everything

Seeing a recent post by @paul@paulkedrosky.com on the bird site, about something a reply to it called “a lack of activation energy” which characterizes many people today, I got to thinking about myself.

Over the last few years I have felt this lack of activation energy. I've chalked it up to having young kids, but I think it's more than that. After all, even with the time I spend with the kids, and working, I do have extra time. I just use that time to play games, watch TV, listen to an audiobook, or perhaps exercise.

It's been quite a while since I created something, as evidenced by this blog sitting silent since last December.

Have I fallen prey to this as well?

An abundance of entertainment

I often ponder about the difference in the world between when I grew up, and today. I think the main difference is boredom, and the lack of it today. I don't have to be bored today, I have so many options available to me. This lack of boredom in my life removes an important driver of this “activation energy”, which is just the avoidance of boredom!

It's almost like being bored slowly refills your activation energy bar. After all, how long could you really be bored before you get up and do something? When I grew up, TV was boring. Even video games were very limited (although some RPGs did capture me for many, many hours). But, eventually, the entertainment options available to me as a child weren't satisfactory.

At that point, I would be forced to get up and do something. What that was, and whether it was a good thing, and more positive than what kids are doing today, I don't know for sure. I can say it typically took the form of trying to find a friend and explore the outdoors, and when we got older, often get into some form of trouble or another. So perhaps it's a double edged sword for children – when they are young it pushes them to explore. When they're teenagers, boredom often pushed, me at least, to do stupid things I later regretted.

Is creation a muscle?

I'm left wondering how to solve it today, for adult me. It's not very practical to completely remove entertainment sources from my life. I work on my computer, we have several TVs in the house, and my phone is pretty much integral to my daily functioning. I also know from experience, that trying to ban things from my life and expecting that to change anything is a fool's errand.

So I'm going to experiment instead with adding something. If the impetus to create, to act, is a muscle, it stands to reason that I can train it. I can hold myself to creating something, or acting on something, each day, and progressively increasing the difficulty, while building in some recovery time as well. Just like a workout program, basically.

Blogging vs. micro-blogging

I think there's a big difference between writing a blog, such as this one, and a micro-blog post, such as my posts on Mastodon and Twitter. For one thing, micro-blogging emphasizes exactly the wrong motivation – external motivation. Given the fact that even though I have numerous followers on Twitter (and a few on Mastodon), but I get almost nil engagement on my posts, chasing external validation is going to result in failure. It's also a poor form of long term motivation, and opens me up to disappointment from criticism, and audience capture, which is the phenomenon wherein a writer starts to take on the opinions of their audience in order to gain more clout.

Longer form writing is a form of therapy for me. Even now I can feel my mind calming and organizing itself better than when I started this blog. So for me, I am internally motivated to write here, instead of externally motivated. Even if no one reads this (likely), I benefit from this.

A blog also is a better exercise of my mind. To squeeze something down into 140 or 280 characters is to truncate my thinking, remove caveats, and place something down in black and white. It's not a style of thinking that I want to continue ingraining into my habits.

Consuming vs. producing

I don't mind consuming information, in fact my entire life I've been a voracious reader, of articles, books, blogs, micro-blogs, etc. Lately though I have been somewhat captured particularly by micro-blogging. The firehose of information I get about health and fitness, politics, technology, AI, and even some philosophic ideas, has been addicting to me. However, I have to acknowledge that the things I write about the downsides of writing on micro-blogs also apply to the content I am reading on those places.

Writers are pushed towards specific rhetorical devices that enhance engagement. The medium is the message, in a sense. And that medium is quite poor at transmitting fully formed ideas. I need to re-orient myself again towards consuming more longer form writing, where ideas are better fleshed out. I used to use Google Reader for this, perhaps I need to setup something like Feedly again. Twitter and Mastodon should be considered “snacks” and not consumed as full “meals” of information, as I have been tricked into doing in the past.