--- Cheers to the fifth edition of _Weekly Wondering_, a sacred time where I share the resonating links, reflections and learnings from my past week to influence your next one ;) ### **✨** In My Life My parents are visiting for a month after a year of me isolating myself and grinding, so I’m going to tone my overall productivity down a bit these next few days 😛 After 2 weeks of development, I’ve created my first ever product, a starter vault in Obsidian MD! In reality, I’m not expecting much sales, but just being able to create something has taught me a lot about the purpose of my brand, the unique value I can provide, and the general process of product creation + marketing. Nonetheless, I do think it’s super valuable for our modern day’s information overload, so if you want to try it out, use the code ULTIMATE50 for 50% off (or 1 lucky person can use ULTIMATE69 hehe) ### **🔗** Links to Thinks [[Minimalism promotes conformity and dissolves creativity and intricacy]] **Understanding and dealing with Anxiety** Anxiety is weird. It’s crazy how much of our unhappiness can stem from something we develop ourselves, in our own thoughts. [[How to calm the anxious brain]] was created with the author’s own desire to understand and overcome it, explaining it through analogies and simple visuals understandable by a 5-year-old. **Optimistic nihilism and the future** [[Optimistic Nihilism]] ### **🚀** Trying New Things [[Dealing with mental ruts]] - After filling myself to the brim with food from hotpot with my parents, I ended up [[doomscrolling]] for 4 hours straight. My path ranged from YouTube to Twitter back to YouTube, doing many things like seeing the updates of old friends, watching videos of old games I used to play, and binging the content of my favourite creators. Each video I watched had a completely new style of presentation and takeaway, even if it was intended to just be an entertainment video, which kept me hooked on the hedonic treadmill. - My weeks usually contain less than 1-2 hours of entertainment (not including anime), so it was interesting to just casually double those numbers in a single day. There’s just so much meaningful content to consume, and not enough time to appreciate everything. I don’t know what my takeaway is here, but I feel that we should be accepting of such relapses. Sure you can feel ashamed and regretful, but then that would corrupt the past experience and remove all form of appreciation for it. ### **🤔** Food For Thought > Hedonism is not an expression of freedom; it is a passport to enslavement by a thousand cravings and addictions. And in the end it produces not pleasure but despair — Matthew Kelly, Off Balance Are you currently being enslaved by your interests? Are the things you do in your day-to-day life truly providing you with freedom, or are you unwillingly binding your happiness to external things? Learn to train your mind to find pleasure in our mere existence.