I've been quite inactive for the past few months, in pretty much every area of my life. The reason is that I'm taking a bit of a break from work. I've been doing nothing but my job for 7 months in a row, with very little free time at my disposal, and now that it's finally over, at least temporarily, I decided to stop for a moment and do some of the things that I enjoy that don't involve work.
This means that for the past few months I've been playing video games, watching movies, slowly reading whenever I felt like it, watching a bunch of YouTube videos and playing DND with my friends. And although these things were all fun in their own way, and I was glad to do them, I also, in time, began to feel more and more miserable.
It got to a point where some depressive episodes started to settle in. I wasn't willing to get out of bed in the morning and instead I just sat there, waiting and hoping to just either go back to sleep or to get right at its borders, where I am half awake, half dreaming. I completely lost any motivation to do anything, even what I mentioned above, and I couldn't even think of something that I could become interested in to occupy my time.
In short, everything went to hell and I just didn't like my life any more. Nothing that I did to fix this worked and I had to accept that I just wasn't happy to not do anything. I wasn't happy to not make progress. The more I stagnated the more miserable and frustrated I felt. Even attempting to do something , anything, to fix this, would end up with me giving up out of frustration and lack of patience.
It was only when I somehow managed to force myself to be even a little bit productive that I began to feel a bit better. But that was just temporarily. As soon as I continued to do what I considered to be fun - playing games, watching videos, talking to people - I went back to feeling like crap.
The conclusion? Stagnation leads to misery. And I've noticed this in a lot of other people as well. As soon as they spend too much of their time doing nothing productive, they begin to feel worse and worse, until they can't take it any more and either they find something to do, or they invent a need or a desire that they desperately need to take care of.
What's to be done about this? Obviously, to change something. I love to do all the things that I mentioned above, to relax and to recover after long period of working. But that can't last too long. A few weeks into it and I have to get back to doing something productive, anything at all. And as long as I don't make any noticeable progress, I can't be happy.
That's why I recently started writing and posting articles again. This simple act, of writing and publishing something, made this inactivity more bearable. I post something here, something on Medium, and I then read 50 pages from whatever book I'm busy with at the moment. That's all it takes for me to feel better and live another day without feeling miserable.
I guess that this is, partly, our purpose in life - to move forward, to evolve and to make progress. Because without it, we eventually begin to feel empty and sad. The more we allow inactivity to be part of our life, the more those feelings torment us, until we can't take it any more. It's much easier to muster the strength and motivation to do something that you care about, something that matters, than to wait, in desperation and torment, hoping that all these feelings will go away without you moving a finger.