writing on commutes to preserve creative spirit — minor success, patreon, ramen profitable — it’s a kind of purgatory —grand goal remains ultimate creative freedom — even partial creative freedom seems to reduce ‘hunger’ —
4. sparring with the ego — how do you remain cheerful and upbeat when confronting a repeated pattern of failure? “Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain!” “I’m not trapped in here with you…” What assumptions about failure have we inherited? What if we decided it was fine, actually?
When I used to have a job (2013–2018), I would write feverishly on my daily commutes, to try and keep at least some of my creative spirit alive. It was a daily act of desperation in my phone’s notes app. I was determined to stave off my most dreaded fate: becoming someone who gave up on his writing, because he was too busy, too tired, had too many worries and responsibilities and so on. I wrote hundreds of thousands of words this way. Not many of them were good. Most of them were janky, transitional clunkers. Here I’m tempted to say “I made my peace with that,” but that’s not entirely true. It seems more accurate to say that I was simply in such a rush that I didn’t have time to make my peace with it. I was so afraid of ending up doing nothing, that I was willing to tolerate doing poorly. Now I’m tempted to joke “I was fighting for my life in there!” – which is obviously an exaggeration, and yet there’s an emotional truth to it. I wasn’t fighting for the physical survival of my meat body, but for the survival of my psyche. I was fighting for the life I wanted for myself.
Then came some measure of minor success, which changed the game. It wasn’t exactly “cover of a magazine” type success, but rather “I’m doing it… I’m actually doing it!” success. I left my job and wrote prolifically on all fronts. My Twitter started picking up thousands of followers. I started a Patreon which got support from about a hundred people. I did a bit of consulting work. I visited internet friends halfway across the planet, and I put together a book that was bought and well-received by a couple of thousand people. I no longer needed to have a full-time job. I was now free to write whatever I wanted. To borrow some startup lingo, I’d call this a state of being “ramen profitable” – meaning that as long as I keep my living expenses low, I can stay in the game. That’s where I’ve been now, from 2019 to 2024 (present day).
Ramen profitability is a kind of purgatory. For a creative, it’s a much better place to be in than in The Bad Place (creative death and/or financial ruin), but it’s not somewhere anybody would wanna be indefinitely either. Over the past 4-5 years, being ramen-profitable has meant having some measure of creative freedom. I haven’t had to do any work that I didn’t want to do. When I do consulting work, I get to pick and choose the clients that I want. When I sell my books, I don’t have to be pushy with the marketing– I get to do it in the artfully improvisational, patient and playful way that I prefer to do it. If I don’t want to do any work for a month, I can do that quite comfortably. Actually, I feel like I’ve hardly done any work since my son was born 9 months ago. And… I suppose that’s about my limit, it’s the point at which I start to get antsy.
I don’t want to feel like I’ve gone more than a year without having done anything ‘of substance’. A part of me will say, “Well we ARE doing work, it’s just not visible yet,” but another part of me will say “Well, why not? Why aren’t we making any of that work visible? We’re costing ourselves opportunities with our reticence.” There are many arguments like this going on in my head at almost any given moment. On one hand, such extensive argumentation is tedious, but on the other hand, it’s also been really lucrative. See, another argument! It never ends. I feel every imaginable way about it. But currently the main feeling I have is, I would like to witness myself making some real progress on my writing. That would feel really good for me.
I haven’t yet properly gotten to answering the question how the game changed for me. While I still have my eye on the grand prize of “ultimate creative freedom” (which does increasingly feel like a platonic ideal that can be approached incrementally but never truly reached), the truth is that even partial access to relative creative freedom seems to have made me… less ‘hungry’, in a sense. I don’t really ‘write like my life depends on it’ any more. And here too I’m conflicted, because… in those years, for example, I didn’t spend much time with my wife, or even my friends, and I regret that. I was sacrificing a lot of my ‘actual life’ to fight to preserve my shot at the life-I-wanted. It’s complicated. I took a calculated risk that my obsessive focus then would buy us more time and freedom later, and that did pay off. Now we have a son, and it’s so important to me that I’m present for his childhood. I definitely don’t want to be sacrificing my family life for my writing, that’s a hard red line for me.
That said, the situation isn’t binary. It’s not like I can only choose one or the other. I’m reflecting on how, in 2015, I would have my day job, and I’d write feverishly for maybe 2 hours a day. I no longer have a day job, and I don’t write feverishly at all. I just sorta take a bunch of notes, sketch out some drafts, but there’s no productive urgency to any of it. Sometimes I have unproductive urgency, which doesn’t help at all. When I step back to look at the bigger picture of my patterns of behavior, it can be quite funny. I clearly have some inefficiencies in my process, and I feel like it’s about time I address them. (We’ll return to this.)
