DRMacIver's Notebook
Notes on a slightly failed spellcrafting attempt
Notes on a slightly failed spellcrafting attempt
A concept I’ve found very useful in the past is what David Chapman describes as velleity:
A “velleity” is a wish so weak that it does not occur to you to act on it. These are desires you instantly dismiss because they do not match your picture of what you think you want. They seem nonsensical, unexpected, and do not fit into your plans. But they are shadow-tracks of passions you do not know you have. Pursuing them, you will capture your desire.
As mentioned in my last post, I’m struggling a bit with figuring out what it is I actually want at the moment. Or, perhaps that’s not quite right, I know what I want but it isn’t what I want to want and I’m looking for some expansion.Even there I’m not sure it’s really what I want. There’s definitely a desire to disappear off into a mathematics hole but I’m not sure it manifests in a way that’s… a fully coherent set of desires.
I thought I’d go on a velleity hunt, so I attempted the following exercise:
Take a blank piece of paper and at the top of it write “What do I want?”
Start writing a list of things. Whenever you get to the end, mentally think “and…” and try to autocomplete it some more.
When writing down things you want, be careful about shoulds. You’re allowed to put down outcomes you want, that doesn’t mean you want the action. e.g. my list ended up containing “for my room to be tidy” and “to write more newsletter posts”. These are things I genuinely want. Note it doesn’t say “tidy my room”, or “write (some specific newsletter post)”. At the moment I genuinely do want the outcomes, but the actual specific actions required to achieve them don’t seem remotely appealing.Actually having written that down I notice I do have some level of desire to clean my room. Not a lot, but some. I might do five minutes or so after I finish writing this.
In general, don’t write down things you don’t want, but do write down things you complicatedly want. It’s OK to want things and decide not to do them, or not to do them yet, because you have other competing wants or practical constraints.
Anyway, I don’t want to say that this exercise was bad exactly. It prompted some useful introspection, but it was mostly kinda sad and depressing if I’m honest. A lot of what I want right now is apparently “be less burdened”, or “do things that distract me from problems”, or “not need to keep doing specific things that distract me from problems but seem net negative”. This is perhaps a useful insight to have but lacks much in the way of positive direction.
I suspect the exercise as designed is actually very poor for hunting velleities, and the best way to find them starts from a process of creation more than discovery. A prompt like “Here are some stupid things I could do…” is more likely to find quiet desires hidden in the noise than starting from a question like “What do I want?”, because the latter risks the big things crowding out the small things.
But I’ll save further experiments for another day.