The State of “Blah”: Why You’re In It and How You Get Out Of It

Want to get notified about new posts? Join the mailing list and follow on X/Twitter.

You know how if you spend the whole day sitting on the couch watching TV, you get kind of restless yet somehow also too tired to get off your butt?

Like you’re tired of doing nothing, yet you’re also tired from doing nothing? You know what I’m talking about, the state of “blah”.

Well, that also happens with learning.

If you binge a bunch of lecture videos, documentaries, textbooks, whatever, without actively working exercises, solving problems, building stuff, then you’re going to fall into that same state of “blah”.

What that state of “blah” indictates is there’s an imbalance between your passive consumption and active production. You are consuming too much and producing too little.

Satisfaction comes from pulling through and achieving something that you know took real work, something that you really earned.

If you don’t go for something that takes real work, something you have to earn, you just waste away in a state of “blah”.

Once you notice this in one area of life, you start seeing it everywhere. Not just in your own life, but also in the lives of other people.

The “blah” is quicksand and you see people who are stuck so deep in it that the “blah” has become their personality.

The only way out of the “blah” is to start actively doing things that require you to put in work.

In the moment, this may seem counterintuitive because you think doing things will make you more tired and lead to more “blah”.

What you don’t realize is your problem isn’t about being tired, it’s about being unsatisfied, and you have to put in work to earn satisfaction.

I know, I know, it’s tough because the satisfaction only starts appearing after you put in some work. There is a brief period of time when you switch from doing nothing to doing something, when it feels like you’re just getting more tired and more “blah”.

But if you muscle through and accomplish something that took real work, even if it’s the tiniest thing, you will start to feel the “blah” dissipate, and you’ll find some motivation to put in more work to accomplish incrementally bigger things.

You keep doing this, and before you know it, you’re out of the “blah”. You’re doing stuff and earning satisfaction. At the end of the day you feel tired, but in a good way, where you can actually feel yourself absorbing rest and recharging your battery for more action and satisfaction the next day.

Want to get notified about new posts? Join the mailing list and follow on X/Twitter.