TLDR
- Collect desired end-states
- We are all elephants tied to posts
- Don’t waste time talking to other tied elephants; free yourself
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In my last vomit I agonized for a little while thinking about how I ought to go about the project of reading and organizing all my word vomits. There are literally almost 400 vomits now, which is 400,000 words, and the idea of starting from the start (which I have done a few times) somehow made me a little queasy. The idea of starting with really structured “sequences”– doing searches for “procrastination”, “smoking”, etc and then systematically filling those out also makes me feel a little frustrated and bored– this project shouldn’t feel like drudgery, it should be fun.
After I published that last vomit I found myself scanning through the vomits I had published. And without thinking too much about it, I just started doing what I normally do when I browse reddit– I started opening a whole bunch of tabs. I have tabs open from 0056 to 0215– about 15 tabs open. So I have 15 word vomits that I want to read. I started reading 0266 and found a chunk about “what I want” that I thought was worth quoting and revisiting and rewriting. So I opened up a Page on wordpress, titled it What I Want, pasted in the quote and a link. And I think that’s a good way to go about doing this. I’m going to continue reading the rest of the vomits that I’ve opened, and I’m also going to continue writing my thoughts about it.
Somewhere in 0266 I wrote about a comment that I saw on Imgur– the post was something like– “I was doing X happily, and then I thought about my responsibilities, and then I continued doing X stressfully”. The top comment replicated the post, saying “browses imgur happily, is reminded of exam tomorrow, browses imgur stressfully”. It made me laugh. I think it made everybody laugh because it’s true, so many of us do that. We continue on a pattern despite knowing intellectually that we ought to be doing something else. And the painful thing is that then we don’t fully enjoy the pattern, and the thing we ought to be doing doesn’t get done. Classic dark playground problem. And some of us, if we never get around to fixing this problem, end up LIVING LIFE STRESSFULLY. Which is a horrific proposition if you think about it. We’re just eating the scraps, never the full meal. We’re just sneaking away little bits of pleasure where we can, constantly worried and afraid about being caught, about getting in trouble, about the music stopping.
At this point I tend to talk about how it might have made sense in school or something, but fuck it. It doesn’t make sense, period. It’s a suboptimal way of being. I don’t need to rationalize this anymore, I don’t need to explain why I have this problem, and I don’t need to be like “Oh, millions of people have this problem,” implying that it’s somehow okay. It’s a case of the elephant being tied to a tiny little post, and not budging or breaking free because it tried once many many years ago when it was little and it wasn’t able to.
And even worse, the elephant doesn’t possess the strength right now. It only possesses the potential, and potential is worse than worthless. The elephant is still weak, and breaking from the post requires effort and failure with no immediate sign of reward. So the elephant continues browsing Imgur stressfully, living life stressfully, until it dies. Perhaps it commiserates with other elephants also tied to their respective posts, and once a week they all go have a drink together to commiserate over how stressed they are.
It’s scary. It’s scary how in a sense we are all drug addicts, in a sense we are all holding each other back voluntarily. We validate each others’ inaction and life scripts and blah blah… I don’t want to get into too much detail there, that’s a trap by itself. When the elephant wakes up to the reality that it’s tied to a post, it shouldn’t waste its time talking to other tied elephants. Rather, it should spend its time working to pull itself free from the post. Maybe it should spend some time talking with FREE elephants, yes. And maybe it should read about elephants that have gotten free before. But even that is an activity that it has to be mindful of, because there are thousands of elephants who sit around murmuring about how nice it would be to free, and read articles about Top 10 Creative Habits Of Successful Elephants, and what Elephant Musk’s Greatest Secret To Success Is. There’s no fucking secret. You work on freeing yourself from the post. You glance at the free elephants only long enough to remind yourself that freedom is possible, that it’s achievable, and then you get your ass to work on freeing yourself.
I have written this before, I’m sure. This will be a common theme throughout these vomits, we know this. I’m writing this at a much higher speed than I wrote the last vomit. I will finish this and then I will publish it and I will move on to reading the other vomits that I have open in all the tabs. I will read every single one of them, and I will write a couple of vomits to go through my thoughts about them. And I have to be mindful. This cannot become a completely mindless exercise, I have to be mindful of my intended end-state– which is that I want to provide myself with the language and tools and perspectives I need to keep me focused on freeing myself from the post. I want to focus my thinking and writing into a sharp laser on a single point, or a few single points, rather than write randomly in the general broad sunlight. (There will always be an element of randomness to my writing whether I intend it or not, so the intent doesn’t actually shape the writing as much as I might worry about. Michelangelo simply tried to make good art, he couldn’t help but paint or sculpt like Michelangelo.)
Break free.