tell you nothing about my personal life or I tell you that I'm losing my shit and it's not all doom and gloom. My life is wonderful. I'm trying to practice gratitude. Okay, that's a lot harder than it sounds. But ultimately, like, despite the fact that I live a very privileged life and that I have so much more than I ever thought I would have, I am allergic to feeling lazy. And I think that's what a lot of us feel in this post capitalist society. I don't actually know what post capitalist means, by the way. It just sounds really fancy and it sounds like something that should have belonged in that sentence, so I used it. But anyways, we live in the hamster wheel of capitalism, which requires all of us to be better every single day, to move the needle forward in whatever way that looks like for you, in your job, in your personal life, in your home. And while progress is a good thing, the overemphasis on progress, I think, is ruining all of us. At least it's ruining me. Okay, I'm not going to speak for anybody else, but the days where I feel the happiest are the days where I'm practicing how to be lazy. And maybe laziness is a form of self care that we've just rebranded into something negative. Because taking care of yourself often doesn't look like taking care of society. And I think as women, we especially feel this because we constantly feel the need to be doing something. Our hobbies are not legitimized as actual interests. They're kind of categorized as frivolous, right? Like, men are allowed to sit around on a Sunday and watch football for 10 hours straight. And nobody really questions that. Like, when you really think about it, watching football on a Sunday all day is just watching TV for 10 hours a day. I know there's a game on and there's analytics and it sort of seems like that's A hobby. But at the end of the day, it's watching TV for 10 hours. Which more power to you if you want to do that. But also, can we flip the script? Like if a woman decided she wanted to watch a Bravo Marathon for 10 hours on a Sunday, that's not frivolous, okay? She's not just watching TV or rotting her brain out. That is also a hobby of hers, okay? If we wanted to elevate that experience, we could say she is watching the intricacies of social dynamics come into play in our modern society. She's doing a human study. It's sociology at the end of the day. And really, it's not entertainment. It is an education in pop culture. See? See how I reframed something that we so love to on women for loving. And by the way, I am not somebody that loves watching tv, but trust me, I find very frivolous, quote unquote things very relaxing. And I was thinking about this this weekend because I was like, okay, I could do some work. Like, I could get some stuff done around the house, even if I don't want to do like the work work that pays for the house. I could clean the house. Like all of our hardware, like our faucets and all the cabinet handles because they literally have not been cleaned since the house was built 20 years ago. Like, it's on my agenda to do that. I have some silver polish. It works really well. It smells disgusting. So that's the thing I have to contend with. So that is something that I could do that would be progressive. But this Sunday I was like, I just don't want to do that. I mean, a. It's not a five alarm fire if our hardware and our faucets are a little bit tarnished. It's not the end of the world. And I have time, right? The goal is to get it done before Thanksgiving. And I was like, I'm going to go to HomeGoods. I swear they should make HomeGoods the way they make Raymore and Flanagan. If you have not been to like a big Raymore and Flanagan, this is the way they lay out that store. At least the ones that I've been to in Pennsylvania are that there's furniture everywhere. Yes, it's this massive warehouse, but then they also dedicate like a cafe to all the customers shopping for furniture. So I think the psychology behind that is that makes you want to sit and stay and like eat free candy and drink soda and then perhaps buy more furniture. Like, I wish they did HomeGoods or TJ Maxx cafes. Those are like my two happy places. And honey, if you put a cafe in a Home Goods, you don't even have to give me free. Like, I'll pay for my coffee, I'll pay for my Nerds or my Reese's PCs. Like just put something there where I can take a little break if I want to and then resume shopping. That would be awesome. Okay, but back to the point, even just going to Home Goods and making that decision to be a little bit of a silly goose for an hour and a half instead of being productive and trying to get to the bottom of my never ending to do list was very restorative. And I think we need this. No, I know we need this because especially as somebody who is a creative of sorts, I have my best ideas. Not necessarily when I'm sitting at my desk or when I'm trying to think of ideas for videos or when I'm trying to think of a clever response to a question that somebody asked me on Substack. Those ideas, the best ones come to me when I'm doing something that allows my mind to just completely turn off. There is something so meditative about looking at well organized and color coded throw pillows in a home goods aisle. And so that's my version of sitting and watching Bravo for 10 hours or watching football for 10 hours if you're a man. And I think we need to hold space for that. Like, I just think it's enough, right? It's enough to see all these examples of success around us and feel like we are inadequate until we reach that level of success. But the goalpost is always moving. And I feel this in my life because I never thought I would be living this life. I always thought, okay, if we can make a part time income from this little social media hobby I have and have maybe like a five figure following on one of the apps. Like, we're good. All right, that's success. And the goal post just keeps moving. And it's almost like they say, oh, the more you