The 'show up' heuristic

Sometimes, showing up is enough. More than enough -- it's all you really need to do.

I've been pushing myself back into regular exercise lately -- something which is vitally important for me and which is usually one of the first casualties of fatigue, busyness, and all their sorry ilk. What this really means is forming new (old) habits -- finding ways to make these activities just *happen*, without each individual instance of them being a fresh negotiation you have to conduct with yourself.

(It's not just a question of motivation -- though there is that. I do get injured easily, and I have struggled with fatigue, a lot, over the past couple of years. Beyond the obvious of 'just feeling tired', it really messes with my brain. Getting overwhelmed, overstimulated, or overexhausted tend to entirely mess up my ability to rest, and send my body into stress overload. Which is a very unpleasant feedback loop that it can be a lot of effort to escape from. So, on days where I'm 'off nominal', the question of whether or not I should push myself is very real. Usually, the answer is 'yes'. But only usually.)

I like pushing myself, I like making progress. But the thing above all is recognising when you can just 'show up' -- defining what it means to do the thing without necessarily pushing yourself past your limits for that day, but also without copping out.

As well as motivation, and the bigger questions I mentioned, this also helps me get my shortcut around *faff* which disproportionately disincentivises me from doing something. If I'm reluctant to go for a run, or to the gym, half the reason -- more than half! -- is usually the thought of having to get changed and get out the door. That sometimes seems like an arbitrarily massive barrier to get over, and not only do you have to do that, you *then* have to actually do the entire thing!

So on those days, I move the goalposts. I ask myself 'can I just show up?' and define what that looks like. For running, showing up might just mean 'putting on my kit, getting out the door, and getting moving'. If I do that, I've shown up. If I then want to bail, immediately, for any reason, that's fine. I've made a good enough effort at the thing for today.

(This is not every time, either -- and those other times I still get to push myself.)

A more concise way to express this, I realise now (as I so often do with these posts) is: it's easy to accidentally make mental shortcuts about what you're doing. 'Going for a run' for me had become, mentally, 'go out and run three miles'. But for me, personally, and my goals, that's not *actually* what I care about on any given day. It's 'get out running a few times a week'. This 'show up' heuristic helps drag me back to that -- what I'm *really* trying to do. What I really care about doing.

The power of this, really, is in repetition. If I can build that habit (system), and do it regularly, the amount of progress I make each time matters less -- that incremental, steady progress is going to take me places. (This is how I approach many things that I care about progressing in.) By showing up and doing it, even 'badly' (relative to my ideal output), I maintain that cadence. (And, as ever, when you zoom out over the right timescale, the 'good' and 'bad' days are hard to delineate.)

And through repetition, you lower the perceived energy cost of doing the thing. You smooth off the edges. Your gear is ready at hand, familiar. You've learned to glide past the foibles and frictions. Your 'bad' day now is 100x better than the 'good' days of your past.

And onwards.

Interruption!

Interesting piece on Atoms vs Bits about conversational norms -- interrupters vs non-interrupters.

Interrupters And Non-Interrupters

• Interrupters have a norm where you keep talking until someone interrupts you, it's not rude to interrupt someone, and you shouldn't mind if someone interrupts you. (Apparently linguists call this "high-involvement cooperative overlapping").
• Non-interrupters have a norm where you don't start speaking until someone else has stopped, or invited you in.

I relate to this, in terms of recognising the dynamic and understanding it as one of those things that affects how much I'm involved in any particular social interaction.

The piece gets into more detail, and is worth reading, but it's not a moral equation or an argument for one norm being superior to the other. But it does make the case that one norm, unchecked, ends up being dominant.

It reminds me also of something I heard about on the Hidden Brains podcast a few years ago, researching different norms around conversational dead-air more generally, and what that determined for people's own norms around when it was appropriate to jump in.

It's this one: Mind Reading 2.0: Why Conversations Go Wrong which, looking back, covers a lot of other relevant ground here, too.

I may have the details wrong, but, for instance, they contrasted an average New Yorker -- with very short dead-air tolerance, to the extent that they're almost collaborative cross-talking -- with folks from different states/cities, where there was much more of a tendency to leave a longer gap between utterances or topics before picking up the conversation. That, too, had a dominant aspect to the dynamic. Not in a socially dominant sense -- just that one of those things will tend to win out by its own nature.

This refers me back to an old post, What are we really talking about, in that it's another one of those communication dynamics that are, I think, fairly obvious when someone gives us the vocabulary to grapple with it. And what makes a good communicator is not having one particular norm over another, but the ability to identify such norms and navigate them skilfully. As with other such things, there's the surface layer, and then there's all the stuff going on underneath.

I suspect there's an element of interiority modelling, as well, that underpins a lot of this -- being continuously aware of [what you think might be] the inner state of your social partners and folding that into what you're saying or doing.

