Potential

You know, with this single entry, I can stop writing any for the remaining twenty-two days, and I would average out to about one ``rant-y'' post per day.

But let's not do that. =)

Today was a day that I spent in some level of contemplation about random things here and there. The thoughts were strangely unstructured, but were more ``free association'' in nature. A key theme that ran through them though, was the idea of ``letting someone live rent-free in one's head''.

The idea here is that there is a certain quantity of potential (I'd like to call it ``energy'', but since I cannot quantify it the normal way, ``potential'' will have to do) that we begin the day with in our minds. We can roughly correlate the amount of potential to the amount of actual food energy available for the brain, or to the numbers and types of neurotransmitters available.

The functional aspect of potential in mind is that it quantifies the maximum amount of effort that we can expend throughout the day running through mental tasks. This can include active activities like hard thinking, consistent conscious observation, and passive ones like rumination, worries, and the like.

Since the potential is finite, if we consume too much of it, it depletes, and we feel mentally drained.

As we get older, two things to such potential happens: we are more aware of what limits there are, and the sheer amount of potential that we have per day tends to decrease over time, not because we are getting older, but because of certain life choices that we made that either depletes potential faster, or recharges potential slower.

Activities that recharge potential include sleep, doing fun things (which is paradoxical when some of the fun things we do can also consume potential), and reconnecting with other low stress situations that promote relaxation.

Considering the hypothesis that we have a finite amount of potential per day, we consume potential when we use our minds, and we recharge it each time we rest/sleep/do something fun, the ``life hack'' way of ``optimising'' potential use would be to consider implementation measures that:

1. Lower the per unit time use of potential;
2. Lower the total potential to be used in a day; and/or
3. Increase the amount of potential we regain at the end of our day.

This is where ``letting someone live rent-free in one's head'' comes in. That statement is a demonstration of a type of potential drainer, a finite upkeep cost that increases either the per unit time use of potential, or increases the total potential used in a day. When we think of someone, most particularly on how they had wronged us, we consume potential to fuel that thought, potential that we could have used on something else. Most of the time, the situation is far worse, because even more potential is consumed to think about ways to thwart that person who wronged us, or even to explore scenarios of comebacks that we could have done/could do to ``right the wrong'' so to say.

The problem here though, is that everything that we just spent all that potential on is completely in the mind-space, and has no [good] consequences. The thoughts of acts of vengeance do not get realised, there is a feedback loop that reinforces the bad memory to make it even easier to conjure up in future causing more potential use, and the impotence of no apparent justice from the lack of visible vengeance makes us consume even more potential getting angry, all without the target of all that anger even being affected.

In fact, it is the ``I'' who have been doing all these thinking that is affected negatively. That person has obtained ``immortality'' vicariously through our constant waste of potential of thinking about them.

No wonder we are told to leave vengeance to the Lord, for it is His to enact according to His will.

All that wasted potential on someone who is flawed and just as sinful as we are... all that potential that could be used to do something that we needed to do (like work), or that we liked to do (like doing a fun thing that requires concentration), all wasted on the imagined version of the person who knows nothing about it.

And if you think I am referring to specific people in my life, you are not completely wrong. Where you are wrong though, is completely missing one very important person.

You see, most of the time I am talking about the past me. Yes, there are some people that I really don't want to waste my potential on by remembering them, but since I spend most of my time with me, past-me is more often than not what keeps appearing.

That's why we are also told to forgive past-me, and strive to be the best we can as present-me, so that future-me won't need to waste potential getting angry at future-me's past-me (i.e. present-me).

No one else knows about the bad things and mistakes that I have done better than me. In fact, I doubt most people will remember any of those things, unless I make the tactical mistake of raising it up to them first, from which point the event can become more strongly ingrained in their memory. We should remember the lessons we learnt from the mistakes we make, but we should not play the guessing game of ``what-if'' about the scenarios that we had made the mistakes in, mostly because it is essentially busy work that has no useful outcomes.

If I claim that my motto is ``do it once, do it good'', then I should learn to live up to my motto---do the things that I need/want to do once, and do them good. If I made a mistake, realise that it was not for a lack of planning and understanding because I did do them as good as I could have done at that point in time---future-me has the benefit of hindsight while past-me didn't.

Even though past-me is my friend (some might even say one of my two truest and closest friends), he can't live rent-free in my head through second guessing; him doing that drains precious potential that present-me needs to prevent catastrophies that would prevent future-me from thriving.

And that's about it for now. Till the next update.