I never thought I would say this but I wish I was raised by much stricter parents. Parents who would teach me through the hard way how important structure is and how dangerous idleness can be. In that sense, my move to the US for education has proved to be very motivating and successful for me because it gave me the rigid structure that I needed to focus on the big things. Although I generally resent any structure that is forced upon me by a single authority, the truth is that I perform much better under such rigid system than when given all the flexibility and freedom of the day.
Freedom itself is an interesting concept to me. It is freedom that I've changed my opinion about the most while studying philosophy. The more you examine the move from scholastic philosophy to modernity, the more it appears in the writings of moral, political, as well as epistemological thinkers that freedom is hardly the absence of bonds, but rather the acceptance of them. We are most free when we succumb to a firm and unyielding structure because only then do we have the freedom to focus on thinking itself: the absolute free state of mind. Even the curriculum at my school was a representation of this idea. While it was given what texts you read and in what order and a single curriculum was mandatory for all students and tutors alike, the same rigidness and constancy was never enforced in what we wanted to think. I did quite well in such an environment and so without it, I naturally feel like I'm slipping into nothingness and idleness.
Usually it is true for me that the busier I am the better I am at completing all tasks and at squeezing into my schedule even more activities. The more idle I am the less amount of work I actually do and the final result is never of any quality. I learned that lessons very early on when for one semester I decided to join a track and field team instead of doing gym hours. While being on the team was much more time consuming than doing three hours a week of mandatory exercise, which was also the reason for why I didn't want to do it in the first place, I learned that the structure that came with it was freeing and exhilarating. Suddenly I didn't have to worry when I do or what I do for the three workouts. I could just show up each day after school at the field and I would be given something to do. It was really mostly about removing "worry" and "planning" from the concept of exercise, which made it much more enjoyable to me in the long run and which freed the time in which I worried and planned for something that was more important.
While we tend to think that planning and worrying really doesn't take that much time, I am convinced of the opposite; I think that just being in this mindset of worry, plan, and the worry again when you don't do what you planned wastes our time and attention the entire day. Often it is hard to fall asleep because of guilt or planning for the next day and more guilt. I get so tired of trying to plan something, make decisions mentally, and then never following through and worrying about it and feeling guilty and useless. When you have a rigid structure, you can escape this entire scenario altogether and at the end of the day feel accomplished and satisfied. The amount of time I really spend in this mindset of worry and plan is incalculable. Besides wasting my time on it, it also makes me feel like I can't move from one place, like I am frozen in this perpetual motion of running in one spot.
But if I know this, then why is it still so difficult to submit myself to some routine? Why can't I do it myself instead of freely submitting myself to something else to decide for me? All I know is that, for some reason, I can never take myself seriously when I try to do it. I don't respect myself and the provisional rules I try to set out for myself. Really, it's as if I am constantly fighting myself but I don't even respect myself enough to stop.
It terrifies me:
We are so alienated from ourselves and we can do so little for ourselves.
The bonds of pleasure make us dependent while the bonds of pain make us free.
And while we know it, we just can't help ourselves and free ourselves from one just to submit to the other. It's almost as if in all this we never possessed free will, as if our decisions really were never ours to make.
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