GHDR Report 0909: Rebuilding and Reassessing Needs

Happy Groundhog Day Resolutions Report Day! For this September 9th, I'm continuing on from last month's observation that the lack of connection is my most critical priority. I think the issue is more deeply personal than I have been willing to admit. So let's get into it.

Reflections on Feeling like a Failure

It's been extremely difficult to write publicly this year, though I write copiously in the DSCAFE Discord Server and elsewhere. I have also suffered from extreme tiredness and physical lethargy, and have been concerned about my health. My screen time is waaaay up, exceeding 10 hours a day as I try to find something to engage my starving brain. I have felt like my very life energy is draining away, my body slowly becoming a lump of inert matter.

I felt like giving up. Here I was, old and washed up and unable to follow through any of a hundred grand plans to completion. Despite having cleverness and insight, such traits are no substitute for Getting Things Done ™. I have been focused on improving my productivity, mindset, and self-understanding nearly twenty years and have little to show for it. No awards, books, organizations, or products other than a handful of mouldering items on the cursed Amazon Marketplace. Trends have come and gone, and I have not been able to harness any of them...

As terrible as this seemed to me, though, there was something new this year: the feeling of sensory starvation and chronic resistance. Let me try to describe what these are:

• Sensory Starvation - This is a kind of malaise that is like depression without emotionality. It feels like there's nothing interesting happening, nothing rewarding to seek, and nothing to do worth pursuing. In the past, I'd have described this as an existentialist or nihilistic crisis, with the mitigation of choosing absurdism to just do things to amuse myself. This year, the feeling was more like my brain was dying from lack of stimulation, and I was choosing "junk input" to try to keep it alive. Only after a lot of low-quality input (e.g. scrolling social media, online shopping, snacking) could I muster the energy to do something.
• Chronic Resistance - I've talked about Steven Pressfield's The Resistance before from The War of Art; Loosely paraphrasing, this is resistance presented as a character/demon that does everything to stop you from "doing the creative work". What I like about this model is how it separates the "bad" resistance from my "good" sense of self, absolving myself from shame. What's different this year is just how strong the Resistance has been, taking on a sense of hopelessness that drained physical energy. I was worried that it might be due to some health issue (which still may be the case), but it's also possible that it's psychological.

The TL;DR of it is that I've been (1) lethargic and (2) emotionally dysregulated for much of the past month. While I was productive enough with work, the rest of the time was spent scrolling and lying on my couch listlessly, desperately trying to muster some kind of energy to do something beyond the minimum responsibilities I had with work. Work is probably what kept me from completely collapsing.

Facing Metaphorical Death

The overall effect that Sensory Starvation and Chronic Resistance had on my mood was that I felt like I was dying, wasting away both mentally and physically. There was no active imagination or desire at work here. I overall just felt terrible. I was also burned-out from work, which had been exceptionally devoid of interaction for the month. That had left me even more sensory-starved than usual.

The first spark of life happened just last weekend, as I had decided to have a self-indulgent sensory weekend without feeling guilty about all my stalled projects and broken dreams. I had gotten the idea from my friend Mroo, who had set forth a menu of pamperings and indulgences to enjoy without having to explain the need to anyone else. Feeling burned out myself, it seemed like something I should try. As a special restriction, I also wanted to reduce the amount of reflection I normally do, instead focusing on external sensory experiences. I managed to go to a store, wander a bookstore, and go to the farmer's market, and this did feel good. However, I noted that I still felt quite disconnected from the world, and the sensory experiences had not delivered a lasting boost of energy.

Depressed, I decided to just sit through the emotion and see where it went. I scrolled and scrolled through 16 hours of trashy audio recaps of manga, napping for a few hours after each segment, occasionally eating something that immediately made me fall asleep again. While on the surface this was just TERRIBLE, I also decided that I wouldn't feel guilty about it for a change, which led me to some important insights.

