What you are doing vs what is hapenning?

A couple of blogs ago i talked about the gap between your ideal self and your actual self.(catching yourself in the act) This time it is about your actual self vs your perception of self. Recently I was catching up to one of my buddies and he asked me what have I been up to?? That put me on surprisingly weird train of thought. I told him about my job, and how I'm learning guitar and video editing and some graphics coding etc.... and we talked about various outer dumb stuff after that.

But once we concluded our conversation and hung up the phones, I asked myself - what AM I upto? And it is true that in trying to learn guitar but I haven't touched it in past 2 weeks, it is true that I'm learning video editing, but haven't made a single edited video in weeks. I'm also interested and learning graphics coding but really what I did was watch a couple of Sebastian league and coding train videos.

This is what I want to tell, I think I'm doing this that and that other thing and gaslight myself into thinking that I'm being productive or I'm improving myself. But in reality I'm just watching YouTube and doom scrolling on Instagram. Don't get me wrong not that anything is wrong with that or that I'm doing something bad by wasting my time, I work full time during the day and get a pretty good pay. I don't need to be doing the other things and just relax watch YouTube scroll on Instagram and go to sleep. But the problem here is that, that's not what I'm in my head. That's not my perception of self.

So I think it's very important to be careful and understand that what you think you are doing vs what actually you are doing are different things and your brain is projecting the reality somewhat bent. What I have figured is a somewhat of a solution to this is to just give 30s to yourself before falling asleep to see your day from a third person view, not what all you did, but what all happened. You might think you wrapped up a big project today but in reality you might have just placed the finishing touch. Maybe you thought your workout was not good and you are feeling bad but actually you did do all exercises all sets and all reps properly, albeit with a bad mood.

I'm scared more about this gap because I don't want to be thinking I'm doing great and everything is going great but actually I'm just living an average life. Again nothing wrong with living an average life, but thinking you are doing something and actually doing something else is something I'm terrified of.

 

SELF DECEPTION

- Mr. Pista