Intentions and Goals 2023

I don't do new year's resolutions, as such. I do find the turning of the year to be a really useful break point, a chance to burn away the old -- which I think is more of an act of self-forgiveness and wiping away the debt of aspirations to which you didn't quite measure than anything else -- and to look forward gainfully to the year ahead.

'Resolutions' to me, though, conjures an image of a particular formulation -- some categorical incitement or prohibition to cover the entire year ahead. 'I will eat less meat.' 'I will look after myself better.' 'I'll finally learn about architecture.' Or something.

Others have various ways of improving on this -- the old SMART goals and so forth. Which I do find useful, and have used -- more or less -- in the past. A few years ago, I set myself specific targets like this. Sell a short story, make 50 fiction submissions, etc. This was useful at the time, but it has its own issues.

Last year, I broadened it a little, trying to establish 'goals' which were really articulations of the sources of fulfilment I have -- and want -- in my life. This was actually very powerful and useful generally in understanding what I value, but absolutely no good as functional goals. They were -- and remain, I suppose -- good standards to measure things against, but not something that I could easily move towards.

This year, I'm taking an approach somewhere in the middle. I wanted to avoid:

• Setting goals that I could 'fail out of', either in practice, or just de facto when I realised it was no longer possible in the time remaining. This is demoralising and undermining.
• Setting goals that weren't realistic to accomplish in a year. Yes, not all goals can fit into such a short timespan as a year, but I want, in this case, things that do (even if they are set in reference to longer-term ambitions).

What I've ended up doing is setting intentions for the year, and then translating these into smaller, achievable goals, that are more clearly defined. Crucially, I'm not going to set out a raft of these goals ahead of time -- just the few that are relevant to where I am right now and towards which I can move. When I reach them, I evaluate what's next. If I can't reach them, I have the chance to rethink with it only being a minor setback.

So, rather than a highly specific and longitudinal 'get my bench lift back to 100kg' or a vague 'do more exercise', I've set the intention to 'prioritise my physical and mental wellbeing'. That, in preference to any specific measurement of it, is what I really want -- exercise will just be an important part of it. What that looks like in practice is going to vary throughout the year, depending on external factors, and at how successful I am at moving towards it.

So my first goal for that was simple: do a session of exercise that raises my heart rate. That's it. Doesn't matter what. It's achievable and immediate, and represents an advance from where I was before (not exercising). And I've done it! So now I've looked at what's next, and starting snowballing forward into specific numbers and targets that suit where I'm at right now while also pushing me to make changes to accommodate them.

I've set aside a certain amount of time each week to move towards these intentions and goals. I've only established a small number of them, because I think there's only room for so much, but, on paper, I'm happy with this approach.

Replacing weekend magazines

I used to 'make' myself a magazine of articles each week to catch up with over the weekend. I may have written about this somewhere before, either here or on Twitter (ah, here it is!, but I collect articles as I come across them, using Pocket. Most of the articles I find come via email newsletters that do their own curation, or via serendipity -- spotting things around the web, passed on by friends, etc.

Once upon a time, I read this as they came in, whenever I felt like it. I find that doesn't tend to happen any more. So I used P2K (Pocket to Kindle) to grab a random selection each week and send them over to my Kindle, which I'd then read on the weekend.

That workflow broke a couple of months back -- I think Kindle made some change to how they handle files, and for too many weeks I was getting failure emails from P2K, so I turned it off. Which meant my Pocket list turned into a tangled mess.

What I've adopted right now is more manual, but waorks out about the same. When I have the opportunity or inclination to read some articles (still usually at weekends), I'll try to winnow the list down to approximately the 20% of them that seem most interesting to me. Then I'll read those.

This Pareto approaches works in so many contexts. It's rarely perfect, but it's such a good, simple heuristic that, when applied, gets you to think about what's really important. In the case of articles, it sharpens for me why I actually want to read a particular thing, which is an important question to ask.

The Idea of a Book

So, books. I think I noted down this shard idea in response to seeing someone sharing that Sam Bankman-Fried quote:

“I would never read a book ... I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”

Which... well, maybe the guy should have read a book or two.

But it got me thinking about the idea of a book. What is a book? There's the obvious, physical artefact -- a set of leaved pages, bound within a cover. (Phrasing something in that way tickles my brain back to a slightly different time on Twitter, where 'a horse is a chair'.) But obviously with ebooks, audiobooks and the like, that doesn't actually describe the concept usefully (though it hasn't stopped people from yammering endlessly about whether 'you are really reading if you listen to an audiobook').

Then there are the more technical definitions to define, say, a novel vs a novella vs a novelette vs a short story vs flash fiction. Which has utility mostly in a publishing and marketing context, although limited beyond that.

For me, a book is ultimately an arbitrary boundary, but it's about lingering with something. A story or an idea. Giving it the space it (hopefully) deserves.