have, the more dissatisfied you are. And I think it's true because that's what society is teaching us. It's teaching us, okay, great. You've achieved what you've set out to do. You can't enjoy it. You must go now, achieve the next goal, big thing, whatever that is for you. And so my whole life over the last month, and it's been a very weird month because we're trying to conceive and everything and that's just been really kind of emotionally grueling is just learning to have grace for myself. I vomited a little when I say that. Like, I just, I am not a very touchy feely person. You can ask my husband. I was raised in a family that we, like, weren't huggers. Like Asian families aren't huggers. They don't say I love you. They express. Express their love in other actionable ways. Like instead of saying I love you, my mom will just make me like a really awesome meal with leftovers perfectly packed in tupperware containers so that I don't have to like get takeout for a week. That's how she says I love you. And so I wasn't raised in a culture where I think I learned to speak softly to others and myself that I love and so am working on that. I wouldn't say it's childhood trauma. I would just say it's sort of an interesting experience growing up in that environment and then realizing that sometimes you do just need to be corny and cheesy as hell and tell yourself that you are wonderful, you are brave, you are beautiful. Because even if you don't believe it immediately, over time, just saying it to yourself over and over again, the repetition, it sort of does lift your mood a little. Like, I fear it does actually help to speak kindly to yourself, even if you don't believe it in the beginning. The things that make us happy, like truly happy, or at least the things that make me truly happy, are often very, very stupid. And it's usually boiled down to something like eating well, cooking for myself instead of getting weird takeout that gives me indigestion, but tastes really good, going down, getting eight hours of sleep, taking my supplements, all of those things. Oh, and being nice to myself when I'm not making visible progress and in my career or in this never ending house reno that we're doing, all of those things help me live my life instead of just waiting to one day live my life. And I saw this comic strip, this Charlie Brown comic that I just absolutely loved. And it's Charlie Brown and Snoopy talking to each other. And Charlie Brown is like, you only live once. And Snoopy is like, wrong. You only die once. You live every day. And I love that because it's almost like it takes the pressure off of being like, okay, you have to live like every day as if it's your last. Okay. And if you are not productive today, well, you have totally up as a human. If you got up today and you didn't work out and you didn't work on your startup or create the next big media empire, like, you're a failure. It's like, no, you get to live every day for however many days you have left on this earth, but you get to do it every single day. So if today was not a productive day, there is tomorrow. And I think there's a balance there. It's like, okay, well, you shouldn't always, like, save all your work or save everything for tomorrow, because you never know if tomorrow will come. Yes, I get that, but we've totally gone so far left field in that that it's like there's so much pressure to make every day your best to improve every single day that I think that's why we're so addicted to our phones. At least for me, it feels like when I want to do nothing, okay, when all I want to do is probably sit on my couch and watch tv, like, not even read a book, because I consider that somewhat productivity, like when I truly want to. To do nothing or go to home goods or something frivolous, but I feel badly about wanting to do nothing. I will open my phone and scroll on TikTok or Instagram because it makes me feel like I'm doing something. It sort of feels like progress, because I think that's what the scroll does. It makes you feel like you're doing something, like you're turning your brain off, when in actuality, you. You are not doing anything. And you're allowing all these big social media companies to, like, hijack your brain because they're trained to show you what you want to see. So you continue to stay on the app and then eventually, yes, sure, you see a cute dog video or whatever, but you'll get to the influencer who makes you feel bad about your life, okay? You just will. Or you'll get to the friend or the frenemy or the mom in your mom group that makes you feel bad about yourself because they're sharing a highlight of their pool house they just built, and you don't even have a pool. Okay? So that's the problem. It's like, you probably didn't care about having a pool house or a pool before you opened your phone to feel like you're doing something when you feel like doing nothing. But now, instead of just doing something restorative for yourself, like going for a walk, listening to music, making a cup of coffee, like literally doing nothing, staring out into space instead of doing something restorative like that you got on your phone in order to placate your guilty conscience, and now you Feel bad about the fact that you don't have a pool that you don't even really care about. And that, in an essence, from my very unqualified opinion, is how social media works. And I think the way we hijack our brains back from the addiction of our phones is by saying I am allowed to be lazy. Because guess what, it's not actually being lazy. It's just called existing. There was a time where you went to a doctor's office and if you were in the waiting room, you did nothing. You didn't scroll. Maybe you brought a book if you knew it was one of those doctor's offices that didn't really ever run on time. You know, like if you knew you had to wait half an hour or something, but you did nothing and that was totally acceptable. And I think about the way my parents