I had the following realization recently about a pattern i’ve been living. basically, after i put my 10mo son to bed, i then get my laptop out with the intent of doing some work. but this is a cover story of sorts. what i really do most of the time is socialize on twitter. now i don’t think socializing on twitter is a bad thing. i like doing it. it serves a good an important function for me. but i dislike this self-deceit where i tell myself i’m going to do something, and then end up doing something else, and then repeat this for weeks. i’ve come to believe that it’s best to be honest with myself. yes, i do have social needs. i won’t pretend that i don’t. yes, i do want to get work done. and yes, i’m tired and i want to go to sleep, too. the current equilibrium is very suboptimal. now that i’ve spelled it out, how can i rearrange these elements so that they’re better for me, without compromising on any of them?
well first of all, I think I’d like to do a wordvomit every night, instead of trying to write essays, particularly when i’m tired. i’ve been tired for weeks now, i’ve been running on less-than-ideal amounts of sleep. i want to feel at least a little productive. and i do want to socialize with my friends. so i think i should reduce my scope for the amount of work that i intend to get done each night, so that it at least gets done. in this case i’m writing this wordvomit, which i will feel good about publishing once it’s done. but is that enough? I’d also like to… move some stuff around in my notes.
I got distracted playing simcity 2000 in a web browser, and then tried to update a post I’d been working on my substack about it, and then remembered that I had this wordvomit open in another tab. I gotta finish at least one of these to feel good about myself when I go to bed. I think I pick this wordvomit (since it’s the most ‘finite’ task with the simplest criteria). And I guess I’ll do a quick sketch of what the simcity post is supposed to be. Basically I used to suck at the game as a kid, and I think I’m pretty good at it now. I did a bunch of strange things as a kid. I”d smooth out the entire map into something that I considered pristine and elegant at the time. When I imagine those maps now, I’d describe them as sterile and… platonic? As in the platonic solids. I’d smooth out every imperfection, eliminating any sort of personality from the landscape and turning it basically into a cardboard box. I found this pleasing as a child. Then, I would build roads that outlined the perimeter of the would-be city. Without any tax-paying citizens, I’d be quickly bankrupted by the road maintenance costs, and be fired from mayorhood. Undeterred, I would repeat the whole cycle again.
I’ve since learned how to actually play the game. You start out with limited resources, so it’s not possible to do everything that you’d like to do. you really have to start with a little micro-city, with some residential, industrial and commercial zones. You want to hook up these zones with power and water, have some roads to connect them, and then you can sit back for a bit and let the simulation run, until your sims start complaining about the lack of police, fire stations, hospitals, schools, libraries and so on. Simcity 2000 actually allows you to go really far without a lot of those things. You can, kinda hilariously, build quite a large city with basically no schools and no hospitals. I don’t precisely know how that works, but I am in the midst of accomplishing it…
basically the important thing i am learning is, instead of trying to flatten the entire landscape all at once, it’s both more effective and more satisfying, to flatten a little bit around where you’re building, and then build that out. and it actually looks nicer that way too as you’re going, because it’s like you have this nice little bit of civilization amidst a wider wilderness. if you flatten the wilderness too much, it starts to feel manicured. and i’m wondering if that’s an issue with my body of work, too. i keep trying to… do these big bold broad sweeps across the whole thing. and maybe instead i should be working in much smaller containers, smaller frames. I think that’s a big lesson for me. I keep opening lots of tabs, I keep tryin to be prolific, i keep trying to say 10000 things at once. what if i could only say one thing at a time? what do I have to say then? what’s the single most interesting, important, condensed in a little space thing i could say? that’s a challenge I haven’t given myself in a while. if I could write only one substack post for the rest of the year, what would it be? 2023 was are you serious. i think I must concede that 2024 would be… the lotus of ambition? but that’s the same kind of essay. i want it to be a different kind of essay. so i don’t want it to be about either ambition or introspection. but am I going against my nature here? It would have to be an essay about media, an essay about smartphones, an essay about wretchedness. Yeah. I think I should work on that. Everything else is secondary to that, in a sense? I should just write that central thing? And if it spirals out of control then I can chop it up and write those essays. But I should… assemble the points. Incels. Weebs. Losers. It’s been a while since I was in one, but I think one of the first things they try to teach you in school is that the world is a fair, just, egalitarian place…