Psychology

Lately, I lost my ability to focus and maintain a flow state. I don’t sleep late, I eat relatively healthy food, and I’m not dopamine addicted. The problem comes down to practices that would align your efforts with what you want to achieve.

The art must have a purpose other than itself, or it collapses into infinite recursion.

I’ve spent a lot of time confused about my own wiring. not in a debilitating way, more like an ongoing low grade puzzle that I kept returning to. the confusion had a specific shape: I knew I was deeply analytical, the kind of person who could sit with an idea for hours without needing it to go anywhere, who would trace a concept back to its roots just for the satisfaction of understanding it fully. but I also noticed I was restless whenever nothing was being made. not bored exactly. more like something in me would protest, ask what all this thinking was actually for.

This is part of a series of notes I’m taking to understand the person I am when learning something. most of them are about understanding myself and applying useful techniques.

Reading about neuroscience can help me save time instead of experimenting blindly and trying to see what works. and I plan to study neuroscience some day, but as for now I want to share what I’ve learned by myself, as I spent the first 19 years of my life learning how to learn. I never even signed up for the famous Coursera course on this topic. the road of learnign was lonely, paved with faliure moods, it was an experimentation based road.

I call this problem floating information. It is a literal translation of the Arabic word “طائفة”, which means floating in space without connection. I first noticed that there is information that is not linked to anything. it has no context, it solves no problem, and this kind of information is the hardest to keep in my mind. I forget it very easily.