Originally published to Minor Dissent on 3/22/22.
Is it really procrastination? What is actually happening, not what is my story of what is happening?
I spend a lot of time doing things I don’t think are valuable. Mainly Twitter and Youtube. And scrolling other social apps. I spend generally 2-4 hours a day on social apps throughout the day. And then another 2-4 hours watching Youtube at night.
I don’t think these are an effective use of my time.
Why do I do them? Because they are “easy”. Or so I believe. Social is mostly just micro dopamine hits. It’s nice first thing in the morning to “find something new”, see what’s happened. I will check Reddit, IG, crypto, Twitter, read IG and text messages and notifications (I generally avoid Twitter messages because they require a lot of work and only review them when I have excess energy and am bored).
Then I will periodically check these between writing or whatever project I am working on during the day.
Then after my wife goes to bed I may write a little more, definitely workout, maybe work on a little project, but otherwise just watch something on TV, play some game, or watch Youtube.
I am always learning. At least with Youtube. It’s never just a complete waste of time. And even on Twitter or Reddit or whatever. Most of my interests are “educational”. But I just feel like its super inefficient.
So next question is: why do I do it? Well it’s because I am out of energy. I am out of “focus”. Focus requires energy. Staying on topic requires energy. Refining a sentence or paragraph or article requires energy. There is an “ideal” thing to say, a way to say it, and a way to structure it. But it is not obvious what that is. I just know what the right way is when I see it.
Trying to “direct” and “refocus” my mind requires energy. Is this innate or learned? Is this inherent or can be trained?
I think meditation helps. Meditation is definitely a lot of work at first. To “regroove” your brain patterns. But afterwards, after those new grooves are grooved, it is easier. I think. Definitely true. Question is just of degree.
Do I just need to do the heavy upfront lifting of starting to meditate again? I haven’t done it consistently since 2020. Probably 20% of the habit “stuck”, but that’s 80% that hasn’t.
It’s happening right now. I just lost interest in that train of thought. It wasn’t interesting anymore. It would have taken me energy to re-read and go “how can I make this flow nicely, how can I pursue and explore this and make it coherent”. Being coherent is work.
My conflict, or at least one of them, is that my brain wants to pursue what is interesting. But my brain also wants to have money and feel useful and say something interesting. Thinking something interesting to me and communicating why it’s interesting to others is two totally divergent domains. Very little overlap. I want to dig around in the dirt and find things no one has found. And then I want to have them be synthesized and communicated so others can learn and improve from them. Or at least think I’m cool and useful and give me money and ascribe value to me.
But also it just wouldn’t actually feel good if it wasn’t withheld. It’s not the reward we want. It’s the reward in contrast to the effort. Which is why social media and just modern instant-dopamine stuff in general is so unrewarding. Without the deprivation there is no satisfaction. A nice steak is life changing if you haven’t eaten in 3 days, good when you haven’t eaten in 3 hours, and disgusting when you haven’t eaten in 3 minutes. This same curve applies to everything. How rewarding the reward is depends heavily if not mostly on how frequently it is administered.
“The fun zone” is the zone where it’s hard enough that it’s challenging but where you still get rewarded reasonably often. If it’s only challenging, if it’s too challenging to the point you almost never get the reward, you get frustrated and angry and lose interest. If it’s only reward, if it’s too easy to the point where you are never challenged, you get bored and distracted and lose interest.
We are all trying to achieve this “fun zone” at all times. Like I’ve explained in previous posts, humans are designed for this fun zone to be a dialectic between our desires and the environment. The environment tends toward a range of difficulty and our brains were tuned by millions of years of evolution for our hunter gatherer lifestyle to elicit maximum fun zone time while performing it (see Uncle Ted for more). The problem with humans is that we are sneaky little fuckers. We are capable through technology of modifying the environment to make it easier. Our dumb little monkey who just wants to get high all day uses our higher minds to change the environment and make it easier for us to get high. But the problem is the monkey wasn’t designed to get high this often and this easy. We are supposed to try hard and then just barely get the reward. But after hundreds of thousands of generations optimizing toward getting more with less, making the world 0.1% easier with each successive cycle, we now have this modern, civilized, technologically advanced world. And what started out for our ancestors as ultra nightmare difficultly has now been converted into Polly Pocket Princess retard baby difficulty. The pendulum has swung so far in fact that the most important thing modern people have to learn is how to make getting high artificially difficult to literally keep us from killing ourselves.
