I feel like there is a real romanticism for especially young men around the idea of ālocking inā and āgrindingā until you achieve some heroic goal. And of course, in one sense, it is true that almost anything significant is going to require consistent, hard work.
However, in my observation, the people Iāve seen who have literally locked in and ground (???) and done something really hard rarely self-conceptualized that way, let alone wrote up a monastic code to live by. They maintained a much less dramatic self conceptualization frankly, probably because actually showing up and doing something boring and hard daily requires you to lower the emotional/āpersonal stakes. If you think of your life as a code or oath to give it all to doing the most good, every failure becomes a betrayal, and thus a reason to abandon the project.
Better to just focus on doing something without creating an identity (especially a publicly performed one on social media) or a code or whatever. I myself have much less grandiose aspirations to live an impactful life, and I find I must constantly downgrade my expectations to keep myself from getting too worked up when things donāt work out. But when I was 25, I was all about making personal covenants and binding myself to the mast. It never worked though.
I agree that a lot of this sounds pretty unhealthy. I think you can leverage your obsessive personality without having to literally end all human relationships for years on end. I also think this post is maybe hyperbolic?
I feel like there is a real romanticism for especially young men around the idea of ālocking inā and āgrindingā until you achieve some heroic goal. And of course, in one sense, it is true that almost anything significant is going to require consistent, hard work.
However, in my observation, the people Iāve seen who have literally locked in and ground (???) and done something really hard rarely self-conceptualized that way, let alone wrote up a monastic code to live by. They maintained a much less dramatic self conceptualization frankly, probably because actually showing up and doing something boring and hard daily requires you to lower the emotional/āpersonal stakes. If you think of your life as a code or oath to give it all to doing the most good, every failure becomes a betrayal, and thus a reason to abandon the project.
Better to just focus on doing something without creating an identity (especially a publicly performed one on social media) or a code or whatever. I myself have much less grandiose aspirations to live an impactful life, and I find I must constantly downgrade my expectations to keep myself from getting too worked up when things donāt work out. But when I was 25, I was all about making personal covenants and binding myself to the mast. It never worked though.
I agree that a lot of this sounds pretty unhealthy. I think you can leverage your obsessive personality without having to literally end all human relationships for years on end. I also think this post is maybe hyperbolic?