in the moderate Aristotelian city

I seem to be doing lots of processing these past few days.

So one thing I'm kind of struggling with at the moment is giving myself permission to spend energy and time (and money!) on things that are fun. I have such limited resources, and so much to do in terms of both individual projects and ongoing stuff, that it sometimes seems like I can't afford to have nice things like, well, social interaction and fun activities.

This way of thinking is... ill-advised at best, toxic and dangerous at worst.

The thing is that I know this. I really do. I just fail to actually act on my knowledge.

So at the moment I have free time. I have some energy that could be devoted to social stuff. I have a wee bit of spare money which I could be using to hang out with people. I also have this mindset that says spending any of my precious resources on fun is... evil and wrong. (Ugh.) And I know that one thing that really helped me, back when I was treating my depression with CBT techniques a few years ago, was going and catching a movie every week.

That's probably not financially viable at this point. Movies are expensive. And I'm finding that I want some social contact as well as my fun, so while movies are awesome, spending the resources I have on hanging out with friends would probably be better. I could start by maybe making a list of people I'd like to reconnect with, and seeing which relationships I've totally burned? (The problem with hermitude is that, well, your friends start to think you don't care about them. Which is fair enough. I've been buried in my own brainfail for a long, long time. But maybe there are some people out there who would not be completely averse to the idea of having a coffee with me and catching me up on their lives?)

I can budget things like time, money and energy. I can figure out how that works. The hard problem is really doing over not-doing, and that's something that takes impetus and push. But this is totally a thing I can do.

I feel slightly more hopeful about this just having typed that out.