There’s this little aphorism that I’ve heard floating around: “knowing is half the battle.”1
I don’t think it is.
When it comes to self-improvement, I think it’s assumed that knowing is at least 50 percent of the battle. Perhaps more. What else are the books for? They’re to fill you up with knowing and then all you have to do is some (often somewhat unspecified) battling to sort your life out.
These days I wonder if this is even slightly true. Knowing seems a maximum of ten percent of the battle, perhaps much less. For instance, I don’t think my life would be much worse if I had never heard the phrase “executive dysfunction.” Sure, it gives me a term, a shorthand, for “why the flipping heck am I not doing the gosh-darn thing that I cannot stop thinking about”2 but that’s just a slightly more efficient form of frustration.
I wonder if this is the source of my combined bugbear with relatability, the prevalence of memes, and therapy-speak in the ADHD community. Yes, thank you, billionth executive dysfunction explainer video in my timeline, but does this really help? I run into the same issue with political awareness content: is it actually useful to know that the world is all flipped up, without explicit instructions following on how to unflip it?
For irony’s sake, here is the exact kind of video I am complaining about. I found it very relatable.
I am kind of done with new names for old frustrations. I know what procrastination feels like; I can summon that flop-sweat sensation at will. What I need to learn is what it feels like to shift out of that mode, to understand what specific switches got flipped, to map the terrain as I go so I can backtrack and do it again next time I am caught in a spiral.
We all know what flailing feels like; doomscrolling, Netflix surfing, snacking, whatever form avoidance takes. We need to find a way to remember, to embody, doing the stuff we want or need to be doing.
I am not sure if this is making sense so I’ll change tack. I like to interrogate the aphorisms I write about so I searched for “knowing is half the battle,” expecting some kind of lineage from “knowledge is power” (France is Bacon) or something like the Art of War or Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.
It’s from GI Joe.
“Now you know, and knowing is half the battle” is the catchphrase from the little safety PSAs that followed GI Joe cartoons.
The more you know.
Possibly everyone knew this except me. I wasn’t allowed to watch GI Joe as a kid – either for demonic or financial reasons, I’m not sure which – so I don’t know where I picked it up from. Pop culture osmosis, maybe?
Anyway, that reminded me of the Fenslerfilm GI Joe PSAs, which were doubly funny to me when I watched them because I had never seen the originals, and I was stoned out of my gourd. University!
The remixed PSAs are 24 years old now. We’re flipping old, you guys! So old! And our rest homes are going to be so weird. They’ll be playing these things to dementia patients and watching their eyes light up like it’s Mozart.
I had intended this to be a shorter post followed by a digest of some of the stuff I wrote about last week, but I’ve gone long. Here’s the stuff anyway! Four articles for the price of one! (My writing is free.)
Also! Here’s a link to that podcast I make with Emily. People have been getting in touch to tell me it’s good, which is probably a good sign?
Thanks, as always, for reading. And listening too these days, I suppose.
Now, comment! I want to know if you knew about the GI Joe thing or if it just percolated its way into pop culture and we’re all going round quoting a cartoon designed to sell plastic dolls to boys like it’s some deep profundity.
What should a new aphorism be called? A neoaphorism? We must continue the research. ↩︎
Sometimes bits of my brain that had deep grooves carved by my evangelical upbringing switch back on unexpectedly and I find myself using swear-word substitutes. I have decided just to roll with it. ↩︎
A lot of folks with ADHD have a thing they call “rejection-sensitive dysphoria.” In the olden days we would have called this being a sensitive wee sausage. RSD is a bit of a meme in the extremely memetic world of ADHD-posting, and it tends to activate my annoyance with overly-medicalised terms and engagement-driven relatability that doesn’t offer much in the way of solutions.
Whatever we call it, the term doesn’t quite capture the feeling of the “everyone hates me” anxiety that burns so hot that it’s sometimes almost impossible to leave the house.
I have/had it pretty bad, to be honest. It can be an awful closed loop; you’re oversensitive to inputs; you overreact, that causes people to treat you with a bit more real or imagined side-eye, you notice, the loop tightens. I’m very aware of it and yet I still let it get me. Just recently I put off following up on a job because I had managed to imagine a very detailed scenario where the recipients of my email hated me (reasons unclear). I did eventually follow up, reasoning that if the world blew up then it wouldn’t matter if they were pissed, and it turned out they were busy and hadn’t seen my email. Because of course.
Things like this make it all the more important for people who suffer from RSD to have an offset. Some kind of collection of all the nice things people have said about you which you can turn to when you’re feeling the RSD pinch. Which, naturally, I have never really had.
