The Couch of Resistance
Part Two of the Sofa Saga
My apartment currently has a fully equipped kitchen, a bed, a sofa and a desk with no chair.
It’s time to buy a desk chair.
I’ve had a busy four months since moving to Nashville. I have an internship at a video production company on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. In September, I spent ten days on the road as second camera on a corporate video shoot. I have been a PA on several music video and commercial shoots on my off days, even weekends, that ran long into the night.
I still feel like a slacker.
It’s probably because I am. When I am not busy with a shoot, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday are completely free days. That’s a full half week of potential productivity. Predictably, it becomes a full half week of plentiful procrastination.
Today is a Thursday. My alarm went off at 9 AM this morning but I didn’t wake up officially until 10. Then I checked social media on my phone and read entertainment news until 11. It was prime time to make lunch when I finally got out of bed.
I listened to a podcast as I cooked. I watched Black Mirror as I ate. By the second episode, I was disgusted with the current trajectory of contemporary society. Then I was stabbed through the heart with the spear of hypocrisy, closed my computer and began reevaluating my life. Bravo, Black Mirror.
Many of my off-days pass like this. Morning slept away, the afternoon dedicated to entertainment. I am taking care of myself. Grocery shopping, paying bills, changing the car’s oil. But I have dedicated very little time on what I claim is my passion.
I say I’m a storyteller. I say I want to write scripts and direct films. But when given the choice between writing and escape into the entertainment world, I always pick the latter.
Is my passion creating? Or am I obsessed with consuming?
This is where I crawl back to Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art. Pressfield slaps me upside the head then mercifully directs my attention back to my antagonist, Resistance. My addiction is Resistance.
Resistance is the personification of my self-defeating habits, procrastination, sloth. If I am honest with myself, there is nothing I currently want to watch on Netflix, HBO GO or Crunchyroll. I’ve finished all the shows that I find worthwhile to experience. Yet I am so adverse to self-motivated work, so decieved by Resistance, that I would rather watch garbage online than exert myself in something that I find rewarding.
That’s disgusting.
But now I’ve identified my enemy, who I already knew, but convinced myself was innocuous. I’ve willingly drawn chains around myself and it’s going to take some doing to remove them. New habits need to be formed and kept. Old habits need to die.
The first step is to get off this couch and buy my work desk a proper chair.
