Snow Leopard
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
For a long time, I've felt quite frustrated with competing interests, the many things that I'd like to do, but lack of physical capacity and concentration to do them.
Now I generally consider myself a good problem solver, and hence doubly frustrated as to why I still don't have a solution to this after so many years. I also figure I'm not the only one.
We all know about pacing, which is not just a binary choice of do/stop doing, but allocation based on how demanding a particular task is, with important tasks being allocated the highest priority for our limited periods of mental lucidity or physical capability, and followed by progressively less demanding tasks that may be less important, but are (hopefully) things we enjoy nonetheless.
Many years ago, I asked on an (able-bodied) forum, the question "if you were awake for just one hour a day, how would you spend your time". I have also asked other able bodied people the same question in the subsequent years. Most people answer along the lines of self-care and doing things that one enjoys the most. Rather than say, arguing with idiots on the internet or working in a shitty job. But most seemed to not consider personal values (perhaps someone wants to have a societal impact) and whether one could spend that time to solve one's own predicament.
There is also the question of keeping up social contact/social graces and the demands of parenthood. Many of us sacrifice friends and social graces, not because we dislike those people, but because it is so hard to keep up with all the social graces, given how thin we are spreading ourselves. Parenthood seems like a double-edged sword, placing demands on time/energy to the exclusion of most other activities, yet the unique reward of raising children. I can barely handle the attention of my nieces and nephews (albeit they are all extremely bright and demanding of attention), so I can rationalise about not having children, yet feel bitter about it at the same time.
Like most of us, I have a small amount of "useful" time where my mind kind of works, but how am I supposed to figure out how to use it? There are so many things I want to do, from a social life, exploring the city on my electric bike, to gardening, to composing music, to the wide range of volunteer work in the ME/CFS field, to pursuing postgraduate studies doing the research that I believe is fundamental to the field moving forward, that other researchers are not doing (and I have lots of actionable ideas). Yet I still recall how I felt during my undergraduate degree, which was basically study to the eclipsing of all else since I had almost no other energy to do anything else - and it took 10 years on and off, to complete a 3 year science degree.
For those of you who maintain employment in a job that you don't particularly enjoy, well, I cannot even fathom what that is like!
How can you choose what to do when there are so many valuable things to do and it takes you so much longer to complete those things than everyone else?
Now I generally consider myself a good problem solver, and hence doubly frustrated as to why I still don't have a solution to this after so many years. I also figure I'm not the only one.
We all know about pacing, which is not just a binary choice of do/stop doing, but allocation based on how demanding a particular task is, with important tasks being allocated the highest priority for our limited periods of mental lucidity or physical capability, and followed by progressively less demanding tasks that may be less important, but are (hopefully) things we enjoy nonetheless.
Many years ago, I asked on an (able-bodied) forum, the question "if you were awake for just one hour a day, how would you spend your time". I have also asked other able bodied people the same question in the subsequent years. Most people answer along the lines of self-care and doing things that one enjoys the most. Rather than say, arguing with idiots on the internet or working in a shitty job. But most seemed to not consider personal values (perhaps someone wants to have a societal impact) and whether one could spend that time to solve one's own predicament.
There is also the question of keeping up social contact/social graces and the demands of parenthood. Many of us sacrifice friends and social graces, not because we dislike those people, but because it is so hard to keep up with all the social graces, given how thin we are spreading ourselves. Parenthood seems like a double-edged sword, placing demands on time/energy to the exclusion of most other activities, yet the unique reward of raising children. I can barely handle the attention of my nieces and nephews (albeit they are all extremely bright and demanding of attention), so I can rationalise about not having children, yet feel bitter about it at the same time.
Like most of us, I have a small amount of "useful" time where my mind kind of works, but how am I supposed to figure out how to use it? There are so many things I want to do, from a social life, exploring the city on my electric bike, to gardening, to composing music, to the wide range of volunteer work in the ME/CFS field, to pursuing postgraduate studies doing the research that I believe is fundamental to the field moving forward, that other researchers are not doing (and I have lots of actionable ideas). Yet I still recall how I felt during my undergraduate degree, which was basically study to the eclipsing of all else since I had almost no other energy to do anything else - and it took 10 years on and off, to complete a 3 year science degree.
For those of you who maintain employment in a job that you don't particularly enjoy, well, I cannot even fathom what that is like!
How can you choose what to do when there are so many valuable things to do and it takes you so much longer to complete those things than everyone else?