Daydreams decide your destiny
Your personality isn’t determined by what you do, but by what you think about when you are doing nothing.
Your life is not your graduations, weddings, or promotions, but the accumulation of what you think about during your idle brain cycles in the shower, waiting in line at the grocery store, or walking across a parking lot.
In Why Early Success is a Trap, I write about how we believe our life choices are conscious decisions, but they’re more like a snowball rolling downhill—each choice builds upon previous ones, gaining momentum without you noticing.
During the period of my life I spent in university, I wasn’t clear on where I wanted to roll my snowball. I just followed the social gravity of making friends by drinking and partying, in an attempt to fit in, even though I never really enjoyed nightclubs.
But when I graduated and stopped partying, I never talked to those “friends” again. If I had more confidence to do what I actually enjoyed—reading, writing, and coding—I would’ve found friends that I could have formed deeper relationships with that would have lasted after graduation.
Because the party lifestyle involved lots of chasing social validation, during the many hours I waited for the campus shuttle I spent my time strategizing who to impress, replaying embarrassing interactions, and making up witty responses to arguments I lost. I got better only at ruminating over my insecurities instead of improving my skills at things I actually cared about, like visualizing my hand positioning in a deadlift—maybe I would have gotten into weightlifting sooner.
If you add up all your waking hours by activity, the biggest category would be all those in-between moments—microdreams that arise while brushing your teeth, waiting for the bus, or pretending to pay attention in meetings.
Even when you’re supposed to be at work (like maybe right now 😉), you’re not in a flow state all the time. You probably have a Slack window open on your other monitor, or are online shopping in another tab.
Pull apart your schedule like a loaf of bread, and you’ll see more air pockets than substance.
What’s inside those air pockets?
What were you thinking about while washing, walking, waiting, working, or wiping your butt?
“Don’t tell me your priorities, show me your calendar”
In the Effective Executive, Peter Drucker explains how the most important thing you can do to improve your effectiveness is to not assume you know where your time is going, but to actually track it and write it down. Is the amount of time you spend on each activity proportionate to what you actually want to get done?
Your idle thoughts don’t influence your life, they are your life. They are your actual experience of living.
Yes, your experience of being alive includes sensory inputs; but bats, cats, and cameras also receive sensory inputs1—it’s how you direct your consciousness that makes you alive, rather than just being pushed around by physics.
For a whole day, I carried around a notebook and set my watch to beep every 15 minutes, then wrote down whatever I was thinking about at that moment. Here’s what I thought about today:
That’s a lot of negative thoughts!2 I didn’t even realize how much of my brain space was spent on negative social comparison until I did this exercise, and I even feel embarrassed admitting it here.
Despite having practiced meditation for years, I was shocked to see that I only spent 2% of my time “Being present”, and another 2% “Being grateful”.
How much of my experience of life would change immediately if I just shifted more of those negative thoughts into that tiny golden slice of mindfulness, empathy, and gratitude?
Meditation is not about “not thinking”, look at all the thoughts I’ve thunk! It’s not even about trying to turn the negative thoughts into positive ones. It’s about noticing what thoughts I’ve inadvertently clung into my fists, and choosing to release them so they can float away by themselves.3
During this exercise, having to write down every thought meant that when negative thoughts came up, I was forced to make a decision about a thought that I would have otherwise ignored. This gave me an opportunity to reframe them, like how I can turn jealousy into appreciation, or egocentric worrying into loving generosity.4
This had the same effect as being forced to wash a dish immediately after using it instead of just tossing it aside only to be surprised a week later to see exciting varieties of mold munching away on the leftovers.
Societal pie chart
What does an entire society look like when you create a pie chart of what the culture “thinks about” in its idle moments?
If you saw a pie chart of someone’s thoughts and noticed that 75% of it was spent thinking about various catastrophes, you’d assume they were anxious and depressed.
I think this is why following the news is so harmful, because you’re allowing an external trigger to steer your thoughts in directions you wouldn’t have pursued otherwise. Especially if that news consists mostly of traumatic events happening to people you don’t know and have no control in changing.
Instead of letting social media algorithms influence your thoughts, if you want deeper, more contemplative essays like this, you can subscribe to my private email list to read the rest of my articles that were too sensitive to share online:
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Footnotes
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You don’t have a body, you are a body. ↩
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Here are some prototypical thoughts from each category:
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Or so that I can return my attention to some objective, like my breath, an idea I want to investigate, or a person I want to empathize with. ↩
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I think the idea of “love languages” is pseudoscience, similar to the myth that different sections of your tongue detect different tastes.
Consider if your “love language” is physical touch. Is it loving to hold hands with your partner while imagining someone else? Is it loving to tell your partner words of affirmation that were generated by ChatGPT?
What we want from our partners is their attention, to occupy a large share of their pie chart of thoughts. Words, gifts, service, time, or touch are just external ways of deducing that they are thinking of us.
That’s because we want our lives to matter to someone. They say that you don’t truly die until the last person thinks about you for the last time. It follows then that we don’t truly feel alive to our partners, family, and friends if we don’t occupy their attention.5 ↩
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In the absence of this love, we chase social status instead, because we ourselves intuitively spend more time thinking about those who seem to have lives superior to ours, rather than those who seem to have it worse. But this is a false adoration, because you don’t love anyone you’ve put on a pedestal—you just want to usurp them. ↩