So this is a random half-finished diary entry I found that was from December 2020. As I want to get back into writing on Medium, I thought it would be good to upload this to have some sort of record. It was kind of cool being able to go back in time and see where my head was at. Here we go:
I started feeling very unfulfilled in my life and just a bit numb. Things on paper are going brilliantly for me but it didn’t feel that way.
Again I just stumbled across an idea that would change my perspective and shift me from numb to grateful — Minimalism. I found a Netflix documentary called “Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things” and it really resonated with me. Here I was accumulating all these “things” with no end in sight and it took me on a journey of really narrowing down what I actually value within my life. Especially with the pandemic really putting my life under a magnifying glass of how satisfied I can be just in pure isolation.
I first started with my wardrobe, taking every item of designer clothing and clothing I hadn’t worn in a while and literally making a list of the pure essentials I needed. I managed to gather about £800+ worth of clothes and miscellaneous goods to throw out. I needed to find someplace to give these away and I found a local facebook page to post them on for anyone who’s come across hard times during the period. Within seconds of me posting messages on messages came flooding in. People were telling me their stories and why they would love to even be given a single T-shirt. All of these painful stories of people who had been crushed by Corona or fallen on hard times and I had no idea. I was clueless. My heart sank.
Here I was sitting with all these things that I had accumulated for years that all this time could have helped someone who really needed it, I felt incredibly guilty and privileged. It hadn’t always been like this when I was younger my parents struggled financially and needed help to get on their feet at times as well. Funny how just a couple of years of living comfortably made me forget all the problems in the world.
Anyway, this is all taking a long while to get to the point but my key lessons I learned throughout this year and to be honest clicked fairly recently were:
- You need less than you think.
- Human connection really matters.
- You can’t change the world, just yourself.
- Social Media can be deadly.
For now I just wanted to end on the note that I’m really fucking grateful for how life has treated me over this year and the past few. I hope that all the things I’m learning and achieving can be used to put people in positions they deserve and that I can increase my generosity. The key thing I’ve learned is that we are only a few bad days away from being down on our luck ourselves and that as human beings it’s our duty to lift each other up. All of this stuff that we think we should care about doesn’t actually matter and there’s much more fulfilling things both you and I can spend our time on.
