maybe time for a wordvomit. it’s may2025. i’ll be turning 35 next month. doesn’t really feel like anything to me. I guess ever since having a kid of my own, i feel like a full adult already. (I don’t believe you need to have a kid to become an adult, or that having a kid necessarily makes you an adult. but having a kid does thrust you into the crucible of adulthood, giving you a context in which the adult you ought to be becomes very apparent.)
hm. that was a nice little contained example of how a wordvomit can be useful by getting me to elaborate on some detail, which produces interesting writing that I can use somewhere. maybe i’m not doing enough wordvomits. i do remember there was a time when i felt like i had said everything i had to say, and everything i was writing was reruns of something I had already done recently, and not in a good way. sometimes repetition can be fruitful, and sometimes it can be an interesting or useful signal. but sometimes you’re just going through the motions. and even that i suppose is a kind of ‘useful’ as a safety ritual or avoidance mechanism– but that’s not what i’d ultimately want for myself. i’d prefer to recognize when i have repeated myself enough, and move on to doing something else– or even not doing anything at all, which can be more fruitful than tedious repetition. as always, there is no substitute for really feeling your feelings. how am I feeling right now? i’m quite tired, but I don’t want to sleep just yet. I want to articulate a thing I was thinking yesterday, which was…
part of me wants to pause all my social media posting and just focus on going through old materials. photos, notes, google drive documents and such. part of me wants to do something kinda opposite: to set aside all old material, and just freestyle in the moment, playing with the information that comes my way– particularly via youtube for some reason. (The reasons are manifold: I sense that most of my friends and readers are probably text-first readers, who spend their time reading tweets and substacks and so on, and they’re less likely to be watching a lot of youtube videos. so I think I would produce fresher material if I worked that way. also, a simpler and more direct reason is that, in my current life configuration, i just haven’t felt compelled to read very much, with the baby and all. There’s something about the format of the video that makes it easier for me to play in the background and pick up clues and cues, and rewind and rewatch bits if I have to.)
Right now I’m thinking either would be fine, maybe I could even alternate between the two, or make small amounts of progress on each thing separately each day. Maybe that’s too much to ask, particularly right now when I don’t feel like I’m making a lot of progress on anything at all. If I had to pick just one… I think I’d start with the paring down of old things. I feel like that would give me more space to think and breathe. I find my notesprawl overwhelming, and I don’t feel like I could truly set it aside. But logic and arguments here aren’t actually very useful, because it’s the feeling that matters. I could just as easily argue for the other side. (Noting here that there’s another interesting branching digression, on the utility of arguments. It would be tempting for someone who is unsure of how they feel to try to test their arguments…
sometimes you’re in a position where you could do one of 2 opposite things– go bigger or smaller, faster or slower, etc– and either could get you somewhere good.
at this point it’s tempting to examine the respective arguments for and against. sometimes this is worth it, but…
in my experience, i’ve done enough examining of enough arguments in enough positions to notice that my mind is more-than-capable of generating plausible-sounding arguments for or against basically anything. and improving the plausibility or rigor of those arguments…
does not help me make a better decision, if it happens to be the case that I actually have a personal preference– rooted in feelings, in emotions, in instinct, compulsion, etc– that I have masked, clouded, suppressed, pushed aside, waved off
eg right now, i feel like i’m at a crossroads re: how to approach my work. should I set aside my old material and try to freestyle something new? or should I pause my current stuff and systematically go through stray old material? I could write you 5000+ words why each is better
and i do think it’s worthwhile doing a quick sketch of each possibility– but even then, I find that the point of this sketch is less to produce a rigorously sound argument, and more to paint a compelling picture. to see which moves me more
sometimes there’s a “just do both 50/50” compromise that works, sometimes there’s a “do a bit of one and then the other and see how it feels” approach which also works and I like a bit more (because again the point is to triangulate and discern how I feel; what I really want)
another way of framing it is, if all the paths are equally plausible, then the path you’d most enjoy going down is the one that gets you the furthest. and ‘enjoy’ here doesn’t have to be about hedonistic pleasure– you might enjoy being challenged, etc.
all of which is to say, I think my heart would really be gladdened if I made some serious dents in my notesprawl problem. what will I do next? right now the smart thing is to go to sleep. so I think I’ll do that. but I could set an intention to make more of a dent tomorrow.
part of me feels a mild tinge of regret that i’m using wordvomit 0888 for something that feels kinda ‘superficial’ rather than something ‘epic’, but whatever man. if i actually go on to make a dent in my notesprawl problem then that would be epic for real, rather than just sound sorta epic.
also- i think this is the first time(?) i’m titling a wordvomit that’s explicitly a sequel to another wordvomit. i might retitle some past wordvomits the same way, to reduce unhelpful complexity/noise, which would also be part of solving the problem.