why it's impossible to finish anything, especially the good things
the effort paradox
Lil essay for you today but first big news - I am doing two more Substack Live interviews:
today (Tue) at 4pm EST with
who writestomorrow (Wed) at 12pm EST with
who writes
I made flyers for each show.
To watch these you have to have the Substack app or be on your desktop at the time of the event and it should just show up idk tbh
Great now let’s do the essay for today.
why it's impossible to finish anything, especially the good thingsThe paradox of effort
I keep having this feeling.
It happens fast like that (imagine me snapping my fingers here very quickly but completely silently) that you barely even notice it because you didn’t hear it because it was dead silent, but still you’re like ‘did someone just…snap their fingers?”
This feeling does not want to be known. It thrives only when you do not identify it, like a Schrodeinger’s cat in reverse, alive only before it is observed.
So what is this feeling?
Allow me if you will (will you??) to set the stage.
First there is a mad burst of creative energy. Kaplow!
An idea rushes forth from the brain and onto the page, flowing like the Nile river when God first vomited it out of his mouth and onto our earth.
Gross, you say?
Friend, this is science. This is how the Nile came about and the rest of the water too.
What, you think God snapped his fingers silently and it all appeared? No, he created it from his own body and soul etc.
But see we're distracted already. That's part of this - getting distracted, but it comes later so let's just slow down.
Take a breath.
Did you?
Now another.
Did you actually breathe? Or just read the words and go “i don’t need to do this I’m busy just lemme at the next sentence already!”
You gotta breathe for real.
If you breathed earlier, you can breathe again here or just keep going. This is now a choose your own adventure essay.
Your call.
Ok so there I am, idea flowing forth like the Nile, and then….the baby cries.
The baby cries because the baby always cries right when the idea is flowing forth like the Nile.
I go and get the baby and give it milk which it refuses so I get it Strawberries which it also refuses. It's really crying now, worse than before.
Hours that each feel like sixty minutes pass.
One After the other. We romp and stomp around the house from the baby’s room to the brother’s room, the living room and kitchen. We are playing but we’re also looking for my glasses which I have lost.
The glasses are nowhere to be found so we get into the car, me and the baby, and drive to the local market Ingles (which I’d been pronouncing in a vaguely Spanish way as “Inglays”) to see if perhaps I’d left my glasses there yesterday when, also with the baby, I arrived at 634am to purchase baby tylenol to help the baby stop crying because the tylenol we had at the house was in “mama’s room,” which is what baby’s brother calls it, and I didn’t want to wake up mama especially given that it is her room even though I definitely also live there etc.
The glasses were not there, according to the teenager womanning the self checkout registers. She went up to the area where you buy cigs and get lottos and she looked around, even showed me a murderer’s row of glasses all there up against the glass, but none were mine.
None were mine.
So we came home and cleaned because we had friends coming over (!!) and I found the glasses, in the shoe basket (!!!) and now, nine hours later, I'm back here, ready to write.
What were we talking about? Oh right - this! This exact thing that just happened, which is me avoiding completion of my past work.
I’ll do anything not to finish an idea I started. Sometimes, as above, it’s by writing about the Nile.
Usually though, it’s far more insidious (!).
Usually, I self-talk my way into doing nothing at all. There's an inverse relationship here: the longer I work on something initially, the more afraid I am of returning to it to finish it lol.
Here's a chart I had the boys at MIT do:
The only reason I can write and finish this piece is because my initial burst of work on it wasn’t all that deep or grand.
What normally happens is more like this:
I spend a while exploring an idea - “Phones are the new malls,” for example.
I write all about how my childhood in malls, spent mostly working at Radioshack selling cell phones for commission, and how now, everything we’d go to a mall for - socializing, buying shit we don’t need, ignoring our parents - it all happens INSIDE those very phones.
I’d talk about how I was responsible, how this was all my fault for selling Motorola Razrs at Radioshack and so on.
Then I’d have to give the baby milk for several days, make several sojourns to various supermarkets in the area looking for sundry items I’d lost there on days prior, and finally return to the idea and think, “I gotta finish that piece about how phones are the new malls — that idea is a HIT"
Then I’d go "na that idea sucks" or, if I still think it's a great idea, I say "I'll never be able to do that idea justice." and then I scroll digg.com for a while until I forget who I am.
These are, of course, rough translations of what happens in my mind, because this voice is non-verbal, or rather pre- and post- verbal — it moves FAST and goes ZAP right into my brain stem where all the scaries go and it screams RUN and the rest of my body goes "Run?? we're just sitting here" and it goes "RUN!" and the rest of my brain goes "WE BETTER RUN" and so it runs away from the essay and my feet are like "man remember when we used to do stuff?"
Distractions are not de facto or even de opiniono bad. They are simply worthy of note.
Not a new idea, but neither was sliced bread and everyone made a huge fuss over that.
Wild how ‘sliced bread’ is still the thing we use as the barometer for how mind blowing a new invention is. We’ve made iPhones, Ozempic, and even newer iPhones, and still it would appear that the list of things is, in order of how impressive they are, goes:
Whatever the new thing is
Sliced bread
iPhone
Electric car
Newer iPhone
Ozempic
So too with our inclination toward distracting ourselves from the stuff we want to write about. Change is harder and we haven’t even lost the penny yet. How the heck am I gonna be able to charge $3.29 if I can’t give anyone a penny in change?
So instead of acknowledging the hard stuff and, idk, changing, we just keep doing the old thing and comparing everything to an invention from 1928. Because saying "the greatest thing since sliced bread" is really just our way of saying nothing new is worth celebrating. But that's nonsense. Look at toasters! Without them, pre-sliced bread is basically fancy bird food.
Sliced bread crawled so toasters could sprint hot hot hot all the way to toasted sliced bread.
We've been innovating all along, we just don't want to admit it.
Because the only thing scarier than finishing something and saying ‘hey look at this,” is finishing something and then saying, ‘hey look at this, I really think it might be a good one.’
But what else can we do? Nothing. Just keep making stuff and putting it out there, saying ‘that’s a cat’ so the cat disappears entirely.
And that realization? Well, it might be the greatest thing since bread bowls.
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— Loretta
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comments
Open comments cuz i g2g but write stuff and I’ll respond I promise.
dammit al I didn’t breathe is this why I had a panic attack last night
Great post! You just described my brain, but instead of a baby, I have a dog. I hope you finish the phones/malls piece. I've always hated malls. And I'm beginning to hate my phone...