Do it fast, do it now - The Ghost that is haunting me.

I recognize the ghost that’s been haunting me.
It’s been a few years—almost a decade, honestly—that I’ve lived by the mantra: "Do it fast, do it now."
The fast and the now are what have been slowly burning me out.

Right now, I’m reading Cal Newport’s new book, Slow Productivity, and a lot of it resonates with me.
Living by that "do it fast, do it now" mindset, I’ve ended up making quick decisions without really thinking about where my priorities should lie. What Cal calls "pseudo-productivity" is exactly what I’ve been doing. And it's taking a toll. The result? Low-value output that I keep churning out.
This blog is a good example too — I wanted to blog daily to gather views, but now I realize this is just as much about me needing a place to let out my feelings and emotions as it is about making new connections with people around the world.

That old mantra has summoned an unfortunate guest — a phantom that lives at the back of my mind, pushing me to extremes whenever it feels like it. This ghost has all the qualities you’d expect: it makes me anxious, it keeps me living in fear of failure, fear of getting trapped. And it constantly uproots my life, pulling me away from the things I really value in my productive life — creative output.

What’s the immediate effect?
I find myself chasing sensory pleasures to temporarily deal with the fear. The "weekend culture" — the idea that you numb yourself all week just to survive till Friday — is haunting me. Pleasures might clear the symptoms for a while, but they don’t fix the real disease underneath. I call it a "disease" because I’m almost always living in a state of dis-ease with my own life. And it’s slowly eating away at the part of me that is human, turning me into a bitter, fearful machine that just keeps going. I think a lot of people can probably relate to this and You can see why it damages the human spirit.

The great wars of the past are over, but in this modern age, it feels like we’re heading into a new kind of war: an inner one. We’ll find outlets for all this fear and anxiety, but I worry that instead of dealing with the root cause—the ghost—we'll end up choosing more extreme escapes, those escapes will leave us in dismay and fear of one another and divide us into groups that will hate each other with fervor and tenacity. I certainly hope we as a collective will come together to build a better future.

Just writing this has made me realize how much I need to start prioritizing myself—with love and care.
I don’t know about you, dear friend, but I know I need a new mold. One that's not built for frantic movement, but built for being a gentler human in a world that’s learning to slow down.

This is the slow, steady step I’m about to take.
Thanks, Cal.

                                                         The Artist's Garden at Giverny, 1900 by Claude Monet