I've written before about the perils of leisure-like activities, those things that kind of seem like fun but really aren't that fun. Of course, most of us recognise that social news sites and other timewasting dopamine farms aren't great ways to spend your time, but we do it anyway. So why is this and how do we fix it?
Of course, entertainment as analgesia is probably familiar to anyone who, faced with an stray unpleasant memory, has found themselves typing "facebo-" into their web browser before they even realise what they're doing. But I think there's a more general principle that you can get from a two-axis analysis: timewasting is not very positive, but it's also not very negative. It's a reliable feeling of just enough reward to be worth it.
That might not seem particularly great, but "not very negative" can sometimes be quite a compelling proposition. If you're stressed, tired, or upset, you know you can quite quickly lose yourself in something that's reliably neutral. Neutral beats negative any day. Unfortunately, that easy escape from negativity can stop you from addressing its source. Worse still, sometimes important stuff is uncomfortable, and discomfort doesn't stack up well against neutrality.
But although the neutrality gets you in the door, I ultimately think it's timewasting's small, safe positivity that makes it really dangerous. Why take a risk on an uncertain positive outcome when you have a certain one right here, right in front of you, just a click away? To do something else, you don't just have to accept the negatives of the thing you could have, you also have to give up the positive thing you have already. That's a brutal combination.
Unfortunately, the time when you most need the awareness to avoid timewasting is the time you're least likely to have it. Everyone gets tired sometimes, or needs a break from thinking. Escapism can be healty when it gives you the distance to deal with something better. And who doesn't occasionally feel that just doing nothing might be the most attractive idea in the world right now?
I think there is an answer to be found in recognising that the "not negative" and "slightly positive" aspects of timewasting are separable. You can have not negative without the seductive safety of slightly positive. You can have a break without putting anything fun in that break to sweeten the deal, which robs the break of its compulsivity. Then the break only sticks around for long enough to you to feel the pull of something positive again.
In other words, perhaps the solution to doing nothing is, in fact, to do nothing. Actually nothing. Not staring at a screen, chatting to a friend or playing a game. Just embrace the lack of anything and see how it feels. At first, probably, relieving. Then, hopefully, boring. It's dangerous for nothing to be interesting.
I've been thinking a little about the various things I like to make and do. Broadly speaking, these fall into the categories of ideas, prototypes, small projects, big projects, and writing. Somewhere in there is commercial work as well, but, as I noted during honesty month, it can be difficult to find a good balance between these things. I often end up feeling like I'm being pulled in different directions that I have to choose between. This is mostly what led to backing off on writing at the end of last year.
Having now had some time to consider it, I think that the solution lies not in balance but in integration. Rather than finding a compromise between different directions, it makes more sense to align them towards the same direction or, if necessary, abandon a direction that is unalignable. I'm only splitting my time between ideas, prototypes, writing and small projects if the different parts have nothing to do with each other. On the other hand, if the parts are all connected, I'm really just spending my time on the same thing but in different ways.
That means if I'm working on a large project, I can split it up into small projects, and further split small projects into prototypes and so on. Ideas can turn into prototypes that turn into new projects, and I can develop new ideas based on the projects I'm currently working on. And, all the while, writing can act as a kind of informational outlet for the various parts of this process, like print statements scattered throughout a codebase.
One particular thing I think is powerful about this idea is it makes my commercial work situation much clearer. My ideal commercial project, then, is something that also integrates with my other work. So work I can write about, prototype, come up with ideas for and so on. An ideal situation is if the things I'm doing anyway can be commercialised, but going the other way and making a commercial need fit with my existing work is also a fine way to integrate, and probably more likely to work in the short term.
I have a truly prodigious number of unfinished projects, unpublished drafts, and unanswered emails. At a certain point, these things seem to hit a kind of procrastination event horizon where I stop even pretending to work on them. The problem is, they never really go away. Still somewhere in the back of my head I'm thinking "maybe I'll get around to that someday". This month, I'm going to go hunting for some of these dangling threads and attempt to either do something useful with them or cut them loose for good.
To make it more concrete, I have four half-written posts that I started over a year ago and never finished, so I'll finish those. I also have Conventional Wisdom 3 and some related ideas to write up (oops). I'm also going to aim to finish off, or at least push out the door, four currently limbo-ed projects, about one per week. Finally, I'm going to dig through my old emails because I know there's some unanswered stuff in there from years back that I wanted to answer at the time. If anything interesting comes of that I'll write it up.
