Days T6-7: The World's Repair and Recovery Center

August 13, 2024

Day 6

It had been well over a week since I got the latest covid variant but I was still battling extreme fatigue. The recovery in Thailand was most certainly helping with that combined with long and restful sleeps. I suppose there is no better place on earth to get better than Bangkok which is effectively the world's repair and recover center

It certainly helps by starting every day with this at the poolside

It just so happened that Monday was the combination of Mothers Day and the Queen's birthday. There wasn't much going on as it was a stat holiday, so it made for a great excuse to head into Starbucks and spend all afternoon finalizing the budget. This time I got as far as next year and even planned for the next trips. What I found is that if you start planning with the money first, then all the other goals follow.

And there's the bus waiting for me. There was enough time to go into 7/11, buy some snacks, use the restroom and the bus was still lingering. It won't leave until it has nearly full passengers on board.

In my currently fatigued stage, trying to muster up the energy to get on a bicycle, let alone do an intense fitness class, is worse than going to the dentist. Yet I still found the motivation to do it. Things were just really hard, and I was still completely out of shape for this kind of workout.

At the end of it, I knew there would be delightful hot showers and then a short walk to a restaurant where I was meeting a teacher friend.

But to get there, it was a matter of beating the impending storm.

Fortunately we made it and had a really good chat. He actually starts work tomorrow so the summer is winding down in a sense. He's around the same age as me. One of the key takeaways from the conversation is that we only have 10-15 more years left of solid workable career years to make a killing and stockpile cash before we're too old to do this. In that sense, we were both thinking of the same thing: pre-retirement and not necessarily in Thailand. We both have the same goal to retire in Thailand, but he is thinking of moving on elsewhere first to make more cash. In other words, leave and come back. He has in mind at least 2-3 more schools in other countries.

He left his former job in another country at the peak of his career. I asked him why he did this. Everything was going so well for him: top of the pay scale, admin let him teach whatever he wanted, students loved him, etc. His response was, "Brother, you need to quit while you're ahead. I realized it was the best it could get for me, it wouldn't get any better. And so I moved on for a new personal challenge."

This guy really had profound wisdom.

I was able to make a lot of connections from that one simple response. Around 2014 or so, I was in the exact position as he was. It was those years that I saw all the evidence in the yearbooks that I had spent digitizing this trip. It made for a lot of sadness when I realized the best years were behind me and I was still hanging on.

So what happened? Well politically we all know. From a career perspective, it also got worse: the admin started taking away my favorite classes and giving them to new teachers.

My colleague had the sense to change jobs when things were at the top of the world for him. He seemed to have a sixth sense about the whole thing. When everyone else thought he was nuts to give up such a lucrative position, he did exactly that.

The analogy is like this: when your stocks are through the roof and doing extremely well, that is when you're supposed to dispose of your positions. But who can do this? It is very, very hard. It takes extreme disclipine and yes, having that sixth sense, the intuition and the willingness to take the risk. It is the belief that now is the right time to sell when the market is white hot and everyone else wants to buy.

But what happens if you're like most people? You hang onto the position. You should have sold earlier, but now you're a bagholder. So you increase your position size while averaging down. As the years go on, that position has now decreased by half. You've kept on funneling more and more cash into this loser, hoping against hope that it's going to recover. But you know that deep down it won't. It's time to take those losses and sell before it gets even worse.

For starters, you can try to make your home home in this.

So that done, I had a great sleep and had some more errands to tackle the next day: counseling appointment, dentist, and the doctor all in one fell swoop.

Day 7

First was the counselor. I was now at the point, thanks to yesterday's meeting with my colleague that I could define my crisis in one sentence: I stayed in China too long instead of leaving near the peak, and am now bagholding a position that must be cut sooner rather than later to avert future losses. Never believe that lie that all positions, stocks or otherwise, will perpetually go up or get better. There were several I held that ran up major losses. They would never recover. I had to stop deluding myself: they needed to be sold at losses. And yes I eventually realized that.

When faced with difficult choices, unpleasant tasks, or hard conversations, procrastination is the simple act of kicking the can down the road. We'll deal with it next year. Heck I did it just now on this trip. That's why the life coach from Russia was quite right when she said, "I know things are happening so fast, but you really need to do this now. If you stay in China another year, you'll lose all the momentum you built this trip."

So I told the counselor I wanted to talk about this and he lit up like a Christmas tree. This was his specialty area (he focuses on ADHD) and talkign about procrastination was probably the easiest cash he ever made for an hour. But everything he said was spot on and he came up with all sorts of good stuff.

