JULYVEJOURNAL
Welcome to Julyvejournal! Where we pretend that it's the mid 00s or that facebook was never invented! And hopefully have a flame war in our beautiful nested comment about how to spell Julyvejournal. Anyways, here's a post:
Attempting to motivate oneself is a boring thing to write about, but still a non-trivial problem, especially if you happen to work on things about which no one but you really cares if they get finished. It has occurred to me that life has been pretty good lately but that I haven't been getting enough done, so here is a little headscratch/resolution, made excruciatingly public because IT'S JULYVEJOURNAL YOU GUYSSZZSS!!1!
Doing The Thing can be broken down into two major parts:
1. Doing The Thing
2. Not doing things that aren’t The Thing.
1. Doing The Thing.
You probably do a lot of things, generally, but the ones that are work are often bolstered by social expectations or rewards. The Thing is different. There might be rewards, but they are far from certain and they are certainly far in the future. No one really expects you to finish your masterpiece, or even your piece. The work in itself can be rewarding, even immensely so, but it isn’t the kind of instant reward that, say, mindlessly clicking on something like an abused lab rat might be.
The broad solution here is to give yourself permission to treat the work seriously. Carve out specific times to do it, boast about how great it will be, etc.
2. Not doing things that aren’t The Thing.
Obviously, you sometimes have to do things that aren’t the thing. You have to eat and sleep, and probably you have to work in order to meet basic survival requirements. You have to exercise basic self-care, which means talking to and/or hugging people you like. Creating on your own requires some minimum of mental health to keep doing.
But the dangerous things that aren’t the thing are probably simple, trivial actions that give a tiny reward but whose possible repetitions could stretch out to infinity, burning more and more inescapable paths of compulsive behaviour into your neurons. Basically: STOP CLICKING REFRESH.
So I guess the basic resolution is I’m going to write first thing in the morning and not look at internet crap until I hit a word count, then measure breaks after that. Also you guys, The Thing, it’s going to be so great.
See, I told you this would be boring.