Love of Lights

Whenever you show yourself to be inclined towards self-improvement, there tends to be some well-meaning person who demands of you, "Why wait? Just do it now. Just do it now." They mean to tell you that each passing day brings you closer to death, so if something is wrong with your life and you want to change it, you are losing precious time by not doing it right now rather than tomorrow, or next week, or as a new year's resolution. But these people over-simplify a certain psychological aspect of motivation. To be motivated to do something, you often need more than just a belief that something is the right thing to do -- you often need some supporting prop: be that an incentive or some externally-imposed structure. Whatever it is, something more than just the belief in what you ought to do is needed to help people along. This is the beauty in New Year's for me. Of course it is arbitrary, of course when the day this year goes from December 31, 2015 to January 1, 2016...

My self-loathing recently has reached an incredible high, which tells me I need sit down and reconfigure my thoughts. University is not going well. My organisation is poor and my motivation is at a near-unprecedented low. I read somewhere that if you're prone to self-loathing, you need to isolate your self-loathing triggers and understand them, then hopefully deal with them. My largest self-loathing trigger is the failure to get things done or failing to attend a class, things which stem from my organisational failures. The reason I've been having organisation failures recently is that my system is built presently on a foundation of feeling rather than structure. My system's instructions read "do x when you feel like it" rather than "do x at time t". As a result, I've been failing to attend classes and do work, especially related to the Italian side of my degree, because I've fallen entirely and fully out of love with it. I also end up sleeping...