Insomnia is a horrible curse, but it’s one of those reminders out there that sleep is one of those things that we can rightly call a blessing and that ultimately, the greatest things within life come from within and not from without, from the simple acceptance of the struggles around us, rather than just continually trying to force things to happen in the way that we want. Nowhere is this more clearly represented than in the domain of sleep.

The simple act of just closing your eyes and having yourself fall asleep is one of the most beautiful and restorative things in the entire world, and when it’s taken away from you, it reminds you at the end of the day that one of the greatest joys in this world is one that is inbuilt, one that lies within you, one that has the ability to transform you if only you will accept it, rather than challenging it by adulterating it with things like caffeine and other sorts of things out there that disrupt the balance, change the equation, and otherwise impede you from doing what is natural to you.

That the body can rest is something that we assume by default should happen, but in reality it’s one of the greatest luxuries upon the planet yet one of the easiest to corrupt the moment, we allow our minds and our psychologies to take over and to take on the driver’s seat, during which we begin to push ourselves to go for more than what is natural, to push ourselves beyond to do certain things when in reality they are neither needed nor desirable for our ultimate furtherance.

Often we sleep late just because we are worried about those things, about all the different matters that will not be completed if we simply do not fall asleep, yet ironically enough that is one of the very worst things that we can do for our productivity because it causes us to be able to do in 8 hours what normally we might do in 2 or 3, causing the entire balance of the equation to fall.

That is what happened today.

Spent too much time thinking about too many things, drank too many cups of coffee that I shouldn’t have drunk, spent time thinking in bed about how to fall asleep only to end up forgetting all the lessons of all the books that I read about sleep and all the benefits that it could have yielded if only I had simply kept my mind loose and ready rather than attempting to corroborate the story with wakefulness that shouldn’t even be there in the very first place while worrying about things that frankly, I shouldn’t even be worrying about.

In many ways I think that if a person were to step back from things that adulterate and that change the way that life is lived, if we simply stepped away from our own lives and from intervening in them, we would be able to do better, with less stress, with less concern over the course of our own lives.

It is something that I am trying to learn even now, to be able to lie in bed and to fall asleep, to relax, rather than to push myself forward constantly without regard for the consequences or anything else of that nature.

If there is anything good about this bout of insomnia, it is at least that I know that I will try in the morning to cherish sleep a little more, that there will be a bad day because of what happened today, but that at the very least there was a reflection that accompanied it that moved me in a positive direction. I don’t know how far it will move me along the way, but I do know that the course of a person’s thoughts can entirely transform the direction and the path that he or she may take along the way. I don’t know when sleep will come tonight, but I can only pray that it will be soon, and that whatever lessons that I shall learn will come along and be well learned from the strengthening of mind that comes along with the greatest of repose.

Goodnight, friends.

I hope I’ll fall asleep soon!

Today I thought I would talk about a little philosophy that has powered me for the past couple of years.

This is the philosophy of advanced laziness.

It’s the same philosophy that has made me exercise every single day since January 1st of 2019, which makes today’s run Day 1740 of exercise without stopping.

It’s the same philosophy that makes me work hard in many areas and to carry forward doing many of the things that I have been doing without stopping.

It’s a philosophy that seems to bear almost no relation to laziness, and may at the end of the day just be a profound rationalization based upon delusional reasoning.

…But I believe in it.

Let me explain.

I believe that somewhere within a person’s spirit, they have things that they wish to accomplish and would wish to accomplish no matter what the circumstances are. As goal-driven beings, we seek to accomplish or do certain things with our lives, and therefore face an innate wish to strive for these things.

Here are some examples. A person might want to lose weight or to learn an instrument. Maybe they might want to successfully create a business that will sustain them or to sustain a social enterprise that is brought forth on the strength of their personality and many other things along the way.

Maybe some of these things are formed by society or from the people around us, or maybe even random interactions between ourselves and the world.

Nonetheless, their existence remains undeniable fact: To deny them is to pay for a future in which one sits up in bed and ponders why the goal has yet to be achieved, to question every moment that came before, and to recognize that one didn’t manage to pay respects to their inner will, leading to existential crisis, confusion, and a recognition that one should have done better.

It is to eventually return and remember the innate wish and see that it hasn’t been fulfilled in the world, and therefore face doubt, anxiety, and a wish to strive for the goal again.

Advanced laziness is founded upon these premises which may well just be assumptions at the end of the day, but it is founded on the basis of the belief that the most efficient way to strive and to minimise the time that a person looks back on life and tries again to achieve something that they could have achieved before is to simply pursue it every single day and with all of their heart to minimise the total amount of time that a person ends up wallowing in regret and wondering about things that could have been and instead capitalising on the benefits of compounding and the growth that comes when a person dedicates themselves daily towards small improvements brought forth manageably as they pursue the goals that arise from within their deepest being.

It is a philosophy that is based upon the idea that benefits compound through daily practice and regrets can be minimized if one doesn’t have a reason to have them in the first place because one is engaged instead in the pursuit of moving the needle forward with each day, interaction, and moment instead. This has always seemed like a more appealing way of living life to me than the converse, though I feel that on a personal level, it hasn’t always played out in that way.

Like any other person, I have moments when I feel subjectively that I’m not up for something, that I’m tired, that I cannot push forward in the way that I would like because of external circumstances, time constraints, or any number of other things that could make life difficult that I haven’t been able to push past constraining me from doing the things that I want on a day-to-day basis. But one thing I’ve come to learn throughout the course of life is that what we want is manifold, and it’s not always clear that we can make rational judgments about what should take precedence over what, and moreover that time inconsistency also assails us with the inability to make decisions on a consistent basis across multiple time periods in the situation that we do not spend time reflecting.

