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I'm 32 years old. To some that's ancient, to others I've hardly begun. Personally, I feel caught somewhere in the middle.
I've always been old at heart. As a kid I was the quiet one who let the noise happen around me. As a young adult I skipped out on a fair amount of societal norms like partying and experimenting with substances. These things just didn't interest me, I'd much prefer to spend some time alone with a book, or eating dinner with a few close friends.
As I've accumulated laps around our nearest star, I've also accumulated marker points that indicate my true inner age.
One that's always stood out to me as a clear marker between the two halves of life was when I bought a sparkling water machine. As a kid I remember arriving in a foreign land on German exchange and being amazed at how the houses looked similar sized from the outside but were double as big inside (the magic of basements and lofts). Why didn't our houses have 4 levels too?
Not only that, I was also struck how everyone was drinking bottled sparkling water. It was strange, unnecessary and didn't tickle my taste buds in a pleasant way. I was happy when I returned to the Thames-sourced tap water upon my return to my all too familiar homeland.
Fast forward half a lifetime and just around the time I'm turning 30, lo and behold I develop a penchant for tiny bubbles in my life liquid. No longer are they unnecessarily distracting, they're now a wonderful addition to an otherwise average beverage. Win.
As an software engineer my mindset is continually asking "how can I systemise this?", and so naturally that led to buying a soda stream. Not only that, I became a soda stream evangelist, showing it off to those who came to visit and even buying my parents one as a present.
That context, the systemisation of incremental improvements in my endless pursuit of lazy gratification, is what led me to buying a pillbox last week.
I've been thinking about buying one for about 6 months. Anyone that knows me well knows that 6 months of pondering time is a pretty standard length for this human, for reasons I've yet to fully discover.
I spent 6 months pondering whether to buy my Bose QC35's back in 2015, and still use them daily now.
I spent 6 months on my pillbox investigation, and currently I'm 6 months into looking into a plot of land that I may well end up purchasing in the next couple weeks (more to come on that in future posts).
So why a pillbox, and why now?
Simply put, because I'm a lazy bastard. I should take vitamins and supplements, but I don't. I don't because the box is in my drawer, it's ugly and it's a faff to open up. All said there's a sizeable amount of environmental resistance stopping me from engaging in the habit daily.
A pill box solves some of these problems. Of course I bought one that's beautiful and functional (hence the 6 month process). It can sit on my desk and I feel proud it's there, as a reminder of my exquisite taste and healthy habits. It being present on my desk provides an easy nudge to complete the habit, making it easier to complete than opening up the standard packaging pills come in.
The ironic part of all this is that in some ways my new system requires more work. I don't simply open up the pills from their existing packaging and pop them in my mouth, I now move them once a week from that packaging into other packaging (my pill box), and then each day move them again into my mouth.
But despite that, this feels like a lot less work. The resistance at each step is small, and even the practice of prepping each weeks set of pills is one that I can sense some satisfaction in, knowing that my weekly pill moving ritual is setting future Fred up for both short-term and long-term wins.
This mini pillbox shaped adventure all serves to remind me of the value of systems, and becoming aware of goals and the micro-resistance we face as we go about the small habitual steps to achieve them.
In life the answer is rarely brute force. Normally it's setting up a new way to do things that over time can be performed without much effort at all.
I've always been old at heart. Now I've just got a pillbox to prove it.