DRMacIver's Notebook

Necessity creates possibility

Published: 2025-03-30

One of the big reasons I’m doing daily writing right now is that I quit caffeine. I have a very entrenched belief that quitting caffeine makes it harder for me to think, and my evidence for this is that my writing habit evaporates every time I quit caffeine.

It is, as a factual matter, true that I stop writing when I quit caffeine. That is a thing that happens. Writing feels impossible.

But there is, it turns out, a great technique for doing impossible things.

Try to do the thing and fail.
Figure out the actual specific thing that went wrong
Fix that.
Try again.

Here is my proposed default thing that goes wrong when you try to do something that feels impossible: You think about doing the thing, you are overcome with despair, you declare that it’s just impossible right now, and then you flinch away from it and go do some dissociative activity to self soothe from the aftermath of your terrible encounter with the impossible.Ask me how I know…

Part of why I’m big on necessity is that it is a fix for this problem. If not doing something you find aversive is an option, not doing thing is likely to be the option you pick. If you’re definitely going to do the thing, you’re able to have a genuine encounter with it without much fuss.

It is, as a purely factual matter, not the case that it’s impossible for me to write while not on caffeine. I write on WhatsApp or discord or TwitterWell, not that one any more. all the time when off caffeine. The actual mechanical act of writing is not that hard for me, and I often say perfectly interesting things.

I could absolutely just open up the notebook, paste a comment from discord, and write here every day without thinking. I could flip to a random page of a book and copy out some text on here. I could write “I am a fish” 500 times.I am tempted to just do this one day to stop this from being a hypothetical that I use and make it a real live possibility.

This means that the only thing that is preventing me from writing here every day is that I am choosing not to.

So, step one: Choose to. Put daily writing in the category of necessity. This forces me to admit that it’s not actually impossible - it’s not actually even terribly difficult - it is just mildly uncomfortable.

This, in turn, creates encounters with the real problems that you’re avoiding. Turns out, for me, I was struggling to find things that were interesting for me to write about. It’s not that I don’t know how to generate things to write about, but those don’t feel interesting either.

I think part of what’s happening here is that there are two major relevant differences between my brain on caffeine and my brain off caffeine:

With caffeine, my threshold for something seeming interesting is much lower.
With caffeine, my thoughts are buzzing all around and generating many different overlapping ideas all the time.

So when I’m caffeinated, sitting down to write is basically just a matter of waiting for an idea to come along, grabbing it out of the air, and pulling on it until the thread of an essay comes out. On the rare occasions I’m stuck, I use a random prompt to lightly prime the process, but really even with the random prompts it works in part because my brain is extremely prone to going “AND THAT REMINDS ME OF FIVE OTHER THINGS”.

When I’ve actually got something to write about, it’s not actually that bad to write. It requires dealing with a degree of discomfort and anxiety about the process, but it’s just a little bit slower and more halting, it’s not actually a big deal it’s just mildly unpleasant.This is more true for notebook posts than for full fledged essays that I actually have to think about because of how much I’m just basically writing down my chain of thought reasoning here rather than trying to make a clear well-articulated point.. But sitting down and going “argh fuck argh what do I write about?” is torture, partly because it’s intrinsically unpleasant and partly because it triggers a whole “oh god my brain is broken how can I live without caffeine? Woe is me, for I am an abject wretch, deprived of that which gives my life meaning!”.

Anyway that sounds like a problem, David, have you tried solving it?

Yes I have, and it turns out it’s extremely easily solved, and the magic was inside me all along because I’ve solved this problem before. The solution is to make a list of things I could write about. I’ve now just got a little pad of paper on my desk with the heading “Things I could write about”. When something comes to mind during the day that seems interesting to write about, I jot down some slightly cryptic phrase or sentence describing it, and when I come to write something I look at what’s on the page. Censored solutions was the first post I wrote using this system (partly because writing Creativity on demand is what helped me spot it), and it’s been great since. There are currenly 20 items on the list (including ones already written).

The key thing that makes this work is that although it turns out that I can’t currently generate ideas of what to write about at a rate that means they just freely appear when I sit down to write, I sure generate a lot of ideas in a day, the problem is that they don’t reliably stick in my memory. As long as over the course of a day I generate more than one idea to write aboutIt looks like right now I generate about five. It’s likely that that will go down over time, but not necessarily - writing begets more writing, because it gives you new things to think about., the list will always be full.I haven’t yet decided what to do when the list fills up. I need to figure that out after finishing writing this post.

Anyway, the point I’m making is not this specific technique is great (although it is), it’s that this specific technique was in fact very easy to create, and I’ve tried and failed to write through caffeine withdrawal multiple times before without creating it.I have actually tried a daily writing habit while off caffeine before and it didn’t stick, but the way it failed was that I was having a terrible time for other reasons and went back on coffee before I ran out of backlog of ideas of what to write about. Taking the option of not writing off the table and just making it my problem to figure out how to do it any way forced me to figure out what the real, specific, problem was, and do something about it rather than just treating it as impossible.

Necessity creates possibility: If you have to do something, probably you’ll figure out how.Or, you know, fail horribly and die. But it’s hard to fuck up a writing habit so hard you die. If it’s optional, it’s too easy to make excuses as to why you couldn’t possibly do it. Frequently those excuses will feel very real and plausible, but evaporate as soon as confronted with a firm insistence that you try.