Why don't I want to publish any blog posts?

I've been sitting on this goal of publishing 15 blog posts for over a year now.

On a practical level, it was doomed to fail, I didn't set a deadline.
But I had such momentum when I started¹
So it felt like I’d do it without issue over the course of a few months.

It was fun and light.
Now publishing anything or even sharing anything with my closest friends seems so overwhelming.
I quite literally burst into tears writing this sentence.

What's with that? Lets explore 👀

Why did I want to write a blog?

I still resonate with the first post I wrote exploring my motivations 

• I do still want to express and get feedback on my ideas / opinions.

• I do still want to have a record of my interests at any given point in time.

• I do still want to motivate people to take action on improving the world.

My obvious mediums of choice are visual, written and on social media. A blog works. 

I think in dialogue, I’ve always read massive amounts. As a kid, my dad nicknamed me Johnny 5, after the robot from Short Circuit.
Input Input 

I don’t just want to create, I want feedback. I want to improve.
The internet is the perfect place for this kind of expression.
Collaborative. Open source. Sprawling.

But I'm very much a passive consumer on social media and in the written form.
How am I able to confidently create through my mediums of events, style, software for accountants?
But not through the internet.

What’s different about writing from those other outlets?

Each of those mediums is notably transitory.

Events are planned up to a clear deadline. The event happens, people have a good time and appreciate the infrastructure for their interactions. Then I’m still left with memories, stronger relationships and photos for my scrapbooks.

Style is iterative. If I didn't like my look one day I can change it up tomorrow. Nothing is fixed. I don't have to be pinned down.

Software is also iterative. You need to release something valuable to users every sprint. But you can always go back and remove a POC that missed the mark.

Writing is more permanent. A blog post or a tweet needs to be finished. Then it becomes tied to your name forever.

A screenshot of an stupid opinion you had when you were 17 can follow you for the rest of your life.

---

I'm more attracted to wikis and docs, stuff that can be added to over time.
Mediums that don’t centre me as the final answer.

I love musicals for this reason. There’s thousands of ways to reinterpret the same book and music. I want to see all the different perspectives on the thing I love. 

I want cool things to exist and I want to add value for people I care about. I don’t care about getting wider recognition for it.

Actually I really don’t want wider recognition for it.

You seem to like writing? Why don’t you write more? 

My mum told me recently that when I was a kid, I wanted to be a writer or a fashion designer. 

This surprised me, because my memory of what I wanted to be as a kid, was an efficient business bitch with amazing style. 

Very relatable scene from Stepford Wives (2004)

That is still something I want to be
I’m a really visual person. I love the spectacle. I want to be excellent.

But I do also love literature

Sadly I was never able to concentrate enough to write something I was proud of, my taste outgrew my ability.

I coped by recognising what I was hella good at - 👏 getting 👏 shit 👏 done 👏,

I got over my grief of not being an artistic savant by going to where all dreams go to die. Business school²  

If I couldn’t create, I could still be part of it by being a patron of the arts.
That rich old lady in the faux fur coat

Shut up and sublimate your envy productively like the rest of us, Lady Catherine

—

What changed?

I got diagnosed with ADHD last year. I’ve been dealing with a lot of grief from that.

So much of what I thought made me, me … has been shaped by my impaired executive function. 

First, what’s ADHD?

I’m pretty insulted by a lot of the TikTok crowd that try to frame it as a superpower.

You know who also has similar levels of cognitive impairment?

• Kids who’ve been poisoned with lead, 

• People with brain damage from head injuries 

• Elderly people with dementia.
  

I’m also going to come out and say it, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t meet the criteria for ADHD if I hadn’t spent so much of my life in front of screens.

If we assume executive function is naturally normally distributed in the population,
My prediction is that smartphones shifted the population leftwards like the below.

In pre-attention economy times, I’d have been closer to the middle. But I was already more susceptible to addiction so it just got worse.

This is also why I’m increasingly worried about smartphone use among the elderly. I think it’s a major risk to world stability. 

But that’s for another time.
back to me 😇

---

Contrary to popular belief, ADHD doesn't mean you can't do anything. It means you can't do anything consistently or focus long enough to do it well. Unless it is challenging or novel.