This seems like a lot, but I'm hoping it will be easier than it sounds because I've already done most of the work. I'm not sure what to expect exactly from this, but I'm hoping that having those old projects put to bed will impart a sense of relief, or at least responsibility. Maybe I will even find that some things I had written off were actually worth coming back to.
Oh, and you may have noticed this is Conventional Wisdom 4 despite being in the 5th month. I originally intended to do it in April, but, uh, that didn't work out. Oh well, better late than never!
I'm currently doing a one-day-a-week residency at Culture at Work, an arts institute I previously worked with on the Brain Light Project and Shifting into Consciousness. Culture at Work is mainly artist-focused, but I pitched them on the idea of having someone with a more technological background around to do some interesting creative technology work.
The main idea I want to develop as part of this residency is the one I described in Behind the Silicon Curtain: it's hard to see the beauty in software because you can't look inside it like you can with hardware. Gears and pistons are interesting because you can see them move, and even if you don't understand what's going on you can at least appreciate the machinery. Code just looks like squiggles, and what's actually happening isn't even written in the code anyway, it's the abstract operations that the code represents.
Part of the blame for this lies at computing's origins in mathematics, which is a notoriously abstract and symbolic subject. Worse still, its other parent is electrical engineering, which is based on understanding and manipulating invisible forces. If computing had developed from weaving or mechanical engineering instead, perhaps we would be in a different place. As it is, we've built our tower out of opaque and arcane materials.
But there's no reason to restrict ourselves to what's been done before. The great thing about computing is just how easy it is to make a computer. It's so easy that we often make computers by accident, to the eternal fun and profit of hackers and security researchers. So what I'd like to do is work on some alternative models of computation that are designed to be transparent rather than opaque by default. I've got some interesting ideas around hardware-based FRP, knitting, and birds, so I'm going to work on some prototypes and see what sticks.
This will ultimately culminate in some kind of technology exhibition, but in the mean time I'll write up the work I'm doing here, which will mostly consist of pie-in-the-sky ideas and prototypes of alternate computation models.
My month of honesty finished at the end of Februrary, though this writeup is coming substantially later. Partly that's for reasons that will become clear in the next Conventional Wisdom, and partly because I had a lot going on. Mostly, though, it was just because honesty was surprisingly draining.
I wrote a little about why honesty is difficult in Small bravery. The habit of not saying things when you don't need to is deeply embedded and difficult to shift. What I found is that it required a constant level of attention in order to avoid inadvertent self-censorship, and while that didn't involve enormous effort, it did just make everything else a bit more difficult. If I had some problem, now I was figuring it out and talking about it. If I was feeling down, I was dealing with that and talking about it. It added a kind of parasitic load to everything else.
That's not to say it wasn't worth it though. In fact, compared to early to rise I feel like the cost/benefit was quite substantial. I wrote in Archivism about the idea of just putting out information without regard for whether it's useful. Or, more accurately, without presuming to know what other people will find useful. I think there's a powerful core to that idea, in not worrying so much about your "audience" or what reactions people might have to what you say, but just following your own sense of right and if people don't like you for it, well, you probably don't like them either.
Another thing was extending honesty into my personal life, which was more daunting but actually not so bad. It helps that most of the people in my life already hold honesty as an important value, and are also fairly familiar with me and what I think, so it wasn't like a surprise turnaround. Business stuff was a bit trickier, but I actually found that honesty helped more than it hurt. Although I theoretically put myself in a more vulnerable position in a few conversations, the actual result was that the other person better understood what I wanted and we both did better as a result. The mythical win-win seems to require honesty, though I expect the win-lose does as well.
The last thing I wanted to do was write more personally on this site, which I wouldn't say I really succeeded at. In fact, I just generally wrote less. I think that's mainly because of the parasitic load problem I mentioned earlier; writing consistently is already hard, and writing consistently with more honesty was more difficult than I was ready for. I would also have liked to get to a point where I felt comfortable writing about more controversial topics. I think that I was too distracted with surface-level honesty to really get to a point where I was saying things where the honesty actually made me uncomfortable. Probably that just would have taken more time.
And that, ultimately, is my conclusion for honesty is the best policy. It definitely made a difference, and actually has been the most substantial and liberating change I've made so far, but it was hard to make serious progress on in a month. Devoting yourself to openness and truth is a process, perhaps a lifetime worth, of unlearning the internalised judgement of others. But this month gave me a taste, and the taste was good.