Infatuation

an intense yet fleeting feeling of love or passion for someone or something

Now that I’m in Bangkok again I’m reminded of some thoughts I had here last year. One of which was this thing where I realised that I’d be infatuated with someone for maybe 24 hrs and then they’d do one thing, some innocuous nothing-y thing that demonstrated our differences perhaps and the whole illusion would be shattered and I’d realise “ah yes, I’m not in love with you”.

I can recall most of these experiences pretty well though I am reluctant to name names so if you happen to spot yourself in this rambling of mine, then you should know that for a moment, however brief, I was totally and utterly into you. Not that I am now of course. Probably.

Infatuation is a funny thing. 

It’s a swirl of emotions, so intense that it feels like it’s almost real and that it’ll go on forever and ever and ever but then just at that peak of it all, at the moment where you’re ready to confess to the world that you’ve hit upon some unexpected love-at-first-sight-rom-com-shit, right then, something happens and the bubble bursts. 

This kinda sounds like I’m talking about one night stands but I’m not, primal attraction to someone is one thing; this is something else. I’m talking about these girls I’ve met through various random encounters and ended up deep in conversation with – I’ve become an audience for their story and as I listen, dopamine starts to pollute my brain and I become enthralled. I reciprocate with my story and they listen intently too. More dopamine hits. This is not a “Hey, how are you?” conversation. No. This is some real marrow, something substantial to gnaw on. The conversation gets deeper, emotional even. The dopamine takes over. I look at them adoringly and think “Holy shit this is it”. 

But then, right at that moment, they say something that catches me off guard. They say something that highlights who they really are and all of a sudden our incompatibility is made clear. We aren’t in love, we don’t know each other, hell we probably wouldn’t even make good friends. The dopamine recedes. I think more intently about if I was even interested in what they were actually saying earlier as I sip whatever herbal tea I’ve bought or whatever beer I can find and say to myself “Huh, guess not”. The dopamine abandons me for another evening.

One of these times was after a particularly long night out that culminated in a drunken breakfast in a desperately posh hotel. I had been dancing with her all night with barely a word spoken and decided to leave to catch a relatively decent nights sleep. As if by chance as I was leaving the bar, she appeared and took me to a food truck.  We ate and laughed and she completely took the piss out of every word I said. I loved it.

An hour or so of this and we were deep deep deep in conversation and then the night was over. We watched the city wake up while we spoke more and more. The conversation got deeper and the hours rolled by. It was early and I wanted breakfast, we found a fancy hotel and strolled in, defying the supposedly strict dress code. We spoke more. I was into her. The posh hotel, the half laying down style seating we were on – it was dangerously romantic. We spoke even more, and sipped away at our drinks almost fawning at each other. For at least that morning, I was besotted. But then she said something, something innocuous, I can’t even exactly recall what it was, but right then and there the illusion just shattered and I realised oh, she’s lovely but… This isn’t love.

Anyway…

While I recognise that these feelings stem from infatuation above all else, I enjoy the experiences when they happen. It’s fucking delightful that for even a tiny amount of time I get to slip into a little fantasy world where this other person is everything to me. It feels so real and emotional. Like one of those Disney shorts that outclasses the movie you came to see. In your dopamine stupefied foolishness you decided to lean into your emotions and you got to feel something almost real. How lovely.

Perhaps there’s no true purpose to these experiences and they just add a little flavour to life or perhaps you need to go through them time and again, because one of these days when you’re knee deep in conversation with someone, listening intently, you’ll realise that you’re not feeling some short lived infatuation, and it’s something a little more. I do hope that’s the case.

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Quotes I’m vibing with rn:

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom – Søren Kierkegaard

If you want to outwit the devil, it’s terribly important you don’t give him advance notice – Alan Watts

Our ideal wise man feels his troubles, but overcomes them – Seneca

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Favourite song for now:

Occasionally I take leaps when things get too comfortable. This means that sometimes I give up a safe and consistent thing in the hopes of something greater, banking on the future. This doesn’t always work out for me. When I do it in business, things tend to go my way or in a positive direction. When I do it in relationships, things go awry to say the least.

Small side note here to keep my ego on its toes but until maybe 2 years ago I pronounced “awry” as aw-ree. 