A pivot to business: I am forever telling my clients that it’s vital to capture customer feedback in the form of testimonials and case studies. Why? Because your biggest single selling point what other people say about you.
I suspect the reason many shy away from this is because we almost all get some amount of RSD. Reaching out for feedback can be nerve-racking.
But if you don’t do it, people don’t say things like this:
We’ve been delighted with our Marketing support from Two Ruru.
Josh hit the ground running. He understood our business, the terminology we use, the customers we serve. We’re able to provide rough inputs to Josh and he turns them into well crafted and relevant outputs, suited to the various modes of communication we use.
Our transition to HubSpot CRM has also been assisted by Josh as a by-product of his engagement. He created our new website using HubSpot as the underlying platform, got us up & running with direct email messaging from HubSpot, which also required us to get our data in order and segment customers. We’re streets ahead of where we were with our HubSpot evolution.
There’s also a bit of icing on the cake. Josh is the Master of Case Studies. We’ve done our first one with him, and it will be used for many any different purposes and shared with several key stakeholders.
And a cherry on top – Josh is great to work with!
So there you have it. Apparently everyone isn’t annoyed at me all the time, which is a bit of a narcissistic the-world-revolves-around-me thought, now I think about it. I am going to ask a few more folks for things like this, which will help me build up my business (and when the feedback isn’t so good, it will help me improve, which is the point of all this!) And it’ll help with the RSD too.
Oh, and if you’re in business and you need someone to do stuff, check out my About page, where I have a non-exhaustive list of all the stuff I can do.
If you’re not in business, consider flinging me a few dollarydoos here and there. It all helps.
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But it could still end tomorrow, depending on what whispers the Mad King hears (real or imagined) that cause him to thumb a button in a fit of demented pique.
I’m a bit over it, honestly! I suspect we all are! Some of us would like to get on with our drinking water problems and go for walks with the kids without the threat of global thermonuclear war or even just the wanton unprompted murder that we’re all somehow used to now.
Good news: we could sort it all out. We could do it today. Here’s a piece in which we do just that and the hideous Wendigos who run the world finally get their just desserts.
A Two Bedroom House
The next new rule was: You first. Guy wants to start a war? Go for it buddy. Go duel the other guy who wants to start a war. You get a knife, each.
An excellent online acquaintance messaged me about some health stuff the other day, and the strange tension of living with unprecedented and difficult issues whilst also dealing with the everyday mundane. “Birds chirping in the yard, you still gotta put the bins out,” they said.
Doesn’t that just sum up what it’s like to live in the world right now? The Mad King with the Power to End All Life has issued one of his terrifyingly vague Truths, and tomorrow, we get to find out if the world ends, or if it’s just the more usual kind of murder with bombs. In the meantime, I have the kids at home on holiday, keen to play all hours of the day, client work to sort out, and I really wish I could get on top of this strange issue I have with water.
I am hydrophobic.
I don’t know why, but unless I’ve been exercising heavily I don’t really get thirsty. I can quite easily go an entire day where my entire liquid intake is the two coffees I let myself drink. Obviously, this is not good for me, and while I don’t get thirsty properly I do suffer the predictable effects of not drinking. I get grumpy and cloudy-headed and headachey, and occasionally some kind of physiological switch will flip and I’ll wake up at 2 AM with a suddenly raging thirst.
Look at Samson. I bet he never didn’t want to drink water.
And what’s weirder is that I don’t want to drink water. I don’t know why! Objectively, I like water! It keeps me alive! But I’ll look at a full drink bottle or glass and a perverse bit of brain will go “yeah, nah,” and just kind of steer me away from it. I just checked and there is indeed a nearly full drink bottle on my desk. It’s been there all day. It’s a rare day where I actually manage to finish anything close to the recommended amount of water.
Perhaps I have a case of Mild Rabies. Or maybe it’s an autism/ADHD thing. Apparently folks who land somewhere on the autism-ADHD continuum can struggle with interoception, the ability to feel and understand the body’s signals; and lack of thirst (or excessive thirst) are common enough among autists that there are a bunch of people posting on Reddit about it. My brothers both get it too. It’s odd. And I’d like to get on top of it.
So that’s the plan for tomorrow. Remember to put out the bins. Try not to get lost in the endless terrible news. Keep the cat’s litter clean. Try to work towards a world where evil narcissists aren’t handed the power to destroy all human life. Drink enough water.
