1000 days project

"We are what we repeatedly do"

Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers (1926)

The 1000 day project is my attempt to steer myself consciously towards the things that are most important to me.

Every day for 1000 days I will work towards my goals in a structured way. I will be posting daily updates on this website.

The 1000 day project runs from 26th December 2015 to the 21st September 2018, which is my 30th birthday.

In the past I have successfully completed two 100 day projects (100 portraits in 2010 and 100 blogs in 2011). In 2012 I spent 1000 hours drawing and painting.

Day 0316


Drove around, filled up the car with petrol for the first time, another everyday activity that caused me great anticipation anxiety. Done now, one step closer to becoming more like normal people.

The chap behind the counter at the petrol station was probably ten years younger than I am and has more real-world responsibility than I have ever had. I have lived entirely in books, digital abstraction and life mediated through symbols; art, code, words. I hadn't realised how far I have drifted until I started learning to drive and interacting with the real world directly, where I am the responsible agent. Compare bus and trains, or being a passenger: all judgement, control, ultimate responsibility rests with someone else.

Have been thinking a lot about the pastel portraits of wounded First World War soldiers by Henry Tonks, which I saw on a documentary yesterday. Melted flesh, missing eyes, jaws hanging off, red gore, neat hair, staring eyes, excellent draughtsmanship. Dug out my pastels and drew a colour self portrait tonight.

Why self portraits so often? Firstly and undoubtedly, self-adoration. Secondly, convenience. Thirdly, importantly, the challenge of a live model.

Day 0315


Drove my sister to Cambridge, which was a big deal for me. A small victory.

Read Man's Search For Meaning, which was far less gruelling than I feared, despite giving me a glimpse into the horrors of Auschwitz. The message is that when you can't change your circumstances you can at least control your reaction to them. Life demands meaning from you, not the other way around. Meaning can be found in every moment, even in suffering.

This may be a highly adaptive strategy, and a recipe for wellbeing and resilience, but it is not thereby true. But given its effectiveness it might be best to swallow it whole and live for a greater meaning as the alternative is the existential vacuum.

Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it
Viktor E. Frankl -Man's Search for Meaning

Enjoying doing my nightly little selfies, some of which show an improvement and are beginning to be recognisably me. Wondered about computational art and the minimum possible amount of information needed to create a portrait that is reliably identifiable. Just a few pixels merely hinting at key features will be sufficient.

Day 0314


Worked on a job application, took Jess's car out, barely left the house.

Passing my driving test is the first step into socializing myself, an inching towards adulthood, approximately a decade late. The reality of personal responsibility is awakening in me, and I don't like it. I prefer to avoid all culpability, dismiss consequence and cocoon myself off from the world. Anything else immediately causes me stress.

Montaigne was enjoined to transmute self-pity into anger, and I'm aware that I have been indulging myself a little too liberally in feeling sorry for myself. Too lazy to do anything other than identify the trait, which conveniently feels like making progress, even though it isn't.

Montaigne recognized that all the reading, learning and philosophy in the world serves a man no better than complete ignorance. The simple, everyday knowledge and physical fortitude of the 16th-century French peasant worked as well for them as Montaigne's learning did for him, if not better.

All knowledge only contingent. Often just a habit, an addiction. Not unasailable truth, but airy words that dissipate at the first sign of danger. I would change all of my views and preferences in moments if I thought it would benefit me.

I have not mastered myself, and never will. I am too pusillanimous, too wracked by emotion and too lazy to do anything other than weave comforting narratives about myself, all of which are immediately jettisoned under pressure and none of which stand up to any kind of scrutiny.

Weaving the narratives post-hoc rather than sitting down and writing principles and then living by them; much easier, sounds almost as good, and yet hollow, vapid, disingenuous.

Day 0313


Passed my driving test! Sick with nerves, tired, fear of humiliation, then euphoria and disbelief! Huge new vistas of opportunity, undreamed liberation!

Doused myself with cold reality by taking myself out for my first solo drive in my sister's car. Realised I've still got so much to learn, and made many embarrassing errors. Now it's just me, I've suddenly realised I have tremendous responsibility for my own actions and inactions, and it has thoroughly sobered me up. Exhausted now.

Day 0312


Excitement and dread about tomorrow's driving test, my second attempt. Have put all work on hold, have idled many hours playing tetris and procrastinating staring into space. Hoping for a good result and a good deal of luck.

I who fled from affairs, born for idle ease
Ovid

Day 0311


Drove well in my lesson today, so feel positive. Stayed late in bed, listening to Montaigne again. Mind cast forward to a mythical future with car, girlfriend, job.

Day 0310


Lay in bed late this morning listening to Montaigne, hardly the riotous start to the day my youth should demand. Mind forcefully turning to the girl I want, quite unsuitable and so wholly perfect for my patchwork, ill-conceived life story. But no action, no high-octane living, just sober family walks over the misty October Suffolk fields. The wrong time of life for slow living! Missing opportunities to assemble a dissipated and fullsomely lived youth.

Halfway through my application to a multinational technology firm, and I'm already getting worried about making a wrong decision and not being true to myself. I'm a self-centered, unreliable dreamer, not a company man! How to accelerate through to idle richness and not have to bend to the yoke of pitifully bland, meaningless years of structure, stricture and soul-sapping tedium?
Must write a book! Must harness the spark, the armchair rebel, before it is distinguished wholly and forever.

Physical symptoms of stress tackled with a prophylactic dose of Jeeves and Wooster.

Day 0309


Nothing is sufficient to quell my mind! Travelling, socialising, working, cooking, waiting, music, drawing, still I have clouds budding and bursting! Silent scream, anguish and the loneliness of being one of the few for whom the day-to-day palliatives of business and chatting and distracting are too weak to conquer the darkness without and the bleakness within.

Galling too to know the malaise is just a matter of chemistry and happenstance, that this maladaptive subroutine in my brain could just as easily not exist and I could content myself with football scores and certainty. Instead, a tangled and infinite mass of options, thoughts and counter-thoughts, base impulses and contradictory desires.

Day 0308


Breakfast in Wimbledon; talked of people and things, not ideas, which I find difficult to focus on.

Matinee performance of 1984, which was a physically moving, mind-filling experience. Knew that in room 101 I would have to betray my sister; a hated thought. Boot stamping on human face - the play avoided the exploration of the point of the party as purely a pursuit of power. Vague feeling that I am more O'Brien than Winston, that I buy the party line and that I think that doublethink is useful, good and true. That an unreal reality is preferable and necessary to the human condition, and that it is always already present.

Having identified the social structure that surrounds us as fundamentally manipulative and hollow we immediately threw ourselves into the hypocrisy of the protective bubble-world of capitalist consumption and travelled for an hour to eat a particular pizza in a particular restaurant. Go through the motions and tick the boxes and play the game and it just about keeps you preoccupied enough to tolerate the real truths which lurk always and ever at the peripheries of consciousness; principally that we are the dead.

Day 0307


London, meeting at barristers' chambers, lunch alfresco in the sun with a friend, Rodin's sloppy, lazy drawings of dancers at the Courtauld, the National Gallery then dinner in Wimbledon. Busy, tired, impoverished.

Drew a dreadful copy of a Botticelli in the National Gallery, but the silverpoint ground didn't work properly so the marks weren't showing up and the silver was skittering and squeaking across the plasticised surface. Highly suboptimal but no real excuse for getting the proportions so wrong.
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