I am seeing the emergence of two lifestyles. The exception lifestyle, and the consistent lifestyle.
A problem with the exception lifestyle that I didn’t consider before is the fact that you’re always recovering. By feeding these desires from time to time, you keep the craving for them alive. And therefore, you never really build streaks. You never really have to properly think about organising yourself, since you have easy ways out of many situations, such as getting a supermarket pizza or staying up late to complete some work. It’s actually much easier, but much less rewarding.
Let’s talk about the consistent lifecycle. By deciding to remove exceptions, you are now working within constraints. You can’t just break the rules when you feel like it. In order to keep this up, you have to build structure. It will initially feel much narrower, but by maximising what you can do within the constraints, the ceilings become much higher than they were in the casual exception lifestyle. Constraints feel restrictive before they feel freeing.
Like all things, optimised balance is needed. There will be times when things don’t go to plan, mistakes are made, or huge opportunities (for progress or for memories) sit behind breaking some of the rules. But a good consistent lifestyle doesn’t necessarily mean perfect output. It’s more a mindset shift. When one of these things happens, it’s seen as harmful rather than relieving. The exception lifestyle sees exceptions as “true living”, and the rest as just waiting. The consistent lifestyle sees exceptions as dangerous chaos that threatens successful systems. This doesn’t mean those things have to be any less enjoyable or relaxing. However, it will change the way they’re approached. The exception lifestyle says “make the most of this time, go as crazy as you can, this is the one time you can do it”, while the consistent lifestyle says “if this is happening, limit the blast radius as much as you can”. So a consistent person would go to the late night party, but if possible they might try to eat healthily, or avoid alcohol, or do exercise before they go. If this feels limiting to them, and they start having the feeling of missing out, it may not be the lifestyle they want. If they feel empowered and courageous going against the tide like that, then this lifestyle could be for them. The consistent person has to be attached to their systems and their baseline. They have to deeply miss it as soon as it’s gone.
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How does one start the consistent lifecycle?
One thing is being present and aware. It requires thought to be consistent. Things like youtube, music and excessive socialising can distract. They can prevent thinking, which can make you forget about the consistency you’re supposed to be upholding.
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How it feels to be (consistent) around others
“Others will try to recruit you back into exception patterns because your behaviour exposes their own instability.”
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Protect sleep aggressively. Inconsistency begins with exhaustion.