It’s not that I hate feeling comfortable, I love it in a lot of ways and I am very much a creature of habit and would be woefully easy to assassinate if you knew my routine. It’s more that somewhere within the comfortable, there’s this consistency, and a little beyond that there’s this creeping sense of stagnation. Like I feel as though if I don’t take some massive leap, make a enormous life change, you know, uproot my entire life, end a very positive relationship, or change my whole personality, that I’ll get stuck and that this comfortable position will be all I ever have. And then I wonder, is that enough?

My polluted ego barks “No! It is never enough”, but the side of me that read and internalised some Taoism retorts that  “greed only knows one word: more” and thus the argument continues. The louder ego usually takes hold and then I find myself in a completely different mode of living a few months down the line and either comfort starts to set in and the argument gradually resumes or I think, “fuck, that spiritual prick was right, everything was fine before” and then drift into some kind of depression. The depression usually culminates in my begrudging acceptance that I can’t exactly change the past, and a thought that somewhere down the line I will find what I’m looking for.

It’s kind of annoying that having some awareness of this doesn’t automatically give me the answer to how not to be like this

Anyway, for the past 10 months or so I tried to combat this instinct and decided to ground myself for a while. Despite a few near misses with enticingly cheap flights or some vague ideas of running away to go and study something inane, I did actually manage to stably remain in one place and mostly maintain a consistent personality. Go me.

But the 10 months is over, and I have taken a leap.

I like to think that this leap is different but I was asked by someone very dear to me “What are you running away from this time?” which threw a spanner in the works mentally.

The problem with the question is that it ignites paranoia within me and forces me to actually consider “Well, are you running away from something?”. Not a fun question to answer. 

I then start to wonder if I’m actually taking leaps at all or if all I’m doing is running. 

I’ve been wrestling with that question for a while and I will say that possibly there’s something I am running from.

For now I’d sooner not discuss it too deeply as I fear that writing a response to that one might take me down a sad little road for a while and I could do with avoiding that so here’s what I will say:

This time, I took the leap to get more out of life, and to try new things though as I write this, I notice I’m eating the same salad I eat everyday and I’m sat in the same slightly hunched manner staring at a screen as every day so… Well… There’s limits to how far I’ll leap.

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Quotes I’m vibing with rn:

May we all have the chance to prove that money can’t buy happiness – Spike Milligan

Do not worry the whole world is waiting for you – Comment under a TikTok video about baby ducks crossing a path

You are struggling to find a purpose. For now, let your purpose be to better yourself – Seneca I think? Maybe Epictetus, honestly cannot find this one again…

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Favourite song for now:

I saw a few pictures of myself from a couple of years ago and I felt, hmm, what’s a negative form of nostalgia? I hated them and wanted to distance myself from that feeling.

When you’re learning to love yourself are you learning to love all previous versions of yourself or just this current one?

It’s like looking at those pictures took me back to a time that I do not look upon fondly and a place that did not bring me many good times, I felt ill.

I’ve noticed that I’ve been thinking like this a lot lately. When I see people who aren’t really in my life now that knew earlier versions of me and they reminisce I get a serious urge to leave and will do my utmost to drag the conversation down a different more recent path, anything that avoids me having to speak on who I was. I guess the issue is that my current self doesn’t identify with who I was in the past. Not that much time has even passed between now and then but the changes internally have been so significant that any time spent dwelling on the past feels like regression, and invites this haunting feeling that I may become that again. It’s as though time spent in the past is like standing in quick sand, I can feel it dragging me in, and I hate it.

I like my present, I am excited for my future. I do not want to live in my past and while there are some memories I look upon fondly, I’d prefer not to be reminded of earlier iterations of me.

But what is it that I dislike so much about my past selves? There’s this TikTok I watched recently and this girl said “There is only one question that really matters: what is it that you are unwilling to feel?”. So what is it that I’m unwilling to feel here?

Perhaps I’m avoiding confronting my past selves maybe because I haven’t actually changed that much in a lot of ways and any serious reflection might make me notice that things aren’t all that different. So maybe I’m refusing to identify with my past because I don’t want to feel that I’m still the same. A fear that I’ve not changed. A fear that in the reflection I’ll find the same face looking back at me.