Insight 1: Without Meaningful Connection, I Die

Sensory Starvation and Chronic Resistance can be thought of symptoms of missing connection. I know that I like to be around people who are doing things, and that my best life experienced have all come from being part of a like-minded group of creative people. This year's Groundhog Day Resolution's has been about establishing such connection, but the way I've been going about it hasn't been working.

Insight 2: I Can't Overcome Chronic Resistance By Myself

I hate to admit this, but I need to have other people to help me motivate. I like solving problems and making things with people who really care about the process and mastery that go with it. It's been over twenty years since I have started looking for ways to be "productive" and "focused" by myself. I'm ready to say no to this. I give up. Expecting myself to maintain sustained momentum beyond three days with NO FEEDBACK or INTERACTION damages my psyche.

Insight 3: I Allow Myself to be Trapped By Faux Connection

There is a distinction between "connection" in work and friendly socializing, but for me a meaningful connection is much more intense and personal. I have described this as "high bandwidth, high intensity" communication in the past, considering it a special case. However, I think I have tried to extract the same meaning from casual and working relationships I have, and this does not work in the same way. Don't get me wrong...it's good to have such relationships but they do not provide the meaningful and deep connections with my desires to do substantive creative work in a prosocially-motivated group context.

Insight 4: I am Limited and I am Mortal, and I Struggle to Stay Positive

As much as I wish I was a super-being and super-smart and all that, I'm just an average person of no great importance. I'm not the center of an adventure story. I'm not blessed with exceptional talent or any outstanding capabilities. At best, I'm a person who tries their best to be a net asset rather than a blight, and I am extremely worried about it. I carry this worry around with me constantly, the result of years of thinking that I needed to have obvious super abilities to be allowed to be part of anything. The most detrimental aspect of this conditioning is to put the emotional needs of others before my own. I am also overly alert to anticipating the needs of others and their comfort, but this can also leads to resentment and frustration on my part.

Takeaways

The above insights are not intended to be "justified reasons" for why I feel this way. Instead, I'm acknowledging that this is how I feel about it. Having sat with these feelings for a few days, I have a few ideas about how to modify this month's Groundhog Day Resolutions stratagems.

• Reassess Priorities - I believe the primary concern is finding that meaningful connection, and for that to happen I need to prioritize doing meaningful things over everything else. In practical terms, that means putting a higher value on doing stuff that I want to do over meeting the needs of others. That's because I have a powerful tendency to drop my own needs if I sense someone else needs anything. I have to prioritize my needs without guilt or shame because I'm bad at it. If I am very lucky, I will gain energy through these interactions.

• Feed Sensory Experiences, Expense Be Damned - I have been staying in the house trying not to spend money, trying to stay focused, not allowing myself to be distracted by trivial things. You know what? It doesn't work. My neurodivergent brain needs varied stimulation and its needs are not met by an empty house filled with clutter. So, I am both prioritizing getting out the house and going to coffee houses (a bit pricey) and walking around various places nearby just to see what people are up to (time consuming, but energizing).

• Triage Projects by Priority and Meaningfulness - While my paid work is important, they shouldn't override my own projects. That said, many of my projects are not really essential to my well-being and are at best interesting in the moment. I would be better served, I suspect, by limiting these "might be cool" side projects and instead invest my resources into experiences away from home. I suspect I could also serve myself better by allowing more indulgences through the purchasing of goods and services from interesting people who I am more likely to connect with. My weekly trips to the Farmer's Market are showing me that this is possible.

• Indulge in Rabbitholes that Produce Rabbits - I have been trying to avoid side quests that I thought detracted from my focus under the umbrella that "the fewer divisions of attention, the faster things go". In reality this never happens with me. What I've gotten good at, though, is documenting and sharing what I learn during these sidequests. I can trust myself to maintain progress on my billable work and outside responsibilities. By denying sidequests and dodging rabbitholes, all I've done is make my life a constant drudgery; after all, work and responsibility is not meaningful in the way that ultimately satisfies me.

