I hate my behaviour.....

Wires_Guy_wires

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Just let it happen man.
Never, ever start a fight with yourself. You can't win. Because if you win a fight with yourself, it's always you who loses. The outcome is net zero.

It happened to me, it still happens. I killed a bunch, I learned a lot. Some of my trees are 20 dollar lessons disguised as plants. Now I can go out for lunch, pay 40 dollars for a sandwich, a coffee and two drinks and be none the wiser. That's two hours spent enjoying and pampering myself though. Worth my time and my money.
Plants in my opinion are no different. If you enjoy the process, the meddling and the work, and it keeps you occupied for a couple hours, what's that worth? Is that a bad thing?
Some people can wait patiently for decades. I can't. That's who I am. So I have a bunch of plants..

Sometimes, especially after some satisfying wiring sessions, I'm satisfied for a week or two. Then the itch starts all over again.

The real question I believe shouldn't be how to change your behavior.. But how to change the way you work with, and how you think about, who you are. You have a bunch of energy and motivation stored somewhere and you need to spend it at something.
Don't get me wrong on this, but some people have spent so much time working all their life, that they aren't really in touch with who they are. When they retire they find out that there's so much they can do in that time that they previously spent working that it can become difficult to figure out what's happening to them. It can feel like nothing makes a difference, that there's no contribution to something, running in endless circles.
Is that true freedom? To just be able to exist and be. I think it is just that.
Relax, roll with that tide and see where it takes you. You might be surprised how fun it can be.
 

penumbra

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Sometimes I sit and study a tree for a good long time thinking about how I might shape it. Sometimes, I end up doing nothing. In those instances, the tree shaped me more than I it. That is part of the road. Let the tree slow you down. They have their own rhythms that can't be ignored.
An excellent response. But instead of "Sometimes" I would say most times.
I've always used gardening as a stress reliever, the calm, the fruiting rewards, the learning of loss and the experience of seeing something new. Flowers, Vegetables, Trees, bushes, & Bonsai all teach me, good or bad I learn. (remembering is another story) Mother nature is wonderful to watch and something we can't control, but I love it.
Completely on track there my friend.
I think it's really time to pare down my collection.
Yeah, right. I say that daily and then proceed to ignore myself.
 

Cajunrider

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I envy your amount of free time. I just started a new job and it is consuming me. The weekends have been so busy, I am lucky to get my trees watered properly. They need some attention and I just have not had the time. I think it's really time to pare down my collection.
I tried to pare mine down and it quadrupled in the last two months. I had to water my trees at 4:30 am this morning to prepare them for the day heat until I get home this afternoon.
 

ShadyStump

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I imagine that what is happening to me has to do with my recent retirement (6 months already) and the excess of time that I am dedicating to bonsai. I will try to take it easy and diversify my free time.
Now I feel a bit silly for bringing it up. Thanks for putting up with this newbie's nonsense. Consider this thread closed.
Oh thanks to all. My daugthers have given me no grandchildren, and I'm divorced and live alone....so this thread has been like therapy to me 😂
I'm in very different circumstances, but still a similar experience.

Recently divorced, I have my kids for a week at a time every other week, and I work in education so am off for the summer. This has all made it VERY hard to establish a healthy routine for myself, and does actually involve a drinking problem. Comparing working trees in uncontrollable fits to addiction is not inaccurate.

As @Wires_Guy_wires said, we can spend so much of our time wrapped up in work or family or other things that we completely lose track of who we are as individuals without all that.
My suggestion would be to LET IT HAPPEN just on small scale. Wonder your garden with a pair of scissors and a chopstick, but nothing else. Tidy some unsightly foliage here, arrange some moss there, maybe adjust some wired branches. 99% of bonsai is maintenance, and tiny, subtle adjustments. You can make ten such adjustments in a day on a decent size collection without negatively impacting anything, but at the end of the season find that you've progressed your trees without even realizing it.
Perhaps start some penjing projects, and you can play with non-living aspects of the hobby. Don't forget that your garden is more than just the space your trees occupy, but can be part of the project itself. Think about rearranging, or adding features to it.

In your circumstances you have a unique opportunity to relearn who you are. It's like a second adolescence almost, only this time you have absolutely nothing to prove. Enjoy it, just remembering that in bonsai you have all the time in the world.
 

penumbra

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Years ago I read the phase that you must like who you are with when you are alone. It was attributed to a Native American, and that sounds appropriate. In searching for the source of the phase, I found this: Wayne Dyer once said:You can not be lonely if you like the person you are alone with” I would imagine many people have said this and many more accept it.
But it can be a daunting task for many, if not most people to look behind the mask and see themselves. In reality, it is an opportunity that we all deserve to experience.
 