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Daily blogging! What fun. I’m kicking off today by talking about a specific kind of procrastination that I get, and who knows? Perhaps you do too. That’s why we’re all here, right?
Let’s say there’s something you want to do, or need to do. Bad news: there’s some kind of unpleasant association or anxiety that’s making it hard to get started.
And there’s something else you’d really like to do. There’s a videogame you’d like to play, or a movie you’d like to watch, or a walk you’d like to go on; something that is unabashedly leisurely and rejuvenating and fun.
Do you do either the hard thing or the fun thing? No you do not.
You do a stupid third thing.
You go, “Oh I’ll just check this one thing.” Either on the little screen or the medium screen. Or maybe even the big screen, lining up something new to watch on the ‘flix. Because it’s not a commitment. It’ll only take five minutes (you tell yourself.) It’s productive. After all, you need to know what people are saying. It’s irresponsible to be uninformed. You can get back to either the work thing or the fun thing in a few minutes sweet Jesus it’s been four hours, where the hell has my day gone.
(My hand lashed out like it was its own alien thing to grab my phone in the middle of writing this which is truly upsetting when I think about it; I realise this actually happens quite a lot. Thank goodness for my Brick.)
When I find myself seeking this kind of Third Way distraction it’s usually a messaging app, or an app with a messaging function. Have any of my friends got in touch? Is there anything I would like to say to my friends? What are some good memes we might send each other? Oh, maybe this algorithm will suggest some. What is happening in the world today? Oh, it’s all terrible. Is there any good news? No, there’s not. I Can’t Believe What This Person Said (Their Third Screenshotted Tweet Shocked Me!). Better make my own snarky Bluesky post about it.
Look at this absolute ghoul
And so on. The reason I call this kind of not-productivity The Third Way is because choosing to do nothing is still a choice, and much like Third Way politics – a doomed “centrist” attempt to reconcile the ravages of neoliberalism with milquetoast pseudo-leftism – it simply doesn’t work. You do not get your work done. And you don’t get any fun done either. Your shows go unwatched. Your strolls go unwalked. We avoid the spending of any perceived large amount of time in favour of spending much largeramounts of time on atomised activities that seem shorter but, in aggregate, aren’t.
I do not have advice, I’m as floundering as anyone, but I know what I’m going to try: just committing to doing either the hard thing or the fun thing. I will have either ticked something off my list, or enjoyed myself, and both are preferable to the weird singularity of just kind of mucking around and choosing neither. And I can tell you that it is already kind of working, because I am writing something I committed to doing – this post – instead of scrolling.
And, as it turns out, the thing I needed to do is also something I had fun doing.
I have been quite tired, and more than a bit sad, and very busy, in that weird way that eats all your time while not providing nearly enough money that seems unique to freelancing/contracting/self-employment. Other freelancers will know what I mean. I find myself in an odd bind where I feel like being honest about this stuff will depress my readers, which I’d rather not do, and then I don’t write, which makes me depressed, and… it’s a nasty cycle, isn’t it?
Oh and there’s the absolute state of the world right now, the endless crises all domino cascading into each other and the way we’ve blithely accepted, as a species, that we will just kind of let the worst people in the world run everything, that occasionally we will wave some signs at them and post some snark online and then continue to let them keep running things. Oh and then there’s setting the world’s hard-won capital on fire in crypto minds and data centres in a hubristic, doomed-to-fail quest to build an artificial god.
Yeah. That gets me down, on occasion, which is to say, every day without fail.
Because it’s me, and after long acquaintance I feel like I’m getting to know this character reasonably well, I wonder if I am also selling myself short. While I’ve been quiet here, I have completed case studies, designs, videos, and a website build for a client. I have done all the Dad Stuff like looking after the kids and cooking the food and such, which I always feel doesn’t count towards my personal productivity score, but of course it should; the unpaid job you do at home is still very real work. And I have started a podcast with Emily Writes (we are three episodes in, two of which are available for public consumption). Here it is, on Apple and Spotify.
We also began a new series called The Brighter Future. This means a lot to me. Do try it.
The Brighter Future is a big deal for me; I wondered if other people were fed up with the endless procession of doom and wanted to script an alternative future, one that doesn’t absolutely suck. Turns out they do. So that’s nice.
In other news, I’m going back to daily blogging.
That month where I did things each day was the only time in… years? Decades? during which I felt like I was in some kind of control. Sure, I was flipping out, but it was more like aerobatics than the kind of uncontrolled spiral I feel like I’m in now. And when I made something small but tangible each day, opportunities just kind of… cropped up. I do wonder if I am constitutionally unsuited to doing this sort of thing; I often think my ideal job description would be “beachside hermit” but that is not the world we live in. And there is value to creating every day. Loathe as I am to look like I’m engaging in hustle culture, writing something (or making anything) sure beats an hour or more of aimless scrolling.