The lack of satisfaction, I think, could be the key factor in my depression. I'm hoping that by indulging myself more and maintaining connection with lots of people doing things, I'll be able to find an improved balance.

So maybe this is the goal for the month?

There's another aspect to this discussion that remains unexplored: What is meaningful anyway?

Sri's Working Definition of Meaningful Connection

I came up with a list of traits that are pretty important to me. I think these could be the prerequisite elements of meaningful connection as far as I'm concerned.

• Generosity, conscientiousness, empathy.
• Self-empowerment, positive-mindedness.
• A delight in learning about other people's experiences and stories.
• Direct, honest, guileless communication.
• Comfort with defining and negotiating boundaries in good faith.
• Clear-eyed view of the vast diversity of human need, perception, and experience.
• Ability to shift perceptions and perspectives based on context.
• Strong desire to learn, produce, and create tangible results that impact other people.
• Active recognition of other's contributions and successes, and giving credit where credit is due.
• Distinguishes between consumption and production mindsets.
• Is not shy about sharing what truly interests them, once they have determined the level of social safety in a given context
• Awareness of how one's word and actions affect the mood of others without pandering to social patterns.
• Able to provide signaling in conversations regarding overflow, overload, need for additional detail, mental capacity at the moment. True active listening requires this sensitivity.
• Being able to sit with dark emotions and express them without lashing out or blaming others.
• Conscious of commitment and followup, recognizing the bond-making powers of reciprocal action.

When it comes to meaningful work, I think there's a different set of principles that I pursue:

• A "human-centered" approach to work, productivity, creativity, and systems thinking.
• A proactive and conscientious awareness of the people who will use and benefit from the work.
• A clear articulation of the difference between knowledge, theory, and speculative thought. Being clear in knowing what one does not know, and not falling into the trap of unexamined speculation.
• Comfort in learning through experimentation.
• A moral imperative to share what we've learned so others may follow and grow the pie of knowledge for all.
• Acknowledging the work of others through citation, and seeing our work as adding something positive to the world.

The assumption common to both sets of principles is that we're making something new to us and we're also refining our craft as we go to produce something really good and useful. This is also, I think, something of a luxury in work-for-hire, which is why I am so keen on being able to support myself somehow so I can take the time and pay experts. It's the ongoing dream...

That all said...this is all a pipe dream unless I can find the energy to find these types of connections in the world. This is what I think is meaningful pursuit of work, and I'd like more partners that enjoy discussing these topics.

The Month Ahead

I've rambled about a lot of stuff this month, and in some respects it feels like the same tired insights I spew every year. However, they keep recurring, so I think there's something to it. In any case I can't think of anything better.

My hope is that by focusing on my needs, I will gain more energy to talk to more people. My needs tend to produce tangible artifacts in the form of shareable nuggets of knowledge with a scoop of personal insight on the side. To help gain more energy, I need to make a point of escaping the crushing isolation of working at home all the time, being willing to spend some money to help establish some daily rhythm in the outside world. To make this all possible, I have to release myself from the shackles of caring about other people's projects more than my own, and be assured that the meaningful work for me is what will help me make meaningful connections with people.

In pragmatic terms, I can start with a simple routine:

1. Get up and get out of the house immediately. Get at least 7 minutes (by car) away.
2. Go do something fun or novel right away, even if it's shopping. Mix up the variety.
3. Visit something familiar to see what's changed.
4. Buy something small from someone who cares about what they're selling.
5. Get steps in from all this visiting of places
6. Don't eat a lot. Go to a coffee shop to start the work. Enjoy the ambiance.
7. Get home early enough so it's still light out to do gardening.
8. Pursue interesting side projects if they can produce a tangible nugget of knowledge or other shareable artifact.
9. Share on Discord, or even better share on a public website.

That's all I got...we'll see how it goes! I haven't spent a lot of time truly thinking things out, but that's OK.

INDEX of GHDR 2024 POSTS