This is particularly stark for me when comparing, say, a non-fiction monograph to a six-paragraph blog post. Yes, on various occasions I have read books where I have understood the fundamental thrust very quickly, inside of a chapter or two. But almost always, there's been a specific benefit to the space -- examples, reiteration, coming at the thing from different angles, complicating the thesis. If nothing else it sure as hell aids comprehension and retention.

A six-paragraph blog post might, might be able to contain the same essential information. But that does not have the same valence as a book on the subject. (If nothing else, if you're reading a book on a subject, you know that the author has had to spend all that time and attention on the idea. That doesn't mean it will be good or worthwhile, but at least someone else has had to do this to a passable standard.)

I think this goes back to something I talked about the other day, in Birdfall:

Musk a) believes he is smarter than everyone else and b) holds a very simplistic (and additionally wrong) view of the world. Having all that money and power has kept him in so much of a bubble that this has never really been challenged.

So that means, when he looks at a problem in a sphere about which he knows nothing and comes up with a simplistic solution, he believes that the only reason that no one else has done that already is down to a failure of their intelligence. NOT, as is the truth, down to a failure of his intelligence and the fact that the domain he's gazing at is more complicated, and actually other people _do_ understand it a lot better than him.

The Elons Musks of the world and their warped, simplistic worldviews. If you think the world is, ultimately, rather simple, and that you are among the smartest people in it, of course you think you can understand something in depth from a six-paragraph blog post. And of course that makes you a complete and utter blockhead.

See also: It's Complicated The Box and Ox

Cognitive Cyborgs

LEUCHTTURM1917, purveyor of fine notebooks, has the motto 'Denken mit der Hand' -- 'thinking with the hand'. This is very much how I think. There's only so much I can accomplish in my head before it becomes recursive and looping or just overly linear, and my mental buffer fills up quickly. There's a marked difference when I can sit down with a piece of paper and a pen and thrash things out on paper. It feels sometimes that I can't think clearly -- expansively and productively -- without that.

This is technology. It can feel strange to stick that term to what feel like quite basic things in comparison to the heights of high tech in which we live. But I'm obsessed with it. (And bags. And chairs.) Who would I be if I didn't have access to abundant and disposable writing materials? (Leaving aside for a moment the vast webs of other things that make that meaningful to begin with, like mass literacy or easy access to an abundance of received, asynchronous knowledge.) If an apocalypse were to come, and make paper scarce, how would that change me? My brain?

This is technology, and where technology meets the self. I can say the same for my computer keyboard, the suite of software that I use, the arrangement of things on my desk. I have learned to use and rely on them. I have learned to think with them, and if I am thinking with my brain as well as these things, then what is that except an extension of the boundaries of the self?

This idea gets more attention right now in the context of collaborative AIs or centaur pairings like chess, and it's more manifest with the ways our high technology can interface with the body. It's certainly not a new idea -- a cursory search of 'we are all cyborgs' reveals a wealth of thought and writing (and isn't the very fact that I can reach into the aether for that information with the barest of efforts part of my point?). But I think it has been true for a very long time.

(The taxonomy of when, precisely, that starts seems potentially more confounding. Is there a distinction to be drawn between tool use and being a cybord? Do clothes count? Cooking? Those were, I think, the ur-technologies which made us who we are, and we would more or less die without them. )

Principle of tactu levi

Something I was batting round yesterday was the idea of a razor for making the 'lightest touch' change to a thing in preference to looking for a more developed solution. This has kept cropping up for me in the context of making revisions to work in response to edit notes. Sometimes, a small, almost lazy-feeling change will satisfy the note and resolve the issue, even if there may be more sophisticated or involved approaches that might address the issue somewhat better.

The 'somewhat' is the key factor there. Obviously, if a small change is underbaked or doesn't work, it's a non-starter. But there's the notion of 'good enough', and virtue in not breaking apart a piece of work more than you have to (because you'll have to stitch it back together again afterwards).

I keep wanting to call this 'de minimis', which means something different. Or perhaps 'the principle of least change', which Google seems to conflate with the Principle of Least Action.

Looking into it further, I realise this is really a broad reading of Occam's Razor/the Law of Parsimony. I've internalised that as 'when deciding between a set of competing equally likely probabilities, choose the one that relies on the fewest assumptions', but a more general reading appears to be 'it is futile to do with more what can be done with fewer', which is exactly what I'm describing here.

Perhaps 'tactu levi', as in tactu levi recenset scriptor -- 'the writer revises with a light touch', by analogy with 'de minimis', which is a shortening of de minimis non curat lex -- 'the law does not concern itself with trifling matters'.

(Also my Latin is exceedingly, embarassingly rusty, so it's perfectly possible that I've mangled my own formation here somehow.)