Don’t worry; I won’t be emailing you a post every single day. I’ll just make the posts here and send out a weekly digest. That way you can play along at home without me annihilating your inbox.
I’ve also done a bunch of Bob Ross paintings: once they have received the required additions and adjustments, prints will be going out to subscribers. Here is one I did today. Doing these helps keep the doom at bay, a little.
As always, I am taking recommendations on what I could add to the paintings.
Perhaps that will be an incentive for you to comment! Please do. The comments are always a highlight.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of the ways I procrastinate doing all sorts of things, up to and including this post which has been rattling round in my head for… a month? Well, here it is now:
Waiting until the perfect time
There’s a meeting coming up. I just finished a meeting. It’s only 10:12. I’ll just keep scrolling until 10:30 exactly. Oh, no, it’s 10:32. Can’t start at such a weird time. I’ll start at 11.
Waiting for the perfect conditions
I’m feeling low today. I just finished a big task, so I deserve a break. I’m feeling energetic so I might go for a run instead. I can’t write with the Internet on so I’d better turn it off yet, but what if I miss something? Better look at Bluesky. The kids will be home soon. It’s too late. It’s too early. I’m too depressed.
Small things get in the way
I’m too scatterbrained. I’m too hungry. I need a coffee. The desk isn’t set up right. I need a new screensaver. Maybe a new todo app will help; I’d better start comparing them. I need to mow the lawns. I haven’t done a drawing for ages. I could read a self-help book, that might help. I’m hungry again. I forgot to have a shower during the school prep rush, better do that now.
Being distracted by finishing a task
I’ve finished a task! Miracle. I feel glorious. Well, I feel a mild sense of relief. Well, a brief escape from perpetual panic. I’m going to celebrate by doing something I’ll regret in five hours when I realise I’ve lost my day to it.
Picking a task from things I see
Right, the kids are at school and the day is mine. Time to get started on the urgent thing. Wait, there are several urgent things. Which one to pick? I can’t decide. Time to walk aimlessly around the house. Oh man, there’s that bit of wall that I patched up and never painted. I should sand that back and get some paint. Wait, I don’t have any paint. Better head to Mitre 10. Wait, the car needs vacuuming. Wait, the vacuum is full. Wait, the bin needs emptying. Wait, the hedge needs trimming. Wait, why do the kids need picking up already?
Sudden overwhelming interest in previously uninteresting topic
I have a task to do but I’m going to look at a social media site. Argh, doom. Wait! Is that… an article about the history of asphalt?!
Just abruptly walking away from my desk for no reason
I wrote this down because I just did it.
Being mean to myself
A lot of procrastination happens because I’m horrifically cruel to myself – in ways and in language I wouldn’t even countenance visiting on another human being – and my brain associates this cruelty with tasks, or the anxiety I associate with the assumption that other people will be as mean to me as I am to myself, and so creatively avoids the source of anxiety: the task itself. This works until it abruptly doesn’t. Clever, stupid brain.
Of course, I’m talking about me, but it might also be about you. Your mileage may vary, but it might not vary that much.
I was lying awake a few nights back, a toddler pick-up having precipitated a late night freak-out about all the undone urgent things in my life, and some cobweb corner of my mind came up with: what if it’s all right? What if your readers don’t mind? What if your clients don’t hate you? What if the things you’re worried about will be okay if you do them?
And I don’t know why but that just about had me shedding sleep-deprived tears, and I went back to bed and slept much better than a baby.
A little logic (puzzle)
If it helps, imagine this riddle emerging from a wise Sphinx-like figure instead of me.
You have two choices, permanent procrastinator: you can be mean to yourself as you always have, and get no work done, or you can try being nice to yourself and (possibly) still get no work done. In the first scenario you are miserable with undone tasks. In the second you still have the undone tasks, but you’re happy.
Which would you pick?
I know, I know, it’s the first one. That’s the one I usually pick too. But maybe give the second one a go.
Anyway, yeah, they figured out procrastination. Or rather, they added to a body of rather chunky existing research across neuroscience and psychology. The reason this research is interesting is because, to the best of my knowledge, evidence-based understanding of the precise neural circuits involved is a new development. As detailed in the Wired story, the scientists discovered that turning off a specific region of the brain would turn off the urge to procrastinate. Here’s Wired:
The experimental design incorporated an unpleasant element. The monkeys were given the choice of drinking a moderate amount of water without negative consequences or drinking a larger amount on the condition of receiving a direct blast of air in the face. Although the reward was greater in the second option, it involved an uncomfortable experience.
