I’ve always had an obsessive personality. Whether it was study, games or work, I always sacrificed all other parts of my life to excel at the object of my obsession at the time.
Without a doubt, daygame is my current obsession: it’s by a far the activity I’ve spent the most time on this year, and have read the most about. Although the impact on my personal life was modest, the impact on my work has been substantial.
It seems that I can bring less energy to my professional life. Part of it is just caring less about my profession in general. It reminds me of that famous quote in from Fight Club:
After fighting, everything else in your life got the volume turned down.
I simply don’t identify as much with my profession as I did before. Overall, I’d say that’s a healthy change: I’ve definitely been guilty of making my work my identity.
Further, I’m working way less hours and have little patience with tasks I don’t enjoy. This aspect had a detrimental effect on my business (I am self-employed). More specifically, I’ve lost a client over the summer because I couldn’t be bothered to deliver what we agreed on in the contract. On multiple occasions, I’ve found myself on the streets of Berlin doing daygame, instead of working on my projects. This is scary. I’m depending on the success of my business to finance not only my daygame, but also my life.
Overall I wouldn’t say things are going awry: my business marketing has improved a lot this year, I’m finding new prospects, and the project I lost wasn’t significant in the grand scheme of things.
In conclusion, I guess I’m still looking for a way to integrate daygame into my life. Currently, i.e. in my second year of daygame, I feel it’s alright to capitalize on the seemingly limitless enthusiasm I feel. Once I leave the intermediate stage, and become advanced, the hours I pour into daygame will decrease naturally.