DRMacIver's Notebook
Where are your limits?
Where are your limits?
A recurring theme recently has been doing things because they need to doing, regardless of whether you currently feel like doing them.
I’ve got some pushback on this, especially on using this daily writing habit as an example, particularly around how “need” is fake.
And it’s true. Need is in some sense fake. You can always skip the dishes and let them pile up in a festering heap, rendering your kitchen ever more difficult to use. You can always let the apples rot. There’s very little you need to do in the sense that it is a logical necessity that you must do it.
But on the other hand, there are a lot of things that you should, on balance, choose to do, and being able to bind your future self to that path, and to be beholden by the commitments of your past self, is often going to go far better for you than not doing it. I might not want to do the dishes now, but future me would much rather that present me had, and even present me will probably feel better for doing it once I get over the initial hump. Being useful feels better than not being useful, most of the time.
But do I need to keep writing every day? Probably not. The biggest problem I had writing today was when figuring out what to write about was once again asking myself the question: Well, what am I writing for? If I don’t really know why I’m writing, it doesn’t really matter what I write about.This continues to be a singularly unhelpful answer.
In some sense, the reason why I’m writing is that I am writing is because writing every day is a good way to discover interesting things and articulate things you otherwise wouldn’t have articulated. This is a true and important reason and is a key part of why my past self decided to do it. But right now I don’t feel like I care about that.
The reason I am writing is because I’ve decided that I write every day. Eventually that will stop being enough, but right now it still is.
But I think there’s a question of… OK, past you has decided that you’re going to do a thing, or present you believes that you need to do a thing. When are they wrong?
One of my failure modes is that I’m not good enough at asking for help, and one of the ways this shows up is that if I’ve decided that I need to do a thing, I will usually do the thing.
Part of this is that depression is a bias towards inaction, and doing more than you feel like you can helps drag your way out of depression. So I legitimately don’t trust the feeling that something is too hard or too much, and I will generally feel better for doing it.
…except when I don’t. Because sometimes it’s actually a bad idea for me to do the thing, and I should make an exception.
I made an exception for daily writing over Easter weekend and that felt like the right thing to do.I’m actually not sure that it was! I do feel like I’ve taken a significant hit to the habit since returning. But on balance it was still probably correct.
Sometimes I have to be chased out of the kitchen because I’m clearly wobbling when I try to stand up and someone else should do the dishes. Sometimes everyone’s in this state and we have to admit that OK the dishes can be done tomorrow.
The question, I think, is when you should make these sorts of exceptions.
The Galahad Principle says you shouldn’t make any exceptions! But I think that we can weasel our way out of them by saying that the thing we’re committing to 100% on is no unprincipled exceptions. Act only according to exceptions that you would be willing to universalise. That is, if you made an exception in every case like this, would that be OK?
I don’t think this is quite sufficient though. Sometimes you experience genuine changes. If I were to lose my ability to type for whatever reason,Which would be very bad for dayjob reasons. I’d probably stop the daily writing, and that seems legitimate but also does call into question the “necessity” of doing it.
So I think as well as the ability to make exceptions you need to find out where your limits are, and learn what to do about them. It’s not always to accept them. Sometimes you do just need to work harder.
But sometimes you need to acknowledge that the part of you that was saying that this was too hard was right, and actually decide that some things don’t need doing and change your commitments accordingly.
Not today though.