DRMacIver's Notebook
There is no sludge
There is no sludge
I’ve been thinking recently about sludge.
Specifically, as a metaphor. When thinking is hard, or motivation is hard, it feels like trying to think through sludge. Details are hard to see, everything is harder, and whatever you do it ends up coming away sortof grimy. It’s a very compelling metaphor. It’s also a common one for people who, like me, are coming off a stimulantIf you have ADHD and rely on stimulants to manage that, please assume I’m suitably sympathetic to your situation and there are whatever caveats you need to not treat this article about my own personal experience with them as an attack. For me they come with significant downsides and I’m trying to figure out my way to manage without them, but that doesn’t mean I think they’re in principle an invalid solution. addiction.Which is to say, I’ve stopped drinking coffee again. I’ve also heard this from people who quit cigarettes. I assume it’s a thing for people who quit stronger stimulants but I don’t know for sure..
Withdrawal is real, of course, I’m not denying that. I’ve certainly had the agonising headaches to prove it. But when you’re past the first few weeks of caffeine withdrawal, everything still feels like sludge. But I think maybe it’s just a skill issue.
The thing about stimulants is… stimulants are really good at solving problems. Having a button you can press and make a whole class of of problems go away is fantastic. Need to get some work done? Drink some coffee. Feeling tired? Drink some coffee. Bored and feeling kinda listless? Drink some coffee. Taking a stimulant amps up your general ability to do things, and that’s pretty good if you’ve got a problem shaped like needing to do something and not doing it. I’m struggling to keep focus on writing this right now, and a coffee sure would help.Except for the fact that it’s 10PM and drinking coffee right now would be a disaster at the best of times.
I think a bunch about addiction. I’m not sure I think correct things about it, but some toy models I have of it are really interesting for illuminating other things.
Take heroin, for example.Which is to say, it’s best if you don’t take heroin. It’s not hard to imagine the appeal of what basically amounts to wireheading. Push button, be happy. Currently unhappy? Take some heroin, that will fix it!I do want to reemphasise that this is a rhetorical flourish and not advice.
Except… it’s not generally my impression that the typical heroin user is particularly happy. Probably they’re at least temporarily happy while on heroin, but that doesn’t get to be a 24/7 state.
I’ve talked about this example before and one of the pieces of feedback I got from people who have used heroin is that it’s honestly not that compelling to them when their life is going well. I think that makes sense. My guess is rat park is mostly fakeI base this on two key facts: The first is that it didn’t replicate, the second more important one is that it’s 20th century psych research., but I do still more or less buy the addiction-as-solution model.
But… I’m not sure the thing the addiction is solving is unhappiness exactly. My guess is that if you compare the average heroin user’s life to one without heroin, the one without is probably in aggregate still happier. I think the thing the addiction is providing is clarity. There is a simple solution to all your problems, it’s heroin. At any given moment where you have a problem, the heroin will make your life better, the only cost is that each time you pick this solution you overall make your life much worse, as an increasingly large fraction of the problems that heroin solves for you, it also causes.
Similarly, if you compare my life without coffee to my life with coffee,My experience with caffeine is probably worse than you’re imagining, but even so I am aware this is comparing two very different extremes, you don’t need to point it out. I am in fact on average more functional without coffee than with. But it’s higher variance, and on any given day where I really need to function, coffee sure would help a lot… But the cost is that I’m highly likely to relapse and find myself with another problem which coffee would help a lot with the next day or so, and then suddenly I’m having coffee every few days, and then daily, and oh no I can’t quit now I can’t afford to lose three days to headaches.If this sounds overdramatic to you, I promise you it’s not. I’ve quit coffee and relapsed like this multiple times. Even knowing this I can’t rule out that it’s going to happen again. Although I have in fact had caffeine exactly once since quitting. I think it was justified in context, and thankfully it did not result in a second time.
Anyway, sludge.
My theory is that “sludge” is actually fake, and is the addict response to leaving a world of false clarity and encountering the messiness of normal human experience.
Stimulants help you do things, and they do this by helping you bypass parts of the normal process by which you decide to do things. And that process, like all real mature human interaction with the world, is situation dependent. You have a specific problem, it admits a specific solution.
One of the things I notice much more without coffee is that there’s a sort of anxiety that adheres to the basic act of creation. I’m feeling quite tense right now just trying to put words on the page, even in a notebook quality way. There’s a genuine sense of fear and anxiety manifesting in my upper body. It’s honestly very weird. It keeps making me want to bounce off the process. Everything feels… not hard and effortful exactly, but painful. Like there’s a literal physical pain to it.
But that’s not the only thing of course. Sometimes I’m just tired.No! Fake! Tired isn’t a real thing. It’s many different real things. Sometimes I know what I have to do and there’s no anxiety associated with it but it’s boring and I don’t want to do it.
Sometimes, even worse, I might have to voluntarily do something mildly uncomfortable.
Sometimes in order to decide what to do I have to engage with the most terrifying question of all: What do I actually want?
All of these are different situations which, if I don’t pay attention to their fine grained texture, feel like sludge.
And they’re all completely different situations. The only thing that unifies them is that stimulants are a solution to them.
And if I’ve rejected stimulants as a solution there is no unification, and their different character becomes apparent as soon as I attend to my actual experience and try to solve the problem.
That’s hard. If I’ve spent my entire adult life papering over a problem, no wonder there’s a skill issue, both with finding out what the specific problem is and also with solving it.
But if I ignore it and just talk about sludge, I’m being a victim of metonymy, and worse I’m doing it by conflating a specific problem with a broader category I don’t have access to unless I choose to adopt the category of solution I’ve rejected. I shouldn’t do that.
Don’t adopt ontologies that force you into strategies you want to avoid. Attend to the specific, and understand your problems in a way that lets you act on them appropriately.