I’ll try to speedrun a train of thought that came through last week:
For a few years, roughly coincidental with the arrival of Covid, then lockdown, then the sort of crappy year leading up to my layoff, I was struggling to do a lot of the creative things I had once done a lot. In hindsight some of it was lockdown stress, some of it was work stress + depression over the work stress, and some of it was probably about an illness I didn’t know I had yet.
It all added up to not making much new stuff, not feeling very creative, and maybe worst of all feeling very crabby and reactive toward the new or the novel. I didn’t like the way the inside of my head felt. I felt sort of old and inflexible.
Once I settled into the reality of being laid off, addressed my health stuff, and chilled out enough to legitimately rest and relax a little I bounced back and that gave me a burst of creative energy. Once I got a new job and had that soaking up some of that energy I faded back a little, but recently I’ve been feeling it again. I can tell because I’ve been experimenting with tools, dusting off stuff I’ve built in the past, and just generally futzing around with stuff.
There’s a lens to it all, though, which is whether these things are doing anything for me: Are they providing utility and what exactly is that utility.
I’ve also thought back to that unpleasant fallow period. A lot of things I had made or depended on fell apart during that period, because I didn’t have the mental energy to keep them going. If something I’d depended on for a while broke because I attempted a minor tweak, or because an upstream changed underneath me, I’d just toss it aside. It was tiring to consider concentrating long enough to fix it.
I guess the broad theme was sustainability. I was lucky to find a good counselor who helped me gauge my own resources and remember to honor commitments to myself. So when I’d have a brief burst of nervous energy or motivation, she’d help steer me back to things that were practical and sustainable as opposed to overthought, overengineered, and unmaintainable.
org-mode has been one bottomless sink of time and energy for me. I’m not a particularly skilled elisp person. Not an elisp person at all if we’re being honest. So nothing really comes easily to me when I’m trying to squeeze some neat idea out of Emacs. When I compare my rate of progress to the period when I was extending BBEdit or TextMate with Ruby plugins, it seems glacial.
And every now and then I just break shit. I am measured and careful enough with my changes that it’s usually easily to isolate, but there are those days when I’m just doing a bunch of things by hand because I blew up some piece of automation or some bespoke UI I built. On those days I wonder to myself, “if you ever hit a trough, or don’t have the kind of discretionary time you have now, or just lose a few more degrees of neural plasticity (as you must), what will this be like?”
I think I know the answer, because I’ve been walking the earth long enough to know that there will be some kind of extinction event, a bunch of shit will go out the window, and I’ll end up with three or four new SaaS subscriptions I’m scrambling to cancel in a year provided the vendor does me the courtesy of telegraphing that they’re reaching for my wallet.
Philosophically and intellectually I’m okay with that. A few moments in my life have offered me crash courses in the value of acceptance in the face of impermanence. I’ve had the benefit of object lessons in the form of being around people I love and care about, but who are perhaps fatally anchored by an identity they might do well to discard, the better to begin growing again.
But also what I want to care about ebbs and flows. Some days, weeks, months, years I want to care about things like org-mode, elisp mastery, and interesting techniques for taking notes. Other times I do not at all, and feel a little crabby about the time spent on these things. Especially because it is not lost on me that my energy is both finite and unevenly distributed. If I’m deeply involved in a bunch of tech stuff, I am probably not taking many pictures or writing about certain things. When I am crowding out certain endeavors closer to my creative core in favor of things I am perhaps a little obsessive about but that are further from my creative core I feel a little out of sorts.
“You’re getting the meta sickness,” I say to myself, and I beat myself up a little.
It was great to spend a week in Vancouver the week before last, then a long weekend on the coast with nothing but an iPad. I couldn’t mess around with much very easily, and when I did try to tentatively poke at something during a lull in the conversation with our fellow travelers I broke it and was left realizing that trying to fix it over coast vacation rental Wi-Fi on an iPad soft keyboard would be far more infuriating than knowing it was fucked up for a few days.
Those twin interruptions knocked me out of a tool fixation ramp-up and made me think a little about whether I was doing what my old Irish boss used to call “polishing the pipes” (we did eventually convince him that didn’t work for US English speakers) and perhaps setting myself up for another round of meta sickness.
Now I’ve got a week ahead of me where I have three plates spinning and people need me to quick dicking around and make a few things happen so they can go do their jobs. That will also help keep the futz monkey off my back for a bit.