Starting and giving up

This is not yet the declaration that I’m giving up on writing after the first post. I have more drive in me than two posts. But I wanted to think about starting things and giving up on them. Unfortunately, I definitely won’t have time to give this topic justice because I only committed to spend around one hour per article. Any serious exploration of any topic would require much more than that. It would be entirely possible to write a whole book on such a topic and spend years reading and gathering research around it. So I’m just doing an hour brain dump around it.

So I committed to doing this writing thing every week usually Sunday around evening. And earlier today as my Sunday was ending I realized that I would need to start writing about something pretty soon. Well, need maybe is not the right word because it is not like I really need to do it because it is a self-imposed thing. But aren’t self-imposed things that don’t have urgency are the most difficult ones to do. For example recently when I had to appear in court although there was lots of anxiety there was never a problem motivating myself to do it. Then I started thinking, why do I feel so much discomfort while thinking that I would need to do writing soon. Is there a specific reason or is it some kind of general laziness? Now some days I’m very tired by the end of the day and just don’t want to do anything at all because of lack of energy or life power. But this is not that kind of evening although I’m somewhat tired as anyone after a long day I knew I had some energy left to do other things that I would be looking forward to more positively.

I want to understand why I would be okay with doing some things but not doing other things. In this case, writing a post. I think the answer is that I knew that I was not going to enjoy the process because I would be having a lot of mental discomfort while doing it. For a couple of reasons. I still didn’t know what topic I was going to write about and no matter what topic I picked anyway the end result would be bad. And this is not self-criticism but a normal outcome for a thing that you haven’t done before. We just suck at doing things when starting.

Because of knowing that the end result is going to be worthless, it is hard to have the motivation to do it. And without having the motivation to do something you will have negative feelings towards that upcoming thing. Well maybe not negative it is not anxiety, fear, or stress but the feeling you get when you know that you are going to attend something boring and not engaging it is hard for me to pinpoint the exact emotion but it will be such a mental state that produces chemicals in your body that will make you not want to do the thing. Or maybe the problem of not having enough chemicals in your body that make you want to do the thing. Your body’s biochemistry is how you feel, sad, happy, motivated, unmotivated, depressed. I’m not an expert on this just someone who has read a couple things about it that seems to be true. Although human biology and psychology are complicated matters at the end of the day we are drawn to do some things and against doing other things. Or could it be that we don’t want to do most of the things because our bodies want to conserve as much energy as possible aka being lazy but certain motivators and thoughts produce chemicals that make us pick ourselves up and do the things. At least that seems to be the experience I’m having.

Interestingly, I didn’t have as many problems motivating myself doing the first post although I knew that the writing would be hard. The amount of discomfort now before the second one is so much higher but what is really the difference? Probably If you have ever started anything new that requires some skill and you suck at it in the beginning then you know that the first day or first attempt is the high point or first couple of ones. But afterward, the realization comes as you may probably know that any skill-building activity requires learning and practice and attempts to do the skill. Although learning and practice may sometimes be fun unfortunately most of the time these activities are causing a lot of mental discomfort. Imagine learning to play piano and having practice sessions two times a week for an hour. Maybe asking to imagine is not the right thing for everyone because in your imagination it may produce good emotions if you have never tried playing piano and you are confusing feelings of being good at playing piano with the feelings of the practice of it. What I want to convey is the feeling of the practice of a new skill and the mental discomfort it causes I have never tried playing piano myself but I have tried playing guitar as a teenager, have tried learning new languages, and recently have been learning salsa dancing and probably have tried many other things that I have already long forgotten but what doesn’t changes between these all new endeavors is how boring and mentally painful it is to learn and practice constantly for for longs periods.

Now in light of this, it is pretty understandable why any reasonable person would try new things and give up on them. George Bernard Shaw quote comes to mind when thinking about how to persist at keeping doing something:

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.

When we try something new we may have expectations of how it would feel doing it, we may have got these expectations by seeing a pro doing it by observing how he feels. Or maybe we want to have the same admiration that a person who does the thing well gets. This would explain our initial motivation and positivity to start doing something new. Also, it just could be a novelty. But once we start doing that new thing sooner or later boringness, repetition, plateau, and normalization to medium will kick in. At this point, we don’t have as many good feelings anymore and the motivation that we had in the beginning is nowhere to be found. Now the question is why would you keep going at the thing after you are not enjoying the thing anymore? Reality may be more complicated it is not that black or white. You may enjoy some aspects not others. You may like most of it and hate a particular one. Maybe you dislike most of it but really enjoy a small part. Whatever the ratio is, imagine yourself as an object in motion that has received its initial push but sooner or later you will come to a stop from that initial push. And the question is what will keep you going, what will give you the next push to keep going.

I don’t have the answer to that it is something I try to figure out in my own life, but what has not worked for me is trying to ignore the lack of motivation and trying to brute force it. I will end it here. There are so many additional ideas that could be threaded out and clarified from the things I mentioned above. I hope I was able to explain some part of the main idea on this topic. Maybe I will expand more on this or particular parts in further posts.