In the last post I talked about wanting to become a mediocre artist. It was based on my desire to let go of the desire to achieve success as a substitute for meaning or purpose in life. It was an attempt to break free from the cult of productivity we all live in.
So by lowering my ambition and choosing to be a mediocre artist I wanted to free myself from the fear of failure and the pressure of pursuing success and just focus on making stuff, even if it was mediocre.
But I realized that I still hadn’t fully let go of the paradigm where achievement becomes identity and gives meaning to your life. I still wanted to be a musician, a philosopher, an artist, even if a mediocre one.
The truth is that if you make music, you’re a musician. If you think deeply and check your thinking, you’re a philosopher. If you tell stories, you’re a writer. Trying to live up to the world’s definitions of what it means to be something, especially a successful something, is bound to be a path of suffering. If you can stick to it long enough, you’ll be successful but you might find that success doesn’t bring the kind of satisfaction you thought it would.
If I believe that life is meaningless, which I do, then all I should want to be, all anyone can ever be, is a Life Experiencer. I experience life and I want to focus on the act of experiencing things and make sure I’m experiencing things fully.
Come to think of it, what makes me frustrated now-a-days is when I’m doing things in a half-hearted, distracted way. Or when I’m fully lost in easy content consumption and not really experiencing anything actively. To be a content consumer is a passive experience and too much of it is not very satisfying.
So that’s who I want to be. I want to pay attention to the things I choose to do. The projects I pursue are still creative projects in music, drawing, writing and philosophy. But the goal of the project is not to finish the project and produce something, amazing or mediocre. The goal is to experience the making of the art fully. Be present fully.
The way to do that is to begin by paying attention to your attention itself. Ask yourself multiple times during the day, “What am I paying attention to right now? Is it focused attention or diffused attention? Is my internal observer, the prefrontal cortex, in control, or am I on auto-pilot?“
And then to report what I experienced as a way to ensure that I’m mindful of the experience. That’s the only thing I need to do.
Rudya Aditya 
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