As the researchers anticipated, the macaques’ motivation to complete the task and access the water decreased considerably when the aversive stimulus was introduced. This behavior allowed them to identify a brain circuit that acts as a brake on motivation in the face of anticipated adverse situations.
If you’re hoping that this development might help with your procrastination problem, you might be waiting a while. You definitely won’t want to make use of the method involved in the study — Motivation under aversive conditions is regulated by a striatopallidal pathway in primates — as it probably wasn’t a pleasant experience for the two macaques involved. The details in the Wired story are obfuscated, but the study is not: the monkeys had brain implants that let the scientists inject a drug that acts as an agonist for DREADDs (I don’t make this stuff up, it’s an acronym for Designer Receptors Exclusively Activated By Designer Drugs) into a specific region of the brain. Lovely!
I recommend reading both the Wired story and whatever you can make out of the study, because both are interesting, and only the study has wonderful diagrams like this.
Scientists are in more dire need of artistic and UX training than any other group in the world.
While there’s no doubt this sort of research might eventually lead to a pill (hopefully not an implant) that you can chomp to overcome procrastination, that might not be a good thing. As much as I have longed for a way to cauterise the inconvenient bits of my personality but procrastination exists for a reason; when it’s functioning normally it’s a very smart way to both conserve energy and avoid horrible things. What we’re interested in, here at the Cynic’s Guide to Self-Improvement, is when procrastination becomes a personal problem that gets in the way of things we want to be doing. And this is where I’m going to veer off the superhighway of science and into the off-road track of pure anecdote-infused speculation.
Imagine a kid who takes things very seriously and works very hard. Bright, but anxious. Sensitive. Eager to please. And the person they most want to please — and therefore their hardest taskmaster — is themselves.
Imagine they really like… it can be anything, but we’ll say it’s colouring-in. They’re good at not going over the lines. And they like the praise they get for being good at it, and therefore their anxiety about not going over the lines increases, and then they do go over the lines, because to err is human, but does the kid know that? No. And their bitter upset at this mistake is going to overwhelm them utterly, to make them feel useless and horrid; they are going to scream at themselves internally (maybe externally too) because that’s the only thing they can think of that matches the intensity of pain they are feeling, and when adults coo and caress “don’t worry, it’s only a colouring-in!” everything will feel worse because not only is the kid upset at their failure but also the adults around don’t comprehend the maelstrom, and on top of that is the knowledge that the adults are right, that the kid is overreacting, and it is just a colouring-in that has no right to make them feel so comprehensively awful.
Maybe it’s not that hard to imagine. It wasn’t for me.
The kid wanted to do a colouring-in, but this sudden emotional hell is so much worse than a blast of air to the face.
Now multiply this effect by everything, forever. Every action and reaction that for some reason has importance attached makes them feel this way.
The solution? Escape. Avoid the things that make them feel so awful because the emotional cost of doing that is somehow less than facing the maelstrom, and because they’ve inadvertently discovered the world’s most damaging yet effective life-hack: desperate terror makes them act. It might even make them feel like they’re finally doing good, which is all they wanted, and eventually their treacherously malleable brain will not know any other way of achieving anything.
I’ll put it another way: why do anything you want to do, when everything you want also comes pre-packaged with self-inflicted injury and insult?
For me, at least, I think this explains… a lot of things. Not least the illogic of procrastination, the way it feels awful at the time but you can’t stop it. Procrastination is one bit of your brain and body trying to protect another bit from yet another bit, all of which are you. And it highlights the importance of being very intentionally kind to yourself, even when/especially if that’s hard to do, and of CBT rituals like the ones outlined in this post which is somehow over an entire year old? Where the hell did that time go?
Remember something we’ve said a lot here: if being mean to yourself worked, it’d have worked by now.
Or — because it does work to a certain extent, else we wouldn’t do it — it doesn’t work well, or you probably wouldn’t be reading this.
On a related note, here’s something dear to my heart. I have noticed a tendency for those of us on the political left to sniff and sneer at anything smacking of self-improvement because of the inherently individualistic and capitalistic framing and… yes, that is a problem! But so is not knowing how to organise yourself well enough to live well, or to help organise others. While I’m at it, dunking on things online and on podcasts, as fun as it is, isn’t winning. So there.