Wait.

No.

Fuck that.

I have changed. I am different. I have done more things, I’ve felt more things, I’ve been to more places, I’ve changed my opinions on things, I’ve developed thoughts more, and learnt a lot of new stuff. I am not the same. Okay fine. I may not have changed everything, and clearly there’s parts of current me that are far too similar to earlier versions of me, that I’m uncomfortable even confronting but reconciliation of the past and current self is necessary if I want to develop. And I do.

I know that I am different and this feeling I have, this fear, that I’ll regress into an earlier me from any reflection into my past is unjustified.

The feeling I’m “refusing to feel” isn’t just this regression thing, it’s also this sickly feeling that other people knew me when I wasn’t at my best. I see the me I am now as so much better than any other me and I’m almost ashamed that people had to meet these semi-formed versions of me that are so not who I am. In their minds, I’m still that same person. To them I’ve not changed.

In my posts I usually present some kind of cure to my anguish, and this time I have a few strategies on offer. Primarily, if a person is no longer in your life then fuck ’em, their opinion on you is so comically irrelevant to who you are now that you ought to just discard it (if you figure out how to do this, please let me know…). Secondly, you can go and interact with them as your present self – ideally you’d want this to be fairly organic but if you get the chance, and need to keep your ego nice and intact, you can go and meet these people who knew you as an earlier you, and present this new and improved version of yourself. Might help the ego. And finally, therapy. lol.

Anyway, probably time for me to take another look at the pictures.

I’ve always found it difficult to maintain an authentic self. To one person I might seem interesting and charming, to a person in my past a little bit of a hedonist, to another I’m enterprising and business-y, to some I’m self centred and dry, to others caring(ish) and thoughtful (occasionally). I think if you haven’t yet decided on who you are and the position is still malleable, you’ll find yourself obscuring your shape to fit into different scenarios without really maintaining an authentic self, you’re just masquerading as another person.

Obviously there is some benefit to being able to wear masks here and there and that chameleon like nature does permit you to move through circles that an “authentic you” may not be as comfortable traversing. You’ll wear clothes corresponding to the people and place; change your conversation to give out the vibe you’re looking to impart; you might change your drink order or eat something outside your base diet; you’ll almost certainly change how you talk and how you carry yourself – you have to give out the right impression, of course.

It’s a defence mechanism, you wear the mask so that nothing can actually harm your real self, if someone insults this character you’ve created, it does far far less damage than if you were being authentic and vulnerable. When you’re being authentic, you’re exposed and you feel more vulnerable so, as a precaution, it’s easier for you to keep the mask on – nothing gets through the mask. But, while the defence is useful, there is a really desperately sad aspect to it, which is, that by not being authentic and vulnerable and not taking the risk to show your real self to someone, you won’t feel anything as deeply, you won’t know whether or not you really like someone, and your ability to feel any genuine joy will atrophy – yes you block out the attacks, but you also stop anything positive from getting through to you. But fuck me, taking masks off is scary.

The fear isn’t just that by showing authenticity, you feel you’re at risk, there’s also deep internal fear that frequent wearing of masks can cause you to lose a little of yourself and when you remove the mask, you’re not certain what will be left.

In the same vein, sometimes method actors take their character preparation to the extreme and through devotion or something more sinister, find themselves lost in their roles, not entirely certain where the masks begins and where their face ends.

It’s not an easy thing to figure out when you’re being inauthentic and I’m not sure I have a cure-all solution for that but I can say that if you’re suddenly apathetic about everything in your life, if you’re lacking feeling, and drifting into nihilism, if your old friends are highlighting negative changes in you, then dude, drop the fucking act and take off the mask. There are things out there that you like, there are places you’ve been that you have enjoyed, there are people that you love – it’s time to go back to who you are and revisit them!

Recently, I’ve been trying to spot when I’m being inauthentic and while I am grateful that through wearing various masks I have been able to experiment with different personalities and styles, I find that the cold nature of inauthenticity does not align with the real me. I guess now I’m just in a place where I actually want to feel things, and I’ll take the good with the bad – whatever it takes to feel the good.

I’ve noticed over the past few years that when people have problems they list them one after another mentally and in conversation they often present them all at once. It makes the problems seem entirely insurmountable as this wall of problems contains so many issues that it would be impossible to even attempt to resolve them. I call it “problem stacking”. 