Seasons, Energies, and Phasic Time

I talked about seasonality a bit back in Monochronic time. I never felt particularly attuned to seasons -- time has tended to be a general wash. But the last few years, I've really felt it. Why?

Changing weather conditions. Summers are a lot warmer, beyond the threshold of 'unremarkably tolerable' that they used to be for me. Hotter -- dangerously ever-hotter -- summers throw seasons into sharper relief for me. I long for summer to end, and autumn to arrive.

Birds. The first singing of the chiffchaffs, later the wrens. The arrival (and departure) of the swifts. The change in their behaviour. By our macro seasons, yes, but also by the local 'seasons' or phases of climate and human activity and whatever must pass for the bird calendar.

Self-awareness. I'm a creature of routine and habit. I tend to optimise my time and my space and my routines to let me do all things I want -- or need -- to do. There's an element of smoothness to this time -- both in a positive and negative sense. The smoothness of everything happen as and when it should. And the frictionless horror of something that you can't get purchase on, sliding from one thing to the next. I'm more and more aware, though, the cylical and season nature of my own capacities, interests, and energies. This leads me to reflect more and more on the phasic nature of time, and the benefits of seasonality and variability.

More resets

CN: food, fasting, restrictive eating

I was talking yesterday about Reset buttons -- a few things I didn't quite get onto in the time/space I had.

First, something more in line with what I was talking about. Every three months, I set aside an hour or so to go over the last little while, consider what's actually happened, and reflect on where I'm at. I call it 'quarterly reflection and planning', which sounds inanely corporate, but I'm yet to come up with anything better. And, really, that is what I'm doing.

I go back through my record-keeping systems to remind myself of what's actually happened -- my journal, my calendar, and a few other specific info-keepers. What happens almost invariably is that a) I am surprised that things that happened near the start of the period didn't actually take place much longer ago ('that was only' three months back?!'') and b) things that happened ~3/4 weeks back didn't happen, like, the week before. Every time.

It's a useful exercise, partly just because it aids remembering and recalling what has actually happened, but because it's a good opportunity to check in with yourself and see how you are (aren't) faring. My journal tends to capture lots of very 'soft' information like if I feel it worth mentioning how knackered or overwhelmed I am. Which, when you read back over things at once, can be pretty stark. A useful warning indicator.

I also turn towards the goals I've set myself at the start of the year, and think about how those are going. I mostly don't do 'output' goals any more -- though maybe I'll revisit that next year. They're more practice/process goals that help me, at times like this, think about my priorities. For me, this time is less about identifying deficiencies per se and more about recognising when I'm over-prioritising, say, my creative goals over more general and important human ones.

The other 'reset button' is a monthly fast that I do. I've been doing this since the end of last year, and find it to be a nice 'digestive reset' (as someone who often has issues with digestion) and, perhaps more importantly, a reset of intentions for my general practices around eating... let's say 'eating well' because there's a lot that collapses.

I've generally made this a 24-hour fast, which is really a small thing and pretty readily achievable (In conversation about it, people often seem to me to wildly overestimate the impact or unpleasantness of it. Unplanned paucity of food is unpleasant. And not every aspect of fasting is pleasant. But it's demonstrably a net positive for me personally.)

What this gives me, above all, is a reset point. Making it a longitudinal habit means that I always know I've got a 'catch' point that I'll reach, which helps me feel more relaxed about my intentions and processes the rest of the time. I think that is a common thread in a lot of what I do -- establishing reflection and reset points that help me be less preoccupied and rigorous the rest of the time. Knowing that there's a time for that, and that it will arrive in due course.

Caffeine, ahoy!

CN alcohol and food/fasting in this post

I took a month off caffeine and alcohol, ending today. I did a similar thing last year, ditching caffeine for about six weeks just to see what happened, inspired in a big way by this article and Michael Pollen's related (and excellent) This is Your Mind on Plants.

Neither this time nor the last has been sufficient to have me contemplating giving up either for good. My goal with them isn't specifically about physical or mental health, but instead about maintaining an intentional relationship with two psychoactive drugs that we're largely socialised to consume without reflection. The act of stopping is a way to remain conscious of the effects they have -- not in a moral sense, but what they change about us, be those good or bad things. I do a similar thing when I fast once a month -- it's partly about the physical benefits, but most of all about having a habit or system which pushes me to engage with how I consume.

I've definitely missed the mental pep that caffeine brings. I've had a fair few days where I feel I could have gone further, done more, or just had more fun working on what I was working on with that chemical boost. But also... it wasn't necessary on those days. Another completely valid -- and probably healthier -- option is for me to reconsider what I 'need' to do and what expectations it's appropriate to set for myself (and how sustainable they are). I am not an individual prone to underworking or underthinking.

