on tedium

repeatedly doing a thing that's not working

a semi-random photo I took on a recent family trip to Amritsar, Punjab 🇮🇳

i. I feel like I’m still having to relearn some very fundamental things about how I write these posts. I tend to have this impulse to tell a meandering story about where I am, and it tends to fizzle out. I’ll try to do something different in this one. I think I’ll draft this post as a numbered list. in a way this functions as a kind of scaffolding, because it feels a little bit like i’m writing a twitter thread, which lets me operate on autopilot, or maybe more importantly, frees me from the unmoored feeling of having too much open space to get overwhelmed by. In a way they are the same thing: I get to a better state of flow when I’m not fussing over too much about grandiose abstract hypotheticals and imaginary structure.

ii. I do still believe in the power of lists. I don’t make use of them nearly as much as I could. I’m reminded of The Checklist Manifesto, which described how a simple surgical safety checklist reduced complications and deaths in many hospitals by more than a third. A hop and a skip from here brings me to an interesting uncomfortable question: why don’t I have better processes for how I do my work? Immediately I find my mind generating excuses: oh, I’m tired, I’m busy being a dad, I don’t want to stifle my work with tedious procedure. But the first two are backwards: a tired busy dad would benefit from better process, since he doesn’t have as much time and energy to meander around. And the third is clunky: procedure does not have to be tedious, and the absence of good procedure can be far more tedious. My experience has repeatedly tried to teach me that the absence of good procedure rarely results in spontaneous flow-state magical improv. It typically just results in bad procedure.

iii. Which I suppose brings me to another interesting question, which is slightly less uncomfortable: what is tedium, really? Tedium is clunky, thoughtless repetition. Tedium is ‘going through the motions’. Tedium is dull, attention-sapping monotony. Tedium is the ominous kind of boredom that isn’t pleasant idleness. Tedium is when you start getting mentally and emotionally checked out. Looking back, I feel like a lot of the unpleasant struggle of my life– possibly the bulk of unpleasant struggle in my life– has been me tediously trying to avoid tedium, and tediously failing. Why have I struggled with this? The boring-but-probably-true answer is that I’ve been using the wrong frame(s). But what does that even mean? It means that I’m approaching it wrong. I’m thinking about it wrong. And I’ve been flinching from trying different approaches that might get me closer to something that works. Why? Well, my ego or sense of identity is probably invested in the approach.

What is my approach exactly? Somewhere in recent years I seem to have fallen deeply in love with this fantasy of writing some set of really beautiful things, architectured in some really clever way, and that it’ll surely “just” come to me sooner or later because I Am A Writer, ie A Person Who Is Good With Words And Ideas, and so Surely It’ll All Work Out Eventually. And, well, maybe when I look back on all of this years from now, the arrival of Visa-36 will, narratively speaking, vindicate the conviction of Visa-33, Visa-34 and Visa-35. If it works out, they will be right, but it’ll because I started acting differently. It’s really hard for me to ever know for sure if something that took me a long time to do, really did have to take as long as it did. More broadly speaking, could we ever have acted differently in the past? The only way of approximating some sort of meaningful knowledge here has to be, if we can demonstrate that we can act differently now. And maybe there are some domains where you only get a couple of shots and so you’ll never know. But writing is not one of those domains. I get at least one shot every day. So while I may never know if I could have acted differently in 2024 or 2025, I do get to act differently now. Let’s see if I pull it off. I want to believe.

iv. What is the opposite of tedium? We get words like ‘electric’, ‘buzzing’, ‘excitement’, ‘playful’, ‘thrill’, ‘passion’, ‘vividness’. What could it mean for a process to be all of those things? I know I’ve attempted to write about this before– I’ve talked about it in terms of seeking surprise, having fun, pursuing a sense of emotional resonance, looking to solve puzzles, feeling my way to the thing-within-the-thing. Right now, my feeling is that the important thing is not to make up my mind ahead of time about where I’m going. I think that’s one of the greatest sources of tedium for me. It’s the equivalent of trying to plan a perfect trip down to the minute– simply writing that sentence makes me flinch, because I know firsthand that all of my favorite moments when travelling are when I take the time to freestyle and wander about.

At the same time, it occurs to me that it’s significant that travel itself for me always happens within a container: I might have somewhere between 1-3 weeks before I have to go home, so I feel some urgency. I typically have several main things that I want to see or do, and I make some rough plans to do those, and then leave some open-ended time around it for wandering. If I have several days free, there are a few different approaches I might use. I might pick a random neighborhood to explore. I might seek out a recommendation for something specific to check out, and then freestyle a little bit around that. I notice that I can describe my process for travelling in a way that feels playful, vivid and exciting. This was a process that I developed quite organically.

v. Maybe before I even think about writing I ought to think about reading. What is my process for reading? I do have a bunch of material that I could describe as being “of interest” to varying degrees. Some of it is directly on-hand and ready to go, some of it I have pointers to in my notes, some of it I just have a vague idea of, waiting for some external trigger to remind me. A lot of what is good in my life is downstream of past reading I’ve done, and lately I’ve been somewhat troubled at how much I’ve coasted from the fruits of past reading. My experience has repeatedly tried to teach me that when I approach reading as something I love doing, it pays all sorts of unexpected dividends, and enriches my world in all kinds of ways, often ways that I find unexpected. And yet in practice, I seem to have been slow to really internalize this. It’s bizzare, actually: How often, looking back, have I woken up and spend the entire day in a vague foggy malaise, wishing for some kind of excitement, which was always accessible to me on my bookshelves? I could say the same thing about exercise, too. My experience has repeatedly tried to teach me that working out makes me feel good. So why don’t I do it more? I have two pretty clear “press to feel good” buttons on my dashboard, and I seem to only ever press them by accident. Why? I note that it’s been a while since I took this question seriously and attempted to answer it properly. Let’s try it. Why don’t I press the feel-good buttons? Because some part of me…

1. doesn’t really believe that the buttons really work.

2. feels that the buttons are hard to push.

3. has a scarcity mindset about these buttons, and feel like I don’t deserve to press them, or that I should save them for special occasions.

4. feels like I have other more important things to do.

5. operates under the delusion that I have I have lots of time (I just realized to include this after thinking about travel seeming being more lively and vivid when it’s time-constrained)

Which is the correct answer? It feels like a mix of all of the above. 2, 3 and 4 are all kind of variations of the same thing. I’ve been doing a lot more reading in recent months after going through a personal crisis, and the main difference between now and ‘the before times’ seems to be that, after the shock and crash, I’ve been able to really just stop and rest. I was never quite able to do that before. Even when I was on vacation, I was always kinda thinking about work. And, as my wife jokes, it’s not even like I was an effective workaholic who traded time and presence for lots of money, which could then maybe be spent on relaxing spas or whatever. If anything I mostly traded my time and presence for… if I’m honest with myself… a superficial sense of psychological safety. And looking back now, that seems like the most tedious thing of all.