You already relive the same day over and over again
I watched the Groundhog Day movie a couple of weeks back with my mother. It is one of my favorite movies and I was trying to get her to appreciate time-travel movies. We had watched the Edge of Tomorrow movie a week earlier and she had come to not hate it at the end.
Groundhog day is one of my favorite movies but I don't think I've watched it since I watched it in college, more than a decade ago. I was a different person then and rewatching the movie made me realize something quite profound, at least to my mind.
(Spoilers ahead)
In the movie, the protagonist relives the same day over and over again. He goes to sleep and he wakes up on the same day instead of the next day. He goes through various stages of grief and eventually accepts his fate. This leads to an interesting transformation where he continues to relive the same day over and over again but works on improving himself. He starts to learn how to play the piano and everyday, he gets a little better. He starts reading regularly because he has nothing better to do so he might as well learn something new. He picks up and practices new hobbies not because it can lead anywhere but instead because be finds joy in them and it helps him spend that day meaningfully.
It sadly never occurred to me how monotonous my daily life is. I wake up, eat more or less the same kind of things, my work is more or less the same everyday, and I watch the same kinds of things everyday while I doze off to sleep. I effectively already relive the same day over and over again. I know how valuable daily habits are because I have slowly chipped away at hundreds of books over the past decade, learning something new all the time. I have practiced Python programming for the past decade, getting me to where I am. But when I rewatched the movie, I realized that I more or less behave like the protagonist does half-way through the film, while he is still making sense of how to spend his time.
I have a long way to go. I mentioned in my previous post that I slowly want to move away from consumption to creation but the process fundamentally involves introspection. This blogpost was a small exercise in introspection, which I am personally proud of.
There are a lot of things that I need to change about my daily life if I need to become as good as the protagonist is at the end of the movie. What about you? Are you reliving the same day over and over again without spending your time meaningfully?