I started this blog for a couple of reasons. One, I wanted a place to express my frustrations at the illogic of people I see all around me all the time. But another big reason was to keep myself writing, to keep me in the habit of writing so I can make progress on the other writing projects I have. But I fell into the same trap here that I have with my other projects. I got busy and didn’t post for a good while. Then I got into the recurring pattern of telling myself that I would make up for it by writing a lengthy, thoughtful post to make up for my lack of writing. But the longer I delayed, the more I avoided doing it. I felt guilty about not writing, which I responded to by wanting to do more to make up for it, but then getting daunted by the project, so I put it off, then feeling more guilty about not writing, etc. until it became such an incomprehensibly huge thing I could not face it and gave up.
For all my desire to be logical, I can’t help but fall into emotional traps that I know full well. I let my guilt and fear of not being able to accomplish what I wanted be the very thing that stopped me from accomplishing anything.
So, what can I do about it? Accept it? That would mean that I am doomed to stay in this rut, failing at what I want to do. Not accept it? That would be stupid, denying reality is hardly logical, albeit very human. Clearly, the only sensible alternative is to accept the past, recognize my patterns and try to break out of them.
The first step I think is to stop thinking of writing anything as a project and just do the standard advice of breaking it down into smaller, easily digestible pieces. So, forget about writing a big, time-consuming piece. Just post something, even if it is just a small, WTF statement or something I found interesting for some reason.
I have been reading Don’t Believe Everything You Think by Thomas Kida. Interesting book, but what I found interesting today was a list of supposedly commonsense sayings that people use all the time, quoting as if they contain the wisdom of the universe. They demonstrate just how little people actually think about what they believe is true. There is a saying to support any position you want to take, so how precisely can these common sense sayings really mean anything?
Better safe than sorry/nothing ventured, nothing gained
Two heads are better than one/too many cooks spoil the broth
A penny saved is a penny earned/you can’t take it with you
Look before you leap/he who hesitates is lost
Opposites attract/birds of a feather flock together
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire/don’t judge a book by its cover
Absence makes the heart grow fonder/out of sight out of mind
The hard part is that they are all true, but only in the right conditions. None of them are all encompassing. But that doesn’t stop people thinking that they can apply them in all aspects of their lives. Almost every situation needs to be looked at on its own merits. There are very few things that pithy sayings are going to help to determine what really needs to be done. Depending on shortcuts like these is not only intellectually lazy, but doomed to failure because it prevents people from expending the effort to figure out what really needs to be done.
