Hey all.

I’ve been away from reddit for a while. I’ve been busy being pretty immersed in my experiences. I was having a lot of social interactions and I find that nothing else has quite the magnetic pull that they do, especially intense and emotional ones, and I got pretty well sucked into them. So I spent the last few months thinking primarily about my job (which underwent big changes), my hobbies (which are quite illuminating and exciting to me but can also be truly superficial), my relationships (which also were shaken up recently), politics (one human being has 150 billion dollars and I don’t have healthcare - that’s probably not okay), etc. I experienced a lot of anxiety and found a lot of subtle and passive hindrances that I’d been blind to during these last few months. But I also learned a lot about what makes me happy, calm, mindful, and mindless. I’ve undoubtedly spent a lot of time with truly meaningless and mindless things and have spent virtually no time actively practicing wisdom. This is not my first experience with a period like this and I have no good reason to believe it will be my last.

Recently, obviously, being here writing this, I’ve begun to return to a place of contemplation and meditation and, looking back on the last few months, I have a lot to learn and investigate and unpack. It’s like I was acting out a film, and now I’ve taken the role of film critic, except my goal is less about analyzing the content of film and more about deducing the nature of film and video from the footage available.

First on that list of things to analyze is a lingering anxiety about how easily I slipped into a state of very minimal contemplation and meditation and of worldly absorption. I didn’t so much as decide to spend a long while lost in convention as I did simply not resist sliding quickly into it. I find that prolonged periods of introspection and practice exhaust me in one way, and immersive ‘humaning’ exhausts me in a different way, and the last decade has been my bouncing between them for periods of anywhere from a few months to a few years at a time.

Does anyone else experience this? Am I a puny spiritual weakling who cannot resist the temptation to become a mindless drone for more than a year at a time? Do these experiences happen on a different time scale for you? Have you developed techniques to deal with this? Do you consider spending some time mindless (as in, the antonym of mindful or aware) important or even vital to understanding reality? Or is it a sign or failure instead, and a waste of time or even detrimental? Or is it all about the way you spend such time?

And really I’d just be happy to get an update from everyone on what the water’s like for them right now. Just dump some thoughts on me, especially u/nefandi, u/triumphantgeorge, and u/aesiranatman, but everyone else too.

Edit: I apologize if any of my wording here is careless. I trust most of you to be clever enough not to be mistaken by it. I’m a bit like a sleepy cat just woken up in the morning. I’ll need a moment to regain my sharpness.