are, like when they travel, they don't travel much, but like, my dad used to go back to China every year when his dad was still alive. Like, he would just what we would call raw dog the flights. He wouldn't bring music, he wouldn't bring a book. He would get on that 13 or 14 hour flight with nothing. Of course he would sleep, he would doze in and out. But also, this man was not flying in business class. Okay, so he's like sleeping upright. So he's not sleeping the whole 13 hours, he's just doing nothing. And I never heard him complain about it. And I think it's because he grew up in an era where doing nothing was totally acceptable. But. But now it's like we go somewhere and we have to be like totally prepared. It's like, oh my God, I gotta like bring eight movies and a book and music just to make sure I don't have to deal with a silence of my own brain for however many hours this flight lasts. And I'm not saying like, you should fly to Asia or fly across the world and practice doing nothing, because sometimes that is really excruciating. Like, that's just so boring to me. I'm advocating for some kind of middle ground. My father is also a very unique creature. Like, he doesn't need much in his life to be content. And I'm constantly trying to learn that, like, he's always happy where he is. He was like, happy when we were poor, he's happy now that we're not poor. Like, all of his joy stems from within and he can kind of find the upside in everything. And he's honestly such an inspiration to me. And I hope he'll be an inspiration to you guys when I say this because it's not an original thought, but it is something that I say to myself all the time when I don't get what I want or things aren't working out the way I want them to. He is always telling me bad things lead to good things. And we've seen that pan out in my family's life. I've seen that pan out in my own individual life, with my love life, in my career. And it's so easy to get fixated on, oh my God, what we don't have or what didn't work out, or I really thought this one guy or this one opportunity was going to make or break my life. And the older you get, you realize, oh, nothing makes or breaks my life when what I do next determines the outcome of my life. And so shout out to my dad, who is one of my greatest inspirations along with my mom. I mean, they've been through so much and they just remain boundlessly optimistic. But I think that's also the reason he can get on a flight to Asia from New York and not do anything because he feels adequate as himself. He's not attached himself to external validation. He works for a better life, but he knows that his self worth is outside of whatever he's able to achieve. Because honestly, it's like the saying, you control the output, you don't control the outcome. And he's always maintained that as long as you keep trying, you'll get somewhere. Okay, it might not be where you originally thought you were going to be, but you'll get somewhere. And so I think, especially for those of you who are single, I think there's a lot of pressure to be like an interesting person. I remember feeling like that. Like, I had so many quote unquote hobbies that look great on a bumble or a hinge profile, but we're not actually things that I really love to do and still do now. Like, at some point, because of a guy dated, I got my scuba diving license, which is hilarious because I can barely swim. But like, in scuba diving, in order to get your license, you just have to prove that you could float or tread water for 10 minutes. So I floated on my back, obviously. And then like prove that you can breathe a certain way to make you sink. So they don't actually care if you're a good swimmer or not, which feels like sort of maybe a loophole in the system. But in either case, I have my scuba diving license and after I broke up with that guy, I Still had it, and I thought it made me sound interesting, so I put it on every freaking profile. And. And I guess it was like a talking point, but, like, I have not scuba dived in 10 years at least. And I also just don't plan on ever scuba diving again because now I am afraid of the deep sea. When I was 24 and I got that license, I was fearless because you're just a little bit immortal at that age or you feel immortal. So I was like, why not? And I know scuba diving can be very safe, and it is very safe. But, like, we're just good. We don't need to take risks. Like, Like, I remember a few months ago, my manager asked me whether I wanted to participate in a hot air balloon ride on a brand trip I was going on, and I politely declined. Like, I am just not participating in any activities these days that require me to sign a release of liability waiver that says that if I die or get brutally injured or disfigured, I cannot come sue you or my estate can't come sue you if I'm dead. Like, that's just what I'm interested in these days. But I think in my 20s, I felt this deep need to be interesting. And so, you know, I was like, I run marathons. And by that I meant I ran one marathon, the New York City Marathon. And I don't know, I think I listed a whole other set of hobbies that none of which I do anymore. Like, I picked up guitar for a little while because I thought it'd be cool to be able to play music again in my late 20s, and none of it really stuck. And so these days, when people are like, what are your hobbies? I'm like, I have no hobbies. Like, I just don't need to add another thing or skillset to my plate right now. In my already, like, very full life, I feel totally content outside of the stresses of this job. I feel very content on the weekends wandering around our town with Dave and Sawyer, going to the park, sitting on the couch, watching a little bit of football with Dave, usually on Saturdays, because he's much more into college football than the NFL and just existing. And I think maybe if we all just got used to the fact that our existence doesn't hinge on our output, we'd all be a lot happier.