I went to bed at about 5am last night – a fairly common thing for me at this point – but what was slightly less common was that I woke up at 1120am. What’s even less common is that I’m now sitting here writing this wordvomit, before showering, before checking my twitter. This is a substantial deviation from my usual behavior. I usually sleep longer than 6 hours – sometimes I’m in bed until 1, or 3, and by the time I’m showered it’s 5pm. So how come I slept less last night? I think it’s because of what I was thinking about yesterday, and writing about: that I’m trying to manage my energy better, and starting pomodoros again.
I’ve been vaguely carrying the idea “maybe it’s not so great to check twitter first thing in the morning every morning” for a long time now. Somewhere along the way Twitter became the primary thing in my life, which has had its pros and cons. The pros is that I’ve made some wonderful new friends, built an audience, and I even make a bunch of money almost every day selling ebooks, without having to do any particular work. The con is… I think my attention has become more fragmented. I try to be as pro-Twitter as possible, but I also do think that it’s important not to allow it to become the dominant thing in one’s life. I think this is true for a lot of things, not just Twitter. There was a time where my wordpress blog – where I wrote about local politics – became the dominant thing. And that was unhealthy, and I had to walk away. There was a time where my Facebook was my dominant thing, where I would write status update essays.
I think something bad happens when I make something “my dominant thing” – I set myself up to be hijacked by forces beyond my control. I start to care too much in a way that’s slightly unhealthy. I start to tie up my identity with my performance, and with the feedback I get on the platform. Which I don’t think is entirely a bad thing if you can simultaneously take a bit of a distanced approach to it. I’m reminded of a couple of riffs about how the best actors and the best salespeople, and the worst actors and worst salespeople, are the ones who seem to take their work quite personally. I think this is probably true for writers, too. You don’t want to be entirely cold, clinical, dispassionate, because then it’s harder to be sensitive, and sensitivity is important in these lines of work.
I came up with the idea once of an “inner newsfeed“. I’ve been thinking about this concept for several years now, but I still haven’t quite expanded upon it, developed it. I feel like it’s moderately self-evident. It’s a backward metaphor – the newsfeed is the timeline on the apps of your phone, the inner newsfeed is the timeline of thoughts and feelings that arises in your mind and body. The problem is, if I don’t check in on my inner newsfeed first thing in the morning, it very quickly gets swept aside by the news I receive from the world. And the way “the world” (shorthand for news media, social media, social dynamics, etc) is set up, everything is urgent, everything is important – “the world” will not be disciplined in the way that it makes asks of your attention. The world will never respect your attention. So you have to respect it yourself.
Ah, that’s a good tweet, my brain tells me. I should tweet that. That’s one of the things that happens when you’re on Twitter a lot. I remember a version of this happening to me with my Facebook statuses, too. I remember when I unfriended everyone on Facebook, once I was walking around my parents’ neighborhood and I saw something – I don’t even remember what that thing is, might’ve just been some observation about the grass or something – and I thought, “ah, this would be a great subject for a FB status”. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It depends on what my priorities are and how I want to live my life. I do want to be a prolific writer throughout my life. But I also think that it’s important for the mind to relax once in a while. Partially for noble reasons, which is to enjoy idleness, enjoy life, drift freely in a relaxed way.
But also… I believe that in the long run this actually makes you a better writer, because then you aren’t too attached to any particular form. One of the things that’s been annoying me about Twitter lately is how much everybody tweets about the same things, and using similar language. It’s exhausting. And I want to get away from it for a while so I don’t end up swept up into this vortex that I find extremely limiting, both creatively and psychologically. It could be that the best thing I could do for myself (and for my Twitter audience, by extension) is to just get away from Twitter for a while, not tweet so much. Maybe do a couple of nerdposts a day and then focus on writing these wordvomits, focus on my book, focus on my youtube videos. I think that’s smart, and I’m proud of myself for thinking this, feeling this, acting on this. I know from experience that it’s not an easy decision to make.
Did I skip past something I wanted to say? Oh yeah, the pomodoros! I started a 25 minute timer when I started writing this. There’s still 7:30 left and I’m almost done. That feels good. Hypothetically, I just need to do 207 more tomatoes and this project will be done. I have experience doing hundreds of things. 207 days from now would be Jan 12, 2022. Would be nice to be done by then. It probably won’t be that fast, because I will surely miss days. But it would also be cool if I could do multiple wordvomits a day. No pressure, no promises. Just navigate by excitement, navigate by curiosity, navigate by tomato. Crush one tomato and then the next. Crush 1000 tomatoes. I might do a tomato of music practice next. I think this sense of “project clarity” might be the thing that got me out of bed. The prospect of rewards – the intrinsic-ish reward of making progress on my projects. That’s exciting. I hope it’s true. We’ll see.
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I’ve been thinking about this concept for a while. Discussed it with a couple of online friends:
Just think of your own mind as a newsfeed that disappears once you come in contact with any other newsfeed (twitter, fb, etc). Curiosities, idle musings, random connections and syntheses between existing thoughts, ideas, perspectives
— Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) January 15, 2018
I saw a quote in my 2013 article “We rarely love people,”
If we can spend time scrolling through Facebook and Tumblr, surely we can spend time in silence, scrolling through our own minds.
“Hello,” have you asked yourself lately, “Are you there?”