Week Sixty! I’m very late this week! I have been feeling pretty lazy, I thought I’d be alright after last entry, but that’s not the case I’m afraid. For starters, COVID-19 is surging in my area, and I don’t see myself being able to get a vaccine shot for another month or two.
Anyways, related to Beeminder, I derailed on both /french and /clozemaster this week, not because I skipped a lesson but because I didn’t gain enough XP, which wasn’t a big deal to me.
However, I made the major error of not updating the Respite number (also known as days of mercy–how much safety buffer you automatically get after derailing) to 0 from the default of a week. (Because of course I’d forget something like that.)
This meant that the day after I derailed, I completely forgot to practice my French–I didn’t realize that I’ve become accustomed to Beemergency notifications prompting me so heavily–and so I broke my streak on both apps. :’(
For Duolingo, it’s not a big deal because they have their cute “streak freeze” capability, however my 250-day streak on Clozemaster was gone completely.
I know it’s not really a big deal, and I just have to start over again, but it really demonstrates how one slip-up leads to another–spiralling downward the same way good work causes a virtuous cycle upward.
Perhaps not coincidentally, I also keep nearly derailing on /sleep, due to restlessness and messing up my circadian rhythm, which has also most likely been causing my poor mood.
When I get down like this, it’s easy to become disenfranchised with the whole idea of this–that I’m juts drinking the Kool-aid of the self-help industry, and that the work I’ve been doing have just been easy busywork to distract me from the more difficult tasks that I’ve convinced myself aren’t Beemindable.
Although I think it’s good to have that kind of self-awareness and criticality, I also realize that I more often than not don’t feel this way, and that I am just trying my best, and that Beeminder is helping me a lot with that genuinely.
And although I don’t think Beeminder is a crutch–as previously discussed in this journal–I do have to wonder if it contributes to an internal or external locus of control.