So, I have to offer at least twenty-two apologies for taking five days to respond to you, believe me there was no escapism happening to explain my absence, more like the opposite, ha ha!

I think I might have used the wrong word when I said comfort, because I absolutely agree with you when it comes to people seeking comfort as a goal. Living in a society that worships instant gratification and escapism offers a constant goal sabotaging path to slog through it seems. Instead of comfort I was thinking more about wellness, the aspect of balancing productivity with overall health so that you can perform at your peak consistently rather than devolving off into burnout land.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately. My nephew was up from college this weekend, I say nephew, but the guy is only six years younger than I am. He's getting his PHD in Nuclear Chemistry, and we were having a discussion about a presentation he was working on. It involved injecting gold nano particles into blood samples and bombarding the samples with magnetic light. It was in that moment that I was having a quite in-depth discussion about nuclear radio chemistry that I had a wtf epiphany, for I don't think I have picked big enough goals.

My form of escapism is taking care of so many people and tasks that I don't focus all (or most) of my energy on accomplishing that big goal that I know I can do. I let my focus be fractured on the mundane instead of balling up and attacking the big goals that I know I am capable of. In that way I am no different than you on one of your weed smoking , garbage food binge-fest fugues. Even though it's tough, I feel better too, when I focus on the first of your states of your phases than the other.

But people get stuck in jobs, relationships, whatever and just keep showing up day after day to do the bare minimum. Happens to me too.

It sucks that this happens to us all, I know that I am excellent at hanging out in comfortable ruts. However, having rambling existential discussions about kicking our own asses into goal accomplishing gear is a nice side effect of thinking about the errors of my way.

Thank you for your thoughts by the way, I've enjoyed them:)