But on the other hand, I think I mostly do work for intrinsic more than extrinsic reasons. (I'm immensely lucky on this front..) Which is to say: I love what I do, and opportunities to do more of it (sustainably) and enjoy what I'm doing more by being more mentally engaged with it more of the time. That's not just the ravages of productivity culture; it's a big part of my joy in life.

I've had really good experiences, for the first time, with decaf coffee and non-alcoholic beer, though. Square Mile Coffee's seasonal decaf espresso has been a genuine pleasure (even if the lack of dopamine kick is always going to work against decaf). Beavertown's Lazer Crush is so good that it will probably replace most of the alcohol I would consume at home -- and elsewhere, if I'm lucky enough to find places that serve it. Sampling that and other great non-alcoholic beers has been a pleasant surprise, and a treat.

Today's blog post brought to you by: overcaffeination.

Autoremembrance

I'm tired today. A week or so of insomnia (possibly caused by heat, possibly not -- though it sure ain't helping), with the great irony that I'm in the middle of a month without caffeine. But: I'm tired.

There's a phrase I think about quite a lot. 'Who are you when you're not doing?' I think I came across it on the Hurry Slowly podcast, though I haven't listened to that for a fair few years now. The question is meant to interrogate: when you get past the activities, work, hobbies, actions that define your day-to-day... who is the person under that?

I actually don't find it that useful a question (which doesn't keep me from coming back to it). It's an interesting question, though, in that it reaches for something that runs against focus on doing and productivity and action, and encourages contemplation of what makes us up beyond that. For me, though, I'm often struggling with the opposite -- trying to pull myself out of abstract (and often unhelpful, circular) thought and into action or immersion in something. The thoughts without action can go round and round and are really just a circular trap.

On days like this, where my brain is just fundamentally broken from tiredness, I feel like I'm trying to remember myself. We are all made up of the stories that we tell ourselves (which is one of the reasons being around other people can be so important -- they actualise or challenge those stories for us). When my brain gets like this (and I find it VERY unpleasant), I feel like I have a better sense of 'who I am when I'm not doing'. I'm the bit of myself that's responsible for remembering all the other bits.

This is mostly a passive process normally, though I do find I lose some sense of solidity when I spend too long not around people (known to me or strangers -- they do different things in this regard). Though I also know that I can only do so much of that in a given period.

In states like this, though I feel I have to work at it -- to hold all of those pieces in my head at once, actively. Which is about as much fun as it sounds.

This isn't meant to be a maudlin post -- I think it fits within the general bailiwick of this blog, and the alternative was no post at all because, well, see above.

I really would like some sleep, though.

Emotional Bids

Emotional bids. First some caveats/context: this is something I've referenced a bunch over the years in conversation and found a very helpful little mental shorthand. I can't, however, remember the original source where I came across this (maybe a podcast like Hidden Brain? I don't know), and looking it up now mostly points me to lots of pop-psych sites the general look and layout of which tend to make me highly skeptical about what they contain. So: take anything that sounds definitive about human nature or makes broad and definitive pronouncements with a heavy dose of sodium.

BUT I have found them a genuinely useful concept to distil, so I'm going to talk about them anyway.

• An emotional bid is when somebody in a relationship says or does something that is seeking some kind of reaction for reasons of emotional reassurance.
• (I'm using 'relationship' encompassingly, though it's even more obvious in romantic relationships)
• They might not know they are doing it for this reason.
• They might be doing it for other reasons as well.
• But at some level it disguises/encodes a sort of emotional 'ping' that's looking for some reciprocal interaction.
• Asking someone to tell you about their day would be one example. Maybe they do actually care about the vagaries of your day, maybe they don't; it's an excuse to solicit some emotionally nourishing interaction.
• Another, flipped example might be my saying something about my day which isn't meaningful/substantial by itself, but is intended to elicit further questions/interactions.
• There are lots of things that can fit into this general definition.
• The original source (and see the above caveats here) referred to recognising and responding to emotional bids as being a very clear predictor for a strong, lasting relationship.
• Crucially, this doesn't necessarily mean responding to them positively and necessarily engaging on the hinted terms. Yes, that's obviously better, but the ability to recognise the bid and turn it down ('I can't talk about that right now' or even something less direct) still indicated a level of awareness of the other person's emotional needs and interiority (acknowledging, consciously or not, the reason behind the surface action.)
• They are, essentially, emotional 'hooks' that offer the chance for someone to see and recognise your emotional needs when they are not plainly stated.
• This is where I've found most interesting to see -- examples between other people where it's clear from the outside that someone is making some form of emotional outreach, looking for a response, and the other person just misses it altogether for one reason or another.
• I find it really notionally close to when you see two people juuusstt talking past each other and not getting why, because someone's missed some piece of important context, or because they're actually just not... hearing what each other is saying clearly?
• There's probably some interesting technique to be drawn from this around writing good scenes between people. So much of that comes down to understanding or creating subtext anyway, or reasons for there to be subtext or omission.
• I realise after writing all this out that I've actually mentioned this exact concept before, back in What are we really talking about. Still, I think I've added more info/detail here rather than just treading the same ground.
• But it's a good time to reiterate that, actually -- so much of this type of communication (all communication, really) comes down to skills for really hearing what the other person is saying and being aware enough of their interior state to figure out what you're both really getting at!

