Step one, before you do anything else, should be to plan hour by hour what you’re going to do today. Let optimistic ambition guide your thought process. All you have to do later in the day (when you run out of ambition) is to follow what your better self told you to do. All you have to do is close in on what you thought was a good idea in the first place. It’s worthwhile and it’s sitting there waiting for you to do it.
I waited to long. I shouldn’t wait to do a single damn thing anymore. I shouldn’t waste a single hour of any day. Everything matters now. I thought for a long time that I could quit — I thought I would have quit by now. Instead I’m stuck with a worse situation than when I started, and I’m not quitting. I can’t quit anymore. Other people depend on me being here. I may find all of this pointless, but it’s not pointless to other people and I can do some good here. It’s not a burden for my existence to be important to them; it means I have something of value to do and that’s just about the best thing you can get.
I’m just going to free write for a little while because I want to:
You have to get to the point that failure no longer matters to you. If nothing matters — if you’re such a good little hedonistic nihilist — then failure doesn’t matter and the long-term high-reward pleasure of getting shit done is what you should spend your effort seeking.
I pushed this too far. I kept it together way longer than I should have. My sentences no longer make sense. But that’s the exercise. Nobody reads this anyway. That’s my excuse. You can push past it and make something better of it. You can squeeze it all down and what comes out will keep you alive. You can get yourself closer to the point that you can actually feel the breeze. That’s a good word: “breeze.” I can use that. Something fun.
You really do have to think about writing this all out as exercise. It will be somewhat painful and you will not want to do it. But you will make yourself stronger. It’s exercise.