The first question he asked was, "Do you use your phone as a way to procrastinate?" When I said yes, he said I was like 99% of other people who revert to the smartphone and social media. Mindless scrolling is by far the most common way to waste time. Last year he had told me all kinds of good stuff which I actually applied, including the apps to limit the time spent on social media.

He said this time, "I want you to step it up a level. When you go phone shopping, also buy a dumbphone. Just talk and text. Then, make certain days where you leave your smartphone at home and just bring the dumbphone to work. If there's something important, people can (gasp) call you or text. Also you can bring cash to pay for stuff, it's not like you're forced to use the phone for payments. If you need to trade stocks, then use your laptop."

He continued by saying, "All this scrolling on social media and short form videos like TikTok are frying people's brains out. It's an experiment we've never done before as humanity and we don't know the consequences."

I said, "Well one consequence we know is that nobody has any attention spans. I can't talk for more than a few minutes in class before the students lose me. And it's a constant battle to get those fucking smartphones out of my classroom."

He said, "I completely agree. It's out of control. By the way, there may be some hope because the latest Generation Alpha is starting to reject all this digital media and they are turning more towards analog forms. Generations in the past have been known to reject the latest fads outright. Even now they are saying TikTok is shit and they are avoiding it."

I said, "Well I sure hope so. I have seen adults watching TikTok and they appear completely mindless, like a brain lobotomy. They'll watch 4-5 seconds of video and then scroll on to the next one. The total time it adds up to is incredible, we're talking hours! Just completely wasted time"

He said, "Yes and the content doesn't even matter. There is no way their brains are processing and reflecting on each video. It's all designed to get those dopamine hits and move on. You would be far better off watching long form Youtube videos. Not that Youtube is any better to avoid procrastination but at least you can learn stuff."

He went on to say, "Procrastination is really about mood management. The way it works, you talk yourself out of doing something that you mentally build up as really hard and unpleasant and you feel all this dread. Whatever you choose to do instead is not productive, but it feels so much nicer and pleasant. You get the dopamine rush because you avoided the hard thing and got a break, or so you think."

He continued with, "It's a lot like doing your taxes. Nobody wants to do them, so they'll hype it up as this massive difficult and dreadful thing. They'll get on Facebook and it feels so much nicer. People who struggle with procrastination also view the task as all or nothing: either I spend all day on taxes and finish them, or I don't do my taxes at all. One way to solve this is just chip away at it. Just do 15 minutes of taxes that day and stop."

He said, "I had to write a 300 page dissertation for my PhD and it sucked. Let's not kid ourselves here, the brain knows these tasks are unpleasant and we aren't wrong. It's just we overhype it. In my case I just wrote a paragraph or two every day. On a good day, I could finish a page. Then over time, with all this incremental progress, I wrote 300 pages."

He said, "Another thing I did was learn the Thai alphabet while waiting for appointments. Let's say you're forced to wait in a queue or sit down at a government office or whatever. What's the first thing you do when you have to wait like this? That's right, you reach for the phone and start scrolling. But there's so many other things you could do! You could, gasp, read a book. Or in my case I had flashcards and would learn a little bit of Thai each time. It's really helpful to take advantage of this kind of time to be productive instead of just scrolling like everybody else."

He said, "So there's a bit of food for thought. Maybe in your case, don't see it as 'I must overcome procrastination right now all at once and solve this problem' but aim for some incremental progress with some of these strategies and go for 50% improvement. The task system you use is already very good, so keep that up. The key is to chip away at stuff, so maybe you'll do 30 minutes of your file sorting system every day instead of the whole project all at once. It also helps to make appointments, i.e. set a time at a coffee shop to do this."

Towards the end I said, "You've given me a lot of really good ideas. Ironically I'm about to go phone shopping now. But here's the thing, I just made a key connection with this topic and my midlife crisis."

He wanted to hear it.

I said, "For all these months and years I had to deal with this problem, the easiest thing was not to. If I sat down with my wife and said 'Sorry honey, it's not you, but your country's leader sucks. It's time to move on', well nobody wants to have that conversation. And so I'll put it off by hyping it up as this massive and difficult thing to do, in much the same way as doing taxes. It's not entirely avoiding conflict, as I have the skills to handle these conversations. It's just massively unpleasant."

He said, "Well that's fantastic for making this connection. Yes that's how I see it too. But try the same strategies. Maybe don't open with that, but build up with smaller things and aim to make incremental progress on all this."

I thanked him for everything then it was time to head to the dentist.

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