It’s taking me a while to get my feet under me this year.
I mean, I’ve never exactly been a quick-off-the-blocks kind of guy, but still—it feels like things are taking their time to come together, and I am trying to be accepting of that.
This year’s big meta-project is, in a nutshell, to worry less about things. After spending some time looking at my life and my work, I have reached the paradoxical-seeming conclusion that the best way to achieve more work of substance would be to stop fretting over ‘productivity’. We can thank Ursula Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching for this, perhaps; I want to determine what it means to “do by not-doing”.
I have already determined that it doesn’t mean “do by doing nothing”, as appealing as that interpretation might initially seem. I think it’s more to do with focus—which is not some Modafinil-stoked obsessional grindset, not an effortful struggle, but rather a release, a letting-go of the extraneous (which sounds much easier than I’m finding it in practice). Nonetheless: the Way is the way things are.
Relatedly, it’s been well over six months since I decided to take a season-long hiatus from Mastodon, and I feel zero urge to return there, or indeed to any other social media. Here’s Alan Jacobs, responding to someone writing about the cognitive and emotional dissonance of witnessing the LA fires through the lens of the socnets:
… having established these habits, when I read a piece like Warzel’s I think: Why do people live this way? I’d rather pull out my fingernails with a pair of pliers. And I bet if any of you, dear readers, would ditch the doomscrolling habit for three months you’d never go back — you’d wonder why anyone would ever go back.
He’s not wrong.
I’ve tried mostly to avoid being a born-again on this topic, ever since the first time—though I hope you’ll excuse my noting nonetheless that I was waaaay ahead of the pack on this issue, even though I let myself be peer-pressured back in again a number of times in the intervening years. I don’t particularly want to become a temperance crusader now, either—not least because I don’t think it’s as effective as simply being abstinent. (“Do by not-doing,” see?)
But nonetheless, one last time for all time: get out of there, and don’t opt for whatever the media methadone of the month might be. Make a hard break, for good.
Over the last half year, I’ve had a lot of people ask me where I might be found on social media, and when I’ve told them “basically nowhere”, every single one—seriously, EVERY single one, ranging in ages from early 20s to mid-50s—has said something to the effect of “oh, you’re so lucky, I wish I could do it too, but I really need to be there for [work/friends/family]”.
So I told them what I’m telling you now: you don’t need to be there for any of those things. There are other ways of keeping channels open to those people and contexts—and if those people and contexts want to insist that they will only communicate with you through channels that make you sick and enervated, then I’m going to be so bold as to suggest that you reconsider what it is that they have convinced you that you owe them.
This will be my last word on the topic.
Part of this week has been taken up by two days of induction at STPLN Lab. STPLN is, among other things, an incubator for creative entrepreneurs in Malmö, and I’ve been lucky enough to be picked as an… incubatee? for 2025.
This should provide a certain amount of support and advice for my existing business activities—as a worldbuilder and critical creative foresight practitioner, but also a writer-for-hire in various fields and to various ends—but I’m also taking it as an opportunity to commit a bit harder to my collage work, and to take the surprisingly difficult step of referring to myself as an artist. I’ve been fine with calling myself a writer for some time; I guess I’ve gathered enough plot-tokens that I feel I’ve earned the right to wear the badge, you know? To call myself an artist, however—that feels like a transgression, still. A trespass.
To be frank, being confronted with the rest of the STPLN intake—a very diverse range of mostly younger people, with seemingly effortless skill and talent in a variety of artforms and activities—really amplified that sense of imposter syndrome, as did my ending up as the last show’n’tell presentation of the batch on Wednesday. Throw in tiredness and a serious caffeine crash, and I don’t think I made the best account of myself at all.
In fact, I know I didn’t, and I spent a lot of it apologising for (in the form of making self-deprecating jokes about) my being old, white, straight and male, a habit that the combination of social media and over a decade in academia have drilled into me very hard.
So it was simultaneously very embarrassing and oddly liberating to have a number of my fellow inductees suggest, very gently, that I didn’t need to apologise for being those things.
It’s gonna be a hard habit to break. The shrill performativity of social justice culture built, in my case, on a deep foundation of insecurity, guilt and humiliation; a structure like that doesn’t disappear overnight.
Rather than set to with the metaphorical bulldozers, however, I’m going to direct my efforts to building a new structure, and leave the old one to fall apart on its own.
“Do by not-doing,” innit.
Leave a Reply