I never struggled with perfectionism in the past
because I knew I wasn't capable of perfect.
So what was the point? 

There's a freedom in being kinda bad at things. It means you don't put your full self into what you create. You just do things because you want to or it solves a problem.

I never really strived for excellence before, because I’d never be satisfied with my work.  

I felt a lot of envy towards the truly excellent.
I’d still do what I could to be around them though.
Because fundamentally, envy is about desire.  

---

My relationship with time has changed a lot. 

People with ADHD tend to experience time as binary now or not now. ³
You can know intellectually that this isn’t true but the feeling still shapes your actions.

I don’t need to have everything immediately anymore.
I can sit still and prioritise.
I am much more capable of thinking about the long term consequences of my actions. 

That does completely change how you think about your life. There was a lot of grief involved in that.

I don’t know when I came to the conclusion that I would die young. But I did have that as one of my fundamental beliefs.

Because it’s exhausting to have ADHD.
Everything is so urgent.
The only way to quiet the noise is to DO EVERYTHING.

But obviously you can’t do everything. 

----

There’s this fantasy if you die young that people will say, “Wow, what a tragedy! Imagine what she would have done if she had more time!” 

That’s pretty appealing to a young person.

As a teenager, I became obsessed with Sartre's concepts of:

• Facticity: The inherent facts about a person that shape how a person understands and interacts with the world.

• Transcendence: The ability to go beyond one's facticity or not be confined by it. 

Clearly I didn’t have the attention span to actually read his full take. That it is bad faith to identify with only your facticity or only your transcendence.

The idea that you can become your transcendence is a lie.

Which is why I’m always suspicious of worldviews that promise an afterlife. Because those can be used to manipulate the unstable. 

---

Something I've noticed while taking ADHD meds is that surprisingly I'm far less likely to actually do things. I enjoy just thinking about them and optimising the best way to do it.

I feel a lot more empathy towards my more conscientious friends. 

You actually could come up with a more complete answer by thinking about it. It was pretty annoying for me to interrupt your flow. Or dive in with a short term solution that creates a mess for you to clean up. 

I now see why you saw me as a problem.

Stimulant based ADHD meds slow everything down. They give me time to think about what I actually value. What I actually want. 

I used to artificially generate the stimulation, by putting myself under intense stress and pressure, so I could concentrate.

Now I don’t need to do that, I can just be. 

Who’s the audience?

When running an event, putting together an outfit or defining requirements, I've got a clear idea of my audience.

• For events, it's people I like and people who share my interests.

• For style, it's people who share my aesthetic sensibilities and appreciation for pockets.

• For software, it's overworked accountants who spend too much time doing pointless admin on cognitively unergonomic tools.

On the wider internet, it's less clear.
Private spaces for longer form discussion have been systematically removed or abandoned (like Twitter circles. Facebook groups etc).

Twitter, Substack and the EA forum are public and I feel it.

Strangers sometimes come up to me and say they liked my EA forum posts.

It’s always been polite.
I did write them because I like talking about this stuff.
EAs are my ideal audience.

But it genuinely makes me freeze up in fear.

—-

Why am I afraid?

Being famous has never been appealing to me. 

I score as highly extroverted on OCEAN tests, but that's only for a known group of people. 

A limited audience. 
Not a faceless entity 
With no concern for my welfare. 

My biggest fear is being compressed into my facticity while I'm still alive.
I really can't stand the thought of being taken out of context.

I’d rather die with clarity than be misunderstood.

---

Basically no one is reading this, why does it matter?

Before I came across EA, I’d never written anything creative online. No tweets, no posts, nothing except marketing for my events. 

Part of me wishes I'd started earlier,

If I'd been more prolific, I'd have a backlog of posts (of varying quality) that would mean each addition was less risky. 

I think it's partly this feeling of performing. Like every interaction is being watched. Not just now but by future people who come across it. 

---

My impression is that it's a common fantasy that you can work hard, prove your worth and fulfil your potential

Ace that big exam, win the big game, you'll live happily ever after. 

We can probably blame that on the Hollywood three act structure. 

