On growing

The greatest consciousness/awareness leap so far in my life occurred after graduating university, when I was 25 years old. Throughout the following 1 to 2 years.

Awareness of how interpersonal relationships grow, some stagnate and then fade; what makes them grow, stagnate and fade; and why some of them last and others don’t. How important being near phsyically, common interests and goals are. What facilitates the forming of friendships: a significant amount of time spent together with a common interest/goal, similar life objectives and ideologies, etc..

Awareness on general patterns in people behaviour (including me, of course) and society as a whole. How, for example, we are experiencing a pendulum swing back regarding gender, sexuality, tolerance and other issues which IMO has already happened before many times, both ways.

And on the passage of time. The sense of how it passes faster as we grow up. Each year being shorter than the last. Some might have read some articles and/or seen videos where it is argued that two main factors drive this time perception change:

• How boring or exciting our lives are as in how many new things we experience, for example
• The proportion each day represents compared to the total we have lived so far.

For example, when we are 5 years old, 1 month represents 1.66% of your total life while when we are 25 years old it represents 0.33%.

It’s ironic how, during a depression I went through on 2020 and part of 2021, time seemed to slow down. Even after restrictions, quarantine, etc. were lifted and life was slowly returning to “normal”, days seemed longer than ever before. I couldn’t wait to go to bed and abnormally dreaded the alarm sound.

Nowadays, every day I go to bed thinking I’d like to have done more with my day. I’d love to have some magic pill that would let me sleep 2 hours and function as well as I do with 8. Which is good, because I rarely have that existential fear of the infinite “void” that sometimes stems from boredom.

What I mean in the last sentence might be hard for me to describe considering I’m writing for the first time expecting someone, somewhere and someday to read this, and english is not my native language. With “void” I mean the lack of a trascendental objective life meaning, such as religions provide. How the vastness of everything and the time scale of astronomical processes in the universe as a whole compare to our individual and brief conscious lives. The idea that after we die it is over. Like going to sleep without dreaming nor waking up.

But returning to “my point”, all this fear, consciousness of death, etc. rarely gets me nowadays because I’m too busy enjoying things and activities again (yay).

I found it becomes a vicious cycle, because the more I thought about “the void”, the more I found anything not worth doing it. Why waste time if nothing has meaning?

How I broke the cycle? A mix of antidepressants, therapy, returning to activities after the pandemic such as exercising, finding videogames and reading enjoyable again. From my humble experience I find antidepressants and therapy were like jump starting a dead battery. They let me get in the virtuous cycle of exercising, sleeping and eating well, doing the things I love which in turn made me feel good and made me want to do more of the things I love.