The problem

Putting things off is a destructive habit which paralyses millions into doomscrolling, into pacing around, into a thought-loop spiral that will make them feel their life is already over because they haven’t finished that task yet.

What this accomplishes ends up to be, usually just misery. It can feel helpless, like there’s no solution to it. It can feel like we’ll never accomplish anything that we wanted to, because any time we try, we bail out as soon as it gets difficult, or as soon as we get bored.

Well here’s the thing. It doesn’t need to get difficult, and we don’t need to get bored.

The inspiration

I’ve struggled personally with this problem for a long time, but recently have kind of found a solution which has relieved me of a lot of stress and would like to share it with the world. This solution, in fact, didn’t even come to be as a result of trying to solve the problem that I just laid out, it came from a random recommendation my YouTube algorithm gave to me: Luvstar.

Luvstar is a Minecraft lets player who inspired this train of thought in me, when she described how to never be bored in your forever world. A forever world in Minecraft is the concept of starting a world in Minecraft single-player, and playing that for the rest of your life.

The Solution

How can I play a world for the rest of my life? I’d get bored surely, especially in vanilla! Well here’s the thing (and by the way, at least add Tom’s simple storage mod so you don’t go insane) - your forever world, each time you play, is molded into a reflection of your mind. Each time you build anything, try to leave it there. Don’t destroy it, instead if you want to change something, mold it into something else. You can do this just 20 minutes to an hour each day, you don’t need to play for 9 hours straight and burn yourself out within 2 weeks. You can play slowly, and your incremental progress will show up over the many years in which you’re playing your world.

Anyway, this whole forever world stuff kind of inspired me to apply this same technique: shaping and molding everything I do (cooking, cleaning, programming, homelab, socialising, etc.) in very minute ways and in a constant manner.

I can dip into anything I want, daily, and make progress on it. It really is kind of a magic bullet, because there is no real commitment to the thing involved there. You just engage with some activity for 20 minutes, regardless of the outcome. Sometimes that ends up leading us down rabbit holes and we spend hours on that activity, instead of the 20 minutes, but that’s great!

It’s difficult to distill what I’m saying down to a sentence, but really the essence of this is that your whole life can be molded into a reflection of what you want, just by chipping a way at things. We don’t need to chip away at it to achieve an end goal, we just need to engage in the things we want to make progress on every day, even if it’s just for 20 minutes. Hell, even if you open up your forever world, dig out 10 blocks in a new path, then log out, that’s enough. Try putting this into practice, maybe I can make another blog in the future on this same topic and write it in a better way, but I just wanted to put this idea out there because it’s very helpful to me.