Achieving the MVA

10/20/2024 6:28 pm | : 3 mins. | Share to:

There's a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, and smoke weed all day, and watch cartoons, and old movies. I could easily do that. My whole life is a series of stratagems to avoid, and outwit, that guy.

I think about this quote a surprising amount. My ADHD and modern society makes it incredibly easy to sit in my comfy chair or at my computer desk, and just fucking surf the web and play games hour after hour, day after day. Modern capitalism is about making you as comfortable as possible, and keeping you in front of a screen for as long as possible to enable more and more advertising to be shown to you.

I recently had the realization that often my daily striving, in the same vein as the Bourdain quote:

Every day, I need to achieve at least level of my MVA (Minimum Viable Adulting), and push to extend beyond that as much as possible.

Am I successful? No. Not often. Not even usually. I wrap myself in the blanket of my 9-5 job, and let myself believe that is that day's Minimum Viable Adulting. The shift I am trying to make mentally is that work is valid and obviously important to my livelihood, but my meaning for the Minimum Viable Adulting is just about being better at taking care of myself and my wife and our house.

But... I could reload Reddit for the 20th time in the hour. Or I can reload X / BlueSky / Mastodon. Or I can play another round of Team Fight Tactics. Or. Or. Or.

Or I can close the laptop and get up and do something. Today was fairly productive with me going out to get a much-needed haircut, doing some grocery shopping, working in the kitchen, assembling our new electric lawnmower and doing some vacuuming.

Today I managed the MVA.