LLet me tell you about my day. I know that is a sentence that, coming from anyone but a girl you are actively trying to sleep with, instantly kills any desire to keep listening, but I promise that it’s relevant to your happiness, self confidence, and future development as a man.
I woke up on a cold Saturday morning at 6:30 AM confused as to why I was already awake. Considering I had been up until 1:30 AM the night before playing video games with my roommates, I had assumed I would be sleeping in. Normally, I wake up just in time to shower, brush my teeth, and comb my hair so I can be late enough to work that my day feels shorter but not so late that I get in trouble with my boss. Luckily, I work hard enough at a flexible company that I can get away with it, but that’s besides the point. Seeing as I had “time to kill” on a day where I really had nothing planned, I grabbed my phone off the pillow and opened YouTube to continue the video I was watching as I fell asleep. My earbuds were still in my ears from the night before.
A mix of YouTube, TikTok, and Podcasts I listened to while playing games kept me entertained until I finally got out of bed at 9:30. I took a quick shower, my phone resting in the shower caddy so I could keep watching YouTube, brushed my teeth, and drove to grab breakfast. On my drive, I relistened to the 5th book of a LitRPG series I have listened to 4 times already. There are 3 different series that I listen to in a rotation, each with between 8-11 books that are anywhere from 15-25 hours long. Over the past 2 years, I’ve probably listened to the same 30 stories 3 or 4 times and can nearly recite entire chapters. After I got my breakfast (Krispy Kreme doughnuts), I drove home to relax and play some video games. I definitely needed to relax after my arduous morning of watching videos and driving 30 minutes. Since none of the 100+ games I own on my computer looked particularly interesting (of which I have completed maybe 20), I bought a new game and watched more YouTube while I waited for it to download. Once it did, I played until 1:30 while continuing to watch youtube on my second monitor. I had been hungry since noon, but didn’t want to go make something for myself. Once I was “too hungry to cook,” I told myself I could eat out for lunch as long as I finally got a haircut while I was out.
The hairstylist was surprised at how long it had been since I last got it cut. It had grown to the point it was impossible to make it look good, so I told her I had just been wearing a hat to work every day to delay getting it cut. That 20 minutes was the first part of the day that I didn’t have some form of entertainment in my ears, and as soon as the harrowing experience of making small talk with a stylist was over I immediately put earbuds back in, grabbed a sandwich, and drove home to play more video games.
The one positive I can say is that I went to the gym and got a good back and biceps day in (while watching another YouTube documentary). Now I am finally getting around to writing the blog post I have been thinking about for the past 2 weeks, and it’s taking a lot of self control to not put on one of the Focus playlists on Spotify. Considering I got a haircut, worked out, and am doing some writing, I would say today was a pretty productive Saturday!
Now if you’re a man in your 30’s or 40’s with a wife, kids, and a good career you may be thinking, “Why the hell do I care that some 23 year old is wasting his day off?” If you’re in your teenage years or early 20’s like myself you’re probably thinking “That’s a pretty damn good day.”
The point of this all is that at no point in my day did I voluntarily choose to take the headphones out, look away from the screen, and sit with my own thoughts. Why? Because I don’t like what I have to think about. Confronting my own mind means thinking about some uncomfortable things.
I have an amazing job that I actually love doing, and I have the added bonus of being good at it. I can honestly say that I work for the best company in Las Vegas and am genuinely grateful for the opportunity to work there, but creeping in the back of my mind is a healthy dose of doubt and discomfort I don’t want to process.
I ask myself questions like…
- Am I just in the honeymoon phase of the first year at a new company?
- Do my coworkers actually like me, or are they just being nice because we have to work together every day?
- Do I really have what it takes to turn this into a career?
Even when I meet every KPI goal that I’m given, create new tools and processes that have been proven useful to my entire department, and have made profit for the company that covers my salary dozens of times over, I still get anxious. Instead of worrying that I am not good enough, I worry about setting too high a bar that I might not be able to beat next year.
I also just broke up with a girl I had been dating for 9 months. The breakup was amicable and a long time coming, but you always have that doubt on whether making the decision to end things was the right call.
- Was she the best I was ever going to get?
- Should I have given more time to try and make the relationship work?
- Am I a horrible person for hurting her feelings?
When you take the time to address these doubts, things start to clear up and you realise your problems are a lot smaller than you think. When I take the time to sit in the discomfort of my doubt I can answer every question nagging me, and once I do I begin to feel secure, self assured, and ready to tackle the real obstacles ahead of me. I can take the constant buzzing in my head and filter it out, blessing myself with a clear, focused mind. It usually takes less than a half hour of quiet discomfort, but instead of working through my doubts I dam them up behind endless hours of noise and distraction. The river of ideas moving through my brain is stopped by YouTube videos, podcasts, video games, work, and audiobooks until the dam breaks and what would’ve been minor stress turns into a nervous breakdown.
The sad part is, most of these distractions are sold to me as things I am doing to become a better man. I’ve listened to the library of “manosphere”, alpha, self-help books enough times that I could teach a course. I listen to podcasts that teach me about business, finance, psychology, biology, politics, and economics. My case for the time spent gaming is less convincing, but none of this time is actually ever helpful because I don’t take the time to listen to understand, learn, and apply the words I am hearing.I am listening to distract instead of listening to understand which makes all that time nearly useless in the long run.
This is a phenomenon I see in a lot of the men around me, and I think we are doing a disservice to ourselves. Almost everyone I see either has headphones in, is scrolling through social media, or playing games every waking minute not spent working. Even when we spend time with our family, the majority of us are doing something on our phones. If we can learn to love our own minds and be comfortable with only our thoughts to entertain us, we can learn to attack the negative and strengthen the positive in the stories being told between our ears. When we disconnect from our distractions and partake in the voluntary discomfort taught by the Stoic philosophers of old, we free our minds to attack life instead of defending our ego from our doubts. We obtain clarity, and are able to take all of the valuable words taught in books, podcasts, and music and actually use them to improve our life. We free our hearts to make meaningful relationships with the friends and family who bring lasting joy into our hearts.
I know that my constant need for noise is just a band-aid that I am going to have to rip-off if I want to Alpha Up. I am committing today to put an end to the endless distractions, and I hope you take this same opportunity to rejoin the world that exists outside the space between our earbuds so you can Alpha Up with me.