all filler, no thriller

at what point do you stop doing things for the thrill, and start doing them just to fill your time/life?

I had a month to experiment with this thought.

it turns out, the point is much sooner than I thought.

but it also turns out, it's not about what you do, but how/why you do it.

if you keep your mind open to experimentation, and positively pursue it at least a few times a day, it becomes enough to keep yourself on the edge. but if you don't, complacency sets in quickly. and complacency becomes contagious.

for example, my playlist: listening to my ipod on shuffle sounds like it might be un-complacent, but it turns out that not having to think about what you're listening to is actually less experimental than picking an album for your mood. at the very bottom of the scale is of course listening to the same album over and over again because you can't be bothered to change it... as opposed to wanting to listen to the same album over and over again for whatever experimental reason (eg. I sometimes do it to create correlations with feelings/activities/whatever have you, just one of the infinitely possible *conscious* reasons!)

if found that it takes me about two days for complacency to turn into boredom, and suddenly, everything turns into "fillers". life loses its essence.

complacency is a many-headed monster. I've seen it in others, but without asking them (which I haven't done yet), I may be operating on a flawed premise. when it comes to myself though, I've seen it actually varies between extremes of optimization and non-optimization. and this itself is self-propagating. non-optimized activities force me into firefighting, basically hyper optimization. and that comes with the general feeling of not being in control. and of course, how do you experiment when you're not in control? you don't.

it's actually much harder to slip out of complacency than to slip into it. complacency almost seems addictive. experimentation, on the other hand, is self-propagating, but needs constant effort and revival.

and so, the experiment is over, and luckily, I'm back to experimentation with a vengeance.

time to finish my strange-but-nice cocktail (lager + tonic + ginger ale + lemon), the photo of which I did NOT instagram, turn off the radio, and go to sleep on the other side of the bed ;)