Things that brought me joy this week:
New bedsheets (that’s also a shade of blue)
It seems my wife and I gravitate towards this colour. Might as well lean into it, right? I’m aware it looks purple in the photo thanks to daylight, but it’s more similar to our wall/bedframe colour.
Homemade sangria!
No photo here unfortunately, but for something that costs $15 a glass, it’s remarkably easy to make at home. And I think it cost us about $20 to make 1.5 jugs.
My wife soft-launched her home-brewed Hong Kong milk tea business this week!
I’m so proud of her!
She’s been working on the recipe for the past few years, and it started out as a solution to a simple problem - it was during COVID lockdowns and she couldn’t leave the house to buy milk tea. Very thankful for those who have ordered - you know who you are :)
Most of my work is digital and word-based, so it’s such a different entity to work on physical products and taking baby steps into e-commerce.
Anyhow, if you’re based in Singapore, check it out below! Either follow the business on Telegram and Instagram, or place an order online. It’s different from the other drinks out there, and I would say this even if I wasn’t married to her. :D
Since I’m done with Starfield for now, I started immersing myself into Baldur’s Gate 3 over the weekend.
Takes me back to the days I spent as a teenager playing stuff like Dragon Age Origins and Neverwinter Nights. Ugh, it’s so good. Production value is top-notch, voice acting on point (especially Amelia Tyler as the narrator) and there’s so much to do.
Plus, D&D and magic! Yay!
What I’m thinking about
Realisation of the week: I complete more video games and enjoy them more when I focus on playing one at a time.
OK this seems obvious. But hear me out!
Previously I would jump around games and play multiple ones simultaneously because I got bored and wanted a change of taste. Which is pretty bad when your wheelhouse is 100+ hour long RPGs which take you months to finish on a working adult’s schedule.
So here’s what ends up happening.
“Oh shit, what was I doing here before I stopped? What button do I press to access that ability? Who’s that character again and why does he hate me?”
It was exhausting to keep up.
And then I think to myself: “Dammit, shiny object syndrome and llama brain strikes again!”
So I was in a constant state of switching, switching and more switching. It’s a real case of shiny object syndrome, where I pick up something new cos it looked cool, try it for a bit and drop it because I got bored.
But when I commit to one, it’s easier to get immersed in the world. I don’t need to spend some time fumbling around to relearn controls or find out what I was doing before I stopped.
It’s so strange, shouldn’t having more options be better?
That’s not always the case, thanks to the paradox of choice - where having too many choices can be worse than having constraints.
In his 2018 commencement speech, writer and civic advocate Pete Davis captures this state of ‘neither-here-nor-there’ brain haze of scrolling, scrolling, and more scrolling.
“It’s late at night and you start browsing Netflix looking for something to watch. You scroll through different titles — you even read a few reviews — but you just can’t commit to watching any given movie. Suddenly it’s been 30 minutes and you’re still stuck in Infinite Browsing Mode, so you just give up — you’re too tired to watch anything now, so you cut your losses and fall asleep.”
If you go even deeper, this principle applies to everything. Hobbies, dating, fitness, business decisions, deciding what to watch for date night, or what to wear. Humans aren’t built to multi-task, and maybe it’s time to admit to myself that I don’t multi-task as efficiently as I thought I did.
Side note, maybe this abundance of options is why we’re so bad at dealing with information overload and our attention spans are suffering. I love this topic, and I wrote an entire essay on it which you can check out here.
The solution to this llama brain problem? According to Pete, it’s committing to things for the long haul.
We may have come here to help keep our options open, but I leave believing that the most radical act we can take is to make a commitment to a particular thing… to a place, to a profession, to a cause, to a community, to a person. To show our love for something by working at it for a long time — to close doors and forgo options for its sake.
I loved reading the speech btw, it prompted this reflection on my relationship with information, decisions and choosing what to focus on.
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Speaking of which, I’ve always wanted to commit to a Depth Year, where you take a whole year in which you don’t start anything new or acquire any new possessions you don’t need.
That means no new hobbies, games and books. You focus on engaging with the hobbies and consuming what you’ve already got
I’ll be honest, it scares me. The back of my brain is like.. “but, sales! But new thing that will change my life!” (Honestly, it probably won’t. It’s the time and energy you invest in things that will change your life, rather than picking up 100 new things and dropping them at the tip of a hat).
I say this, but my lizard brain says otherwise.
Dammit brain! Why you like this.
It has been so long since I read anything on raptitude.com! What a fun surprise to click on Depth Year to land there. I imagine if I committed, I would be forced to re-discover all the thing I previously started but stopped.
Interesting post! I really like the phrase "Infinite Browsing Mode" that Davis uses. But for me, part of the problem is the situation, not the activity. Just why would he be browsing for Netflix options late at night?
You mention lizard brains. That notion, as I understand it, stems from the "triune brain" concept, which is described as "one of the most successful and widespread errors in all of science" by neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett in 'Seven And A Half Lessons About The Brain' (p. 15). https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48930266-seven-and-a-half-lessons-about-the-brain
It's a good read!