Even My Discipline Was an Escape?

If there's one word to sum up the past few weeks, it's distraction.

This quote from Carl Jung has stuck in my head for a while:

”

Carl Jung

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls… who looks outside, dreams; who looks inward, awakes.

I put in a lot of hours. All of it felt "fun." But underneath the fun, my real goal kept gnawing at the back of my mind.

Here’s a glimpse of all the work I did the whole time since my last post:

What pulled me back was a much needed retreat.

The Silence and Solitude Retreat

My church's Drama Ministry organised a Silence and Solitude retreat - a shorter 2D1N version in Batam, Indonesia, compared to the 3D2N I went in 2024.

Shorter, but exactly what my tired body, soul, and spirit needed.

We wrote 2 letters. One at the start before we began any of the activities, where we wrote down our current burdens and prayers, and another one was a letter to God.

When we ended, we received back the 1st letter we wrote to ourselves and we prayed for each other, for God to be with us and that we will always remember to focus on Him when we get back to the hustle of daily living.

One decision came out of that retreat clearly: cut the distractions. All of them, as much as I could.

Saying Goodbye to a Game I’d Played for 288 Days

The 1st one to go was a mobile game I’ve been playing for 288 days straight.

Truthfully, it wasn't really the game that kept me hooked - it was the people. I was in Realm 286, part of the strongest alliance on the server, [NGP] NothingPersonal, and somehow ended up on the leadership team. All I did was show up for events and be welcoming.

I watched top spenders, like SgPiggy, also from Singapore, drop an entire month’s salary in a single afternoon. I saw players from completely different timezones show up for each other like a real team. Everyone quirky, everyone genuinely into it. It was a privilege for someone like me because I wasn’t a major contributing force to the events.

When I decided to leave, I didn't want to just vanish. So I gave everything away - my resources, and even the account itself. Something I'd spent months painstakingly building.

For a few days, I got to feel what it's like to be someone handing down an inheritance before they go.

It was fun while it lasted. But I needed to focus.

What Distraction Actually Meant

I'd powered through distraction before, in my younger years. What changed is that as I got older, distraction stopped being a phase and became an escape hatch.

I ran an analysis on myself with my own AI setup. It came back with a capacity problem, not a discipline problem. My nervous system was demanding downtime because it was genuinely exhausted, and self-development, learning, "doing more," was my brain's way of taking that rest without feeling guilty about it. All that hard work was high-functioning avoidance in disguise.

Oof, hits hard.

I connected that to something I'd learned from Nir Eyal:

• Traction: an action that moves you toward what you intended to do
• Distraction: an action that pulls you away from that intention

If I'd scheduled time to watch a show, that's traction toward rest. But if I'm in church, and instead of listening to the sermon I'm sending instructions to Claude, that's distraction.

Did My Distractions Get Satisfied?

The desire to get back on track was always real. But I knew I was choosing the distraction, and I let myself do it anyway. I was far from where I should've been spending my time and focus.

Even the distraction wasn't wasted, though. Some of it turned into something useful. Having a space to post my own content, without worrying about views, turned out to be exactly what I needed. No metrics to chase. Just a place for my own thoughts to exist.

Which brings me to the three things I actually said I wanted to focus on:

• Financial: rebuilding my online coaching offer
• Spiritual: getting back to writing my book
• Physical: getting in shape ahead of Easter 2027

My current distraction is building a second brain inside Claude, and I see it happening in real time. It doesn't get to replace the coaching offer, the book, or the gym.

Those three are still the point.

I have these written on my wall, not a rule I’m enforcing, but a reminder of what I already know.