Jess lanai

‘I am less attracted by successes which I might secure along trodden roads, by examinations, influence, the study of documents, seniority, the favour of my superiors. Still, there are moments when I cannot think without regret of all gratifications to vanity which awaited me in the public service; the satisfaction of having my value officially recognized by swift promotion; . . . The pleasing sensation of being regarded as a capable and useful person; the glamour which would surround me and my family—-all these considerations dazzle me when I have drunk a bottle of wine.

‘I need careful and sober reflection to convince me that they are but cobwebs spun by foolish vanity, and are on the same footing as a dandy’s pride in the cut of his coat and a banker’s delight in his money; that it is unwise and useless for us to seek our happiness in the opinion of others, and that a reasonable man must live his own life in accordance with what he himself recognizes to be right and true, and must not be guided by the impression he makes on others or by the thought of what people will say about him before and after his death.

‘In a word, I am not free of ambition, though I regard it as just as bad as any of the other passions, and even more foolish, because ambition, if I give myself up to it, demands the sacrifice of all my energy and independence without guaranteeing me, even in the most fortunate event, any permanent satisfaction. . . An income sufficient for my needs and enabling me to set up house in town would not be mine, even if I were eminently successful, until I was about forty years old and had been raised to a presidency. By that time I should have become dry as dust, should have grown hypochondriacal, should have had my health undermined by a sedentary life, and should only need a wife as a sick nurse’

Otto von Bismarck quoted from a letter he sent to his fiancée. I took it from the biography written by Emil Ludwig.

Why am I quoting Bismarck?

I don’t know I found this old book randomly in a thrift store. Bought it. Started reading it. Haven’t even finished it.

I don’t even know who Bismarck is yet. But I really like reading his letters to his father and his mother and the many different women he was interested in. I aspire to make this blog like this Bismarck character’s letters.

Most of my life I have been incredibly bad at productivity.

To define ‘bad’ I mean I didn’t get things done unless I was extremely interested in doing them or I had reached the point where I had no choice left.

Like, pay the car payment or the car is getting repossessed type thing. And it wasn’t that I didn’t have money. I was just that ridiculous.

Even as I’m writing this at this moment, and thinking about how to describe it, and in doing so remembering the details, I’m in real time realizing how terrible I was and how drastically I have improved.

My improvement might even seem impressive but the truth is I was just so terrible that I had not much other options. It was get better or suffer horrendously.

Which I did suffer horrendously and it lead me to open up my mind and pay attention to any possible means of improving.

And now that I have improved and I’m not suffering horrendously I’m actually getting better and better at productivity and it is highly possible that I’ll become one of those very productive people that has a fully functioning life.

This blog had been very fun for me.

It’s also tortured me in the way that writing has always tortured me.

My motivation is on a seesaw and it never balances. It shoots up and crashes back down.

I’ll go through a period of hyper focus, motivation and confidence and then crash back down into terrible shame, avoidance and despair.

Then I’ll go right back up like I never fell down at all.

This is a very unfair advantage to motivation. Not only do I get up very high on the seesaw and crash down all spectacularly and dramatically, I also go right back up in a spilt second.

Because I go so fast from down to up I learned to not take my depressive or panicked episodes too seriously. I know I’ll feel better.

That mechanism has kept my motivation for writing very high because if I just kept doing it that crash will transform back into motivation.

But transforming a crash into motivation is not productivity. It’s an addiction. And nothing kills productivity more than an addiction.

I’m going to define what I mean by an addiction. Not the technical meaning of it but what I mean when I say addiction. What an addiction is to me and therefore why it can be bad or I guess, unwise to indulge.

An addiction is anything I use to feel better. To treat the symptom of not feeling good so I can ignore the actual disease.

It doesn’t get me anywhere. It doesn’t help me with anything of any substance it just makes me feel better.

It fixes or temporarily removes a really bad feeling and lets me avoid looking at the thing causing the really bad feeling.

Productivity is tricky. There are a lot of ways to feel productive without getting anywhere.

For they are usually things that make me feel motivated. It’s not that feeling motivated is bad. It’s just tricky. It’s not always real.

Because sometimes motivation is so deep in the future. It’s not being present with reality. And all we want sometimes is to feel like the future will be okay. So a lot of the time motivation is triggered by projection and ideas maybe even fantasies. Just all this stuff that’s not actually real.

This is remarkably difficult to explain. I have a post on here I titled ‘depression’ that helps this make a bit of sense.

But for someone like me I consider depression, the crash, to be my life saver.

I don’t have a mood disorder. I don’t jump up and down because I have bipolar or adhd or whatever.

I jump up and down as a safety break. My depression is real indication that I’m not actually getting a real result.

