every day it gets a little easier by Vincent H. '23

the title and subtitle come from my favorite scene of bojack horseman

some of my friends prefer the alternate saying “it never gets easier, you just get stronger”. i think these sayings are communicating the same thing and don’t believe the distinction is important, but pick whichever phrasing you like more i suppose

during the summer, fall, and winter of 2020 i refused to clean my mouth. i never brushed my teeth or flossed or rinsed or used mouthwash, and no dentist ever yelled at me because we were in lockdown so i never saw any dentists. my gums became weaker and weaker, my breath began smelling worse and worse, and i noticed these things and merely accepted them. back then i’d told myself that you had to brush and floss every day for the rest of your life to have good oral hygiene, and there was no way i was going to maintain such a long streak when just doing so for a single day was excruciatingly boring, so i might as well give up now, right?

during the fall and winter of 2020, i couldn’t work for more than a few minutes at a time without getting distracted and needing to walk around or check social media. part of it was general boredom with virtual classes, part of it was me not having a clear idea of what i wanted to learn or focus on, and part of it was me thinking everyone around me was so much more capable than me that i lost motivation to work. i only survived that semester because three of my classes contained intro-level content i was familiar with, the fourth (film music) consisted of watching movies and listening to soundtracks, and the fifth (organic chemistry) was being graded on pass-fail with massive curves. when i took a break from school that spring to do an internship, i told people it was a cost-cutting move and that i didn’t like remote school and wanted to get more work experience, and those things were true, but i also did it because i thought i couldn’t handle a full courseload

during the fall and winter of 2020, and the spring of 2021, i didn’t exercise for nine months straight. back when i was at home i would go on runs every two or three days, but during those nine months i moved around a lot and there were no parental figures to hold me accountable so i didn’t bother. when i did attempt to run, every step felt like i was smashing my foot into the ground, and the path ahead seemed endless, and i’d think about how i would have to smash my foot into the ground a thousand times more before the end of the run, and then i’d decide to spare myself from all that unnecessary pain and quit

maybe all these issues were symptoms of bigger problems. maybe i was depressed, or maybe it was just adult growing pains, or maybe it was the pandemic playing tricks on my mind, or maybe it was all of these things and more. whatever it was, it left me lethargic, with a complete inability to perform any form of self-care or self-maintenance, and i didn’t even realize this was a problem because i didn’t yet understand these things were important

while on break from school i moved to sf and got my first close-up glimpse of silicon valley culture. i’d already known beforehand that tech founders were obsessed with speed and moving quickly, but it was only after meeting more people in person that i realized the obsession with speed often bled over into seeking out quick fixes to problems: productivity hacks to help with focus, self-help tips for becoming a better person, experimentation with meditation and substances to resolve internal conflicts, an endless array of b2b products that claim to solve any problem a business might be struggling with

i imagine some of these suggestions have actually been quite valuable and have helped many people resolve their issues – for instance, i have sometimes found a self-help book to be useful and have occasionally stumbled upon products that address their intended use cases painlessly and quickly. but my experience is that most problems are not so simple to resolve and most solutions do not work nearly as easily as they are advertised to: i personally have never found a productivity hack more effective than old-fashioned planning and scheduling, a lot of b2b software is painful to use and requires hiring dedicated personnel to interact with, my friends who arrive at epiphanies while meditating still struggle with implementing those epiphanies and grappling with their consequences afterwards, and so on

in short, immersing myself in tech culture didn’t solve any of my problems, even though various people promised it would and i desperately wanted to believe them

in my favorite basketball interview of all time, a reporter (R) asks michael beasley (B) how successful his team will be this season and how far they’ll go in the playoffs. some context: it’s september, the season hasn’t started yet, and playoffs happen between april and june at the end of the season. beasley knows that he’s a role player on a new team and that a lot can happen over the course of the season, so he refuses to answer the question and instead tells the reporter that the team’s goal is to work as hard as possible, one day at a time

R: With taking it a day at a time, where should this Lakers team end up by the end of the year?
B: Exactly where we want to be.
R: Which is? Where do you want to be?
B: Taking it a day at a time.
R: But once you add up all those days, where can you end up?
B: The future.
R: Fair, if you’re going to move the calendar there, but in the future, let’s say April through June, April through May, where should the ceiling be for this group?
B: Ceiling? I don’t know. I’m not sure. That’s not up to me… Like I said, we’re here to do one job which is work, sacrifice and take it a day at a time.

