Thoughts About Stress as of Late
I’ve been finding myself stressing out over the future lately.
As school winds down to an end, I’m left with midterms, and before I can even recover from midterms, finals. I need to find a place to live for the last month of the school year because my lease ends before my school does. Also, where am I going to live next year? Where am I going to work in the summer? Why have I been putting all of this off? These are questions that I would deem relevant. They are immediate, pressing questions that demand my attention in the present. This is the healthy stress that motivates me to get work done - the “character building” stress.
The remaining questions that have been stressing me out lately are the more existential ones, such as: What do I want to do in the future? What is my goal in life? What if I don’t achieve x, y, or z?
These remaining questions are, in my opinion, so completely unworthy of my time. They are wholly uninteresting and they are irrelevant. The reason I’ve found these questions to be particularly insignificant is that, while it is important to plan ahead, it shouldn’t keep me from the “now”.
This is why I have started to embrace my distractions, because what normally distracts me from my immediate task at hand is my art. I can’t express how much time I’ve wasted in my head stressing out over the far off future when I could’ve been creating something that brings me happiness. Whether it’s an idea for a video, a photo, or a song, when I feel like making something, I will make it then and there with no bullshit. The less time I have to spend thinking about the future the better. It doesn’t make sense to waste time stressing about something that might never happen, especially it it’s keeping me from being happy.
- M