No post tomorrow as I’m: not here.

Peak–end rule

People tend to remember two moments of an event/sequence of time more than others: the most intense point, and the end. This is the Peak–end rule (pleasingly and correctly with an en dash rather than a hyphen).

I stumbled across this recently in: The way we view free time is making us less happy. The advice there is to 'hack' this rule by, when you're on holiday, for instance, scheduling something intense in the middle and nice at the end, with the intent of enhancing your memory of the event (not to remember it more vividly, per se, but to remember more of it (by stacking time between peak and end) and trying to couch those things positively).

I've no idea if this actually works, but I intend to try it -- and the structure of the rule itself fits with my memory of various past events (though, actually, not necessarily with a singular peak event if there are several that operated slightly differently but were still notably 'peaks').

The 'end' part of this rule put me in mind of recency bias, and a quick survey of the relevant Wikipedia pages tipped me onto: the recency effect/serial-position effect, the Von Restorff effect and leveling and sharpening, which all seem fairly congruent with the peak–end rule.

Head Empty

I slept very poorly and have (un)surprisingly little enough brainpower to assemble thoughts for this blog. (Dear god, that sentence was perversely hard to write, that's how bad things are.)

I've also flipped into one of my lower-energy modes, which arrive periodically and lead me to want to do as little as possible for a short while. I'm generally, to say the least, a bit overfixated on work and work-adjacent things. It's got a lot worse over the years as the work I do has aligned more and more with the things that I enjoy doing. That alignment is, undoubtedly, a good thing. But it comes with flipsides.

There's also the sting in the tail that most of the things I enjoy as leisure (reading, playing games, watching films and TV) have overlapped more and more with things I do for work. And it's hard to get my brain out of that analytical mode, or to read or play things with reference to the things I'm working on or want to work on. In terms of being better at my craft, that's really useful! But in terms of being a more rounded human who enjoys his downtime, it generally sucks. This has also worsened during the pandemic, as my main escape hatches (fighting people in white pyjamas and moving heavy things around) have been largely closed off to me.

I'm also in a low-noise state at the moment (Going low noise), which is very welcome. I think one of the strongest recommendations I have for other people regarding the somewhat weird habits I sustain is this conscious dialling up and down of outside noise (Noisedialling). I'm not checking the news. I'm only occasionally on Twitter, and even then see almost exclusively original posts from people I actually know. It's nice.

Something from Orbital Operations a while back that stuck with me:

I needed to completely empty my head the other day, disconnect the front of my brain and let all the loops and intrusions out, so I spent some hours clicking around on the tv. Not something I usualyl [sic] do, but I need to to a force-reset. This is how I discovered Karate Combat, which is like MMA except you apparently get to do an attempted murder. Very odd.

I definitely hit these points from time. Where I just feel I need to do a memory dump. I haven't quite found my mechanism for that yet, but suspect it will come in the form of 'comfort games' that I have played to death and which offer me engaging but low-effort play with familiar patterns (Subnautica, Oxygen Not Included, XCOM 2, Doom (2016)).

Distance and Intimacy in Text Communication

A small one today: I'm just really appreciative of messaging services with emoji 'React' features. For anyone not familiar/not sure what I'm referring to (though I feel they're fairly ubiquitous now with their arrival on WhatsApp): I mean the ability to tap on an existing message and stick a little emoji on it.

There's a functional utility to it, in that you can e.g. give a light-but-specific signal without advancing or cluttering the main chat. But it also affords two extra effects of note, I think, both of which I'm particularly appreciative.

The first one is just a pure, playfully expressiveness. It almost feels like a little metalinguistic joke sometimes -- finding a weirdly apt or unexpected emoji to respond with. (Although at what point are we just communicating in two parallel languages, using pictograms to mark up another one with things or emotions? I know at least one Discord server that has its own specific emergent mini-lexicon, and I'm sure that's not unique.)

The other is that... sometimes it's hard to know what to say? In many ways, I thrive on text-driven communication. I'm a writer, after all -- it's a space where my brain lives a huge portion of the time. I think it's easy to see the ways that text communication is less emotional, intimate, and personal than in-person interactions. But there are elements that run the other way: it can feel bare, raw; there's no microexpressions, noncommital noises, physical touches or gestures to hide behind. Trying to replicate them in words can work, but also risks feeling trite or dismissive at best. Which often leads people (I'm people) to say nothing. Not because they don't care, but because it's hard to find something to say which is substantive enough to show you really are engaged with this and thinking about it... without, say, derailing the conversation, coming off as flippant, or just asking inane questions.

