I would like to have more solitude, since when I’m alone I have more time with myself and when I take time to be with myself I seem to have a better understanding of who I am and what I like. I can kind of learn things about myself by being around other people and noticing how the way I act or feel changes, but what I’m really talking about is lingering in myself, like brewing a big Liana tea.

If I’m not able to linger in myself, I don’t really have the necessary conditions to journal effectively, which means that I lose a critical feedback loop for figuring out what I want out of my life and where I want to be. If I’m missing out on something so crucial it stands to reason that I’m probably missing out on other things downstream, plus I’m losing out on investing early in myself.

So what are the necessary conditions for Liana to make a big tea? Does it matter when other people are existing in the space that she’s in, or does she need to be enclosed within a tomb of her own attention? Is it about flow and interruption? What should I be aiming for and when?

Certainly I want to be doing this practice as frequently (spaced out) and as early as possible so I can pull the Liana hockey stick (number go up) earlier in time where it’s more valuable and before I’m working under sub-optimal conditions where my body has aged a bunch and I’m old and tired or whatever. One of the values most important to me is making the most out of life.

Given these conditions and the fact that the benefits I get from solitude are mostly fat-tailed, I would like to be aiming for at least two hours of solitude a day with a sweet spot of three hours on weekends.

I did a bunch of really boring math on where I could fit solitude into my schedule and found that my options are limited on weekdays because of my cats that like to scream at me in the morning and because of my long work hours.

I did find out, however, that I’m spending most of my free time with my spouse on weekdays, adding up to about six hours per day. This feels unsustainable in the long-term and likely to generate resentment on both sides without either of us having a break from each other.

We talked and rearranged the apartment a little bit and collaborated on how we can both get more time to ourselves

Last year I did an experiment where I tracked how I was spending my time every thirty minutes and I got some interesting data but not enough to really coherently say anything. I also only tracked my time during the week, not the weekend at all.

I’ve thought about doing this experiment again, but it’s pretty high effort and it seems to me like I could get the same value from just really thinking and being honest with myself about how I spend my time. I do also think that my choice of what to categorize and how it’s named wasn’t very skillful. Nevertheless, here’s the data (which I find a little difficult to include in this post since it’s embarassing but I’ll include anyway since I’m practicing doing things that risk face):

I wrote some things here that I later judged to be really dramatic and not fit for the tone of this post, so I will refrain for now

Until next time.