In lieu of all that, here is Time Management for Anarchists: a well-argued and straightforward here’s-how-to-sort-your-💩-out guide for those of us who don’t have bosses, or would like to not have one, or who would prefer to keep the bastards off your backs as much as possible.
It was written back in the More Analogue Days, but there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, I’ve found the best systems either are analogue, or most resemble analogue in digital form.
These are good quotes:
I hate the bullshit moralism connected with being organized. All this stuff about get started early. If you know how long something takes you can indulge yourself and leave it to the last day.
Yes! Invalidate procrastination and toxic productivity simultaneously whilst doing the things you want to do!
I don’t really believe in lazy, I don’t really know any lazy people. I know people with low self confidence who find it really hard to believe in their own projects. I know people who have never learned the pleasure of stimulating and engaging work. I know people who are too worn down by eight hours of pointless, meaningless tasks to take on new projects.
Precisely.
Thanks, as always, for reading. God willing — and as we have learned, gods are frequently unwilling — I’ll be back with something new next week.
Now, leave a comment!
This place actually has good, non-toxic comments! No, I don’t know how I did it either!
Christmas is tricky and exhausting. New Year’s is fraught.
It’s the time of year overachievers make lists of all the things they did in the previous 12 months. Reading these makes me want to throw up – all they ever do is remind me of all the stuff I didn’t get done – so I won’t subject you to one. If you’re keen to get a picture of what did and didn’t self-improve you can always go back and read the archives.
And I’m not keen to do an New Year’s Resolutions post, or even an anti-New Year’s Resolution post, because I feel like there are enough of both of those? And mine would be deja vu all over again, again; I’d like to be fitter, I’d like to spend more time doing the things I want to be doing but never want to do in the moment instead of the stuff I have no interest in long-term but can’t resist at the time.
So here, have some scattershot reflections, disguised as not-resolutions.1 It’s what you’re here for!
Become suspicious of entertainment, and things that are labeled leisure but aren’t
While it’s definitely possible to burn out on overwork, it’s just as possible to burn out on lack of sleep, shitty food, and too much scrolling or streaming or videogames.
If certain things fall into a mental “leisure” or “chilling out” or “giving myself a break” or “#selfcare” category, we have a tendency to ignore that they are often very tiring.
Maybe that’s why we’re all all Surprised Pikachu when the holidays turn out to be exhausting.
So much of our time is spent in an escape, dreaming ourselves elsewhere. Fancying ourselves other. I think scrolling fits into this category too. Peel away the pop science of “dopamine hits” that we currently use to frame our relationship with technology – especially phones – and shed some of the cultural baggage, and we are left with a kind of augmented daydreaming and personality projection device, something Phillip K Dick would write a cautionary tale about during a palpitating amphetamine haze.
I think dreaming or looking around to find ideas is fine, but I’d rather be writing them down and turning them into projects and story plots than just letting them run, unharnessed, not taking me anywhere in particular.
Put another way: I have spent hours, days, years, thinking about the things I want to do. How much more effort would it be to actually do them?
If I’m going to mention dreaming I should probably lay into the other way that dreams manifest:
The horrors
I started drafting this post after Christmas, in the little interregnum before the new year went comprehensively to shit. I could be talking about any number of things but, this time, it’s about Venezuela.
It is not ideal that mad emperors with the power to extinguish all human life have started getting feisty in their dying years. Someone who by rights should be an incontinent crank yelling at the aged-home nurse is instead toting around a global doomsday device while invading neighbouring countries and making it clear there’s more where that came from. It is unquestionably terrible, and I do think it vital that the rest of us rapidly find ways to disestablish dictators, foment true democracy, mitigate climate change and end the looming threat of nuclear destruction, but you know what won’t help do that? What I’m always tempted to do, which is scroll the doom and occasionally make a snarky post about it. It doesn’t help the situation at large, and it doesn’t help my brain either, no matter how much I try to tell myself it will in the moment.
you realise he'll press the button, right? and you know who I'm talking about and what the button is
this doesn’t help anyone, much less you! just stop it!
What I do think will help is:
Be more present and more sociable
I want to be where I am. I’d like to learn the names of the plants in the garden. Identify native trees. I’d like to learn the constellations, so I can tell my children the names of the stars.
I want to spend more time with friends. Not with my friends on the other side of a screen. Making the effort to go meet them, or have them over for food, and hang out in person.
I want to play with my kids more. Sure, I need time away from them to do work, but I can be a bit more purposeful about this than I sometimes am. If I am letting the kids go on devices just so I can spend aimless time on devices, what have any of us gained?
