A lot of people don’t get it, but our brains don’t have infinite space. It is constantly trying to forget things, recent and old. This is simply how our biology works.

It is also a curious fact that our primitive brains are not wired to keep up with this barrage of information that are suddenly available at our fingertips. It’s no wonder to me that geniuses often live tortured lives.

So many times in my life, I see people happily discussing owning multiple houses, cars, and having to deal with the complicated tax system as if its some source of pride. It’s flabbergasting to me.

For my entire childhood, I wanted to live in a single family house and as far as possible from our cramped 1100 square feet apartment. But when it finally happened when I was in college, the feeling wasn’t what I expected.

It turns out that maintaining a house is a crazy ton of work. Especially these days when half the contractors in the area just seem to cause problems to profit off later, it’s hard to truly know when a good job has been done. You cannot sleep well because if the previous contractor messed up badly, the problem still exists but now you gotta find someone else and they may not be the true antidote either. All the while, you gotta pay property taxes, worry about pests, and obsess over the security of your house, the house insurance, like ugh.

One of my other biggest pet peeves is driving. I hate driving a lot. I only do it because I have to in America, where politics has consistently trampled on the desire of many for better public transport. I hate having to play out scenes in my head of potentially getting in a bad traffic accident, having to constantly swivel my head at high speed to check for clueless pedestrians / drivers, constantly doing complex geometric equations in my mind to see if I could fit into a parking space, you get the point.

Saying you are tired typically implies being physically exhausted, because that is something visible. But how do you explain mental exhaustion to someone who cannot see it with their eyes?

Reducing the mental load is my key to happiness. I just want to focus on what matters, and the world cannot force me away from that.

CZ