106 lines
9.6 KiB
HTML
106 lines
9.6 KiB
HTML
<meta name="title" content="Poof, and it's gone">
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<meta name="slug" content="poof-and-its-gone">
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<meta name="createdAt" content="2025-12-20T17:54:05.000Z">
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<meta name="updatedAt" content="2025-12-20T17:54:05.000Z">
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<meta name="tags" content="">
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<meta name="guid" content="4655d2b9-0c4b-4dd7-bf95-538d36166000">
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<article>
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<p>
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Since reading Ray Peat's work and drastically improving my wellbeing—something that had been declining for years—I've
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been thinking more and more often about the phenomenon of learned helplessness and its relevance in my own life. Sometimes,
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looking back to past times can be useful to help reorient yourself in the present. In doing so, you can be better equipped to
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aim towards a more desirable future. Sometimes, a new perspective or experience might instantly obliterate previous
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behaviour without any concerted mental or physical gruntwork to eradicate it.
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</p>
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<p>
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On the flipside, I have sometimes hopelessly tried to forcefully change my behaviour, employing all the en vogue
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self-help tricks to form long-term habits, only to lose them just as quickly as they formed in the months that
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followed. These kinds of experiences remind me of those hypnosis advertisements that claim they'll have you give up smoking
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after just a few sessions; sometimes it's even after just one visit. There's no short supply of <i>miracle cure</i> stories
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or reports of sudden, permanent breaks in addiction. Cold-turkey clean cuts that seem to arise with no obvious effort on
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the part of the addict, no signs of worn willpower.
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</p>
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<p>
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When I was sixteen I spent six weeks abroad in a small town called Marburg in Hesse, Germany. I spent that time
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living with a new family along with my exchange student, Arne, who had been staying with my own family in Melbourne for
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the same period of time just prior. Those were six exciting weeks of school, new acquaintances, a new language
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(albeit one I had been "studying" in the Australian school system) and unfamiliar cultural quirks.
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</p>
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<p>
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It was a barrage of stimulation, I came home every day from school and would collapse, totally exhausted, onto my
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exchange student's bed, which had been graciously given to me to use for the duration of my stay. Even tough I was utterly <i>kaputt</i> it's not like I was actually expected to
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<i>learn</i> anything or do any homework whilst I was at school here—I was basically on holidays and could really
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have just treated it as such. Plenty of my own classmates who had also been on a very similar trip certainly did. I'm not sure many of them
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learnt or used much German beyond <i>"Wo ist McDonalds?"</i> Thanks to a romantic summer fling,
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I had been gradually becoming more fascinated with the structure of German before arriving. Once there, the Deutsch on the blackboard looked more like a sophisticated puzzle game than a
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complete drag of a memorisation task, presumably aided by my younger, more language sensitive age at the time. Each day was a new game of detective guesswork, and better still, I got to play
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with new ideas about how the language works each day in the schoolyard with the new friends I was making. New ways to
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describe how things are situated in space, adverbs for how they move in relation to one another, mysterious new prefixes and other quaint linguistic
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quirks, like the insane backwards word order of German—unlimited entertainment to see if I was up to
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the challenge. I practically spent all my time in class ogling the immaculate chalk handwriting of the various teachers, I remember biology and German class in particular, and
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trying to work out what on Earth was going on. For some strange reason, it was a kind of bliss.
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</p>
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<p>
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On top of this, I was in the grade just above mine back home in Australia. Whilst that really shouldn't have made much
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difference, the amount of responsibility and independence these kids were allowed to exercise at sixteen or seventeen was
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nothing short of amazing to me at that age. I had never seen anything like it. Some of my classmates would stand out
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the front of school during lunchtime and smoke a couple of cigarettes with their own teachers, something I find kind of insane
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still to this day; it certainly would never have been acceptable back at home. Starting in the senior
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school, you were allowed to just leave and go home if you didn't have anywhere to be, so long as you were back in time
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for class. And we did. School uniforms simply weren't part of the culture either. For everyone else this perhaps just meant stressful decision making,
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another way to play the oft cruel status games of teenagerhood, but for me it was like every day was casual dress day back
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home. To top it all off, the legal drinking age in Germany is sixteen, at least for wine, beer, and other weaker drinks.