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Intellectually I think I’ve always “known what to do”. The challenge is that emotionally I seldom feel like doing it. Which is funny, because I did write an entire book about how to deal with that class of challenge. A lot of it boils down to respecting the emotional truth of the situation, and really listening to that. However, just because I’ve solved several puzzles before– and have written about what I’ve learned solving those puzzles, and have received feedback from others about how my writing has helped them with their puzzles– none of that is any guarantee that I’m going to be able to solve the next puzzle easily. All of that experience simply makes me better able to withstand the process of puzzling. Y’know, it’s not like all doctors are perfectly healthy or like skilled marriage counsellors never have any difficulties in their own marriages. Having problem-solving skills doesn’t mean you have a problem-free life. It just means that you can address those problems better. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you will. In fact, hubris can really fuck you up here, if you think, “Oh, I know how to solve these problems, so it’s not a big deal if I accumulate a bunch of them.” Problems can compound and spiral. But if you manage to stave off that hubris, I do think it’s probably fair to say that you’re less likely to have debilitating problems, because problems now look like solvable puzzles rather than unsurmountable afflictions. I’ve always had some amount of self-doubt, which I think is healthy, but I’m also grateful to note that it’s been many years since that doubt was so totalizing as to reduce me into a helpless, godforsaken wretch. I’d like to believe that I have a handle on it now. It still beats my ass, but now I see it as a friendly (though annoying) sparring partner rather than a demon eating away at my soul.
I’ve often burdened myself with this unrealistic expectation that I’m supposed to make myself perfect before I can do anything. From time to time I realize this is happening, and once I can’t ignore it any longer, I make the effort to work through it. I’ve found it to be quite like stretching out stiff muscles– in both cases, there is an immediate relief, and some lasting benefit, but then eventually it returns again, constraining my movements and my happiness. And I have to remind myself again that the reoccurrence is not necessarily a major personal failure on my part, it’s simply the reality of being human. Is it conceivable that I might be able to someday identify something upstream that, when addressed, permanently resolves the issue? Maybe. In the case of tight muscles, for example, a lot of it boils down to being generally sedentary. If I weren’t sitting around so much, I wouldn’t have to stretch. So maybe the interesting question to ask is, what is the unrealistic expectation a consequence of? Where do unrealistic expectations come from? The first answers that come to mind are “school”, “society”, “culture”, “family”, but all of them seem feeble at the moment. They’re not real explanations. Maybe the better question is, “what purpose do unrealistic expectations serve?” And ah, I feel something here… they serve to protect me. All of Kenny Werner’s riffs about how the ego gets in the way of a musician’s performance are relevant here.
I’ll try to restate it in my own words, my own interpretation… basically it seems like the ‘ego’, or the mind, or the self-preservation complex– it’s name isn’t really important, so let’s just go with ego- constructs elaborate mental architectures to protect us from having to face uncomfortable or unpleasant feelings. The straightforward read here– which I feel a personal flinching from, which probably means it’s likely true– is that my unrealistic expectations of “first I need to be perfect before I can write about <topics>” are meant to protect me from the unpleasantness of having to deal with people’s interpretations of my imperfect work. And here I feel this rush of familiarity– I had this exact problem when working on Introspect! And I struggled with it and fought it and it beat my ass into submission and I had to get up and fight it again, and I lost that battle many, many times before I eventually was able to go through with it.
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There are a couple of loose ends from earlier that I want to return to. (1) is the inefficiency in my process, which I will save for a separate post. (2) is “intellectually, I’ve always ‘known what to do’”. Those quote-marks are important because… I think I know what to do, but… if I don’t have an internal consensus that it is indeed the right thing to do, and as such am unable to do it… then, from a bigger-picture perspective, IS it really the right thing to do? We arrive at a somewhat philosophical question about the nature of knowledge. How do I know that I’m right when I say “I know what’s the right thing to do”? What if I’m wrong?
Part of this feels like a matter of… the decent plan executed now is infinitely superior to the perfect plan that never gets executed. A bird in the hand is worth many in the bush. This is actually related to the problem of unrealistic expectations. Not only do I have unrealistic expectations of who must I become in order to do things, I also seem to be attached to the idea of a perfect-but-unfeasible route to get to where I want to go.
Thinking this through explicitly and seeing it in writing is… quite something. Humbling, maybe. Kinda funny, kinda sad, then kinda funny again. I have a blogpost from years ago where I quoted Ray Dalio: “I learned that failure is by and large due to not accepting and successfully dealing with the realities of life, and that achieving success is simply a matter of accepting and successfully dealing with all my realities.” In that post I wrote about the silly pattern I was stuck in as a schoolboy, where I’d promise myself that I would do my schoolwork later, but then never do it, and then never quite seem able to properly acknowledge the reality of that pattern, let alone deal with it.
In a way, really, what I’m going through now isn’t all that different from my schoolboy pattern. Which… I find kind of exciting, actually. And THAT’s where something is different, for a change. I used to quickly get depressed when I encountered repeated patterns of failure. But now I seem to have accumulated enough wins, enough kinship, enough self-trust and self-belief, that the idea of facing a powerful old enemy no longer intimidates me into despair. I feel more like Dr. Strange going, “Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain!”
I spent a long time being quite upset about the idea that I had failed myself as a kid, and a part of me wished that I would have a chance to do it over. Well, here’s a chance. I’m once again faced with a pattern of behavior. And this time I’m stronger, wiser, braver, more discerning. I think I can accomplish something here that I haven’t been able to so far. Not immediately; it’s going to take some work. But this is starting to feel like a weight that needs lifting that’s maybe 10% heavier than my current max lift. It’s within reach.