I want to seek out friction. Technology is a boon and I love a lot of it, but so many tech things that should be easy are too hard, and things that probably should be harder are too easy. For instance, I want to find ways to get my money directly to artists instead of routing micropayments through rapacious intermediaries like Spotify. Listen to music on CDs or MP3s that I’ve downloaded from Bandcamp. I want to restore my old iPod. Get that valve radio I found at the side of the road working. Make myself less dependent on tech rented to me by megacorps that are so eagerly throwing in with a dictator.
Being more present and less tech-dependent might have some side benefits. How much of my neck pain is from simply staring straight ahead, at a small rectangle, or a slightly larger rectangle, or a road?
How much better off would I be if I did a bit more looking left and right?
That isn’t a metaphor. I just think I’d like to be more of a monk.
Become a schemer
I feel like lot of folks – particularly young men – took Heath Ledger’s Joker character a bit too seriously, which is much funnier when you consider the character’s catchphrase, but I still want to use this now 18 year old movie to make a point.2
There’s a sequence where Joker claims that he doesn’t make plans because he’s not a “schemer”. “I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.”
Of course, Joker is lying; he is a meticulous planner! All the same – maybe it’s the ADHD – something about that scene really rang with me. I grew up thinking plans were a bit pointless: something is always going to go wrong, so why bother?
Of course, I know logically that not planning is sophomoric at best, but this tendency clings to the back of my brain, and in many aspects of life I still end up winging it.
So in an attempt to provide a better metaphor than that offered by a fictional psychotic clown, I think plans are more like sailing ships. You can’t control the wind, but you can harness it. You might get blown off course from time to time, but you can still set a course, and do your best to return to it.
On that sober note, I’d like to propose that next year:
Be more unhinged
So much of what I do is because I’ve spent a lot of effort learning about what made people like and dislike about me, and acting accordingly. This is true for us all to some extent, this is simply the way that cultural and social dynamics are, but I feel like with non-neurotpical folks it can be a bit… extra. If you have really extreme rejection sensitivity (clue: were you called a “sensitive child”? Subsequent clue: were you perhaps a bit sensitive about being called sensitive?) it can become both map and compass; things that might carry rejection risks are automatically avoided and you end up spending life drifting down the lazy river of “don’t make waves.”
This may go some way to explaining a personally perplexing trait where I suddenly stop doing something the moment I experience mild success: the urge to achieve is suddenly absent and all that’s left is “people might be mean to me”.
Here I’ll mention, in passing, that I often worry that writing about rejection sensitivity and the like will be seen as a bit pathetic and self-absorbed. In other words, it’s rejection sensitivity about rejection sensitivity.
At least I’m not the only one afflicted:
So this year I’d like to be a bit less afraid of pissing people off. Or, at least, I can make a priority of pissing the right people off. And I’d like to stop avoiding projects I very much want to do because there’s some real or imagined rejection risk. That’s where the good stuff happens!
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Also, comments! I love comments. Get amongst it in the comments.
“And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
“It’s a lot more complicated than that–“
“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
I’ve been asking myself why I find weekly newsletters such a struggle when I wrote one newsletter a day for thirty days and found it easier than weekly writing.
I mention this less because of my constant state of agitation about not meeting my weekly writing goal and more because you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t struggle with consistency too, so this may be applicable to something in your life.
There are, I think, two reasons.
The first is that because I have never been able to settle (indecision, again!) on what day this should come out, I don’t have a hard deadline to meet.
And because of that, I have an almost-audible voice that tells me “perhaps this would be better on another day.”
Monday is the start of the week, you should send it out then.
Wednesday is “humpday,” people will be more likely to get something out of it on a Wednesday.
Thursday is funny, because there’s that Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quote you appreciate about Thursdays.
Saturday, because people need something for the weekend… and so on.
And then I’ll get the feeling that whatever I have is too slapdash, and there’s a bit of breaking news that I really should add, and the indecision really spirals.
I have decided to fix this by allowing you to decide when this newsletter comes out:
The second reason follows from the first: If I get the smallest inkling that I’ve done something wrong or let someone down, that’s it for the task. I get very all-or-nothing; all I want to do is avoid it or fix it.
If there’s something else that seems urgent – or merely something sufficiently distracting – then I have another great reason to avoid it.