Reacts actually help a lot with that. They're less committal than words without being meaningless or overly vague. They can communicate something specific, even if it's not bound to an exact semantic space. I find myself using 🙃 a lot, because, isn't that a vibe? Sometimes, they can just show that you're listening.

(I am someone who overthinks written communication in ways that can be very stressful to me, but which are also probably perversely helpful for my job. Reacts and emojis generally can sometimes soften this significantly. I like them.)

Going Low Noise

I've spent a lot of time over the years tuning my levels of digital noise (more on this in existing post 'Noisedialling'). Most often, that's meant dialling down the number of notifications I receive and how strongly they're foregrounded (e.g. having messenger apps display notifications only in the notification area of my phone, meaning I have to actively go and fetch them rather than them interrupting me), or establishing rules for how I interact with 'noisy' digital systems like social media.

I've always found myself, though, reverting to a state of higher noise. This has often felt like a 'failure' relative to my more disciplined and healthy approaches. It also feels like somewhat of an inevitability, because, as I've come to realise, sometimes the higher noise state is just what I need and contributes to making me feel better, not worse.

Dialling down the noise, then, is not the best state in and of itself. The important thing for me is being critical about what I actually need and having mechanisms to move between the two. All of which amounts to intentionally considering the digital noise I am letting in and shutting out, and recognising when I actually need to shift states. The contrast between the states also helps me stick to the behaviour of each one.

Low Noise

• Notifications off for major messaging apps (for me that means Signal, WhatsApp, and Discord)
• Phone almost always in some kind of focus mode
• No Twitter on phone
• Use Tweetdeck on desktop, tuned for no retweets and only people I know personally
• Generally try to time-box or batch communications rather than being as ad hoc
• Avoid or minimise checking the news or other information firehoses

Obviously there need to be temporary exceptions -- e.g. if I'm due to meet someone who'll message me by WhatsApp, it's silly for me to be actively opening the app every few minutes to see if I've missed something.

It's also a lot about what it shows me in my own behaviour. All this isn't much good if I'm opening the apps every ten minutes. But being in 'low noise mode' helps give me a framework to remind myself that I'm trying to invest less ongoing attention in those things (right now), and push myself to, say, reading an article or book (or doing nothing!).

High Noise

• Notifications on for major messaging apps
• Phone in focus mode when working or needing quiet time, but otherwise open
• Twitter on phone is okay but still try to limit the doomscrolling
• Enjoy being more ad hoc and responsive with messages and communications
• Open to the information firehoses

If my brain feels like it's exploding or that there's just too much going on, that's a building signal that I should switch to Low Noise state. If I'm constantly checking messages anyway or reaching outwards for more stimulation or connection persistently, that's a sign to step it back up again. But I try to stick at the current 'footing' for meaningfully long periods.

(When I say that I overthinking everything and overengineer structures for myself, this is the sort of thing I'm talking about. And yes, is it really over-anything if it actually works for me? Who can say?)

Why is a Dojo like a Toilet?

In Jiu-Jitsu, there is the concept of creating a notional, even ritual space in which to train. The practice of 'rei-ing' (bowing) in to the dojo -- the physical training space -- is a performative act that represents an engagement with that space -- a step away from the norms and rules of regular life, and into something other.

(At least, that is how I have always thought of it. The organisation with which I trained is built on the Japanese martial art of jiujitsu, but is several steps removed from Japanese elements of it by history (e.g. by being imported and reshaped in the UK). There are elements, such as the names of techniques, which bear reference to its history, but I don't intend to make any suggestions about the art's roots, nor Japan. Caveat lector.)

This bowing is a threshold ritual. Most people I trained with had at least one story of sleepily bowing into a toilet or a lecture theatre or a church -- other forms of spaces that feel specific and set apart from your average room in some way. People weren't seeking to venerate those spaces, but the pricking awareness of the otherness of the space they were entering triggered a reflex.

I think this connects interestingly to the nature of modern community space. The foundation with which I trained doesn't have permanent training spaces -- it makes use of shared university gyms, community centres, even squash courts. (There is, it must be said, something singular about the experience of having to wait, robed and belted to practice pretend fighting, while a bunch of 10-year-old ballerinas file out of the hall looking much cooler than you.) The act of bowing is a transformative one -- it changes the space into which you're stepping from a room into a dojo. I find the idea that a dojo can be anywhere -- that it's made by the people and their observance of it -- compelling.

