Daydreaming towards success?
Daydreaming on a rainy day is one my favourite things to do, as well as the most fabulous lifestyle perk of being a writer, as we are technically working not doing nothing, honestly and if I do not judge you, please, do not judge me, lets just all agree we are very busy and that honouring the space of silence is a legitimate thing to do. However is it not strange how we feel the urge to justify that space, that glorious silence that can only be achieved by nothingness. Influencers peddle their journalling and time planning, but how do you plan for getting lost in thought and moving closer towards your intuition rather than becoming identified with the thinking mind whose purpose is to plan and organise. The truth is daydreamers get to imagine a better world, the planning mind only gets to work but we need both to change the world.
They are two contrary forces acting over each other, the thinking mind is stronger or certainly louder, it points things out, it draws your attention, it reminds you and even critiques you, whereas the intuition is silent, you have to deduce it's existence, you observe its effects rather than directly observing it. As if it were a black hole whose gravity spins light around it which is how people know they are there, so in the same way our emotions are pulled and influenced by our inner being that is intuition, it shows up in our resistance to thinking that does not align with it, and as you feed it, it becomes stronger, whether you do so knowingly or not.
That is not to say you cannot use the thinking mind to guide you towards your intuition, it can be a lens through which you can recognise something that you cannot directly observe, and once you have intellectualised the fact that it exists, you are then able to put a value on it, give it a sense of worth that can be prioritised. The mind can organise time to serve any purpose as long as it is plausible to you that it serves a purpose, and by giving it value you can devote time to it, you can actively block out time in your day to do nothing except daydream, you can develop the habit of being still and having presence with silence and yourself. This may be my British bias, but there is no greater accompaniment to afternoon tea than a good sit down in a comfy chair with the only soundtrack being the back garden and your own mind.
To be able to sit without any attachment to achievement or purpose is a wonderful joy, it is the ultimate luxury in a minimalist lifestyle. Whilst I love the game of minimising your stuff, through I do not worry about the number items I have rather my focus is on whether I am getting value out of everything I own, and that I treat them with respect by maintaining them and giving them a home in my home, because why own things I do not care about and that is left wherever junk ends up (usually in strange drawers and on tabletops). Minimalism in itself is just a starting point, a proof of concept of ideas that is powerfully demonstrated in the physical world by decluttering your stuff, a clean room can feel like a clean mind, and nearly everyone who does minimalism ends up more excited by how it makes them feel rather than any physical benefit they really get, and that is the important thing, to use minimalism as the beginning of a process that begins with your home but ends in the mind.
Daydreaming is what happens in the space that you give yourself in your life, and people are naturally great at it. As Khoffman discovered we have two systems of thought, one for actively thinking and the other for habits and daydreaming, out of preference we prefer to use the second, not only does it use less energy, doing things out habit is just simply easier, but because daydreaming is so valuable. Being social creatures is not easy, and to get better at it we have to visualise it and practice it in a low stakes environment, and unlike other habits which are formed by doing things in the real world, being social has to be practised within our heads, as to practice in the real world would be fatal, if we are to make every mistake in real conversation, the cost of doing so would be enormous, that is why the mind practices it within your head and makes it easy to do so, indeed it makes it our default mode so that we do do it, automatically and without having to think about, and it rose precisely because of natural selection.
It is only really in the modern world that this has become a problem, there is plenty of time for daydreaming in hunter gatherer societies, indeed the Aborigines having built it into their culture with time spent in the walkabout being an honoured tradition. Sadly these treasured spaces have been squeezed out by industrialisation and institutionalised work ethics that despise unused time, when humans were treated as robots, units of production whose productivity had to be maximised, daydreaming had no use or utility.
However now we have the choice between consumption of consumer goods and free time, we have for too long chosen to indulge our love of shiny toys and status symbols, and it is perhaps unsurprising when we have lost the value of empty time and space. It does not help when it is so hard to trade money for time in a marginal way. You have your job that pays your salary and you have to do 60 hours a week for it, and there is not the flexibility to work one less hour and getting paid for one less hour, so we get used to giving a lump of time for a lump of money and we then spend it all. And whilst there is an escape route, you can buy assets that pay you income that replaces your need to work, you have to fully in because whilst there is a massive pay-off, there is also a massive delay in gratification, something that people are not good at.
And part of that massive pay-off is the freedom to daydream, to unfold yourself from the constraints of time being spent on behalf the other people. You have the freedom to do what you want, and within that the freedom to actively do nothing, which gives you time to walkabout, to spend time in your default mode of visualising being a better person, which might unsurprisingly mean that you become a better person, as you have time to think about how to act more elegantly and skilfully towards other people and yourself.
To use the old phrase, it only when when you have time to do nothing that you have the time to work on yourself, because given no other activity (and most people chose to do anything other than spend time with their own thoughts) that is exactly what the mind will do, it will daydream. Whilst people might be hostile and like to think that your are way with the fairies dancing on the clouds, in reality you are actually practising to be a better person (which scares people as they might find out they are not perfect now), and better people are more successful people, so give yourself time to daydream early in your life, nurture it through your career and perhaps in time you have the freedom to really focus on some serious daydream, and because there are no limits in your dreams which means in time there are no limits on your life, as whatever is plausible to you is possible.
