simplistic but feels right: good repetition is mindful, bad repetition is mindless
meta: mindless repetition isn’t all that bad either… as long as you don’t overdo it for too long. you can have a little mindlessness as a treat. it’s ok to eat junk sometimes. you don’t have to be this perfect thing all the time.
GKC quote
I feel tired repeating myself, but why? Why can’t I enjoy repeating myself? I feel trapped by the repetition somehow. I’m not paying attention to the nuances. I’m not letting myself be surprised. I’m oppressing myself with this false sense of certainty about how things are going to be. Maybe I should write a substack post about repetition. Repetition legitimises. When you see something, and then you see it again, you realise it wasn’t an accident. It’s a sign that something was deliberate. Is that always true, though? Nowadays we have computer tools that can replicate things effortlessly, so repetition can be an accident.
Lead with feelings. My writing feels stale because there’s no emotion in it. I’m going through the motions of repeating my talking points verbatim. To make it interesting I’ll have to get a little more experimental. I’d have to change the pacing, the grammar, the vocabulary.
Bo Burnham has a song called Repeat Stuff (2013) “I love the fact that you are dumb enough to not realise everything I’ve said has been said before, in a thousand ways, in a thousand songs, some with the same four chords”
Beautiful repetitions, rotate slightly, create beauty… some of the oldest art that marks itself as human is just the repetition of simple geometric patterns. what makes it look childish vs beautiful and refined? hmm childishness is an interesting dimension here… thinking about cirque performers who are professional children
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0057 – Stop feeding the trolls (2013) – Heh I just had a funny recursive thought about how I’m repeating myself and I’m sorry for repeating myself and how even that apology is repetitive… I make no apologies for that though. Children learn through repetition, all learning involves repetition and if repeating this plays a role in reshaping my brain then I will do it!
0059 – waking early (2013) I’m not saying anything new here, and again there’s a constant need for repetition. It’s the mental equivalent of practicing a musical passage over and over again until you get it right, until you feel it in your bones and you internalize it and you don’t need to be conscious of it. I built a fitness routine (momentarily disrupted because of my Remedial Training, but I love it and I’m getting right back into it once my RT ends) where I do a little workout when I wake up, and when I get home from work- I tie it to my showers, and it’s something I had to do without having to make the decision over and over again. Decide once, decide deliberately, then trust yourself and execute.
0072 – don’t break the chain (2013) I’m repeating myself a lot in these few posts, but I think that’s a reasonable price to pay. Repetition is reinforcement, and it forces me to refine my phrasing. I get better at talking about it each time I talk about it, I get more precise and clear. And I’m writing this for me, so fuck it, man! I still can’t shake off the “I’m writing for public consumption” mentality, but I’m trying. I really want to get to a state where I’m really writing for me, with minimal self-censorship. I know there’ll always be some of it, but I think it’s really important that I try.
0075 – sleepy and unfocused (2013) I repeat myself a lot and it’s frustrating that repetition is so necessary. Latest thoughts are the importance of repetition and constant refinement, constant pruning, constant revisiting. I’ve reduced significant amounts of background noise from my life by keeping my email inboxes empty (work and personal.) I still have a shitload of nonsense to declutter from my home PC and from my bookmarks at work, my google drive and evernote.
0208 – earn your keep (2015) – So where do we go from here? I feel like I’ve definitely written about this before, but I’m just going to write it again. It seems like there’s a certain amount of repetition necessary for these things to really get internalized. I need to start by prioritizing my sleep, because I work better and think more clearly and experience less fog when I have slept well. That means getting in bed before midnight, preferably before 11. I’m changing my way of thinking about it- it’s not just something that happens at the end of everything- it’s a priority, because it’s fundamentally restorative. My mind without sleep is ugly and useless.
0209 – repeatedly revisit what you know (2015) — What matters is that I know now that daily practice is the only thing that has a decent shot at getting me away from the person I no longer want to be, towards the person that I want to become. I may have said this before, which is good- because repetition is necessary for learning. I will repeat it a thousand times if it’s necessary. My brain’s a little odd that way. I may have to learn other things along the way- so be it, I’ll figure out those things as I go.
0232 – use stories as a thinking tool (2015) Robert also talked about dialogue, and how bad dialogue is often repetitive because people can’t figure out the best way to say the thing that they want to say. I realize that I’m incredibly guilty of this. I have been repeating myself over and over again throughout these vomits and throughout my life. Perhaps I’m hoping that if I repeated myself enough, eventually I’ll find a way. And that’s another classic observer-participant problem. The reason that the repetition is supposed to give way to the elegant solution is that I’m supposed to eventually spot some pattern, eventually get annoyed or frustrated in some way, or eventually just accidentally mis-copy what I was going to copy, and in that moment there is some sort of Eureka. I can sort of get that, I can sort of surrender to that process.
Perhaps at the end of the million words, what will be interesting is to then see how much it can be compressed into. It seems like generally things can be compressed into about a tenth of the space, so that means maybe a hundred thousand words. And if then there is still some repetition I might be able to compress it further still.