Some people seem to do it as a defence from having to actually analyse and resolve their problems, likely because they’re afraid of having to fix the issues themselves or afraid that they won’t know how to fix them. That fear is so overwhelming for some that they find it easier to have this mental list of insurmountable issues to spew out if someone, for example, suggests a better path for them that they could take if they dealt with some of the problems.

While my old response was to see these people in a negative light and write them off, in recent times better instincts have prevailed and I’ve been trying to help people deal with their problem stacks, though generally selfishly so that I don’t have to listen to them complain about shit that I know they can obviously resolve.

Here’s a few things I’ve learnt:

• You cannot deal with a whole stack of problems at once, you have to look at each problem individually
• Most problems are not that hard to deal with on their own – be brave and take them on one by one!
• A lot of problems are just symptoms of other problems – prioritise fixing the root cause and the symptoms will abate
• Some things cannot be fixed so the golden rule must be “if you can change it, why worry? If you can’t change it, why worry?”

What you’re going to find when you confront your own stack of problems is that a lot of them are pretty fucking easy to deal with once you take them out of the stack and start to figure out what the issue is and the most effective path to a resolution. Most things generally are not that hard to solve. “Life admin” tasks like this are boring as hell but if you can fix some of these problems then that mental burden you’ve been carrying will lighten, and you’ll become a far better person for it.

You’ll also see, though very rarely, that some problems can’t be fixed but you can change how you feel about them and accept the situation, remove them from your problem stack, and move on. It’s up to you to figure out which problems can’t be fixed but trust me, nearly all of them can be. There’s a 50 Cent song, “Gotta Make It To Heaven”, where he recites the Lord’s Prayer. Now I’m not religious and frankly the only reason I know any semblance of a prayer is because it appears on one of the greatest rap albums of all time but these words are pretty relevant here so I’ll leave you with them:

“Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”

You know, right now things are good. I’m actually kinda happy. I quite like this life despite how small it is. I get up, go for a little walk listening to an audiobook, do a few hours of work, make some lunch, couple more emails, go for a run, reflect a little, make a little dinner, watch a little movie or play a little xbox, then sleep and repeat. Sounds boring but truthfully I kinda like it, throw in a little spontaneity on weekends and, shit, I really like it. Despite my enjoyment, one quote does bother me at present “Life is too short to be small“, thanks Disraeli.

Anyway, my present happiness is fairly new and while I am passively concerned for it’s longevity and stability, I am thinking that maybe, just maybe, I could be even happier.

In this pursuit, I recognise that directly seeking more happiness isn’t viable, happiness is a result, it’s not a base element. You need to do things or be with people or think things etc that result in you feeling happy. Accomplishing growth in happiness requires you to push out a little, it requires you to go and do stuff slightly beyond your comfort zone. So in order to grow and potentially become happier, you have to risk the little happiness you’ve now cultivated, and you have to embrace some discomfort.

Psychologists call this tolerable discomfort “the zone of proximal development” or “ZPD”. It’s the boundary slightly beyond your existing comfort zone and as result it causes some unease and discomfort, though not too much, and it’s tolerable enough that you can always retreat back to your fortified comfort zone if things get too much.

I haven’t played much in my ZPD for a while, primarily because I’ve been trying to repair my foundations and ensure my newly built fortifications are steady but now they’re pretty much ready for action which means I’m approaching the point where it’s time to build on them again. Kind of nerve-wracking. Kind of exciting.

Time to get uncomfortable and seek a little more happiness.

P.S. I have overused the word “little” in this and for that I can only apologise, the word seems to have polluted my head this evening.

You know when you have the freedom to do whatever you want, sometimes you end up in this state where there are so many options in front of you, just infinite possibilities that making any choice is so overwhelming that you just become paralysed by your indecision. I’ve been like that for a long time.

I read these lines from Sylvia Plath about her sitting in a fig tree looking at the branches ahead of her. Each branch in the tree was a life path she could take; one a scholar, the other an athlete, the next a mother, and countless other branches. She sits there for so long that one by one the figs at the end of each branch wither and die, and she in turn, unable to decide which fig to have, starves to death.

