#104: What you were escaping is what you needed

🌍 Move to a new city, stay connected, break free from productivity debt, foster kids’ autonomy, and find what you’ve been seeking all along. Transform your life intentionally. ✨

Jan 25, 2025

👋 Welcome to this week’s Pursuit. My name is Amir, and each week, I go over 10 hours of content about personal growth and mental well-being, bringing you four insights and thought-provoking perspectives from leading thinkers. I hope to have a tiny impact on your life and inspire you with the tools to lead a more fulfilling life.

This week at a glance:

✈️ Move to a new city without losing touch with your network
⛓️ Breaking free from productivity debt
🪄 Instill autonomy & decision-making skills in your kids
🔑 What you were escaping is what you needed

✈️ Move to a new city without losing touch with your network

Environmental influence is the most effective form of behavioral control. Accordingly, if you want radical change, radically change your environment. Being in the wrong city will cancel out years of self-improvement.

Can't agree more! I saw a radical change in my life when I decided to move from Toronto back to Berlin. Don't settle for a city that doesn't work for you—take the risk and change your environment.

If you tell someone “we should keep in touch,” you will not keep in touch. Instead say, “I’m going to schedule a phone call with you in two months to catch up, I’ll send you the invite — if we need to adjust when we get closer to the date, that’s fine.”

I'm quite negligent when it comes to calling my friends, especially those who live in other cities. I know I love them and want to stay updated about their lives and share mine, but somehow life gets in the way and we don't catch up. I started scheduling monthly calendar events with them to catch up. Even if we can't meet on that day, we move the calendar event to a few days later and still make it happen. It's been a great approach to staying connected with friends I want to keep in my life.

✨ From Sasha Chapin - 50 Things I Know

⛓️ Breaking free from productivity debt

Productivity debt is the concept of feeling like one starts each day with a debt of productivity that needs to be paid off by the end of the day. This constant pressure to be efficient and productive leads to stress and a constant feeling of falling behind. The solution proposed by Oliver Berkman is to shift the focus from paying off this imaginary productivity debt to moving a small but meaningful set of items over to a 'done list' each day. By doing so, one can make better choices about what to focus on, make more progress, and reduce distractions caused by stress about neglecting other tasks. It is crucial to realize that completely paying off this productivity debt is impossible in the modern world of work with endless tasks and distractions, making it more important to focus on achieving meaningful accomplishments rather than striving for an unattainable zero balance in productivity. 🎧 5min snip

🪄 Instill autonomy & decision-making skills in your kids

If you have young kids or are thinking of having one, read this next piece. Even if you aren't a parent but are curious about how your parents' commands shaped your decision-making, you might enjoy this snippet.

A practical way to foster autonomy is by minimizing verbal instructions. Try spending 20 minutes with your child without giving any commands. Studies show that in some communities, parents issue only two to three verbal inputs per hour, whereas in Western societies, it's often around 120. This constant stream of instructions can create power struggles and stifle a child's natural decision-making skills. 🎧 3min snip

Balancing autonomy and structure is crucial. While it's tempting to manage your child's time closely, doing so can hinder their ability to prioritize and plan independently. Instead, guide them with encouragement rather than direct instructions. For example, ask questions like, "What do you have on your plate tonight?" to prompt them to think independently. 🎧 4min snip

🔑 What you were escaping is what you needed

There is this part of your brain, this scared animal part that says: I need to be judging everything right now, or thinking about how to guard my reputation, or planning for some weird fantasy of how the future will go, or I will die.” It’s not exactly the inner monologue, but it drives a fair amount of the inner monologue. And when you relax that part of you, and accept, for a moment, that the universe is much larger than your judgements, and will continue with or without your consent, Awareness happens.
You’re just surrendering “you” so that something larger can take over, something that is beyond understanding. In this deeply relaxing, deeply humiliating moment, you realize that the searching voice is, itself, made of Spirit. Your whole stupid personality with its dramas. Your feelings of being pathetic and alone. This thing you were trying to escape: that’s what you were looking for. There was nothing else to begin with.

✨ From Sasha Chapin - The Spirit Does Whatever It Wants With You

🎵 Music I’m listening to

You’ll find mostly Ethnotronica, Organic House, World, Disco, and Organic Electronic here:

🎧 If you appreciate the music I carefully select and haven't followed my Spotify playlists yet, now is the perfect time to hit that follow button and join me on this musical journey! 🎶

🌒 Pano: Danceable and electronic obscure songs
🌓 Sisy: Ethnotronica and organic house
🌑 Berghain: Dark, minimal techno and tech house
🌕 Heide: Groovy soul and disco house
🌞 Sonntag: Afterhours shit
🌎 World: From Latin jazz to Turkish psych
🌚 Super Slow: For your intimate moments