Crystallizing is Killing Me

This is a continuation of my last blog post. In that post I talk about the start of my travels in Vietnam and how it changed my views on the kind of life I wanted for myself.

I'm going to skip the rest of the travel stories, because there's another point I want to make, and that's how easy it is to recrystallize. I eventually settled in Ho Chi Minh in the south of Vietnam. I stayed in a homestay for about a month, and eventually moved into an apartment. It still felt like I was "traveling" while I was in the homestay, even though I had decided that I would stay here for the foreseeable future. Everything was still new and undecided, and I spent my days exploring the city and discovering new things (doing all of the "touristy" things while I still felt like a tourist). It was fun, and I got a good feel for a lot of different parts of the city.

Eventually, though, I moved into the apartment that I'm living in now. I got a laptop so I could work on a few hobby projects, and found some coffee places that I really liked. It was a completely new area, so I was still exploring and discovering new places all the time. That probably only lasted for the first month, though. After a while, I knew which coffee places I liked and found a handful of ones I didn't particularly care for. I started working on hobby projects on my laptop with some regular cadence, and my days started to fall into a pretty familiar routine. I would wake up, work my way to a coffee shop, drink a few cups of coffee and eat lunch, then head home in the afternoon to clean a bit and maybe work a bit more on whatever project was catching my interest on a given day.

It was a nice routine, and at first a really appreciated some regularity after the chaos of traveling without a plan. But after a few weeks of this, I could feel myself starting to crystallize again. I was starting to get comfortable, and the passion and drive that I felt for life while I was traveling felt like it started to fade into the background, giving way to routine again. It was slow and subtle, and I think I existed in that state for a week or two before I started to see it for what it was. Eventually I came to realize that I was just going through the motions without moving the needle in any meaningful way. I was working on these hobby projects that seemed really cool, and I was writing AI applications that made use of tooling which I had heard a lot about but had never gotten the chance to explore and play with. But it wasn't going anywhere. I felt like I was just spinning my wheels.

I realized that the decrystallization that I had found so refreshing and so valuable during my travels naturally started to fade as a settled into a routine that provided me with comfort and predictability. I also realized that, because this recrystallization happens so naturally, avoiding it was going to have to be a constant and conscious effort.

I'm on the downswing now, and as I reflect on how best to avoid the patterns of behavior which will lead me nowhere, I find that a bit of crystallization can actually serve a purpose. There are behaviors and routines that you absolutely want to lock in. Meditation, exercise, a consistent deep work flow, and a cadence of doing things that make you uncomfortable and meeting new people are all valuable routines to have. And that last part I think is really the key. It's easy to go through the motions of going to the gym, working really hard at your job, eating healthy, and doing all of the other things you're supposed to do to take care of yourself. But unless you're regularly doing things which are both valuable and outside of your comfort zone, you're leaving a tremendous amount of life on the table.

At the risk of sounding obvious, I believe that routine is a necessary tool in all of our lives. It is the necessary foundation upon which your efforts to live well are built. If approached correctly, a well-thought-through routine can be the single most significant contributor to your inevitable success. Approached mindlessly or incorrectly, your routine will be the thing that keeps you stuck exactly where you are, and can be the single most significant contributor to your inability to achieve your goals.

All great things are necessarily built slowly, piece-by-piece. Our lives are no different. And seeing as we only get to build the house once, we ought to pay some attention to how the bricks are laid.

Anyways, like I said in the last blog post, this kind of content isn't really indicative of what I want to post. I just felt like telling this story and sharing the revelations I've had over the past few months as a warm-up to writing long-form content in public. Expect more technical posts in the future.