it’s tricky to know what exactly is the most useful thing i could be doing with my time at any given moment. part of that is because “most useful” is something you can only really know fully in retrospect. so let’s reframe.
can i know what is a moderately useful thing I could be doing with my time at any given moment? i feel like the answer should be yes, and yet if i look at my behavior, the answer isn’t a resounding yes. part of that must be that “useful” itself is something I might be unclear about. after all, isn’t everything that we do… to fulfil some intent or purpose? though now I’m thinking about say, addictive behaviors, eating the whole chocolate cake, and so on. what’s the purpose of the last ‘marginal’ slice of cake once you’re already full and kinda grossed out? it’s not to enjoy the taste of cake. it’s rather to placate an anxiety. it’s like hoarding. it’s like a bird grooming itself bald. it’s a form of self-harm. it might not be immediately obvious how that’s “useful”, but it IS serving a kind of function. it might provide short term relief from emotional distress.
circling back. why am i even asking these questions? obviously it’s because i feel dissatisfied with the way I have been spending my time and energy recently. particularly I’m struck by the following pattern, which roughly follows the “revenge bedtime procrastination” pattern– i bathe and dress my 1yo son and put him to bed, then I crack open my laptop, telling myself that i’m going to try and do something productive, get some work done. but then i tend to mostly go on twitter and hang out with my friends. i continue this until it’s about 2am. hardly any work gets done. I go to sleep frustrated, and i wake up really tired, and i spend most of the next day just reacting to whatever’s happening. this cycle has been going on for weeks now, it feels like. I’m ready to try something different.
I think what’s happening is this: I need to be honest with myself that I have social needs and I want to hang out with my friends. I do know that I spend less time on twitter if I’ve been meeting people in real life. this has been harder ever since i’ve had a kid. I don’t mind this so much generally; i think maybe there’s even a twitter-social-only solution that might be better than my current arrangement. though as i think this out loud i find myself thinking once again that i should arrange zoom calls with friends.
one little substitution i think would make a difference is– it would be nice if the first thing i did when i got to my computer was write a wordvomit. and then hit publish on it. my son will be 400 days old next week. if i had done this every 3-4 days or so, i would have already finished the 1000wordvomits project. several thoughts emerge here. (1) is, yes it would be nice to be done with the project. but (2) is, i don’t want to rush it. i don’t expect wordvomits to be beautiful, they’re literally called wordvomits, but i’d like them to feel… worth something. i was working on one yesterday that sputtered out at about 200-400 words when i got distracted. i could’ve continued from that today to save me some time, but i just tossed out the whole thing. (these days i toss things out by dumping them in calendar event descrptions). there’s something about a sense of continuity that matters to me in a piece of writing. if i wrote something from one particular headspace or emotional space, it takes me quite a lot of effort to try and either return to it, or to something adjacent to it, or to write something else that complements it. far easier to just start from scratch entirely. i think about how i’ll want to return to the 1000wordvomits project years from now, and i’d be annoyed if there’s a high volume of posts that seem unnecessarily fragmented and incoherent. so I do have some standards.
how do i meet these standards? there’s a school of thought that like, creativity can’t be forced. i’m open to that. there’s another that’s like, i write only when i’m inspired, fortunately inspiration strikes at 9am every morning. (faulkner?). I’d like that, too. and there are other riffs that are like, the first draft of anything is shit, most of anything we write is shit, try to put the shit in the wastepaper basket. there’s that, too. fairly recently i think i was ranting on here about how i felt logjammed by my body of work and how that led me to writing less than i feel like i ought to. how does that feel right now? well… i feel less jammed than before, but i’m still writing less than i feel like i ought to. and i think that’s part of why i’m writing this particular thing. i reminisce about how i used to write on my commutes regularly– though when i look up the statistics, it seems i wrote less than i thought– but even so, my commute writing had a beautiful desperation to it that i miss. i can’t recreate it directly. i’ll have to ‘recreate it in the aggregate’, in a sense. i like the school of thought that’s like, don’t try to quit smoking, keep smoking but try to reconstitute how/when/why you smoke. stop smoking in a particular room in your house. stop smoking in your house at all. how is that relevant to what i’m talking about here? ah… i don’t believe in say, “i need to quit twitter”. rather, i want to… get a minimum amount of work done before I get on twitter. and it feels like the fastest way i can do this is by writing and publishing a wordvomit. I get a chunk of satisfaction from doing that, and that satisfaction actually helps me sleep better, i do believe. it seems like i stay up on twitter for more hours than ideal the same way the additional slices of chocolate cake work– it’s not about the taste of the thing or the feeling of the thing, but it’s about the assuaging of an anxiety.
what’s the anxiety here? I’ve got some crossed wires. part of it is that i’m afraid that… being a dad means i will lose my friends. being a dad means i won’t get any work done. and both of those statements have half-truths in them, but the reality is never that binary. i still do consulting calls. i haven’t published a really good essay in a long while and i think i’m making my peace with not doing that– not even trying to do that– for at least a couple of weeks. but i’d like to keep my words flowing. it’s like, i’m burned out from trying to go too hard in the gym, but that doesn’t mean i become entirely sedentary, that stresses me out too. rehab requires baby steps. take slow leisurely walks. this is a slow leisurely walk. i’m tempted to do another one right away, but i’ll save that for tomorrow and instead allow myself to get sleepy. gn