Ian's Blog of Doom

I’ve always been a pretty outgoing person. I like being around people, joking with friends, and inserting myself into conversations whether I was invited or not. I’m not the type to sit quietly in the corner or back away from group plans. But for someone as social as I am, I’ve always found it interesting how much I still value those small, quiet moments of being alone. Not all the time, but just enough to make me realize that being alone and being lonely are two completely different things. For me, being alone isn’t about escaping people. It’s more about making space to think. When I’m around others, especially in busy or loud environments, I don’t really think that much. There’s so much going on, especially with my attention constantly being pulled from one thing to another. I like that energy, don’t get me wrong, but after a while, it builds up. That’s when I feel the need to retreat for a bit. Not to shut everyone out, but to give my brain some breathing room. S ome of my favorite...

Every time I end up on social media, I always see some absurdly productive high school freshman giving advice on how to manage time. They all say the same thing. Focus on what's important. Get rid of distractions. Allocate your free time to doing something important. I used to watch them over and over again, and then save them for future use. But of course, they were all eventually forgotten, buried in hundreds of more videos that had the same prospect of revisitation. I could never figure out why I didn't have that same motivation to do more, and I still don’t know. Probably something to do with my laziness. While others were doing something productive, I would always end up goofing off with friends after school or doing some random activity. I hated the fact that I was wasting my time with these random things and not focusing on something more important to my life. But over time, I started to notice something strange. Those little moments of “doing nothing” stuck with me. The...