note: this may sound cliché from a self-help book :) but this is just my experience, not a life lesson.
maybe it’s just me, but being an engineer can put you in a loop where you’re always thinking about how things work. it is cool, but it also makes you feel like you’re not doing enough. so you try to be productive, but do you really know what being productive means?
i realized that being away from “consuming” and just “doing” won’t make you more productive… consuming is not a waste of time, it’s just a way of experiencing things and they can actually make you more productive in the long run.
btw, don’t forget this fact: high quality input > high quality output, and low quality input > low quality output. so be careful about what you consume :)
doing things for no reason
did i live like a robot? not really. i mean, i did things i enjoyed, but i often felt like i was wasting time. i couldn’t just enjoy things for what they were. for example, while watching a film, i was not enjoying it, i was feeling like i was wasting my time. this made me want to watch less and less films even though i love them.
it’s an illusion that if you do everything for a reason, you’ll be productive. you won’t, you’ll just end up not enjoying anything and eventually you’ll be less productive than before.
the magic moment
one day, i just decided to rewatch one of my favorite films “lost highway” after not watching it for years. that was the magic moment i realized we need to do things for no reason. spending 2 hours watching a film didn’t make me less productive, it was not a waste of time. it actually made me more productive because i remembered the reason why humans are working. we’re working to live, not living to work…
so yeah, find something that has no reason to be done and do it. it won’t be a waste of time, it will be your magic moment that breaks the loop.