I read somewhere that one of the reasons team sports are predictive of later success is precisely because it teaches the lesson that it isn't all about your one-off performance. 

It’s your average.

---

I think this is true for men but not for women. 

The gender role for men is to be productive,
The gender role for women is to be perfect. 

Neither of these are true. But if they feel true then it will guide people’s actions. 

Rayne Fisher Quann writes incisive essays about womanhood. She coined the verb to be “woman’ed” to describe when 

"everyone stops liking a woman at the same time".

I’ve been “woman’ed” many times, it really sucks.

It’s so fundamentally traumatising to feel the safety you thought you had, disappear from underneath your feet. 

I’m sure people reading this will think of cancel culture, of “woke”

But I’d like you to consider reading this prophetic post about Amber Heard and think about how it would feel to be humiliated at this level. Without any means to defend yourself. 

Realising that you reached too high. You crossed a line that you didn’t know was there.

Now no-one will defend you, because they fear the same will happen to them.

---

I've been trying to tweet more. 
I definitely had a fear of tweeting. 
A fear of being a bad tweeter. 
Of being cancelled, 
Of being publicly shamed, 
Of people silently deciding they don't like me because of my twitter presence.

There's the fantasy that if I tweet perfectly, in a way my future selves would eternally endorse, that I'll be safe and belong. 

But this is nonsense.

I don't need to belong everywhere and with everyone. Like everyone else, I just need to belong to some people, somewhere. 

Just because I know that's intellectually true, doesn't mean it's any less of an emotional weight guiding my actions. 

---

When you struggle with calibration, unless you can play the leadership or protector or provider role, you tend to need more vision and resources to feel safe. 

You aren't really safe if you can't reliably align yourself with the group. 

If you can't demonstrate alignment, you really need to demonstrate value add.

Be useful, Be funny, Be endlessly warm and kind

In general, women are better at calibrating with the group.
But that’s probably because they had to be
And it also means they are more vulnerable when the group turns on them. 

—

Uhhh, how does this relate to your blog?

The frustration with putting something out there incomplete is that, I’ll get feedback about something I’ve already thought about but I didn’t prioritise

The blocker is my capacity to write it up. Rather than me not having thought about it.

There’s this sense of running out of time.

Agile software development solves this by having an incremental release schedule. You release the value you have to add in pieces.

Because if the users don’t see value, you’ll run out of money.

Notably this is done in teams not alone. It’s only the product manager that owns the outcome. If you’re working with a good one, you’ll still get recognised for your contribution.

---

Large language models with access to the internet can do this weird thing, where if you put in someone's name, it summarises everything on the internet it knows about them. 

This was true before LLMs, it was maintained on Wikipedia, manually curated by dedicated volunteers. 

But it was only famous people that appeared there.
Now it's anyone who's ever been online.
And there’s no human curator. 

We’re all going to die someday⁴, being compressed into facticity is inevitable.
The weird thing with AI is I can already see it happening. 

---

It’s reading everything humans have ever written and compressing it. Simplifying our complexity into neat little summaries

Sometimes it’s really good - for the simple questions where we’ve come to agreement on the answer.

But there’s so much we haven’t finished yet

The explicit plan is to build god, in the hope it can enable us to transcend. That’s pretty crazy, they probably won’t be able to do it.

I hope they can’t do it, because I’m not ready to hand over control.

I’m only getting started, 

---

Maybe it can make better decisions than me, it’s definitely smarter than me now, but even if the decisions I make are bad.

I want to be free to make them. 

Fundamentally I think creativity is about personal expression to the group. To contribute your piece to the mosaic of humanity. 

I think there is so much to be horrified by, the poverty, the cruelty, the indifference. But that’s never a reason to crush someone’s ability to choose.

I don't need to cram everything I am into this one post.
But that doesn't stop me wanting to.

My brain may have slowed down
But it looks like the world is speeding up.

--- 

So anyway, I’m looking to publish blog posts more consistently
but I’m ditching the goal.
This is my hobby, not my job.
I’m more than my ability to be productive.
For what it’s worth, I think everyone is.

1. 7 posts in 6 months while working full-time is decent imo

2. JK - business school was great

3. Over-simplification but useful

4. Probably