But even when you know what to do, how to do it remains difficult. And it is made even more so by how complex the alien world we live in is. Getting food is easy. But getting money to pay for it is hard. Feeling important is easy. But building actual relationship is hard. Finding something novel is easy. But finding something actually meaningful is hard. We have mastered-to-the-point-of-vestigiality all the things we are phenomenal at, now left completely dependent on complex problem solving abilities at which we are only mediocre. This issue used to be held at bay by culture and elders and religions and shit so we didn’t have to figure out everything ourselves. But in the modern world: if you don’t want to stack up at the bottom you better be damn good at figuring out shit yourself.
The ways in which we are built for our lives to be hard, they are now too easy. And the ways in which we are built for our lives to be easy, they are now too hard. Sounds like no fun to me!
Back to procrastination. Writing is hard. Or at least, writing things I’m proud of and think are actually useful is hard. And they drain my energy for other difficult tasks I could do. Writing like this is easy. But I don’t think this is particularly useful to other people. It feels nice to publish I guess but was it really worth publishing at all? Would that time have been better spend beating my head against something more useful? I think it depends. The answer is always yes except that sometimes you just need an easy win.
To be in the fun zone you need to work hard and then you need to get the reward. If you can’t get the reward, because it’s a long term project or something, you must artificially inject reward to stay motivated.
I think the danger is that artificial reward injection is always prone to diverting you away from the hard work. As long as you can maintain the system it works great. But because we have been engineered over millennia to take the path of least resistance, the system is inherently unstable. If you give yourself a cookie—or a checking of Twitter— after every 30 minute block of the writing grind, you slowly trend toward more time Twittering and less time writing. After enough cycles (only a few dozen) your reward time will completely replace your hardwork time. At which point you produce nothing and are depressed. And with how many Twitter-equivalents of easy rewards are available to us modern retards, life is a minefield we must be perpetually vigilant in if we wish thrive!
What good is Twitter for me? It allows me to let go of “small” ideas. If I don’t post it, it will just fester in me. And I think these small ideas are useful and worth sharing. But maybe that’s just because they feel nice when they occur to me. If they were as useful as I think they’d have more engagement, no?
Dopamine fast. The problem with dopamine fasts, like any extreme deprivation, is that they hurt. And then you feel like you’ve “earned” naughty time. So then you go even harder later. Like hyper restrictive diets: not sustainable. It must be sustainable. But sustainable is hard. If you can get over the hump and retrain your brain, you can get your baseline of addictions lowered by maybe 50%. But eventually they will always trend back up. Which is annoying. Vigilance!
My other issue is that I think these are trash posts. That they are an eyesore on my really effortful pieces. So I try to avoid writing them. But they are highly useful to me. They help me solve problems. It’s frustrating that I sometimes need to write multiple in between “real” poasts, but maybe that’s just the way it is. Remember that whatever you need to do now so that in a few years you will actually have the important ideas fleshed out is permissible.
Right now my readers (yes, you beautiful retards) are all weirdo earlier adopters who want to watch the process. Later, maybe when I’m 40, I’ll take everything coherent and useful I’ve ranted on this blog, and turn it into a few books or something. Right now it’s just about doing whatever is necessary to have there be some coherent and useful bits to pull from, and to make that process public for whatever it may be worth to others.
Okay, so what’s the takeaway?
Whenever stuck, Journal. Poast it. If people hate them, they don’t have to read them. Whatever leads to faster progress on effort poasts.
I don’t think social media is positive. But I don’t know what I’d fill the time with. It needs to be “easy” time. Is replacing Instagram with TV really an upgrade? An alcoholic replacing Vodka with Beer certainly isn’t. What do most people do? I feel like most people just do dumb life maintenance shit.
My mind needs always to be occupied. It is like a stomach. Well, if it’s like a stomach, the stomach only always needs food when it’s always getting food. Take food away and it will adapt.
Maybe I need to stop consuming. Think more. Just sit and think. Could also walk and read books. Walk will help me with cutting fat. Read books makes me cool.
No phone (Twitter, IG, Reddit mostly) until next Monday. Just logged out of everything. Replace time spent on phone with walking, reading, meditation, hanging out with family, journaling, working out, playing music, doing house chores, thinking, or writing. Journal more, think more, walk more!
I think another error I make is that I am trying to write the effort poasts at the same time I’m trying to formulate the ideas. If I get stuck on a poast I need to step aside and really refine the idea and the structure before continuing. I get really disheartened when I spend a bunch of time making all this really good prose and then realize that the idea it’s conveying is wrong or extraneous to the point and I have to significantly change or cut it out.
For MBTI 4 and Religion 3: no more writing until you finalize the outline and what’s a priority to include.
I think that’s good enough for now.
Today is my birthday.
Poast.