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</p>
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<p>
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These classmates of mine were running their own meetings headed by the <i>Klassensprecher</i>, the class
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representatives, and much unlike similar candidates back home, they actually seemed cool, they seemed like people I
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might like to hang out with and befriend. Alongside decision making regarding general classroom organisation, they would
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organise class bus trips: we saw a local band comprised of kids from the local schools, and for the first time in my life I drank
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alcohol along with everybody else there, just hanging out and left to our own devices. It was a sense of freedom and self-responsibility
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that wasn't afforded to me by the school system back home. Increasingly Australia, and especially Victoria, from which I
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hail, is branded as a "nanny state", and my experiences in Germany reinforce that.
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</p>
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<p>
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I really felt like I was in the midst of some sort of Hollywood production, an atmosphere that didn't quite seem tangible in
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Australia. The intersection in the Venn diagram of taking on responsibility and having free reign was
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vanishingly small amongst teenagers. Either you wagged class and maybe did drugs, or you obediently followed the rules. As the
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years went by, the fine line between the two seemed to vanish further and further, at least that's how it looked from where I was standing.
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</p>
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<p>
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Back in Australia, a routine had begun to solidify itself leading up to this trip. I would come home,
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maybe do homework, and then browse Reddit and play hours of Team Fortress 2. I had racked up an impressive 2000
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hours in-game. It seemed fairly inconsequential to me, and my high school friends, unlike primary school, were mostly
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fragmented, and so on weeknights I didn't find myself hanging out with many people regularly. I did try to get Team Fortress
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working on the old computer my host family had in Germany, just for fun, but to no avail. However, even whilst
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attempting to get it set up, something about it began to seem like an entirely futile endeavour.
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</p>
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<p>
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When I arrived back in Australia, it was as if a switch had been flipped. I all but stopped playing Team
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Fortress, a regular staple of my free time. Practically overnight it seemed to have turned from being an incredibly
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seductive way to pass the time to being a colossal <i>waste</i> of it. I just stopped playing cold turkey, and as far as I could tell, no
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effort went in to the dissolution of that habit whatsoever.
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</p>
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<p>
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I'm not exactly sure what facet of my overseas trip pushed me to change my behaviour so effortlessly, but I think it was
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the culmination of all my experiences in that incredibly enriched environment. As I have looked back on those times over the past few years, especially since
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discovering Ray, I can't help but think that I found myself in a "rat park" experiment during that time. Or I perhaps I was one of the rats
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looking on, watching as others were freed from certain death by drowning. My habits in Australia suddenly seemed dull and useless, like I was stuck in
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what the Germans call a <i>goldener Käfig</i> or <i>gilded cage</i>; basically inescapably trapped in an environment forged by
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my own riches and good intentions. Participating in the foreign exchange program widened my horizons. I could see that what
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I was missing out on indeed <i>was</i> possible, and I had the power to change my lifestyle.
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</p>
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<p>
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It would be nice if I could now say that I've since enjoyed a deeply enriched life and it has been smooth sailing from there on out, that this turning point in my life catapulted me into nirvana. But alas
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I wouldn't be a fan of Ray's if I never encountered a struggle or two along the way. But it seems to have profoundly changed the course of my
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life for the better. Ever since then, I've found it extremely difficult to waste my days away without having a
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sense of direction in my life. Although, this has been a source of anxiety, some time more than others. I certainly don't think I
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would have found it so simple to move abroad and continue to learn German whilst living, studying, and working in Munich for
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several years like I have been if I had never gone on that trip.
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</p>
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<p>
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So I guess, in that respect, watching your fellow rats have a good time, in real life, might just get you to settle for
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no less. One look at those old menial habits and—<i>poof</i>—they're gone. And for that I'm grateful.
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</p>
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</article>
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