perennial problems
Frame Studies · Psychology & Emotions · 2026 · 1.6k words
A reflection on realizing Visa's been struggling with the same problems, perfectionism, poor habits, motivation, for over a decade. He considers whether he's just talking about change or actually growing, and concludes there's a threshold of competence in managing these perennial issues.
perennial problems
here we go again
I was revisiting my blog archives and I was haunted to discover a cluster of writing from 2010-2011 where I was struggling with many of the same issues I’m still grappling with today. I felt knots in my stomach as I found myself uncannily retracing my steps: “Perfectionism” as avoidance. Poor sleeping habits. Yin-yang ebbs and flows. Addressing the underlying issues of wretched boredom (I ended up writing an entire book about this). Static vs dynamic identities. The truth about routines (Not having a good routine doesn’t mean I have ‘no routine’, it means I have a bad routine.) The importance of prioritization, which I described as “make time for sacred work”. The importance of being present with one’s feelings, and realizing that emotions are what drive us. Over and over again, I’m reading things from 16 years ago that almost seem like I could’ve written them last night.
There are a few ways of thinking about this. One straightforward, damning interpretation is that I’ve been play-acting the whole time, merely talking about my problems rather than doing anything about my problems. Worse– talking about my problems as a way of avoiding doing anything about my problems. I think there is some truth to this, but it doesn’t feel like the whole truth. I did make some attempts. I wish I had made better attempts, and I wish I had made more frequent attempts, but I did make some attempts.
A more charitable interpretation is that these are ‘perennial problems’, which can never be perfectly solved, the way you can never brush your teeth so perfectly that you won’t have to brush them again. Again, I think there is some truth to this, but it doesn’t feel like the whole truth, either. I think it makes more sense to talk about physical messes than tooth-brushing, which is a simpler and more contained problem. Dealing with messes is harder than brushing your teeth, because a mess is a clutter of intentions, whereas we don’t really have conflicting intentions when it comes to cleaning our teeth. Messes inevitably accumulate in people’s houses as people live their lives. But that doesn’t mean that everybody’s house is equally messy, or that everybody is equally skilled at dealing with messes.
Everybody’s houses do get messier when there are young children in the house– even the god-queen of tidying, Marie Kondo, said that she’d “kind of given up on tidying” after having her third child. Nevertheless, I’m sure that her house with 3 kids is definitely tidier than mine with 1, because she’s more skilled, enjoys the tidying process, and so on. To quote her directly:
Playing with my children sparks more joy for me than anything in the world. The KonMari Method has always centered on choosing what sparks joy, and as our lives change, so does the answer to that question. When I had my third child, I could barely get any sleep, let alone keep my home as tidy as I had before. I realized that it’s more important for me to savor the present moment with my children than to worry about the mess. I now accept that it’s not about “always” keeping our home tidy. Once you’ve completed a tidying festival, and every object has a place, it’s easier to restore the house to a tidy state even when things get messy. Everything finds its way back to where it belongs, even if it has to wait until after the kids go to school or bed.
I think “focus on what sparks joy” is the central element of everything, but in this moment I’m noting how she has deeply internalized these concepts– “every object has a place”, “everything finds its way back to where it belongs”, and the concept of a “tidying festival” which creates a sense of occasion, a ritual, something to celebrate. Scrolling through her Instagram I encounter several more useful concepts and frames: “When you put your house in order, you put your affairs and past in order, too.” “15 minutes of dedicated time to tidy can still make a difference in how you feel in the space and it may even motivate you to do a deeper clean!” These strike me as the utterances of someone who is deeply competent at their craft. And I think there are thresholds of competence when it comes to dealing with ‘perennial problems’. The problems never go away entirely, but that doesn’t mean we’re all struggling the same way. Some people are enjoying their time swimming leisurely or confidently in the problem-pool, while others are thrashing about, even drowning. I’d say I’m not quite drowning anymore, but swimming through problem-space remains very inefficient and effortful for me.
✱
What you do is what you do.
Over the years I’ve pretty much read and heard everything there is to be said about these topics of tidying and organizing and productivity and so on. I don’t think that’s much of a flex. It’s like someone saying “I’ve read the entire dictionary” or “I’ve read the entire Bible”. You could read both of those books multiple times– let’s also throw in, say, David Allen’s Getting Things Done (2001)– and still not really be any good at writing, or being a good person, or being productive.
What you do is what you do. If you do a lot of reading, you become a person who is well-read. If you talk about what you’ve read with other people, you become a person who is well-spoken. And there are benefits to being well-spoken. But… to go back to the swimming analogy– you ultimately still have to do the laps. Intellectually knowing about all the biomechanics involved in a breaststroke, and what perfect stroke form looks like, doesn’t actually do the stroke for you. It’s conceivable that it might even get you all up in your head and actually impede you from performing well.1
If someone cheerfully accepts that they’re accumulating information merely for the sake of accumulating information, with no expectation of it changing outcomes, maybe they could be psychologically well-adjusted. But I think those people are very rare. I think most people who accumulate information tend to do so with the expectation that it’s going to amount to something eventually. And there’s no way to be absolutely certain that it never will. But the more time passes without any discernable change, typically, the more dread sets in. If your date is 15 minutes late, they might still show up. If they’re 2 hours late, you should probably accept that they’re not coming. Looking back on my own life, I see I’ve spent a lot of time waiting for myself to show up, and coming up with all sorts of excuses and justifications for why I wasn’t. “If he wanted to, he would,” is a phrase often used in dating discourse, but I find myself returning to it even within myself. Is this what I’ve really wanted for myself? To be someone just doing the reading and talking and so little of the actual living?
✱
At the start of this post I implied that I’ve been circling the same things in a way that diminishes rather than nourishes. There are good reps and bad reps, and these feel kinda like bad reps, at least initially. But when I dig a little deeper, I notice some nuances in the language. I have gotten better at talking about my problems. My early language was clunky, cumbersome, and I would say kind of unintentionally dishonest– and here I have to laugh saying this, because I see this with my clients all the time. Even before AI was ever a thing, I think people are conditioned to speak tediously. It’s like playing dress-up with words– we start out as kids who speak plainly and truthfully (see again: to feel and to fail) and then we struggle with that seeming childish, simplistic, and we want to be more grown-up, and so we use grown-up words, but we don’t quite understand how it all works yet, and so we cargo-cult adulthood. And at some point if we’re lucky the whole thing crashes around us, sometimes slowly sometimes all at once, and then we learn to speak plainly again.
✱
PS: I have to wrap this up to go run some errands, so I can’t spend as much time as I’d like making this post better, tying up loose ends etc, but I’m happy I wrote it because I think it sets up a few things for me to followup on. I particularly feel like rereading Gellway’s Inner Game of Tennis. I also ought to be more specific about the differences between my old writing and my current writing, which maybe is the subject of another post entirely. Might also edit more stuff into this one later idk.
There’s something to be said about how there are peak performers in all fields who describe how they experienced some kind of ‘no-mind’ state when they performed at their best, and inversely, how they messed up a winning shot or moment because they made the mistake of thinking about it. I might get into this more in my next post.
Originally published at https://visakanv.substack.com/p/perennial-problems.