Last evening was the first time this year I was in a movie theatre. I’d forgotten what it is like to truly immerse and lose yourself into something. It’s wonderful. For those two or so hours I am absolutely locked into the world the movie is presenting. No smartphone, no distractions. You can momentarily forget about whatever that is troubling you out in the real world. Oh right, I got to do that important thing for work next week…
The movie I saw was the fourth Spider-Man movie headlined by Tom Holland. Kudos to director Destin Daniel Cretton on a fantastic job. We always love seeing Asians representing and making an impact in the wider American culture.
A Saturday night out to the movies wouldn’t be my standard cup of coffee. Because the later show times affectively delay my beginning hours of sleep. When you’re a serial life optimizer like myself, deviation from the practice can lead to not only the initial pain of going off schedule, but also the anxiety of the cascading effects caused by the deviation. Any true gym-rat can attest that missing one workout session can feel like a regression of all the recent gains, and a ruiner of subsequent sessions.
Declining to see a late movie with your friend simply because you’ve got a sleep schedule to adhere to is a terrible way to live. Optimization in it of itself is fine because I think that’s how we get to consistency. Then the habit becomes a self-sustaining flywheel. So perhaps initially you should be rather strict about working out at a specific time - all the time, or an absolute ban on certain foods because you’ve got diet goals.
It is then difficult to get out of that mode because obviously the optimization has given you positive results. Otherwise it wouldn’t have grown to become habits. So you feel like you cannot deviate. But it is crucial that once the flywheel is achieved, we allow some randomness and serendipity back into the schedule. A compromised night of sleep will be forgotten in a few days. The time spent with friends enjoying a movie is a pleasant memory worth remembering.
That’s the central theme I got out of Spider-Man: Brand New Day: it’s fine to work on yourself and go at it alone for a while, but eventually you will need friends and human interaction to have a fulfilling life.
Hydration break.