“Talent. The talent of some men appears slighter than it is because they have always set themselves tasks that are too great.” — Friedrich Nietzsche – Human, All Too Human, Section Nine: Man Alone with Himself – Aphorism # 538
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a conversation with a younger friend; his words are in bold
I sort of feel that the work I do is solely rate limited by my ability to control myself from getting sucked into the algorithm. You know how some people have no impulse control with money and spend every cent they have? That’s me with twitter/insta/yt and time. Like for weeks I’ve been thinking that I should write something or read something in my ample free time at [redacted]. And yet I end up seeing reels or shorts for hours. As much as I want to cope that I don’t have time. I do. It’s just paying a 100% algorithm tax
My belief is: with all copes, including this one, the problem is something upstream of the cope. Time is rarely ever the real bottleneck for anything since people make time for things that are really important/compelling etc
Yea. idk how to fix it. I mean I know. Its trivial to download a blocking app and ive done it…
Me: that’s not the problem
… yea
The problem is that you don’t have actual internal consensus on this. if you’re serious about it you have to reframe the narrative and the project-manage such that reading or writing is more compelling than the other stuff. and it might actually quite simply be that random scrolling is fine actually lol. the optimal amount of random scrolling is not 0. I would work backwards from the writing you do already do, and ask how to do more of that
Hmm. i just usually stare at what i write for a long time. and try to think through it till it feels right
this is process thinking which is a layer out from where the core is. The core is, why do you care?
Trying to escape it is part of what keeps you stuck, the way is to kinda disregard it, and just focus on what you want to see more of. “dis-traction” implies going off-track and the way to get on track is not to go off-off-track but to get on-track. ie, get into much more detail about what you’re curious about, soften the ground around that. when you solve the actual issue this won’t be necessary. Twitter block continues to frame twitter as some sort of bad/naughty thing, guilty pleasure or indulgence or whatev. when your conscious mind gets tired of being a taskmaster your subconscious rebels will find ways to subvert and indulge
true. but the issue is like. i lose control when im on it
I would seek a higher res picture of this story. what does lose control mean. describe it in as much detail. let yourself do whatever feels natural but take notes as you go
some part of it is just me enjoying the drip drip of dopamine boost
everytime i see a tweet thats funny, a research paper summary etc. and everytime i get more of that. i cannot stop. i just want one more. and one more. plus for insta its music covers which i am addicted to. same thing
the framing is overwrought here like. I don’t see why any of these things are bad
yes none of them are bad in moderation. but there’s no break that stops me after 10 minutes. and if there is i usually supress it
how’d you settle on 10 minutes as a limit
its not a limit just a number i made up now. but there has to be some limit
I actually think it’s possible to not use one. You gotta zoom out and see the big picture
the starting point is to make a list of all of your goals and interests and desires. Which can include say 4 hrs of enjoying nonsense scrolling a day. try starting from that and imagine making the rest of your life work around it
its just that my stated goals dont include scroll 4 hours a day. after i see it i dont like it. im like wow i wasted an hour in it and it wasnt even fun. like it was fun in the moment. but not in hindisight
the thing I’m trying to get you to see/do is give the scroller a seat at the negotiating table. like now you’re not in the scrolling mood so you can dismiss him. but that’s a losing move
oh. hmmm yeah. my fear is that the scroller is a power hungry mf. who takes everything he can get by force
he’s only that way bc you’re so dismissive. rebel/tyranny arms race. In Easyway to quit smoking, one of Alan carrs effective moves is to insist that smokers keep smoking throughout the book. this is how you actually dismantle the trap. because the internal tension between “I wanna smoke” and “smoking is bad” creates guilt and shame and anger which leads to more smoking. so you start by basically “legalizing” the behavior. Harm reduction principle. once the authority say ok smoking is fine keep smoking and smoke more actually. that allows for the dismantling of the guilt/shame/anger complex. And that reduces the powerhungriness of the scroll cartel
so lets say i give it a seat at the table. and then it becomes legalised. Then what.
you’ll witness yourself scroll different. Watch it for a month see for yourself
alright im gonna try
a lot of the fun is actually from the fact that it’s illegal/naughty
another part of it is just its a placeholder for things to come. like im waiting for my boss to tell me some work but he’s on a call. so i get on twitter
and then he takes longer than expected or lets me go off
and it continues
none of that should matter if you’re meeting your goals
yeah. but im not so
that’s the real problem
after it happens i feel like i should have used the placeholder time. to do the productive stuff instead
if you 2x’d the thing that matters the most to you, you wouldn’t mind scrolling 8 hours a day even if you could somehow do both. thinking about things in terms of time management and distractions etc etc is a kind of slave morality mindset thing. like it’s meant to please some sort of internal taskmaster authority figure rather than make any substantial difference
What’s the alternative?
work backwards from the biggest wins you can get
you don’t win big from being the goodest good boy you can be. ie by minimizing negative variance. rather you win big by maximizing positive variance
what does that mean in practice. because like when i want to maximise positive variance i usually end up on twitter. which by itself is not a bad idea. but you know the cycle repeats.
it’s different for each person but in your case I’d suggest writing the best thing you’ve ever written. my thesis is that it’s taskmaster bullshit keeping you in this cycle, which is tedious and annoying but safe
it is definitely taskmaster bs keeping me in it. because at some point i got annoyed that i didn’t get anything done. so downloaded todoist. and it worked fine. until i got to a small project which didn’t fit well on a todo list. and then it all went berserk from the todo list’s POV. because the missed tasks piled on as i was doing my small side project
what was the project lol
i got very annoyed with that [redacted] post i was ranting about
and i have like a 4k word rebuttal of it. showing how wrong it is in many ways
but i also didnt want it to be an entirely negative post
so i made a framework of sorts i can use for future essays
which all took time to think through and write
hahaha. all of this is fine lol, you’re just young, you’re supposed to do all this stuff tbh
yeah idm
but ALSO i had planned to restart doing math
which went out of the window this week
which is probably higher priority if i was forced to put a gun to my head
more bleak taskmaster shit lol guns
dominance hierarchy
i mean
even if i don’t want to have a priority list
there is one
Yeah I’m not saying don’t prioritize, I’m just noticing the language you use
I’ve helped people become both happier and more productive by literally telling them “put the gun down”
yes the gun metaphor is definitely a bad one
should stop using it
don’t worry too much about it tho lol that’s a recursive finger trap thing too
always we come back to: focus on what you want
not what you don’t want, what you should stop doing, etc
[next day]
This is incredibly freeing ty
I can repeat it every day but people still don’t really get it lol
Bc the programming goes so deep ig
I don’t know how to set my goals tho. Like I had this very bad experience a few months ago when I was like
“I’m going to go through this textbook in 3 months”!
And turns out as I should have guessed, for a first time reader 3 months is very little time
Slowly working to make better ones but I suspect part of the problem is that I’m awful at planning
Not now like from school also
well right away the question is “what does ‘go through’ mean”
Yeah I didn’t have enough detail on that
You need to read through it in lots of detail
But I hadn’t done that ever because it was my first time reading a book myself without lectures
my rec would be to spend a day scanning it to then get a better estimate of what you think you might actually get out of it and how long that would take
I wouldn’t say I knew how to make plans until I was like.. 25, 27 ish. You’re doing fine lol