I used to think discipline was a contract. That if I paid enough into it — the early mornings, the deleted apps, the parties I didn’t go to — something would pay me back. A slimmer body. A sharper mind. A life that looked, from the outside, like I had figured something out.
But the evidence kept not cooperating. The girl who eats whatever she wants and moves through the world like her body is an afterthought, effortless in it. The person who says the wrong thing at the wrong time, careless with people, and somehow still has a full room at the end of the night. The stranger on the street whose posture says: nothing is unresolved. I don’t know their life. I’m just reading their shoulders and feeling something I can’t name. And then the oldest image, buried under all of it — a version of myself I can barely remember, who did things without accounting for them. Who ate the thing and stayed out late and didn’t lie awake afterward measuring the cost.
I have watched all of them, carefully. The way you watch someone do a magic trick you don’t understand. Trying to find the part where they’re paying.
Freshman year I was one of those people. Or I thought I was. I wasn’t thinking about who I was becoming. I was just — alive, loudly, without accounting for it. And then somewhere in the middle of it I got tired of not knowing what I was building, or if I was building anything at all. So I pivoted. Completely. I started running. I deleted the apps. I stayed in on Friday nights and felt, quietly, superior about it.
What I didn’t understand then is that I had just found a more sophisticated way to avoid the same question.
It’s not that I stopped consuming. I just replaced one kind with another that felt cleaner. Your favorite song for the AI podcast in the shower. The thing you actually wanted for the thing that was making you better. And somewhere in the swap I picked up a smugness I didn’t ask for — this low hum of I am doing it right, I am the person who uses their time — that is somehow worse than the scrolling ever was, because at least the scrolling knew what it was.
Music in the shower is a pleasure. A podcast about AI in the shower is self-improvement wearing pleasure’s clothes. I chose the second one every morning for months and called it a habit and felt, quietly, better than everyone else. Better in what way, exactly, I couldn’t say. Does it compound? I don’t know. Into what? I don’t know that either. I just know I stopped listening to songs I loved because they weren’t doing anything for me. Stupid love songs mostly. Too simple, too sentimental, no nutritional value. I had decided they didn’t count.
If your favorite song made you happy, that was real. The happiness was the point and it arrived and that’s a complete transaction. But I had decided happiness wasn’t enough of a return. I needed the thing I consumed to be making me into someone. And that is a very exhausting way to take a shower.
The exhaustion set in slowly. Not the tired that sleep fixes — something underneath that. A buzz that doesn’t stop. Every choice folded into a larger argument I was making about myself, to myself, constantly. The run wasn’t a run. It was evidence. The book wasn’t a book. It was an investment. Even rest became a strategy. Sleep eight hours so you can perform better tomorrow. Sit quietly so your nervous system can regulate. I was optimizing so hard I forgot what I was optimizing for.
Someone asked me recently: what are you expecting to receive?
I didn’t have an answer. Which is how I understood, finally, that the discipline was never really about the reward. It was about the feeling of control in a life that kept refusing to be controlled. The career roadmap pivoting. The grade that didn’t come. The reactions of “non-transcendent” people who didn’t understand what I was building. The question of who I actually am when I’m not performing my own becoming.
And the values. I defined them early, the way the books say to. Wrote them in a journal with clean handwriting like I was signing a contract with myself. Ambition. Curiosity. Depth. Presence. Maybe, values defined too early become a costume you can’t take off — that you’ll spend years being loyal to a version of yourself that no longer exists, calling it character.
A friend told me about something she was excited about — something frivolous, something that wasn’t going anywhere. I listened the way I’d trained myself to listen, which is carefully and a little above it. I said something measured and wise. I walked home and thought: I used to be the person who would have just been excited with her. I didn’t know when I had stopped. I didn’t remember deciding to.
What I’m describing is a religion. Complete with its texts — the books about habits, the podcasts about presence, the journals about intention — and its rituals and its quiet sense of being among the saved. I built it myself, which made it harder to see. Religions you inherit you can push against. The ones you construct feel like clarity.
I’m not saying none of it matters. I don’t know if none of it matters. That’s the problem. The discipline might be slowly building something I can’t see yet. Or it might be an elaborate way of feeling like I’m moving when I’m standing still. I cannot tell from inside it. Nobody can.
What I know is that I am tired in a way that the discipline was supposed to prevent. That somewhere between freshman year and now I stopped doing things because they felt good and started doing them because they were supposed to make me good, and those are not the same thing, and the distance between them is where the exhaustion lives.
There was a song I’d skipped a hundred times because it wasn’t the kind of thing I was supposed to like anymore. Too simple. Too sentimental. I heard it coming from someone else’s window and stood still for a second on the sidewalk without deciding to. It was a stupid love song. It wasn’t doing anything for me. It didn’t compound. It didn’t make me into someone. It just played, and I just stood there, and for a moment I wasn’t measuring anything at all. That was the whole thing.
That was, I think, the whole thing.