DRMacIver's Notebook

Motivation gradients

Published

2025-04-28

There’s a type of depression that I’ve written about before where it feels like a restriction of the possible. You want to do normal things, but doing them feels completely impossible, even when in a more literal sense it’s perfectly possible to do them.

But there’s another type where everything just feels sortof flat. It’s not actually difficult to do things - there’s not much internal resistance per se, but there’s also no ability to orient. The feeling is not “I can’t do things”, but “I can do things, but why would I do this thing in particular?”. When presented with any particular choice of writing topic, the bit where interest or disinterest would be responds as a sort of emptiness. It’s not an unwillingness to do the thing, it’s more like a total directionless neutrality on the subject.

Anyway this is what I’m feeling about writing right at this minute, so I’m just writing down the phenomenology of what I’m currently experiencing, because that seems like a good default.

One of the interesting things is that I’d lost my pad of writing ideas.Bad labelling and organisation on my part got it mixed in with a bunch of other identical pads of paper and I couldn’t find which one was it. I initially thought this might be the source of the problem, so I tried to generate some more ideas, and I didn’t actually find it very hard to generate a new list of ideas. Many of them are ones that I abstractly recognise would be good to write about, but I look at them and try to imagine writing about them right now the answer is still that empty sort of why.

I think part of the problem is heat, honestly. It’s about 25C in my office right now, which isn’t scorching, but that’s after significant attempts at heat management, and I think part of what’s happening is that my brain and body are going into a sleepy heat crash.

One perhaps telling indication of this is that as soon as I thought of that and started thinking about steps to take to reduce heat in this room it became very easy to take actions for that.Mostly I bought fittings so I can get out my proper AC unit and install it somewhere useful, and I filled up and turned on the swamp cooler I have in my room.

The weird thing is that I don’t feel particularly hot. I feel… lethargic maybe, but I’m not getting any strong signals about temperature, just behavioural responses to it.

One of the things I pointed out in labelling feelings is that you’re allowed to figure out what you’re feeling based on observing your own actions like you would for anyone else. Something I hadn’t noticed before is that when trying to figure out what you want, you can partially infer this by finding things that are unusually easy for you to do right now.

I think a lot of the time this will end up in unendorsed actions, like doomscrolling, but I think if you cast around and explore the space of alternatives maybe you’ll find there are some unexpected things in there that are much easier to do than expected because how easily you respond to the idea of doing something towards them.