Making the cut.

"It gets easier. You just gotta do it everyday" Your reference for self-improvement, the thing you cannot get to, because it's the thing you don't do. everyday.

"Hey Ashmit, how was your weekend?" "Well, when I introduced myself, I mentioned that I don't have much of a life, aside from my work and my cat. So not much. Just slept a lot and watched the weekend pass me by"

"I went to a monster truck show" "I cooked this huge mushroom I bought from the Asian store that looked like meat." "I watched Project Hail Mary" "I watched this Indian TV Show on Netflix about lawyers."

Life getting better doesn't work like an exponential formula. You won't emperically find it to be better down the line just by virtue of you having lived longer. Your progress isn't something that compounds everyday. You find yourself living the same life, day after day, nothing changing, until one day you find yourself asking one of two questions. Either that life is not the same anymore, looking back, you realise that you just weren't noticing, and you don't recognise the person from your past. and maybe that's a good thing. Or you meet people living a different tier of life, not by virtue of circumstance, but by their willingness to chase their own joy, and you realise you've changed without your life changing with you. You realise that in chasing survival, you forgot to live. You forgot that you're not surviving anymore. You just forgot to notice it. And maybe that's so much worse.

You witness a moment in your life where you did the same activity as someone else, and yet when asked to recall it, it couldn't break through the surface tension of the pool that is your sub-conscious. In comparison, someone else remembered it enough to be able to compare it to the previous season, and talk about how this one wasn't as good. You concur. The first season was indeed better, and this one felt like it got nowhere. And yet, you remember a time when that would have been something you would have wanted to talk about. You remember getting annoyed when tv shows you binged did not meet your bar of a dopamine hit. And just that was somehow better than this. The indifference to every waking moment of your life. How did you get here? "It gets easier. You just gotta do it everyday" That's what the hippie monkey said to Bojack when he had collapsed to the ground while on a run, trying to start over at a better life. A healthier life doesn't need to involve something exciting. It just requires you to not live on autopilot. To not waste away in a bubble while you get consumed by time passing you by in three dimensions. Even your Netflix show has turned into being part of the backdrop while you amble on, unconscious of every breath you are taking that you could have made better, if only you chose to care for it enough. You're so busy worrying about everything that is wrong in your life, that you forget everything good that's there or happening to count towards every little win that makes your life better than it was yesterday. You forgot the little things. Or at the very least, you stopped counting the ones that made that cut. And lately, you have been telling yourself that nothing makes the cut.

This is not life getting better. This is everything that happens after the show ends. This is the aftermath. Remember. You are no longer in threat of surviving. You figured out you will always find a way. Or at least, life will give you a set of cards and you will play them. You now know the game. You just need to come to the realisation that the chase for a better life includes stopping to do something for yourself and taking a breath. It gets easier. You just gotta take a breath. And notice yourself doing so. Everyday.