Seven things I know. Over the next six days, I will be recollecting on lessons learned by experience or reflection in the last year. I want to engage with the hardest personal subjects I manage to. These are field notes from the frontlines of unlearning. Maybe they'll spark your own uncomfortable conversations!

Day 2 — Need for action
My present sense of self-worth is dependant on the my perceived state of action.
My waking life unfolds as an inconsequent series of distractions. Among the preferred distractions there is deeply listening to others and being immersed in a game (by which I mean any directed activity with clear feedback loops).
My mood will swing based on how much I feel I am contributing to some present, intangible aim. Nobody needs to care about that goal except for myself. I need to be fully buried in the activity, swimming in its flow, to feel happiness comparable to the bliss of detachment. Work main benefit is that it grants temporary relief from existential boredom.
Some days, I feel miserable but then wonder: am I really sad, or am I just bored?
I learned that I cannot expect myself to function if I'm not ambitiously pursuing something. It does not even matter what the aim is. It might be trivial like tidying up the flat, or indulgent like shopping around for wines. It's been like this since I was a kid.
After school, I used to pester my parents asking "Che facciamo?", "What are we doing next?". Back then, the preferred distraction was a trip to the bookshop to pick up a new punchy detective story. Little has changed.
Today, I find being buried in the short reward cycles of making something work heavily addicting. Longer quests can also be rewarding. Fixing obscure bugs across millions of lines of a legacy IBM codebase was the ultimate chess puzzle. If writing is seldom entertaining, editing often is.
Listening offers a different route to escape. You enter someone's home, you start to feel their wounds and sparks. You begin to play with their worldview. For a little while, you get to forget about your daily experience. You disconnect from the habitual thought paths. You relax your judgment more than you ever afforded yourself. You board a cruise to a different planet. The experience of relatedness offers a special kind of existential relief. While the conscious feedback loop moves to the background, you do feel that the quality of your listening impacts the other’s present experience. It’s a game of continuous rewards.
When the state of action is so satisfactory, perhaps the greatest of all is the courage to remain unflinchingly in place when all circumstances seem to cry out for action. To nourish oneself through inaction is to absorb the energy of one's instinctive responses and transform it. Noticing the snappy comment as it surfaces and redirecting its force into attention.
The road to conscious inaction depends on understanding the need for action from up close.