0364 – tidy up your mental filing cabinets (2015) And to do that I need to pre-empt that I’m going to thinking about picking up smoking again at some point in the future, and I should write myself an easy-to-access letter about it in advance. And I should have a reminder to myself that I have this easy-to-access letter at my fingertips. I think that should work…. So what are the letters? I also need to know how to think about my fitness, how to think about my diet. I shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel over and over again (which is what I have been doing with some of these vomits– the idea being that it’s better to repeat things than to have said them once in the past and then forgotten about them). So I’m in the repetition stage. I’m doing things over and over so the neural patterns become stronger, or something like that. And then when I’m ready, I can pull those papers out and burn the filing cabinets, and then have a nice prim and proper folder that applies in most if not all situations. It will be a huge weight off my mind.
0385 – schedule revisions for learning through repetition (2015) – Yesterday I wrote about how it’s hard to truly have fun when I know I have unfulfilled obligations waiting for me. So the next most important thing I need to work on– and this is stating the obvious, again [2], is how to attack my obligations and break them down into little chunks and get them done one by one. This is extra hard compared to learning a difficult song on the guitar, because my emotions are tied up into it. Ugh fields come into play.
Repetition is important in learning. I was thinking about how, when I was in school, I used to pay attention in lectures just long enough for me to nod my head and go “Yeah, that makes sense, I get it,” and then drift off. The problem is, later on when I got the homework, it wouldn’t make sense any more. And I’d think, “Well, it made sense to me at some point, so it should make sense to me again, I just need to do the reading real quick– so we’ll do that later.” And what would happen is, the amount of necessary readings would accumulate, and I would keep writing them off thinking it’ll just take a few minutes. And the minutes would snowball into hours, into days, into massive unmanageable chunks.
0421 – beware false victory, and validation (2015) – Anyway. I just need to keep focusing on shipping vomits every day. They won’t be perfect. That’s fine, that’s a part of the process. I’m repeating a bunch of truisms but it feels like repetition is necessary.
0429 – dissatisfaction with wordvomits; how to fix? (2015) Ugh, this all really just feels like I’m running the same old ground over and over again, to be honest. Do I really need to write another vomit about this? Wasn’t there a meta-point I was trying to make about how I get caught up writing about starting conditions? Here I’m writing about the basic steps I need to take, the prescriptive stuff. I already know these things, so why am I writing about them again? Because I need a reminder? Fair enough, I guess, but there’s something inelegant and repetitive about this process. I’ve written before that if repetition is what is necessary, then that’s what I’ll do, but I’m starting to think that the repetition isn’t enough. I can’t just keep walking the same old ground.
0669 – consider the nature of deliberate practice (2017) I need to reflect and review more every day. This is something I’ve been repeating to myself. But it’s true, so I need to keep repeating it. (The next line that was lined up in my head was “until it sinks into my thick skull”, which is needlessly aggressive and obnoxious. I think there’s some amount of plain hard repetition required to make something happen. And yeah maybe it’s just blunt brute force over and over again, the big schlep. Or is there something else that I’m missing? A smarter way of doing things?
0689 – do reviews to measure your progress against the ceaseless sands of time (2017) I’ve been thinking about the passage of time. I’m sure I could google “visakanv ‘passage of time’” and find quite a large set of writing. I’m tempted to do it now, but let’s pause that to finish the rest of this vomit. What do I mean by passage of time? I mean, time passes all the… time… and I don’t really feel it. A couple of vomits ago I talked about “endlessness”. Another way of framing it is repetitive mundanity. Repetition by itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I don’t mind the repetition of writing again and again, day after day. It soothes me, nourishes me, helps me calm down, get into my bones. But I hate the mindless repetition of a daily commute. Commutes just suck, period. I’m sure lots has been written about it already, so there’s no need to reinvent the wheel there. The point is that there’s good repetition and bad repetition, and since so much of life is repetitive, it makes a lot of sense to try and get more of the good and diminish the bad.
0692 – dream bigger, recalibrate your life and walk into the dark (2017) — I suppose a part of my frustration has to do with the technical debt I’ve incurred over the years. By not being better at tagging and sorting things, I’ve gotten to a state where – if I’m writing on a fresh sheet of paper (digital or otherwise), I’m going to end up repeating myself again. I’ve repeated myself before. And while I’ve said that I’m okay with repeating myself as much as necessary, this doesn’t feel like “necessary” repetition. This feels like pushing against a pull door because I haven’t figured out how to pull it. This is searching under streetlights because that’s where the light is, not because that’s where I dropped my keys. I need to look for my keys. To do that, I have to be willing to leave the comfort of the light and walk into the dark.
0715 – experiment with using volume over intensity (2018) So now I’m thinking about these word vomits, and the story I have in my head about what I’m doing here. I know why I set out to write a million words – I did that because I believed that I would be a better writer at the end of it. (I’m feeling some deja vu here, I’ve definitely written about this before – and this feeling has definitely prevented me from writing before, and I’ve definitely also written about how I should deal with that feeling by deciding to repeat myself if I have to, because that repetition will be valuable information for me down the road when I’m reviewing this whole thing).