im bad at titles

Another possible practice/strategy:

When other thoughts arise, one should not pursue them,
but should inquire: 'To whom do they arise?' It does not
matter how many thoughts arise. As each thought arises,
one should inquire with diligence, "To whom has this
thought arisen?". The answer that would emerge would be
"To me". Thereupon if one inquires "Who am I?", the mind
will go back to its source; and the thought that arose
will become quiescent.

With repeated practice in this manner, the mind will
develop the skill to stay in its source. When the
mind that is subtle goes out through the brain and the
sense-organs, the gross names and forms appear; when it
stays in the heart, the names and forms disappear. Not
letting the mind go out, but retaining it in the Heart is
what is called "inwardness" (antar-mukha). Letting the
mind go out of the Heart is known as "externalisation"
(bahir-mukha). Thus, when the mind stays in the Heart,
the 'I' which is the source of all thoughts will go, and
the Self which ever exists will shine. Whatever one does,
one should do without the egoity "I". If one acts in that
way, all will appear as of the nature of Siva (God).

                        - Ramana Maharshi

I feel like I need a change of everything (do you get it?)

I do. I am in one of those moments myself, have been for the better part of the year. Nearly everything about me is in a process of revision.

'working on oneself' is such a western thing to do.

that's a good insight. The capitalist idea of "self improvement" is one that I fell trap to and then shed not too long ago. Right now, as I'm starting to develop an interest in indian (sorry, bharati) philosophy, a different kind of work suggests itself, one that, for starters, does away with the idea of a 'Self'.

but I also feel like i'm trying to cultivate boredom to some extent.

'cultivating boredom' is such an underrated concept these days. Today, we try to fight boredom with all our might. Ironically, some of our attempts to shut it out, such as scrolling through tiktok, end up being a sort of self-reinforcing form of boredom: At some point it becomes boring af, but your brain just can't seem to let it go!

Cultivating actual boredom, on the other hand, is a very nice thing to do, for it (in my experience, at least,) prompts you to do *something*. The key is not to escape that boredom through easy routes, like the aforementioned tiktok.

Case in point: I have stopped browsing most sites I used to visit, partly because they were doing me no good. Now I have a handful of sites I still visit (in principle, just two of them, one being the midnight pub, in practice, a couple more), which are quite 'slow', which has meant that I now open a web browser and it's quite boring. It always was, only I could go to a number of sites and distract myself from that boredom by looking for something worthwhile --there was hardly anything. Now I just shut it off after a while, do something else.

Sometimes, there's really nothing to fix, only anxiety in comparison to the world around you.

I try to harness that anxiety, or at least to alleviate it by trying to address the object of that anxiety. I don't ignore it enough. I've been trying to relax a bit and do something less 'productive' such as reading fiction or playing videogames. In the end, whatever I tried to do to be 'productive' ended up being counterproductive, most of the time!

- - -

I hope you find your point of balance, meawhile...

~bartender, some hot chocolate, please. Dark, if you don't mind.

> I feel like I need a change of everything (do you get it?)

What I'm currently getting is that letting go of the need to change *any*thing is the only place where peace could possibly be hiding from the laughably inherently futile attempt to change what couldn't possibly be moved by an illusory of free will....

Sure, "whisper words of wisdom"... but, more importantly, let it be.