Gabler

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I know I need to adjust my ADHD meds when I start getting crazy with the shears. I need to take the advice of @sorce and let things grow longer before cutting them. I end up slowing down the development process more than necessary.

A while back I decided to keep my trees that need to be left alone at my parents‘ house on an automatic sprinkler. They have a private well, so no water bill. Just a few bucks a year running the well pump. I check in every week or two when I visit.

Maybe you can put some of your trees in development out of sight and torture a ficus or mulberry or something similarly bulletproof. Better yet, keep a few mulberries and rotate them.
 

Mike Corazzi

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Maybe you actually NEED aphids.
Ones you can pick and squash individually.
That could use time and concentration and create a healthy sense of accomplishment. ;)
 

ShadyStump

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Maybe you actually NEED aphids.
Ones you can pick and squash individually.
That could use time and concentration and create a healthy sense of accomplishment. ;)
This sounds a bit like, what's a firefighter to do when there's no fire?
You're not wrong.
 
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It’s uncomfortable to come to grips with obsessive behaviors. In art, it’s easy to turn a simple thing into a problem by overworking it. What I like about bonsai is how much of it is out of my control — and talk about having to sit for long periods staring at fugly, unfinished work!

I probably go on about drawing too much here, but keeping an illustrated bonsai work calendar / drawing journal has been a great way for me to leave the effing trees alone. Now I can mess around with the idea of them, and the plant isn’t suffering a dozen micro-tortures throughout the growing season.
 

Smoke

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Working on trees in the nude is a good combat to your compulsive nature. Soon, your neighbors will start screaming for you to put on clothes and threaten calling the cops. This will preoccupy with new compulsions and soon you will just stay in the house and look at pictures of good trees on the computer. Problem solved.
 

LanceMac10

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Working on trees in the nude is a good combat to your compulsive nature. Soon, your neighbors will start screaming for you to put on clothes and threaten calling the cops. This will preoccupy with new compulsions and soon you will just stay in the house and look at pictures of good trees on the computer. Problem solved.


It's really a thing....no need to hand wash any thongs either......

1655833810080.png
 

penumbra

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LOL, I'm in the middle of many wooded acres. Can barely see another house in winter and not at all during growing season.
I get plenty of vitamin D.
 

dbonsaiw

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Ah, the spectrum that is mental illness. If your nature is so far on the spectrum that it is adversely affecting your day to day life, then maybe speak with someone and consider medication. Otherwise, my advice to myself is to embrace yourself - both the good and the bad. If it wasn't for the quirky personality issues you described, I promise you would not be painstakingly caring for mini trees. They are two sides of the same coin. Being well adjusted is boring and overrated. Everybody tries to be a copy of a copy of a copy. You do you.
 

Paradox

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@Fidur
I am jealous of your retirement (congrats BTW).
I can't wait until I can retire and be able to spend more time on my trees, go fishing, spend time with my family, dog, or do whatever I want.

I think setting up a calendar of bonsai care is a great idea. In fact, I am in the process of doing the same for all the species I am keeping but for the opposite reason.
I seem to always miss the things that need to get done because so much of my time is spent working and doing the other things I need to do.

I am worried that the kind of behavior you are describing could be detrimental to your trees in that you could be doing things at the wrong time or end up doing too much with successive episodes of this occurring. When you feel this urge coming you need to remind yourself that trees are not like us. They work on a much slower time frame and we need to have patience and do things at the appropriate time or things could go bad for the tree.

I would also recommend picking up another hobby or a pet or both to give you more to do with your free time.

I have been reading about the things people can go through mentally when they retire, and Wires Guy has mentioned some of it.
People can get lost in all that free time when they go from having 40-50 hours a week devoted to earning a pay check to all that free time.
Some people have a real hard time with the adjustment.

I hope to retire myself in a few years but I think I have enough hobbies/interests at this point to keep me busy.
 
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ShimpakuBonsai

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When ever you got the need to do something on your trees try to be patient and do something else like weeding and polishing your bonsai pots for example.

Or maybe some woodworking, build a bonsai stand or improve your bonsai benches.
 

Gabler

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When ever you got the need to do something on your trees try to be patient and do something else like weeding and polishing your bonsai pots for example.

Or maybe some woodworking, build a bonsai stand or improve your bonsai benches.

Stropping your tools is another good option. Sharpening curved blades with a stone is a pain in the butt, but if you maintain the edge with a strop, you may find you never need to sharpen the edge at all. It also helps tools last longer, since sharpening a blade means removing material, and that can add up over ten, twenty, thirty years of frequent use.
 
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