I want to say, “every day I sit down and try to do some good writing”. Though that’s not entirely true, I don’t always do it. But I’m trying to do it right now. It seems like I often sit down and try to do some good writing.
What do I mean by good writing? Something interesting, something compelling, something insightful, something true. I want to get better at understanding things, including myself and the patterns that constitute me, the people in my life, people who aren’t in my life, the world at large. Good writing is pleasurable for its own sake – the process of working through it is something that gives me satisfaction in my body, the way some people feel satisfaction from exercise, or playing music, or anything else.
Lately – around a year, it feels like – I haven’t been able to do much good writing. I have a hope of publishing good writing, by which I mean “write something interesting and then publish it somewhere and tell people about it.” I’ve gotten fixated on this goal in a way that’s become unhealthy and unproductive. Unhealthy because it manifests as tension in my body, making it hard for me to sleep, and hard for me to be present in my life, for myself, my wife, my friends and loved ones. Unproductive because I haven’t even published anything of note since Are you serious, which went live in early January. So for 4 months since, I have been gnashing my teeth in frustration, churning out lifeless, unsatisfying drafts that I don’t even feel like looking at, let alone working on or sharing with anybody else.
I know that embarrassment or shame around a feeling of stuckedness prolongs the stuckedness. Nonetheless my pride has kept me stuck and revving the engine while mired in place. Maybe I’ll let go of that now.
Watching some media has helped. Watching Kung Fu Panda helped me get unstuck a little bit, as did watching some of a podcast with Casey Neistat talking about the problem with daily vlogging – that you can get swept up in the performance of it, the theatrics, and it gets hard to stay authentic and honest when you’re aware of the meta of it all. Very relatable. I struggle with it too. Part of me wishes I didn’t. Part of me recognizes that it’s inescapable. Here we are.
I’m grateful to my past self for setting up this wordvomit blog, because then I can do writing like this here, and not feel like it’s a waste of time. I know, I could theoretically just write in my drafts or notes, but I don’t seem to want to do that. I could also do this for a substack post, but I don’t want to do that either. The first phrase that comes up when trying to explain why is “it’s too self-indulgent”, although that doesn’t feel quite right. “It might get perceived as self-indulgent”? Eh. It’s a distraction from the core thing I’m trying to do with the substack? It’s unclear. If I had a clear sense of how I feel about everything then I wouldn’t be struggling in the first place. So the way out of struggling is to writhe against the ropes less – I know I have an old wordvomit about exactly that, maybe I’ll look it up in a bit – and try to relax, and step outside the narrow tunnel-vision frame, and see the bigger picture. Articulate the patterns that are happening. Articulate the possible paths.
Take an inventory of everything on-hand, or most of the things. At this point my standing inventory of material is so large that it’s basically impossible to do an accurate comprehensive overview. Doing that would take so long that it would be inaccurate by the time I’m done. But that’s… just something I have to work with. (Also, I know that I’ve done a version of it before, by working on my book Introspect. I had to eventually ship something without having the time or capacity to even make sense of everything I’ve written, let alone everything I learned along the way. Such is life. As Orwell said, every book is a failure. Best we can do is to try for interesting, useful, insightful failures.)
What do you do if you have an inventory so large that you can barely conceive of it? The best you can, lol. It’s sort of like trying to make sense of a city, or a society, isn’t it? You ask, okay, what are the most important elements? What are the most popular elements? It could be that you miss out on some. It’s in fact inevitable that you’ll miss out on some. But that’s something you just have to make your peace with.
A part of me, I suppose, has been averse to even attempting a thing when I know that it will be imperfect, as if the imperfection violates some principle. What is the principle? Um, “don’t fuck it up”? “Do no harm?” Well. Part of the way to avoid harm-doing from imperfect models is to begin with a lecture about imperfect models. I’m not sure if you’ll necessarily avoid the harm, but you at least… have an out. You can say, hey, I warned you not to mistake my model for reality! I warned you!
And here I get to some of my perennial frustration with people who don’t read properly – sometimes they’re unwilling, sometimes they’re incapable. And it’s somehow always the people who are most belligerently wrong who are loudly obnoxious about it. Here I want to remind myself that they are in fact a tiny fraction of everyone. Most people are actually fairly sensible, kind, fair, etc. And when you connect with someone who really gets it, everything is beautiful, resplendent, joy and lightness.
So… then what? Then I face the sad truth that I have so often allowed the worst elements of the worst people to influence my behavior, which results in me withholding the best elements of myself from the best people. Gosh, what an emotional place to end up from an innocuous sounding question about inventory management.