The Model Kit

Read for yourself. Draw for yourself. Write for yourself. Because these are ways of thinking. Ways to keep yourself sharp. It’s like physical exercise, you use it or lose it. It’s okay to be bad at it, especially at first. When you learn to draw, you’ll draw people all out of proportion the drawing will look jarringly, embarrassingly wrong in retrospect. You’ll look back at your work and cringe. But this is because you’re learning to see the mistakes, developing a trained eye. It’s evidence that you’re improving! It’s the same with writing, playing an instrument, taking up a sport or learning a martial art. You probably don’t have to do any of these specific things these days in order to make a living and survive. But thinking is thinking. Sharpening the mind is bound to yeild overall improvements in different aspects of your life. What do you have to lose, an hour or two a day you might otherwise spend doomscrolling, or passively consuming increasingly artificially generated content? Interacting with things that no one could be bothered to create themselves with any kind of mindfulness? Take just a little time away from that and read a book chapter. Draw a self portrait in the mirror. Write someone a letter on a peice of paper and send it. Call it a form of therapy. Set aside some time to think for yourself.