Losing my interiority

Over the last year I've gotten back into the swing of learning Mandarin and I think I've been making a lot more progress than I have in my many, many past attempts. The big difference this time, I believe, is that I'm spending a lot more energy on immersion learning than spaced repetition. Spaced repetition is a good strategy, but without a sense of where you're going, it's really hard to stay motivated for the literal years it takes to gain proficiency in a new language.

They say you should be doing at least an hour of immersion practice every day to make meaningful progress. I figure I can spend an hour a day watching television. I probably already do that plenty of days a week, and maybe I'd even feel better about if I could justify it to myself as "studying." But once I put that spin on it, there's a switch that flips somewhere in my brain. Watching TV isn't really something I do intentionally; it's not something I'm planning my week around. It just happens, usually when I'm tired, having already done all the other intentional things I do in a day.

For the longest time I convinced myself that "having your life together" looked like having a set of things to do every morning, and the extent to which you had your life together was measured in the number of those things you manage to accomplish every day. For me, at various points, that's included making food for the day, doing the dishes, exercising, journaling, meditating, often all together. For most of my adult life, I've sought to wake up around 5AM each morning to make doing all these things possible, let alone realistic. The fact that it's hard to do everything and still make it to work at 8 has made it something to strive for, or feel bad about struggling to achieve.

But you don't need to spend an hour meditating every day to have things to do. You always have things to do; I think this line of thinking comes from the fact that the less you do, the harder things get. The dishes pile up. You're scrounging for something to eat come supper time, when you have the least energy to cook. You're jumping over piles of stuff to get to the front door. And when you're not doing that, you're going to work, you're taking classes, or you're sitting on the couch, writing in your journal, wondering how to make it all fit together.

One of the things I've found to make the bare reality of busing to the grocery store or doing the dishes more enjoyable is listening to podcasts. I find they fit into my life really well, in that I can be doing things while still enjoying something, even if that's not the thing I'm actively doing. And it feels kind of natural as someone who's into podcasts to use them for immersion learning. The thing is, the point of listening to podcasts while doing the dishes isn't to listen to something, it's to enjoy something when the something else isn't enjoyable. Trying to do immersion learning while simultaneously doing physical labour seems to have the opposite effect on me, leading me to interrogate the process itself rather than just go with it, lock in, and wash the dishes.

And in that interrogation, here's what I've found:

I think the two conditions that lead me to spend a lot of time writing are:

• that I am actually making the time to do it
• and that I'm also making the time to let my mind wander.

I've mentioned before that I find I tend to write more when I'm listening to podcasts less:

That's not all that surprising and today I think I'd take that one step further and say that I think I have more of an interior life when I'm passively consuming media less. I am my most marketable when I'm essentially a sort of philosophical zombie. I'm acting less on critical thought and more on impulse. I'm just trying to get through the day and not make any trouble.

The problem is then, in large part, that we live in a world begging for us to be philosophical zombies. On a similar note, I wrote about a video I watched a while back advocating for taking a break from listening to music:

There is maybe a bit of a class character to whether or not it's reasonable to enjoy the world as it is "in the moment." You can try really hard to cultivate niceness in your life but there's a big difference between shopping at the Superstore and FreshCo¹, doubly so if you don't have a car. There are nicenesses that are defined principally by your class, and I think that goes for most of the nicenesses you have access to once you leave your home. All of a sudden the unenjoyable thing you're doing, the thing that needs to be drowned out with entertainment, becomes merely existing in the real world. A world begging to be drowned out, begging you to stop thinking.

I do think there's something a bit revolutionary (or at least, spiritually healthy) in refusing to drown out your shitty world as it is.

But I also think it'll make you a more miserable person. My partner and I have talked quite a bit about the prospect of ordering Instacart deliveries for groceries because the thirty some-odd dollars I'd have to pay in delivery fees are probably worth the most of a day I otherwise spend around planning and executing a trip to the grocery store. But equally so, failing to live up to your own values is another great way to make yourself more miserable. So I guess there's a balancing act, as with all things.

Funny enough, Lauren, who partially set me down this rabbit hole in the first place, published a new video recently. I haven't watched it yet but I have a suspicion it ties in well:

Footnotes

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