just showered and got in bed, i could go to sleep– i didn’t get much sleep last night– but my mind is alive rn so i might as well crank one of these out first. while i haven’t published any essays on my substack in the past two months, i feel like i’m developing some new clarity about what i want to be doing. i have a couple of drafts in shapes that i like. the key insight is that i’ve been overburdening myself with a tedious sense of obligation to write good essays, but it’s much more fun to aim at writing good sidenotes. so that’s what i’ll do.
the puzzle i’m trying to solve is, why do i have such a sprawl of notes? and now i’m wondering about urban sprawl as a concept. looking it up. ok so urban sprawl is when there’s a rapid proliferation of low-density housing, single use zoning, enabled by a reliance on automobiles. its correlated with increased energy use, pollution, congestion, decline in community cohesion. catalyzed by bad planning…
there are some clear parallels here. i feel like the equivalent of automobile overreliance might be the ease of creating new notes. if i were limited in the number of notes i could make, i would be forced to try and make fewer notes do more things, i would be forced to condense things, have “mixed-use” notes. the equivalent of energy costs is something like the cognitive load of trying to keep track of everything, having too many notes for too many things.
the good news about being the sole monarch of the urban sprawl of my notes is that it’s up to me to condense things; i don’t have to argue with anybody else about it. so… should i just start doing it? ok so i spent like an hour… i deleted a couple of notes. I rediscovered that i used to ask too many questions and spread myself too thin. This is sort of painful to contemplate. Making progress at a few things is better than… sprawling.
I’m running low on energy, it’s approaching midnight. I find myself thinking “i should’ve known better than to go looking in my notes, that always leads to… more sprawl?!” what?? well… yeah my notes are full of intentions. so the question here is like why do i have so many fucken intentions? i… i feel so bad about deleting things, i have a tremendous grief in me for the things i have lost, misplaced… but then what? it’s the same as grief about anything else, right? how long are you going to put off living your life? maybe I should rewatch Up. what does it really mean to honor the dead, honor the fallen? it can’t just be about being frozen in front of their graves for the rest of your own life. you honor the fallen by living your own best life. like tom hanks’ character says to matt damon’s in saving private ryan. earn it. make it count.
i think the thing i gotta do as i go through my notes is to ask myself what the intent behind each thing is.
i spent like another 20 minutes going through my notes and combining snippets together, contextualizing them a little. feels good. i deleted some stuff too if the snippets are too vague.
alright i’m running out of time, i want to go to sleep before 1am, so let’s stop with the notes and start wrapping up here. what have we learned? my stuff is sprawling, yes. i should merge as many things as i can. gosh, i instnatly felt the urge to open my notes app again, which is similar to how i often have the urge to check twitter. i suppose if i can actually make progress consolidating my notes that would feel like a big W. but would it ACTUALLY be a big W? I was just talking with someone on twitter about how i’m fascinated by people’s psychology, how someone who actually succeeds at something might still not feel like a success because they don’t fit into a particular model of what they think success looks like– a model which might turn out to in fact be a bunch of smoke and mirrors, a bunch of PR bullshit. i’m reminded of something else someone said about how they used to compare themselves to some other founder or company and couldn’t understand why they couldn’t measure up… until it eventually came out that the other party was literally committing crimes. so… comparison is not only the theft of joy, it’s also… a source of confusion? misunderstanding? we don’t know what we don’t know.
a part of me is tempted to reread old wordvomits looking for interesting sidenotes to expand on. but i’m starting to see more clearly at the moment (i know i’ve had this realization before, and maybe didn’t fully capitalize on it, but hey, here we are again)… i’m starting to see that the mistake i would likely make in this situation is to try and make a sprawling list of as many sidenotes as possible. that would be a mistake. that would be a failure to think in intermediate steps. the real winning move would be to maybe look up 5-10 interesting sidenotes, pick my favorite and then run with that, expand it into something interesting. and that will create more cascading interestingness.
that’s a process that i know works. to navigate by interestingness. the crackle must be followed by the boom. if we have all crackle and no boom, the we just get tired and overwhelmed by the sprawl of endless crackle.
i’m tempted to say “no more”, bu realistically i know that behavior change never quite happens instanteously or overnight it’s a small win for me to just finish this wordvomit and publish it, and then i can go on to delete and merge and consolidate more stuff. and hopefully within a week or so, i’ll actually publish some substack essay. and it won’t really matter what it is. what matters is that i enjoy the process.