The Root of a Low-Energy State
Every time I run into something I am not good at, I want to learn it immediately and master it as fast as possible. But real mastery takes a long stretch of steady learning and accumulation. It is easy for that process to be interrupted by trivial things, and then the little I learned fades away.
Too many of the small things in daily life have nothing to do with what I actually want. Five days a week go to making a living. The two days of the weekend are spent trying to recover the energy I lost. After coming home tired from work, it is hard to stay focused on one thing for long in the evening. To satisfy my curiosity, I keep scrolling through Zhihu and the latest news, worrying about things I do not actually need to care about. Another day ends like that. Time gets consumed by these things, and I gain almost no experience or understanding from them. Day after day, this kind of life keeps my state low. My energy has nowhere to go except into things that do not matter.
When I think about the cause of this way of living, I realize I rarely think effectively because I live mostly by inertia. Recently I read an article about improving the body's overall functioning, and it helped me understand that inertia better. It mentioned dopamine. Many things in life feel driven by the satisfaction that comes from dopamine release, which makes people want to keep doing them. But after that brief satisfaction passes, dopamine drops below its usual level, and people start wanting more again just to get out of that unhappy state.
Compared with scrolling on my phone and chasing the latest trending topics, I think being able to study for one steady hour is already something very good. But first I need to know what I actually want to do, and then learn the knowledge and skills connected to it. Otherwise I will only waste time learning things I will never use.
Typing helps me sort out my thoughts. It lets me pull a few meaningful questions out of a mess of scattered ideas, questions that are worth thinking about further.