Weekend Wallowing

So Saturday is very nearly over here in Japan. I slept until about 10 A.M., though I awakened a handful of times through the night, considering rousing to try and find some entertainment. I just thought it would be better to let my eyes rest because I had a sort of pressure-ache around them. Which was strange, as I hadn't really done anything that involved eye strain. I hardly get to look at a computer for an hour a day during the week, most days. That has been a good thing in a way in terms of dependency/addiction, but at the same time - given my lack of engagement offline - it is sort of soul-crushing too.

My best friend is a lawyer, and I am really proud of her. She has started taking art classes to help her mental health, and I feel like the person that I knew a few years ago would have written that off as unnecessary. She has grown a lot, and I am glad to have known her for like ten years now. Yesterday, she encouraged me to find small things to enrich my life outside of my job, and she was pretty convincing that the whole "not having time" thing isn't really valid as she usually reads novels in five minute bursts in the bathroom.

And she is right, of course. These are things I know objectively speaking. However, here in Japan (and with less than a month until I go back home) it seems like the effort involved in "having a life" outside of work would be just a disastrous affair. I don't live in a major city (though Yokohama is about 45 minutes away and parts of Tokyo about an hour) which I actually prefer but it means that the expat community here is pretty small. I don't often run into random English-speakers.

More than that, it is the crushing exhaustion that gets to me. Throughout the day at work, I have moments where I feel like myself. Sometimes I have whole, huge fic ideas or other itches to create. Last weekend, I somehow found the motivation to get started on a fanvid, just barely, but I haven't been able to work on it all week, and at the moment I don't much feel like it.

I thought I might come home Monday or Tuesday and work on it, but neither day did I feel like doing much of anything. I would turn on my computer, and I think one night I played MTGA for an hour or something, but every other night this week, I have basically just fallen face-first onto my futon before 9:00 P.M. and slept through until nearly morning. I was at least in the habit of going to the bathroom around 12:00 or 1:00, but lately if I awaken at all to pee or get water or whatever it tends to be much closer on to daylight. I just completely lack the stamina to do anything outside those ten hours I spend at work every day. I only work for about seven or eight of them, but I have to be there the whole time. I recently had a conversation during our sort of free conversation period with two of my best students who seem pretty attached to me about work-life balance and how it basically doesn't exist here. They think it should, and I'm told there are reforms in the works, which might be more than can be said for the state of the American economy. It feels like an impossible catch-22. Either you live in a country where jobs are available and do nothing but those jobs, or you live in a country where you can hardly find a job to sell your life to.

So yeah that kind of has been making me sad. I have been looking for jobs to apply for near home for starting sometime in January, but so far there hasn't really been anything, and I am getting worried a bit.

Anyway, the point of this post other than just catching up with things was to mention that in listening to a podcast called Female Criminals, they were discussing an old psychological study called The pathology of boredom. As I understood it, it was a study where the volunteers were subjected to social isolation and sensory deprivation for days at a time. They were allowed to leave at any time that they could no longer bear it, but they were incentivized to stay by being paid $20 (about $200, adjusted for inflation) per day for as long as they stayed.

I didn't get figures on how long the average volunteer stayed or anything. It wasn't relevant to how it was relevant to the podcast story. But basically they were saying that the volunteers went in with ideas for how they would fill the time. Some planned to mentally work on coursework or plan papers. Others planned to plot novels or to imagine other things that they wanted to do in the future. They had "food for thought" going in. However, all the participants reported consistently that they were not able to get very far with this because under such circumstances, they were unable to maintain coherent thought on any one topic for very long at all.

Boredom, in mild doses, can be a catalyst for creativity. However, there is a kind of soul-sick boredom that sets in when there is a lot of it that actively combats what even makes us ourselves. That particular study is so old because since then no one has felt ethically right about repeating it, not because the people were physically harmed or complained much or anything, but because the volunteers were found to have suffered damage to their cognitive abilities, even though said damage was temporary. They performed poorly on elementary school-level tasks having to do with cognition after that experience, and it took them a while to recover.

And that's basically how I feel on the weekends. Like, my main goals for this weekend were to work on some fandom stuff and to clean my apartment floor of shed hair. So far, I have done neither of those things and literally spent most of the day in and out of my futon. And I am considering going back right now. I think part of this might have had to do with a low-grade migraine that I finally took some of my meds for and the aftermath making me a bit drowsy, but I am just so frustrated that when I do have "time" to myself, I can't do anything but just kind of coast along and exist. I feel the most personal motivation and inspiration when I am trapped at work.

I have started to carry a notebook again when I can remember it. This was a habit I had as a child, pre-mobile phone days. It has come in handy a couple of times, but the thing is that this kind of impact seems cumulative and to really have a negative impact on my confidence in my ability to work on anything going forward. It makes me just sort of give up.

If any of you have gone through similar things, how did you cope with it? I feel this way when I go through bouts of unemployment, too.