Amoge's Archives

8 January, 2026

12:23am

I’m increasingly finding excitement in simple things.

These are things that I would previously have found stressful or boring. For example, getting out of bed early, showing up for my workouts, taking care of my responsibilities, and doing what needs to be done. Some call it ‘adulting’, and in the past, I have said adulting is stressful. It still is. What feels different now is my relationship to these boring yet fundamental things that make my days worth living.

This excitement started a few days after I cut out all forms of external dopamine, save for rewarding myself with movies during my food breaks (unfortunately, this is one habit I quite like and intend to keep for now). I have no other external sources of dopamine. I cut out sugar, alcohol, and smoking of any kind, plus I’m already celibate. What this means now is that if I crave excitement, I must find it by doing tasks that contribute to the growth I want to see, and daring myself to do interesting and positively impactful things. Like writing and publishing on my blog every day. Or the prospect of turning a blog post into an audio version. Or turning that audio version into a visual story.

Life is full of exciting novelties that are enough to keep us engaged if only we take the time to slow down. But quite often, we’re in a hurry to get past boredom, and so once our mind is unoccupied, we immediately occupy it with consumption –watching back-to-back series of movies and TV shows, doomscrolling on social media, consuming copious amounts of alcohol and drugs.

So far this year, I have not consumed sugar, alcohol, or my own personal favourite, weed. I see the way they have become normalised in the world today. So normalised in fact, that it’s stranger to find someone who doesn’t indulge than to find someone who does. So I asked myself a simple question:

If everyone is going this way, what does it look like to go the opposite way?

There’s a popular saying from the final lines of Robert Frost’s 1916 poem, “The Road Not Taken”. It goes:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

And so I’m choosing to walk the less popular path, the path that gives me autonomy over what I can control –myself. To reclaim my time is to exercise my free will in its purest form. This means returning to my default state, where I can live life to the fullest without dependency.