It’s been a full month since I last published something. When I started out I naively thought that I’d be able to publish two vomits every weekday and maybe three on the weekends. I think there HAVE been days when I’ve written 3 or 4 vomits, but I vastly overestimate myself, over and over. I overpromise and under-deliver, which leads to me living an uncomfortable life of lies and inaccuracy. I am increasingly clear that that’s not how I want to live my life in the future.
Why haven’t I been writing? Some family stuff cropped up that I didn’t know how to handle, and this external stressor just demolished my existing system. My fitness routine, reading habit and guitar practice all suffered too. I haven’t been able to write anything for Poached either, and it’s been a struggle just to stay on top of my work.
I have always been uncertain about how to operate when you’re writing about things that could potentially impinge on others. I remember when Lilly Singh uploaded a video about her family life and then promptly took it down, presumably because her family was unhappy about it. I don’t know. I don’t know and so I clamp up and get blocked, because I can’t possibly write about X when my mind is heavily preoccupied with Y. I suppose on hindsight the solution might be to write anonymously, say with a throwaway account on Reddit, or maybe to write fiction. I have little to no experience with either.
Anyway I don’t want to think about that too much right now- it makes me uncomfortable and I don’t have the luxury of going through that when I have work to do. That is something I can’t resolve in a vomit- I’ll need to set aside time to write, think, edit, revise, reflect, meditate. While I call it a luxury- because it requires time and focus- it’s also a necessity, because I won’t be able to operate at 100% until it is resolved. In this regard it is much like an injury.
So setting that aside for a while I think the most important thing for me to learn here is the importance of redundancy, of reserves, of deep assets, of emergency routines, structures, backup plans. Here I think I am arriving at an insight that only comes to me in times of difficulty, which I need to preserve to inform my “peacetime operations”. An analogy:
If I were a nation-state I’d be screwed, because I wouldn’t have a standing army or strategic reserves. I’d be a straight-talker, saying what I mean even if it offends people. This will inevitably get me in trouble. The problem is, I’m unable to empathize with venomous, grudge-holding people. I forget that they exist at all. I don’t hold grudges. I’m just not predisposed to.
I remember that there were moments as a child where I wanted to get angry and stay angry with myself (typically for getting into trouble at school), or with my parents (for trying to discipline me). “I’ll show them,” I’d mouth angrily in the mirror. It would never last- I’d stop caring about it the next day. Everything fades away, everything will turn to nothing, why be angry?
I sometimes think my akrasia- my inability to follow my own instructions- comes from a deeper wisdom that knows better than my short-sighted, fleeting ambitions. I trusted
‘chaos and randomness’ because they were easier to accept than badly made plans, or well-made bad plans, or well-made good plans that were badly timed, or badly executed… I would have to take the blame for all of it, and it seemed silly and wrong.
I responded to the systems’ oversimplistic grand plans with an oversimplistic heterodoxy- my plan was to reject the plan that was foisted upon me. I have more in common with Republicans than I thought.
It is clear to me today that my approach was oversimplistic, and that there are costs to my Diogenesian lifestyle that weren’t obvious then.
Quick parallel aside: when I look at my writing from 2009 to early 2012, I see a writer who has too much time on his hands, who presumes too much of his audience. I wrote in a sprawling, tedious manner. It was self-indulgent and unnecessarily ornate. I’m still less succinct than I could be, but now I’m pressed for time- I’m writing this on my morning commute. The biggest difference is practice, of course- the more you practice, the more you develop your aesthetic sensibility, and the more you get frustrated with unnecessary elements. I think the second biggest difference- for me, at least- is the fact that I have real commitments and obligations now; bills to pay, work to do.
Let me restate that: I think the constraints of being a working adult is forcing me to become a better writer, because I have to say more with less. I don’t have the time for long drawn out arguments on Facebook anymore- those were like little scrappy catfights more for personal entertainment and minor social point-scoring than the fundamental development of my craft. It helped, I think, but it wasn’t optimal. Still, suboptimal progress is better than optimal fantasy.
Let’s return to this idea of the random/chaos lifestyle. I thought I was being free and wild but I wasn’t- I was in suboptimal routines of my own. I didn’t grow and develop as much as I could’ve. As Scott Adams put it, losers have goals, winners have systems. I rejected goals, but I failed to build a good system. There’s the rub. The absence of goals does not make a good system. A good system has to be carefully crafted.
Earlier I talked about badly made plans, well-made bad plans, etc. All of those can be avoided through a gradually built system (as robust as possible) for navigating complexity, for exploring the unknown. It can be done, and I think I’ve done a bit of it by accident over time- that’s what experience is, that’s what wisdom is. But I think it can also be pursued and built deliberately, and that’s what I want to do.
Ok I got to work, continue in the evening