My first few days on modafinil (it’s life-changing medication for people who get sleepy during the day), I was so excited, I didn’t sleep well, but I think that difficulty was more related to my excitement that I had found something that helped, rather than the effect of the medication. Last night, I slept like a log, and made up my sleep deficit. So far I give a big thumbs up to modafinil.
I’m fascinated that when I share with friends how I’ve found something that has dramatically improved my life, more than 90% want to diss me and what I’m doing. I’ve noticed this over the course of my life. I’m a serial enthusiast and when I get excited about something, my friends rarely join with me in my joy. So I guess I don’t have much credibility because of my serial enthusiasms.
Still, I think there’s something to the idea of a net that friends and family will often try to drape over you to keep you in line with what they expect, and when you deviate from that, they become uncomfortable and if they can’t bully you back into their view of you, they drop you. I sense this reaction in myself when friends do something radically and threateningly new. Almost all of my big significant positive changes in my life (overcoming CFS, converting to Judaism, 12-stepping, modafinil, blogging, writing my biography of Dennis Prager) have had to be done against the wishes of most of those closest to me, and much of the time, I had to leave these friends behind.
That’s why moving can be such a spur to growth because you’re no longer held back by the expectations of those you grew up around.
On the other hand, people like Dennis Prager say they’ve never lost a friend, so there’s perhaps just something really wrong with me.
