jankposting from the hip

on feeling like a different person every day

Betty Lou Gerson in "The Red Menace" (1949)

I feel like a slightly different person every day.

My routine has been largely the same ever since my son was born in October 2023– I wake up, usually because the baby is up, and my wife and I take turns tending to his needs– we feed him, change his diapers, play with him, rock him to sleep when he needs a nap, whatever is required. We have breakfast, lunch and dinner, squeeze in some phone or tv time here and there, and then when he’s asleep for the night, I get the chance to do some writing.

Is this an ideal system? Probably not. But it keeps changing as he grows, and I was never good at schedules to begin with. Also, my wife and I have been plotting a move from our apartment to another, which took up a lot of our time and energy and focus. It’s hard for me to definitively say what I got done since my boy was born, apart from caring for him. Oh– I did finish and ship the epub version of my ebook Introspect. I went on a couple of podcasts, most notably Modern Wisdom with Chris Williamson. I gave a talk to a local audience. I wrote a handful of substack posts, a bunch of tweets. Mostly it feels like it’s been challenging just to get by.¹

on the difficulty of any project:

Let’s circle back. I want to think out loud about the phenomenon of feeling like a different person every day. It makes it a little harder for me to work on meaningful projects. I’m very proud of my definition of a project, which is anything set of tasks substantial enough that they can’t be completed in a single work session by a single individual. If it takes two work sessions across two days, it’s a project, because now today-you has to collaborate with tomorrow-you, and those two people may not have the same interests, same goals, etc.

This is part of why it took me so long to ship the Introspect .epub. Most days, I just didn’t feel like working on it. And– this took me a while to corroborate– I’m someone who’s especially bad at making myself do something I don’t feel like doing. I figured that out by comparing the consequences I was willing to endure for not-doing things, such as getting into lots of trouble at school, or even being court-marshalled in the military for failing to perform certain tasks. Most people eventually are motivated by The Stick, but I seem to have a very high tolerance for beatings. There are both pros and cons to it. I wouldn’t particularly recommend being this way, and I’m not sure anybody can really choose to. My guess is that the people who think they choose it, were probably already predisposed that way. But I don’t know for sure, and I’m not sure there’s much utility for me in developing a much higher resolution model of other people’s willingness to acquiesce.²

Feel like I’m getting distracted. I still think there’s something interesting in ‘feeling different every day’ that I want to get inside of and crack open. What have we established? It’s hard to get substantial things done in the short run if you keep feeling differently about what you want to be doing. But I do honestly believe that it can be a strength in the long run, if you take some notes as you go. This might seem a bit like a breadth-vs-depth or specialist-vs-generalist thing, but I don’t think it’s exactly that. It overlaps with that, maybe. Novelty-seekers might be likelier to simultaneously be breadth-seekers. But one can also pursue nuance-as-novelty. Lets use music as an example domain.

on exploring a particular domain:

Within the domain of music, if you’re committed to being a musician, you can explore a different thing every day. You can work on your rhythm, or your melodies, or your understanding of chords, of composition, and so on. You can try learning something from an unfamiliar genre. You can invent challenges for yourself. It’s an infinite game, for which a single human lifespan is heartbreakingly limited. But there have indeed been many people who have devoted their entire lives to music, and all of them develop in different ways, typically because they’re each following their own ears and hearts. Everyone at the beginning of a game (say, filmmaking) starts out fairly similar to each other, because they tend to be exposed to the same things, and imitate the same things, and make similar tweaks, do similar experiments. But after a couple of decades, those who stick around tend to be substantially different from each other.

I spent several years dabbling in music, and it means a lot to me, and I hope it will always be a part of my life. But I’ve seen enough to say that I’m probably not quite cut out to be a professional musician. I’m not quite hungry enough. The story I always tell people is how my band was playing at a gig (which I organized), and we tried our best and we had a decent sent, and then we witnessed another band– with older musicians– who played with so much love overflowing from their pores that I instantly just felt like I was doing it all wrong. Imagine a couple at dinner who’s not very happy with their relationship, and they aren’t even particularly fighting, but they see an older couple at the next table who are clearly deeply in love, and it motivates them to break up because they can see that they don’t have whatever that is. That’s how it was. Now I can intellectually argue the other side of this– maybe it just takes time! Maybe they were having an unusually good day, you’re comparing your internal experience to someone else’s highlight reel! Those are good considerations. But I think when you feel the emotional truth of something inside you deeply resonating and then percolating outwards in a way that pushes you to make a decision, that’s usually the right thing to do.