When I reflect personally on the different things that I’m doing, including Korean, cello, making videos, and pushing forward in learning how to educate people, I recognize at many different decision points that these things are difficult to balance because they require discipline and many other facets of personality which I have only imperfectly developed throughout the relatively brief duration of my life upon the mortal coil that is the wick of my life upon the candle of earth.

There are times when I am tempted to deviate and simply rest and stop and pause for a quick bit, allowing the wave of freedom to wash over me, only to realize that this decision represents, when I reflect upon it, a denial of my previously freely chosen decision to pursue these things in the very first place and represent an insult to my earlier self. One could very well contend that a person should be free to make decisions at an earlier point and then also to make decisions to deny that earlier decision when a person has changed. But has a person really changed along the way? Not necessarily. I know that I definitely haven’t. When I reflect upon the deepest parts of my soul, I recognize that the things that I say are valuable, remain valuable, regardless of my immediate feeling of stress or difficulty with coping. Because when I look at the deepest part of my being, I see that I value knowing how to speak Korean and with the world at large. And I know that I value music and its ability to unite people by appealing to the soul in ways that can only be brought forth with skillful practice and a sensitivity not only to rhythms but also to the souls of those who lie without. I see in the balance of things that impacting souls and helping them to strive for better, to live for better in the eventuality of things is and remains something tremendously worthwhile to aim for.

Each of these things is something that bears the possibility of failure the moment one moves away. A person cannot learn a language by simply choosing not to continue a class and hoping that one’s innate nature and supposed freedom will bring them on the path towards a greater mastery.

The same applies for learning an instrument. In the absence of teaching, it’s not always clear what I would do on my part and therefore, any freedom that would be brought forth on that front would eventually be drawn back closer into the sphere of what I had attempted to do before, across all different things, which in turn leads me yet again as what goes up comes down in what seems to be a teleological direction of return towards facets that I had identified before and that innately I know I should continue to pursue. These are facets that will ever remain as part of me, and that if I wish to chase with efficiency, I must muster the strength to push forward each day.

There is no guarantee that other people abide by the same way of living or think of the world or value improvement in the same way.

But I feel that this will resonate for those who do.

Here’s to advanced laziness to those of you out, there are striving for better and seek to accomplish it in the most efficient way possible, while paying respect to your nature. Thanks for reading.

One of the most solid pieces of advice that I’ve ever received is that you should write the way that you speak; it’s something I think that I still fall short in, a piece of advice that I’ve wanted to implement but struggled to take, something that I personally want to improve myself in.

Somewhere along the line, I realized that in life, using difficult words and complicated expressions isn’t going to do you any favours – the people whom you’re supposed to serve won’t understand you, which means that if they are going to continue reading what you’re writing, they will have to use a dictionary or otherwise rack their brains trying to understand what you’re trying to say.

The answer probably is a solid no.

Even if you want someone to appreciate the high flown nature of your ideas, and to somehow elevate themselves, if they don’t get what you’re trying to say, then, there is no point – you have just wasted your time, which you could have spent either leveling yourself up so that you would be able to express better ideas, or perhaps, even just watching a television show in the first place:

People will most likely take one look at what you’re saying and immediately go away in favour of greener pastures or messages that they can understand; congratulations, you lose the attention war.

This isn’t to say in any way that people are dumb because they don’t appreciate difficult vocabulary and neither, by the way, is it to say that people should avoid difficult vocabulary altogether. Rather, it’s to say that when we express ourselves, whatever the scenario, we want to do it in such a way that the maximum number of people can understand us.

I feel that the underlying message is solid: whatever you communicate, make sure to phrase it in such a way that you aim to be understood by the person on the other end because if you’re just writing things in such a way that you use things that people won’t get out of hand, your communication will be unsuccessful.

Still, it’s something that I’ve identified and want to get better at, so here’s a note of vulnerability.

This is something that I myself struggle with, because when I think about things, I don’t always think about the most simple, or intuitive way of phrasing things – I tend to think in terms of complete ideas and full sentences, just as I have read them in books; I also tend not to filter them, so they come out the same way that they appear inside my head – unfiltered, often dense, and usually very quickly without any further consideration for the person on the other end.

Often it’s not the case that I think directly about what the person on the other side must be understanding or receiving from my words, hence everything comes out, unfiltered, overly convoluted, reflective of my thought process, and in short lacking usefulness.

I want to have my thoughts more relatable to people so that they can immediately respond rather than face confusion in top of getting what I’m trying to say, and why I’m saying it – that means being able to relate to people a little more and chatting with people in the knowledge that they can understand everything that I’m getting across.

I want to have more people understand the thoughts that I’m conveying, which isn’t just about changing the language that I use so that it can be more easily understood, but also learning how to think about ideas that are worthwhile to share in the first place, and to understand why and under what circumstances to share them.

I’d like to caveat that to some extent, though. I don’t think that learning how to share your ideas with the world necessarily means dumbing them down – in many ways, it means understanding how people will relate to things, how they will engage, and how they can understand things through examples, analogies, and many of the other things that link us together as human beings in the common experience.

Writing in a simple way often isn’t reflective off linguistic simplicity, but rather it’s something pretty darn sophisticated, because in order to write, simply, you often have to really boil down the essence of what makes an idea what it is and then convey those things to the person who is listening while paying attention to what they’re catching onto and constantly listening to their needs – definitely not something that’s possible in the course of writing, an essay, but something that a person needs to be able to imagine and demonstrate effectively when they’re in the process of writing an exam.

This too is something that I’m trying to learn at the moment, and I think I can do it to a southern extent, but perhaps writing it down here will solidify my intent, and make it more clear what I’m trying to achieve. Here’s the hope that in the days ahead, I’ll be able to better implement.