at first glance it seems like beasley is deliberately trolling the reporter. take a closer look though, and you realize that beasley has given one of the most realistic answers possible to the reporter’s implied question of will this team win a championship?

here are some of the not-so-quick fixes that helped me become a more functional human being: watching that bojack clip every day for months in a row. doing more activities with other people, instead of trying to do everything alone. taking things a day at a time, or an hour at a time, or a minute at a time

when i started brushing my teeth again after not doing so for almost a year, it was as boring and uncomfortable as i’d remembered it being. but you gotta do it every day, that’s the hard part, i reminded myself – brushing my teeth would always require effort in the moment, while i was in the act of brushing. but the good news with taking things a day at a time was that i no longer had to worry about maintaining a long streak or about brushing my teeth every day for the rest of my life; i just had to focus on brushing for the day i was currently in, and as long as i did so things would naturally get easier over time

when i trained myself to study and focus and read again, i took the same approach on the timescale of hours instead of days. i used the pomodoro technique, where you divide your time into half-hour blocks and alternate between spending 25 minutes working on a single task without distractions and 5 minutes taking a break. the philosophy behind pomodoros is to forget about all your texts and emails and other obligations and to make the next 25 minutes your entire life – it doesn’t matter how strong the urge is to open emails or look at your phone or get up and take a walk, you only have to resist that urge for a few more minutes and survive until the end of the block, and afterwards you can cave in and do all the other things you wanted to do. and this is helpful because 25 minute blocks are much less intimidating and therefore much easier to commit to than multi-hour work sessions, even if you’re stacking your blocks into a multi-hour session anyway

when i started running again, i divided my runs into individual minutes. i’d start at a walking pace, and then every minute i’d bump my pace up by half a mile per hour until i was having trouble keeping up, and then every subsequent minute i’d decrease my pace by half a mile per hour. doing so allowed me to try out faster paces without immediately giving up (because i could tell myself that i only had to maintain the pace for a minute, after which i could decide whether to keep it or slow back down), and imposing that structure helped me run for longer without quitting

none of the techniques i’ve described here are really cures or solutions. taking things a step at a time does not change what is possible or unlock new skills; it merely shifts your attention to focus better on the present, and it’s nowhere near foolproof at that either. i still have days where i feel especially unmotivated and decide to go to bed without brushing my teeth; i still have hours where i become unusually antsy and switch tabs even though i said i was in the middle of a pomodoro; i still have minutes where my legs suddenly begin feeling like a pile of bricks and then i decide to end my run prematurely. i have never found a way to prevent these kinds of relapses, only ways to try and reduce their frequency over time until eventually on most days i can stop thinking as consciously about fighting the relapse and can instead carry myself through sheer force of habit

these days a lot of my attention goes towards another set of problems – i struggle with anxiety and don’t have the healthiest relationship with food and still don’t focus as well as i’d like to. i am still looking for the right frameworks to give myself for these problems, and once i’ve found them i will try to apply them a day at a time and a meal at a time and an hour at a time, and surely it will take a while and surely there will be relapses but hopefully it will also get easier over time

there are no miracles, no shortcut buttons to fast-forward to the end of the process, no magic spells to suddenly make everything right. and i think this is a good thing – i believe life would be unendurable if all our problems could be solved quickly, because that would imply that all our flaws are our fault, that they should’ve all been resolved already and the only reason they haven’t is because we did something wrong, and the intolerance for error would be unbearable. i think it is good that these things take time and have no end

on an only tangentially related note, here’s another take on flossing that i found in a vlogbrothers video and appreciated:

“I advise you to floss. I know it is hard and annoying and kind of unpleasant, but I am a big fan of flossing not only for dental health but also because it is a wondrous act of faith. Flossing is a way of current you saying, ‘I believe that there will be a me in the future, and that this me will be older and more frail than the current me, with less healthy teeth and gums, and I floss today not for current me but for that future me.’ It’s kind of a beautiful thing. Same with sunscreen, by the way.”