I have committed myself to doing the Day Zero Project, and while I haven’t officially started, I have decided that tonight is just as good as any to kick off one of my goals and start answering the 50 Questions That Will Free Your Mind.
1.) How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?
That is a really, really hard question for me to answer. I have found myself increasingly preoccupied with my age as I’ve gotten older. I think this primarily has to do with the fact that I haven’t quite reached the level of personal, financial, academic, and professional success that my younger self imagined would come along with being 23-years-old. That said, I’m not really doing badly, if I want to be honest with myself. I may not have a lot of close friends, but the ones I do have are pretty awesome; I might not have the most prestigious job ever, but I’ve escaped retail hell, I make a decent amount of money, and I don’t dread going to work in the morning; I have my own apartment in a city I love, and most of the time my life is generally not too shabby. On the other side of things, I’m still pretty immature when I want to be (and sometimes when I don’t), I’m not always as sure of myself as I think someone my age “should” be, and my romantic life is currently stuck in a whole “I don’t feel worthy of going after the people I like thanks to one long, drawn out, quasi-rejection” sort of state that needs to be broken. Reflecting upon all that, I would say that I’m probably somewhere between 22 and 25 years of age…so, not too far off the mark, actually.
2.) Which is worse, failing or never trying?
I struggle with this one on a daily basis, but I’d honestly have to say that never trying is way worse than failing. If you never try to attain something which you want, you’ll just belabor the process of moving past it and you’ll also short-change yourself out of the opportunity to experience failure and let it strengthen you as a person.
3.) If life is so short, why do we do so many things we don’t like and like so many things we don’t do?
For me, this absolutely boils down to mindlessly performing tasks which I think I’m supposed to do in order to be a “happy, well-adjusted adult.” Often, I think it’s pretty common just to do things because they’re culturally expected of us or because we’re too mentally lazy to analyze ourselves and figure out what we really, really want and trace out a path to reaching a place where the actions we perform aren’t knee-jerk reactions, but rather mindful steps toward making ourselves happy. This question actually fits perfectly into my current goal of completely my Day Zero Project. For me, I think the thing that truly held me back from doing the things I want to do before was the fact that I continually made excuses and never really felt like I was living my “real life” at the moment, so to speak. There was always the whole “Oh, I’ll wait for X, Y, and Z before I do A, B, and C” line of thinking that I allowed to stand in my way, and quite frankly, that is complete and utter bullshit. As I’ve spent the last 23 years learning over and over, every day you spend procrastinating about making yourself happy, is another day that you spend proactively making yourself miserable.
4.) When it’s all said and done, will you have said more than you’ve done?
Given that I’m naturally a very loquacious person (online and in writing, anyway!), I almost certainly will have said more than I have done…unless I take some action to change to that. Though, I’m not really sure have said more than I’ve done is entirely a horrible thing, to be honest. Words are an extremely valuable and under-appreciated currency in my opinion. Given that, I really do need to work much harder at moving beyond the conceptual world of words and actually acting upon my meticulous plans in a timely fashion.
5.) What is the one thing you’d most like to change about the world?
Damn. This seriously a hard one. I realize it’s incredibly cliche, but I would honestly be grateful to see a world in which the great monsters of ego and entitlement were slain. I think those two things contribute so overwhelmingly to global ills that eliminating them would doubtlessly be the start of something good.
I can honestly say that each one of these questions could have easily been fleshed out into their own post, but I think just answering them at all and getting myself thinking about what they entail is as good a start as any, to be honest. So…look forward to the next nine installments?