Because I am too easily motivated. By everything.

Depression is my full stop alarm signal. To stop and reevaluate how I’m spending my effort and time. That it’s possible I’m not actually being productive.

What is productivity?

What’s the point in it? Why do I care?

Productivity is the actions that actually produce a desired result.

I care about producing a desired result because I’ve been very terrible at doing that for the majority of my life.

And being terrible at doing that is not peaceful. It’s very chaotic. It causes a lot of consequences and problems and stress.

I would like to have a good taste of peace. Prolonged exposure to it.

I’ve started to get some exposure to peace and it is very, very nice.

It makes life more colorful and fun and it makes more things available for less cost.

So if I’m trying to produce peace what do I need for peace?

I need very basic foundational things.

The most basic foundational thing I need is good relationships with other people. But to have good relationships I need to be a happy, capable and stable individual person.

To be happy, capable and stable I need money.

Most importantly I need to not be worried about money. So I need a savings.

On top of that savings I need to make enough money that I can pay my bills, have a little fun and still contribute to a savings so I keep feeling stable.

This actually isn’t as hard as people think. Like, for basic feelings of stability I really do not need to make very much money.

But money isn’t enough for peace. How I get the money is also a huge source of my peace.

I have to like my job and the people I work with and I have to take at least a bit of pride in my job.

Everyone that sees Mektoub tells me I should be an actress.

The people that love Mektoub are even very disappointed when I tell them I have no other films or any plans for anymore films.

I’m not saying I’d never be in a film again. But here’s the thing.

Acting is really hard.

It takes a lot of exposure and managing and displaying and will powering and persevering and just so very many other ings.

You have to really love acting to be able to tolerate how hard it is.

I don’t love it enough to do all that inging.

What about my reasoning behind why I won’t go back to porn or do only fans?

Thats not hard. And that does give a lot of money.

Because porn was something I did very impulsively when I was freshly twenty. It’s not something I would have done if I was using my brain. And because of my easily motivated nature I went hardcore into it.

Eventually I hit enough of a depression wall to fully stop.

Im not saying I didn’t have some fun doing porn or that I regret it. I got a lot out of doing it. It was a mistake but mistakes can lead to interesting places sometimes.

But I am saying the act of doing porn is not the same as the result of doing porn.

I do not like the result of having done porn. The level of attention that sort of stuff gets is pretty poisonous and toxic. And poisonous attention is not fun at all.

I know a lot of the people that read this blog do know me from porn. But for the most part, this blog will not hold the interest of the people that just want that kind of entertainment.

Which is what I like about writing. Writing filters a lot of people out. Developing the skill of writing isn’t just meant for learning how to engage the right people it’s also for learning how to bore the wrong people.

So then what about writing itself as a career? Could I do that?

Well it’s not exactly a peaceful way to make money.

It might be a peaceful way to make extra money though.

And it is certainly a fantastic hobby.

Hobbies are actually very productive towards the path of peace.

I can spend hours and hours and hours working on my writing just for my own enjoyment. It’s an entirely independent way I can fulfill my little human needs.

The need to be creative and contribute and improve. I think gaining a skill, no matter what it is, is very healthy for the humanity in us that wants to solve problems and explore its ability to imagine.

Humans are so good at imagining things and then creating things from imagining that we really need to exercise that part of us to feel sane.

It can create better relationships as well.

Because I have my little writing hobby I feel very fulfilled and I always have a lot to do even if I’m left all alone. Which makes me very pleasant to be around because it gives the people around me a lot of space and freedom.

Writing as hobby is very productive to my peace. If I could also make writing an extra income it’d be even more productive.

But if I tried to turn writing into a full time career I’d be robbed of some peace. Because to make enough money from it to fully support myself would mean I’d have to please a select number of people on a consistent basis.

Which can be very very stressful and very very confusing. And can put me back on the seesaw.

Where I go up and down from high to low because if I need to depend on writing in order to survive, it starts to matter a lot more what other people think of my writing.

That can be exhausting.

The hardest thing about productivity is that it usually involves doing the very unglamorous things that are either not motivating or even kind of torture to do.

Even now, as I write this blog, I’m doing the motivating thing not the productive thing.

This blog is also a means of avoidance. Working on this blog gives me my hit of motivation while I avoid actually posting or submitting my fiction writing.

Or even exploring non fiction ways to maybe see if I could actually make a bit of money writing.

I’m not saying I shouldn’t work on this blog. I’m saying that I need to be aware that Im using it to indulge myself. And that because I am using it to indulge myself, it has to be second.

It should be what I do after I get the truly productive things done. The things that are a little bit more scary or tedious. Maybe more boring or even maybe more exposing.

Which is not what is currently happening.