I tend to write up long posts that talk about my future plans around my birthday. I think that somewhere I believe if I write it all out, it will give me conviction to carry them out. Yet that never seems to happen. At best, I’ll maybe do a few minor things that I mention and everything else will just get pushed to the next year (if it’s not absent entirely)

I make big promises, but when it comes to taking the appropriate steps, I put them off. Call it laziness, a lack of self-confidence, or fear. What I think it ultimately comes down to is comfort. I’m too comfortable and that’s made it hard to push myself further.

It feels strange and a little contradictory to say, but you can be comfortable and miserable. Contradictory because we’re often taught that comfort is something to be sought and obtained. We’re led to believe comfort is a measure of success. The promise of obtaining comfort later is part of what makes us work hard early in life.

The truth is, comfort isn’t really any of that. It’s just a point where you’re not really being challenged by anything. While it can be a great escape and reprieve, comfort by itself will make you miserable. It will make you miserable because you’ll see things you want but they’ll only be obtainable if you put effort in. Effort that would take you out of feeling comfortable.

You would think that being miserable would make you uncomfortable, and while it does, it only very rarely produces action. In a lot of cases, it’s easier to just ignore that discomfort when you think about the potential discomfort other things would bring. Even if that minor discomfort does compound and lead to worse things overall, it’s the in the moment feelings that tend to matter most.

It’s why when I write these posts I often get very supercharged about changing my situation, but then when the next day rolls around it’s like I completely forgot about what I wrote. The discomfort grew more as I wrote/thought about it, but the next day? I would just start playing a game and that irritation would be buried for a time (at most until my next birthday where I’d start the whole thing over again)

Life needs stress, and living is about pushing yourself (among other things of course) It’s similar to how you grow muscles to gain strength. You can’t just sit there, you have to physically tax them so that they grow. Same with a person.

There’s often a lot of people who argue you need to work hard. I used to disagree with that, but I think what I disagree with is the idea that you need to work hard to deserve to live. I think people deserve to have food, shelter, and health care without needing to be wage slaves. However, when it comes to working hard in general, I think people do need to work hard sometimes to keep their lives from settling in ruts of comfort where they can’t achieve any feelings of happiness.

For this year, I don’t want to make any grand promises like I’m going to go live in Japan and learn Japanese. I would still like to, and I’m not taking the option off the table, but what I need to be focusing on isn’t the destinations. I need to focus more on the journey I’m taking to get there. I need to stop being comfortable and push myself a bit more.

I want to meet new people, but I’ve been hurt a lot in the past by relationships that didn’t work out. Putting myself out there, as I am, has often seemed like a futile effort. To paraphrase a question someone online once asked me “Why should someone get to know you?” A sentiment that I’ve often wondered myself and that has kept me from putting myself out there.

I’ll be 41 this year. I live in my room in my parent’s basement. I play video games, watch anime, and read vns. Nothing about me particularly feels very exciting. If anything, I often feel like there’s a lot of things to put people off. I feel like there’s tons of people I’d recommend others to get to know before myself.

However, I accept that is a subjective and rather negative view of myself. We are our harshest critics because we often compare ourselves with the person we long to be. It’s only other people who help us recognize the person we are.

I can’t answer why someone should get to know me. That said I can’t assume there’s no value to getting to know me either . All I can do is just put myself out there and hope that someone else will see the reason. All I can do is gamble on myself.

It’s stressful and undoubtedly fraught with many failures. It’d be easier to isolate and live with the discomfort at times. However, the only way to get any value is to push myself. At least that’s how I see things right now.

I’d like to continue to improve my Japanese. I think I’m going to have to start relying on other methods besides just reading VNs. While I don’t think they’re meaningless, I think pushing myself to do other kinds of learning might help expedite the process. More specifically, I think I need to output more instead of almost exclusively relying on reading. Much as the idea of making mistakes terrifies me, I’m never going to learn without being open to them.

I’d also like to learn to draw. However, instead of just buying the materials only to touch them once, I think I need to actually devote myself to doing some practice everyday. Even if I have to sacrifice my time with other stuff. I should really make it a habit and just do it. Accept that I’m going to suck for a while and just live with it.

It’s nice outside. I think I’ll start my other goal which is to get myself off this computer more. I’ll try to update this site when there’s something worth updating about.