For me, I realized that my thing is words. I love words. I’ve written millions of them, and I look forward to writing millions more. The idea of trying to strive for “most prolific author of all time” is something that still kinda appeals to me– an exciting thing to strive for even if I fail at it– though I notice as I type this out, I find myself flinching a bit. But I can also tell it’s largely because parenthood has depleted me energetically in the short run. I struggle to keep up with basic tasks, how am I going to pursue grander ambitions?

answering the question:

I have to start to wrap this up. I was hoping to have this post end up as a substack post, but it's now 1228am, my wife has come to bed, i'm sleepy and tired, and I should probably call it a night. The question is, can my tomorrow-self make something of this? Will he even want to? I suppose this is where it would be a good idea to think about persuasion. How can I persuade my tomorrow-self to be interested in revisiting this? What’s in it for him? No, wait– I’m currently internally conflicted about whether I can even finish this post. If I don’t finish it, it needs tomorrow-Visa or some other future-Visa to finish it. But if I do finish it, then I don’t have to turn it into a project. It can just be done.

So. What would it take for it to be done? I’d have to get to an answer to the implicit question I’ve been setting up. What’s the question? “What is to be done about feeling like a different person every day?” The boring cached answer that comes up is “there’s nothing to be done, you just exist, man”. Ugh. True but useless. Useless because I wasn’t specific enough in the question. The question I’m really asking is something like, “How do I make progress on my goals as someone who feels like a different person every day?” That feels like a question I might have answered quite confidently if I were well-rested and it were coming from someone else, especially someone that I care about. Let me simulate that. Okay, let’s a promising kid asks me this exact question. Ahem.

Well, first of all, have you defined your goals? Yes, of course they have. They want to do some good writing. Have they defined what good writing is? Not really. They know it when they see it. Okay, that’s generally valid if you’re operating over a long time horizon, but if you’re trying to get good writing done in a short and fragmented time frame, you’re probably going to have to define something specific. And here I’m guessing you’re probably conflicted because you know that your current definition is imperfect and wrong or not-even-wrong. But you can’t actually do very much about that. You either shoot for an imperfect goal, or you meander (which isn’t a bad thing). If you feel like you don’t have the luxury of time/energy to meander, then your options are to either shoot for imperfect goals, or barely shoot at all. So what’s it going to be?

Alright, shoot for imperfect goals. What is the imperfect goal? Well, I don’t know what it would be for you, but I can tell you what it would be for me. It would be to start anywhere with whatever observation or thought I have, and then look for the implicit question that arises, and then try to answer it as honestly as I can.

If I’m a different person every day, and I don’t have the time and energy to coordinate a collaboration between those different people, then I have to design an process that doesn’t require collaboration. I have to shoot from the hip.

Let’s step back and look at that. How does it feel? Well. I started this project (Substack, Frame Studies) with the intention of doing these big juicy complex essays. But trying to do them has been kicking my ass. So, in the spirit of Frame Studies, I have to reframe the problem. Question the assumption. What are the big juicy complex essays for? They were my idealized form factor for the work I wanted to be doing, which is to communicate ideas to people about the art of reframing. And it sure would be great proof-of-work if I demonstrated skill at reframing things for myself. So, turns out one of the first things I have to change the frame on is “what is the form of this substack”. It’s going to be a bunch of one-session jankposts. I’m going to get really good at one-session jankposts.

(source tweet)

Well, I get an opportunity to practice what I’ve preached. I do think it is the way. Apologies to anybody who got on board looking forward to the big juicy complex essays; those will probably have to wait for some time. Although, one thing my past experience has taught me… sometimes we end up doing the difficult things by accident while doing the easy things. So, we’ll see. I don’t know. Tomorrow-Visa might feel differently.

1. I try to remember what it was like before we had a baby. Every parent probably says something like “what did I do with all that time?”, and I’m no different– though I do have some records and notes that I can reference. From time to time in the old days I would spend an entire day in some random intellectual rabbithole, researching something like the true source of the name of the color Chartreuse, or caravan trade in the Sahara. I haven’t really had the time or energy to do that lately.

My son is now 18 months old, and he can say a few words, which allow us to communicate. He can tell me that he’s hungry, what food he wants, or that he wants to get out of the house. We have fun reciting colors together. He loves pointing out the moon at every opportunity he gets. All of this has been glorious, and I’d do it all over again. We probably will.

2. People often tell me that they find me to be a very charming and persuasive person, and my sense is it’s largely because that I’ve had to charm and persuade myself to get anything done at all.