Photo by the blowup on Unsplash
I’ve found myself desiring an increase in activity in my life. Admittedly, this is quite relative. The last few months have been hermit-like to the extreme.
I’m partly riding the wave from travelling to see my parents in London without any major repercussions. Again, the base is low when it is essentially travelling from A to B, where I then spend my time sleeping and eating.
My tendency in the past has been to yo-yo from little activity to a lot, sometimes quite dramatically. Last year, I could go to several day festivals based off the adrenaline, but then find myself wiped out a few weeks later.
Now, I no longer want to do that, but my baseline energy does seem far more stable. Hopefully, it also means that it can improve, slowly but surely.
It means that I’m meeting this new found energy with a level of caution. The impulse to suddenly go out a bunch to a full social life would be folly.
Yet I do also see this burst of motivation as a positive sign. My mentality has turned markedly insular recently. Part of me started to doubt whether I could have a normal life ever again. And whilst I kept myself busy through things like learning sanskrit, the pay off was so distant in the future that I felt like I was planning for my life at 50.
In this sense, I feel like I’m having a slight philosophical shift. Whilst I do hold that my life will likely mature much later than most, the risk is that I give up on life right now. There was something romantic about following the stoic’s path where I would disappear from the face of the earth for many years until returning with some level of mastery. But I don’t think that quite fits fully. If my life path were to be such a slow, stoic build, then the first few decades would not have been so vivid and multi-disciplinary. The evidence seems to suggest that this will also be the case for the decades to come.
But one step at a time. I’m still quite a long way from even fathoming normal levels of activity. For now, I think it’s slowly reintroducing myself into society, and doing things where it feels enjoyable and relatively easy.
It’s important I also hold reasonable expectations around how enjoyable these things will be. Part of the reason I stopped going to events was I found myself getting disillusioned with modern-day socialising, particularly in the bigger cities. Everyone seems to talk about connection and community, yet people will cancel on you at the drop of a dime.
I’ve learnt to distance myself from people who will only contact me when they need something, or who treat my friendship as an optional extra. Whilst this sounds noble and affirming, the reality is that this has also led to quite substantial isolation.
Ironically, I do feel like I’m taking the same extractivist approach where I will turn up and put in little effort, something that feels commonplace with social gatherings in 2026, but I think it’s just being honest about how the world is right now, without trying to be a saviour who fixes the system as I was previously. Besides, I can count dozens of times where my good-willed aim want to contribute ends up in me being another case of the ethnic taking the disproportionate burden around organisation and hospitality that ends up being taken for granted.
The most positive thing is that I do feel a lot more settled in being alone. This means that socialising no longer feels as pressurised as it was some months ago, and it should – at least in theory – feel easier to prioritise myself rather than feeling pulled by the desperate need for connection. In an ideal world such a need wouldn’t be problematic, but alas, we live in trying times.
I suppose it should be no wonder that community cohesion takes a hit when only this week we’ve had students being teargassed in the streets of Brussels, a European Parliament Resolution sponsoring Islamophobia and a US President boasting about live streaming an execution.
But I try not to dwell on such things too much, else I’m not sure I’d really be able to survive it all.