It came up in conversation with a friend recently that there are analogues between this and some of my daily working rituals. I have 'start-up' and 'shut-down' procedures that mark the beginning and end of my work day. They are rooted in something practical -- they are a set of things that it is useful for me to do at the start and end of the day. But through habit and ritual, they become something more than that. They're not passive markers of the start and end of a period of time -- they are a performative act that creates or transforms that time into something else.

Noisedialling

Social media, messenger apps, and notifications in general are a massive drain on my sanity and attention. That's almost definitely true for you, too, and odds are you either rationalise it as a necessary evil or have stopped noticing.

I've been very intentional about how I handle this problem for years now. It's probably made me difficult to deal with in some capacities (though I've also had comments on how it's changed other people's expectations around communication into a more positive mode). What I've found is that, while less noise is usually better for me, that's not universally true.

I've pared back what spaces I'm actually present on and participate in -- e.g. I've been off Facebook since 2018 or so. That's something that I have almost no qualms or regrets about, but I do notice the lack of a 'stable' (for a given value thereof) social network that's been constructed diachronically over the course of my life (vs spaces that have grown around a single interest or career). But I'd say that's still been almost entirely a good thing.

In practice, I often turn off or bury notifications from the messenging systems I actually use (e.g. WhatsApp and Discord), so that I have to go the them rather than having them come to me. There's a flipside to that, which is that sometimes (particularly when co-ordinating with someone or expecting to hear back on something), that leads to compulsive checking of those apps which is far more stressful and distracting than a push notification. That's usually a sign that I need to turn up the noise for a while. I could write a whole post of how I approach siloing off email, but that's for another time.

Rather than treating noiselessness as an end goal, I've come to regard it as something that happens in phase. Sometimes, I need to be in a high-noise state (active notifications, Twitter on phone if necessary, less use of focus modes) and at other times in a low-noise state (suppress notifications, no SoMe on phone or ideally at all, phone almost perpetually in a focus mode). The practice of switching is also useful, beyond the recognition of having multiple states -- the contrast of moving from one to the other makes each more effective, and feels like I've given myself another lever of active control.

That's all it's about really: living intentionally and modulating my signal and noise as required.

Personal Energy Budgets

I've been thinking a lot lately of 'energy budgets'. Not, I hasten to add, anything to do with energy-as-in-power-as-in-electricity generation and its current pricing crisis. I'm talking about personal energy – our available energy to get up and do things.

Spending a lot more time watching animals has also sharpened this thought process. It's a reductive way of seeing the natural world, but a very clarifying one. Many (most?) animals devote huge amounts of their lives to acquiring food -- their principle source of energy. It's interesting to view any action an animal takes through what it costs them and what it gains them in terms of energy.

Here is my current working model:

1) Energy = Attention + Time. The biggest discordance for me comes from wanting to do something and not being able to. It often feels like a function of pure time, but that's not true -- I have lots ('lots') of time, but more often lack the spare attention to do what specifically I want to with that time.
2) You need to be generating more than you're spending. In the longer term, at least. In theory, everyone has a personal threshold of activity beyond which they're draining their reserves rather than replenishing them. Which is okay in the short term, but is fundamentally not sustainable if that's the way you're living as a matter of course. Add to this that working above that limit means that you're not only not generating energy, you're spending more of it at the same time.
3) Rest and leisure is an active process. Broadly conceiving of rest and leisure time as being what generates energy and of work or work-adjacent time as consuming it, you need to be... actually putting the effort in to do rest and leisure well. They are not purely passive time in their conception, and not all versions of them are created equal. I also find that, when I'm getting overwhelmed with work, I rapidly lose my ability to adequately benefit from downtime, which leads to a feedback loop.

These are the Rules

I love rules. Languages, systems, models. I make my own, I pick up ones I find lying around, twiddle, adapt, iterate.

I think it says something (probably a bit too much) about how my brain works. But I'm always looking for ways of framing things in these terms. There are obvious ways in which this manifests -- I write and design games, which in one way or another are a representation of something else through rules -- but it's also a big reason I love writing more generally.

There are sets of rules, models, tools, and heuristics that form the craft at every level. You have technical minutiae like grammar or punctuation. There are shortcuts and mental filters you can apply at the level of the scene, in fiction, to assess and elevate the drama. Rhetorical devices to make your point land better.

It's a nexus of interlocking rulesets, each serving a purpose and linking to one another. A lex scriptandi of rules and tools. All can be bent or discarded, but understanding the system as a whole is what gives me the confidence to actually do anything. This is not intended as a prescription, but the practice of making the implicit (because the system is there whether we perceive it or not) explicit, and then internalising that explicitness as informed intuition, is a kind of euphoria for me.

This bleeds through into 'real life' as well. I mentioned last week several connected lens on explicit understanding in conversation. It's why books like Thanks for the Feedback resonate so much with me -- they render explicit the hidden rules of parts of life (or: they form a rendering of them). And when we understand something explicitly, we are far better equipped to deal with it.