Disambiguating things-to-be-just-done
Sent to a friend, upon request, after a phone conversation on similar topics.
"You can just do things" — true! But "things" are not created equally.
Some things-that-can-be-done require quite a bit of planning and care, have months-long, unsatisfying feedback loops. (E.g. "solving the dating problem" or "joining a research lab")
Other things-that-can-be-done take a couple hours, and land you with a concrete, finished product at the end of it. (E.g. "I'm gonna make a ceramic pot" or "I'll bake cookies and give them out to my neighbors" or "I'm going to hit chest at the gym for an hour and a half" or "I'll go on a two-mile run with a friend")
It seems like you have an itch to do something — but also that you don't really distinguish that strongly between the two categories above. And there aren't really two categories above, there's a spectrum — many spectra, actually.
- How much commitment does this require? Ten minutes? An hour or two? Five hours every week for the next three months?
- What's the downside for failing? Can range from "I feel a bit silly in my living room for 10m" to "I've actually lost some important relationships to me" to "I've lost thousands of dollars" etc
- Is there a clear end-state? Can range from "well yeah, the cookies are out of the oven and my neighbors are currently putting them into their mouths" to "hmm well I could touch up that other thing…"
- How satisfying is it to be doing?
- How satisfying is it to be done?
- How long will it take until you feel that satisfaction? What's the shape of the graph of invested plotted against satisfaction returned?
Things-to-be-done vary widely on these axes. If you treat the possible things-to-be-done which are in-fact very very different as very similar, you're going to get fucked up feedback loops, where the input "do more things" gets the feedback "gah I've been doing this for thirty hours and it's not satisfying at all and I've lost my joy for life but I fucking committed to this and so I'm going to keep fucking doing it." Which, naturally, leads to the input being downweighted in value.
But I think collapsing all of the things that scratch that itch to do something is actually the mistake here. If you did something that scored on the "easy" end on all of the above a few times a week, you'd be in a different fucking league.
Some examples of things that score on the "easy" end on most/all of the questions:
- Cooking/baking, especially doing it for other people
- Working out, especially lifting & running, especially doing so with friends
- Recording & uploading a short-video
- Babysitting once or twice
- Doing ceramics, especially throwing on a wheel
- Volunteering at a church sunday school on a random sunday
- Tutoring a kid for a few hours
- Sprucing your apartment up for a few hours
- Going shopping for a new style of clothing that you've not worn before
- Playing a sport, especially with friends
- (for me) Folding origami
- Performing music for elderly folks