There’s a similar tale – Buridan’s donkey – where a donkey is placed in between hay on one side and water on the other, the donkey can’t decide if it should go for the hay or the water for so long that it dies.

I’ve been feeling like this donkey, and like Plath, for a long time. Always in between options. It’s done serious damage to any previous mindfulness I was able to achieve so now I’m trying to look at things in a different way, and it’s working.

You see, the problem, I think, is options. I think we over present options to ourselves, I think we actually drown our dreams in a sea of options. When you have infinite options or a shit tonne of them, you force yourself to go through the ringer in a pros and cons based approach of deciding which option is better than the other without ever truly asking yourself WHAT DO YOU WANT. Not “what are the options?” but “what do you want?”.

Not an easy question to answer but it will have an answer. There will be an answer to that question and you sure as shit will not find it by analysing every possible option and working backwards through them.

While asking yourself what you want can be helpful, you may end up still spewing out more than one option, so, indecision continues. A few solutions have been offered to me through friends and through books but I think the best answer is a combination and one philosopher, Kirkegaard, sums it up pretty well.

Kirkegaard talks of this topic extensively and calls this over-optionality, and analysis of infinite possibilities, the “dizziness of freedom”. He talks of the anxiety felt in this situation and offers probably the optimal “way out” of this trap you’ve caught yourself in. “Take a leap of faith” he says. Make a decision. Pick one of your options and just commit to it.

I think if you do this, shit, I mean, if I do this, I think fairly quickly I’ll figure out whether or not the decision was the right one and then I can make a decision to carry on or to take another leap of faith, either way I won’t be starving to death in a fig tree.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Blaise Pascal

I spend a lot of time in my own company – “alone” is what people tend to call it but I’m not alone, I’m there, present and listening. I find that in these periods of self imposed isolation I get nice and introspective; question my thoughts, objectives, feel things. It’s meditative.

Quite often I’ll figure something out about myself that I hadn’t quite realised or I’ll be reviewing recent interactions with someone and understand, to a greater degree, what they meant. I can spend hours just with myself contemplating the past and planning for the future. It’s made me a better person and allowed me to slow down my thinking – I now have breathing room for my thoughts and consider them to a deeper level which has ensured that my actions that follow now come from a more conscious position. But it wasn’t always like this.

I think initially people struggle being only with themselves because they have thoughts that they’re not yet comfortable processing or at least not comfortable processing alone. I’d also wager that they have a tough time getting to sleep at night sober, the external silence of the solitary night turns the internal volume right up. It’s not easy. You have to really be able to sit there and let these thoughts happen and if you’re not ready to listen to them, then that time in solitude will be fucking awful because there’s a conflict happening – your mind is being filled with thoughts, and you want to run away from them but remember that you cannot outrun your thoughts and you’ll carry them with you until you deal with them. I’ve tried to run from thoughts before. Hell I’ve travelled 10s of thousands of miles trying to run from them. It does not work. Those little fuckers are persistent. Socrates writes “How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you?“ and how annoyingly accurate he is. You need to deal with the thing that drove you to leave in the first place and the best way to determine what that thing is, is to ask yourself. If you sit with yourself, somewhere quiet, it will come to you.

I said “sit” then, but my real method of figuring out how to enjoy solitude and use it to my advantage is to walk. I walk. I walk around parks, random hills, to little lakes, everywhere. It’s delightful. I wander around and I think things; sometimes useful things that I grip onto and explore, and sometimes unhelpful things where I’ll watch and try to determine where they came from. Sometimes in this observing, I’ll notice a little thread I can pull on, a little theme between the lines of a thought, and when I do find these little threads, I start to pull intensely – I’ll analyse, I’ll dig, and hopefully I’ll find something. Then I can determine whether or not the discovery is actionable or just something that I need to move on from by feeling and then accepting. I’m not an expert at this but I have found that in just wandering around by myself and letting my mind roll, a lot of things start to make a little more sense.

Give solitude a chance.

How much does it cost to have fun? When making making most purchases, I often consider this cost vs enjoyment “principle” – I want to enjoy myself and not be limited by money but I recognise that money and enjoyment aren’t linked exactly and I can’t spend my way to happiness or can I?

