Louis Michael: Growing into a new phase of my life

Why is it that my productivity determines my happiness? At what point did my disposition shift from lazy layabout content to do nothing all day and not feel a shred of guilt or remorse about it, to hyper efficiency orientated militantly organised to-do list obsessor?

There’s undoubtedly a factor of ‘growing up’ involved. Around the time I started university, at some point between learning how hard it is to buy a week’s worth of food when you don’t know what days you’re going to be in and therefore whether or not to buy fresh food and risk it going off before you have time to cook with it, and discovering that financial responsibility is more than just resisting the urge to buy unnecessary things, it’s constant number crunching and quickly scribbled equations to make sure that yes, you do have enough for dessert without having to starve for the next week, I realised that I didn’t want to continue being the unproductive, disorganised walking disaster that I had perfected during my teenage years.

Being forced to be an adult made me want to be an adult. I started enjoying being able to handle my money well, and perfecting the art of the perfect weekly shop, and becoming a more responsible, reliable individual. I started deriving a massive sense of satisfaction every time I successfully ‘adult-ed’ a situation. And consequently I began to feel myself growing into a new phase of my life, one that involved more respect, especially for myself.

The desire for change has to come from yourself

I found that all this new organisation was a means of respecting myself enough to improve my own quality of life and better myself, and in all this realisation stumbled upon a nugget of truth about what it means to be an adult. You have to want to improve if you ever want to improve at all. The desire for change has to come from yourself if you ever want it to stick.

But that still doesn’t explain why I’m so obsessive over my new productiveness. It was something a friend said to me recently that helped me understand it. He explained to me how it was important that everything we do comes from a place of love, a genuinely positive place, otherwise we risk doing things that might seem self-beneficial, like becoming organised, out of fear rather than love. This gave me a much needed new perspective. My new goal is to rid myself of the fear of slipping back into my old ways, and focus on the love that motivates me to continue bettering myself.