Forever, For Now

Time

Time is a strange concept to get your head around, I’m not sure we ever do. It lies at the heart of everything; life and death, progress, joy and pain, hopes and wants and expectations, disappointment.

Cake and Eat It

One of the issues I have always had with Self-Improvement is that I’m happy to do the hard work; go to the gym, eat healthy, meditate etc. but I also want to do the degenerate stuff like getting drunk and eating shit food. Any positive work I do has to be time limited to allow some scope for the more debauched activities. Many people have this issue, and so introduce cheat days, or cheat weekends. I have a psychological (or maybe it’s chemical) glitch that doesn’t really allow for consistent moderation. If I have one cake, I will literally be thinking about what other shit food I can eat next, whilst eating the cake. I’ll be eating the cake and simultaneously scanning the cupboards for the next bit of junk I can consume. When you have a glitch in your makeup, you first need to acknowledge the glitch. Hello, my name’s Chris and I can’t do anything in moderation. You can of course accept this glitch, consider it to be part of your personality or one of your charming personal frailties, something that makes you more human and more relatable. But if you want to overcome it you have the choice of trying to fix the glitch or working around it. In my opinion, either option is worth pursuing.

Monk Mode

Imagine my delight when I came across the concept of Monk Mode. The idea behind Monk Mode is that you live the disciplined life for half the time, and the debauched life the other half. The disciplined, Monk Mode periods should be a minimum of 21 days in duration. As an example, a simple Monk Mode plan might be to be in disciplined, Monk Mode every other month. During periods of Monk Mode you are supposed to meditate and exercise daily, as well as abstain from drugs and alcohol. You should also add one or two further disciplined actions that are relevant to you, for example daily journalling, study, reading, writing, cold showers, breathing exercises. You know the kind of thing.

The main thing that appealed to me about Monk Mode is that I got to indulge both sides of my, let’s call it, personality. I got to be disciplined during Monk Mode, and I got to let loose during non-Monk Mode. I never had a good name for the non-Monk Mode period. I tried ‘Normal Mode’,’ ‘Debauched Mode’, ‘Hedonistic Mode’… none of them quite seemed to fit the bill. Unlike the living for the weekend approach, Monk Mode also allowed me to build up some good momentum and develop the discipline muscle. When living for the weekend I always found that I only really had two or maximum three positive days a week and even those days weren’t as positive as I needed. In order to develop yourself you need consistency and momentum; you need to build up a head of steam. For instance, if you are trying to write a novel and you drink at the weekend, and still feel a bit jaded on Monday and Tuesday, you only really have Wednesday and Thursday to write, before you are back on the alcohol again on the Friday. But to write a novel requires a level of commitment and immersion that you can’t achieve by just dipping in for two days a week. Your head won’t be deep enough in the game. I figured that month long periods of Monk Mode would be ideal to be decently productive before indulging in a month of Normal Mode.

My first effort at Monk Mode was a bit hit-and-miss. I mostly stuck to the discipline but for a few days I faltered somewhat. The biggest benefit was that it helped me believe that I could successfully do Monk Mode in the future.

My second effort at Monk Mode was my most successful. I was in a heightened state of energy and creativity. My sleep was often compromised due to excessive brain activity, but I loved the feeling of buzz. Some mornings I would wake and just lie in bed experiencing the electric buzz course through my mind and body.

Subsequent Monk Modes were never quite the same as the second one. I struggled to get into it. I might flounder after ten or twelve days or so.

I tended to find the periods of Normal Mode were too long. Note, when I refer to degeneracy, debauchery, and hedonism, this is with my tongue firmly in cheek. Normal Mode for me meant a few drinks here and there, some lazy hours (days?) watching Netflix that sort of thing. Essentially, periods where I wasn’t focussed on discipline. Of course, there’s nothing to stop me being disciplined in Normal Mode (unless I consider it to be undisciplined to go against the hedonistic intentions of Normal Mode), but the rigours and controls of Monk Mode were absent. I would feel tired, jaded, and have a loss of energy after too long in Normal Mode. Part of me considered this a good thing as I would then embrace the idea of the next Monk Mode with heightened enthusiasm.

Forever, For Now

After experimenting with a few periods of Monk Mode I then decided to essentially go into a permanent Monk Mode. The idea being that the more I lived in Monk Mode, the more I would adapt to it and the easier it would become. And the idea that if I stopped doing the debauched activities they would eventually die off. A kind of use it or lose it idea. Any time that we periodically revert to hedonistic activities we lend them extra power over us. We are essentially signalling to ourselves that this is how we would prefer to be spending our time.

Being permanently in Monk Mode doesn’t mean that I adhere to the practices of Monk Mode each and every day, but it does mean that I intend to adhere to them. A success rate somewhere in the 90-100 percent range is good enough for me.

I remember watching an episode of the High Performance Podcast where an endurance athlete essentially said that he knows at the back of his mind that there is always the option to quit so why spend time thinking about quitting. I think the idea of Forever, For Now is similar. My focus is on living in Monk Mode forever. I don’t put any time limit on it, so I’m not reaching for relief in the future. I’m just in it, experiencing it for all it brings. For Now is simply the option to change in the future, be that in a year, a decade or longer. Maybe the For Now takes a little bit of the pressure off.

Whenever I am enduring something unpalatable, for example a long run or a jail term, I play with time in my mind to make the suffering seem more acceptable. I might calculate the expected period of suffering in minutes or seconds rather than hours, days and months, in order to achieve a number that feels more manageable. Often, I find the best solution is to forget time, to accept one’s fate and one’s suffering and the idea of Forever, For Now pertains to that.

Sobriety

I find it interesting how different people use different timeframes to help them get their head around going sober. It highlights how so much of this work is just a mind game. What mental construct can you build that helps you achieve your goals. Adherents to the 12-step program famously take things one day at a time. Other people take the opposite approach and say they are definitely never going to drink again in their lives. Some say they’ll do 30 days and then see how it goes. I was recently watching a woman on YouTube who has been successfully maintaining sobriety one year at a time. She explains that the idea of saying that she’s not ever going to drink again feels too much.

And then there’s me. I’m not drinking Forever, For Now.