When you increase expenditure on something you desire to get more out of it: “it costs more so it should be better” (and make you feel better). This doesn’t seem to be the case though a lot of the time. I’ve stayed in horrifically expensive hotels that are pointlessly decadent and, more importantly, entirely un-fun despite the fact that their rates were 5x other places nearby. Did I feel 5x happier? No. Did I have 5x more fun? No fucking way.

So money doesn’t exactly correlate to making things more fun or making you happier, a point well discussed by plenty of people smarter than me BUT there are frequent exceptions where increasing expenditure does lead to a more fun, and therefore better, outcome.

For example, when traveling, a bus might be 10x cheaper than an Uber but it takes twice as long and is multiples more uncomfortable so generally even at the higher price, the Uber, by virtue of getting you there faster and without having to deal with other people, is going to win here as cost and enjoyment align or are certainly closer to aligning.

When choosing somewhere to stay on holiday, yes, the hostel bed in a shared room of 10 people is super social and 3x cheaper than the private room but it is going to cause far far more discomfort than that 3x price reduction appears to alleviate – you try getting to sleep with strangers shagging and snoring all night, not fun. However, the hotel room that’s twice as expensive as the private room at the hostel likely isn’t going to be 2x more comfortable despite the major price hike, it’s also going to be unsociable as nobody, bar business men and hookers, meets new people in hotels, in this argument, if you’re travelling solo, the private hostel room wins. The cost vs enjoyment aligns.

I generally struggle to interact with people who don’t understand this argument and who always, no matter what, go for the absolute cheapest option and entirely neglect the possible gains of enjoyment from spending a little more.[Note: if you don’t have the money, you don’t have the money, I’m talking about misers not people who are skint]. You can have a better time if you spend a little more, in the right way. If you want the cocktail that’s a few pounds more than the others then get it and enjoy it, you shouldn’t allow small expenditures of money to limit your enjoyment.

I have wondered frequently where this desire for the cheapest thing comes from in people, I used to think it was people letting value-seeking-bargain-hunting instincts go into overdrive to the point where the real value was lost in exchange for the false value of something just having a low price but now I’m fairly certain it’s some kind of post-poverty mindset drilled into people who have gone from having no money to “some money”. Anyway, I may explore this in a future post.

In the meantime, I’ll remind myself that spending should align with enjoyment.

One prevalent issue you notice in a lot of interactions is that people can’t take themselves out the equation when talking. “I” forms the basis of nearly every sentence and every time they speak it’s all “I, I, I”. Very ego heavy but most people’s favourite topic is themselves as it’s the topic they’re most well versed in.

This kinda thing highlights a truth that most people are pretty poor conversation partners and perhaps that they don’t quite understand or at least internalise that other people have thoughts/feelings/an internal world.

I wouldn’t suggest doing this frequently but when either you’re not keen on revealing your cards or you’re experimenting or in conversation with a person who can only talk about themselves, lean into it. It’s not hard to do: just stop saying “I”. Literally. Ask questions to the other person but do not respond with “I” anything if they reciprocate with a question. Don’t try to relate or talk about yourself, just converse but do not use the word “I”.

Something I [the dreaded “I”, necessary for this blog post] have noticed, and others clearly have too, is that conversations are often far more interesting when you take yourself out of them. If you remove “I” and you stop talking about yourself for while, you can start to really genuinely listen to the other person. And you’ll find that occasionally they’re pretty interesting or at least have a few unique thoughts and perspectives for you to chew on. A little marrow.

Every time I’ve done this, conversations have improved dramatically, as have the relationships between me and the other person. I’d argue this is because conversations can get past that boring surface level shit faster if it’s just one person talking about themselves and you inquiring about them; the opening up on their side adds a significant amount of intimacy.

Another benefit is that fairly quickly you can determine if you actually like this person because, by virtue of being (or at the very least appearing) interested and finding out more about them, they’ve revealed who they are to you. Allows you to make a more informed decision on them in relation to you.

There is a little trap here though that I’d like to warm you about if you are going to try this with new people, sometimes you might realise that you really do like this other person but they don’t know anything about you. So all their cards have been revealed, but none of yours have. You may end up in this one-sided intimacy – you know them, they don’t know you. Tread lightly.