That’s a long-winded way of saying that I feel bad about not posting for two weeks! But luckily I found a good reason to climb out of my funk:
The weirdos are coming for ADHD
There is a bit of an online kerfuffle amongst ADHD folks arising from this deeply stupid article (🏴☠️link), by one of those newspaper columnists who – mysteriously! – has superior knowledge to any qualified expert in whatever subject they feel like writing about that week. It has already been roundly debunked, but I still think it’s worth keeping an eye on.1 These people, hand in glove with far-right fossil-fuel think-tanks, are who gifted us the Culture War on Trans People, and now they’re coming for ADHD.
But if we’re being properly skeptical, we might ask: does the article have a point?
The answer is, as is so often the case: it’s complicated.2
Firstly: the article is a keyboard interview, so don’t take it seriously, but do take seriously the fact that culture warriors have turned their attention (lol) to this topic.
Secondly: there is a surplus of online influencers who have discovered a profitable niche in ADHD and are churning out ultra-relatable, extremely non-evidence-based content which is only tangentially related to ADHD, which may be convincing people who do not have ADHD that they do have ADHD (and, conversely, may be pointing out to people who didn’t know they have ADHD that they indeed have ADHD)
Thirdly: whether or not you find online content relatable has no bearing on whether or not you have ADHD, and dickhead columnists aren’t the ones who get to tell you if you have it or not. That’s what doctors are for
Fourthly: we are beset by apps and devices designed by the smartest people alive to divert, monopolise and fragment our attention, which can give rise to ADHD-like symptoms in even the most neurotypical people
Fifthly: ADHD people may be more susceptible to said apps and devices and may suffer more from their deleterious effects
Sixthly: ADHD and autism exist on a spectrum, goddamn it, a fact that is only objected to by weirdos and gatekeepers (and is almost always embraced by neurodiversity advocates). Yes, you can be more or less ADHD/autistic, or be ADHD/autistic in different ways. Yes, autism and ADHD can be profoundly disabling, and it’s important not to be flippant about that, or use labels as excuses, much like it’s insulting to people with obsessive-compulsive disorder to say “Oh, I’m just so OCD about (trivial thing.)” But this doesn’t invalidate a diagnosis. Just because an autistic person is verbal or an ADHD person can focus on things they find interesting does not make them not autistic or ADHD. And the increase in diagnoses bemoaned by agenda-hucking weirdos is primarily because of greater understanding of the breadth of the spectrum. Yes, your train-obsessed granddad who ate the same thing for seventy years was probably on the spectrum, no he wouldn’t have been diagnosed in 1942 because we have had a fair bit of medical and scientific progress since then. Scratch the surface of almost any reactionary columnist’s shallow rantings and you will find, almost inevitably, that they are bemoaning the notion of progress itself, and setting their own arbitrary definitions of what “counts”
Seventhly: neurodiversity advocates are not trying to proscribe people through “labels;” they are celebrating and advocating for the diversity of human experience (the clue is in the name) and understanding that there may be a mostly hardwired reason you are the way you are can be empowering instead of limiting
Eighthly: of course people use labels as a way to be special and/or annoying on the internet. This is not a new thing. The world contains men who put MAGA in their bio and wonder why it makes them undatable. People who get all hung up about labels would put “no labels” in their bio and not even clock the irony.
Ninthly: the set of understandings, tools, tips and tricks developed by the ADHD community to survive in an informationally-hostile world can be incredibly useful to people who may not fit technical definitions of ADHD but who, due to device proliferation and and information overload, find themselves feeling ADHDish. Go ahead and use them, if you want! No-one is stopping you! You don’t need an ADHD license!
Tenthly: no-one does more wondering if ADHD is real than people with ADHD.
Cool tools
Distraction-free writing
I really like distraction-free Markdown editors for writing, even if I occasionally get distracted by trying to find the perfect distraction-free Markdown editor.
For now I have settled on Typora because it does what I need it to do and I already owned it for some reason. I really liked iA Writer, but it was $99 which I can’t justify.
If you write things and want a distraction-free writing environment, give Typora a hoon. It is inexpensive and it works (on every platform). It’s what I’ll be using to write for the next however long.
a e s t h e t i c
Write on schedule
I will be writing in an upcoming piece about how useful time estimates and time-tracking are for ADHD folks, and anyone else who finds themselves attentionally challenged, but for now I’ll plug a tool I have just started using and am already finding incredibly helpful: Super Productivity. Ignore the mildly toxic name: it’s free, open source, and actually works – an escalating order of rarity in software.
This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
– Douglas Adams
Enjoy whatever day of the week this finds you. Thursday is a state of mind. And brace yourselves – Christmas is coming.
If this email has found you well, or even if it hasn’t, please leave a comment. Comments are the best.
