I live in Ukraine. For the last few years, my daily routine has included a constant background fear of sudden death, physical mutilation, and losing everything I’ve ever built.
You watch your past life vanish. Your friends leave, relationships break down, and you’re just left sitting there, marinating in total burnout and the absolute injustice of reality. My psyche was flatlining. You can't just "schedule a therapy session" when the world feels like it's ending every Tuesday. I was psychologically dying, year by year.
I realized if I didn't aggressively take control of the only thing I still owned — my mind and my habits — I was going to go completely insane.
So, I downloaded a few popular habit trackers to start getting my life together.
And there I am, sitting in a state of existential dread, opening them to see a bunch of colorful rings I need to fill, graphs, and cheerful prompts. I looked at it and didn't understand where to stick these rings and what the point of it all was.
It felt like a sick joke. The absolute absurdity of this fluffy, Silicon Valley dopamine-design hitting me while my reality was literally crumbling. I didn't need a "streak" just for the sake of a ring. Ultimately, a simple piece of paper and a pen worked better for me than all this UI glamor. I needed a bunker for my mind, not a game.
So, I turned to a centuries-old concept: Asceticism (or Tapas). No motivation. Just a voluntary vow of restriction. You choose your challenge and you lock yourself in that decision for 7 to 365 days.
I took the vow. The noise in my head started to clear. But since pieces of paper kept getting lost and brought no sense of accomplishment or victory, I built a simple digital instrument strictly for myself. A brutal, minimal environment. Just a timer. You make a vow, and you sit in it. Along with the timer, I added a simple meditative element for relaxation—something to help anchor the mind when the anxiety becomes too loud. It’s all about creating that one spot of control in a world that’s falling apart."
Unlike standard habit trackers that reset at midnight, I built a rigid 24-hour cycle logic. If you miss the window — the vow is failed. No 'undo' button, no fake motivation. Just raw accountability.
But because coding became my only escape from the madness, I accidentally leaned a bit too hard into it.
I ended up turning a discipline tool into a NASA mission control center. I integrated a real-time space weather panel and a few meditations made exactly to my own taste, without trying to please anyone else.
Yes. Right inside a habit tracker. It shows: Solar wind speed, Geomagnetic activity (Kp index), Interplanetary magnetic field, Moon phase
My logic was: if I’m struggling to keep my sanity, I might as well know what the interplanetary magnetic field is doing. People constantly blame themselves for having low energy or feeling like shit, forgetting that the literal cosmos is storming around us. (No astrology, just raw live astronomical data from satellites).
So now, technically, I can maintain my vow of asceticism and fight off bad habits while casually monitoring solar plasma activity. Productivity meets orbital mechanics.
And it worked. I started training daily again. I haven't smoked e-cigarettes in half a year—after smoking various crap for a couple of decades—and I do a bunch of things that are good for my health. I live in astronaut mode on a hostile planet, but it actually helps me survive and keep my mind alive.
Sometimes, productivity isn't about "crushing your goals" . Sometimes it's just about building a harsh, quiet space where you can survive alone with your own mind.
I genuinely wish no one ever has to feel this kind of hopelessness, especially for so long. But if you’re tired of being treated like a toddler by your dopamine tools, maybe look into the old ways. Asceticism works.