I don’t want to paint or write long-form fiction in the age of AI.

This isn’t me going on strike or anything. It’s just a report from my soul-crushed inner landscape of not feeling like making art and not having felt like making art for the past few years.

Doing everything by hand feels pointless and tedious like writing a desktop app in all assembly without macros would be in the age of compilers. “Kind of like construction work with a toothpick for a tool.” as the lyric goes.

While combining AI and my own penstrokes into one image is taboo in this age of anti-AI sentiment. Using AI for flatting or backgrounds or art assistance is just as frowned upon as full-on prompt-jockeying and slop-pushing.

I can’t bring myself to paint or write longform. It’s like how stairs become that much more tedious to climb once an elevator is installed next to them. The hacker mindset, right? We want to do things for the first time and solve problems generally and recursively, solve a whole class of problems in one go.

As a painter I embraced G’MIC and brush-editing and scripting and path effects. 3D-modelling some blocks to help me with perspective lines that I then painted over. The digital equivalent of stippling with a toothbrush instead of placing dot by dot with a finetip. That was core to my whole art ethos: I make tools in order to make my art. I’ve made auto-masking scripts, Emacs comic lettering modes, auto-hatching brushes, stamp sprays, feathering path effects. For writing it’s been working on outliners and text metadata and timeline sorting tools.

I always try to look for the general solution.

Please don’t get the wrong idea that I’m trying to blame this bleak ennui on the anti-AI crowd. I think some of their arguments are great and I don’t look at AI art either. This isn’t a manifesto, I haven’t figured out an answer yet.

I’m not trying to push a context where I could combine AI art and my own art into one work, where I could make a comic mixing my own drawings and AI, where I could figure out some way to have AI assistance when writing that’s still primarily my own voice, without it getting hate and without me getting bans.

I understand full well the reasons why it can’t be like that. People in my bubble hate everything that AI has touched and they hate it not out of irrationality but for good reason and I do to.

It’s just me feeling hopeless since everything I used to do—write, paint, make music, write programs—that’s all gone. I don’t have any other skills. I can’t do anything else and everything feels so meaningless and tedious.

So that’s the main soulcrush: I wish I could use the tools in conjuction with my own hand, like how a camera was both a blessing and a curse to realistic painters. When the camera was invented it ate that them but they could also use it as a tool for reference. But mixing in AI with art production is rightly condemned since this time around the camera is evil. It’s more like horse&buggy vs a gas-guzzling, earth-wrecking automobile than it is like canvas vs lens.

Competing with the machine

The secondary soulcrush is that even if I make art, publishing that art into this AI world doesn’t feel fun either. Not that I worry that AI would learn from it (I have consented to that. This web site has 1300 text posts and 300 images all made by me and most of them CC-BY-SA and I have not minded if AI wanted to learn from them. That’s been OK by me. I haven’t fought scraping), but trying to upload music into in a world where 40% of the hit list is fully AI made just isn’t something I want to do. I don’t want to be put on the same plate as an AI dish.

I know I harp on the Monet/​Turner/​Twombly exhibition all the time but putting Twombly up with Monet and Turner felt so wrong. I don’t want to slag Cy Twombly because I do like his art too. It’s just that it felt like such a staring-at-finger-and-missing-the-moon moment. “Oh these three artists all look blurry so they belong together” where Monet and Turner are impressionists, the ultimate right-side-of-the-brain sublime-what-you-see conduits, Twombly is a lexical symbolist. That is the opposite.

If I were any one of the three them I’d feel slightly offended to be equivocated is what I’m saying. All three of them are good but it’s like “If you think we are the same you don’t understand what we were trying to do”.

I pour my heart and soul into this stuff—I’m “painting my nightmares” as a friend said when I was painting with him around—and I don’t want it served up on the same menu as a bunch of machine talk.

Or for another version of the same metaphor: ever been to a party and as you’re in a productive but exhausting conversation with some privitive screwhead that you’re giving the 101 to, up comes a even more wrongheaded schmoe and starts “agreeing” with you and now you’ve got two problems because you’re stuck in the middle of the original argument and the “whoah what did you just say?!” Completely hecked-up new argument.

Yeah, yeah, when I hate AI the least I can think of it as sort of a rhyzomatic L-space, an organism that grew through roots of a million voices. It’s not a machine talking, it’s us—it’s just been filtered and composted and regrown into new meaning by this organic-like ginormous ANN. But any such appreciation for AI I could possibly twist and turn and force my mind into feeling, I’m gonna put on permanent hold until the two biggest problems—first is is the extremely externalized and un-accounted-for costs to the planet and to other humans, and second is the increased centralization of means-of-production ownership—are solved, and it’s looking right now like they’ll never be.

I’m right there with y’all: When I find out that a song I’m listening to is AI, I turn it off. That’s happened twice now. I believe I can tell right away when a text or image is AI made but I know for sure I can not tell when it’s music. So it’s not out of repulsion I turn it off. I don’t know why. I just do.

I fear that a misread of the main text and of this appendix is as some sort of passive-aggressive slag agaist the AI-hating crowd. That I’m trying to be all sly and smug and friends-romans-countrymen about it. But that’s not it. I do understand where the hate against AI is coming from. I think some of the arguments are really bad and I don’t agree with those parts of it (as a copyright hater I’m especially sickened by those arguments relying on a proprietarization of visual expression) but I’m trying to be super frank and transparent about that. I’m not trying to be swifty or satirical here. We’re all stuck in this wrongheaded world during this utterly misguided era and navigating it best we can. To the exent that people feel threatened by AI, I do too and that’s the whole point of this essay.

My entire reason for living has suddenly been swept away and with it my footing. I don’t know what to do for a job and I don’t know what to do for leisure. It all feels so meaningless. Don’t worry, I’m not about to [end it][ei]—my mental health toolbox is jam packed and I get by with a li’l help from my friends. For now. But on an existential and philosophical level (and on an income level because what’s my job gonna be?), I’m like what the heck? Where do I even go from here? I don’t know how to do anything other that this. I thought I was renaissance and multi-field with my writing and music and art and programming and game-design but it’s all been fell-swooped by this slop singularity. I’m too dyspraxic for woodcarving or sewing. All I could do was this stuff.

The glimmers of hope and why they’re unbearably faint

I’m not saying never. Maybe I’ll just pick up the pen or the guitar one day when I for some dumb reason feel like it. The most recent batch of art I made was all pen & paper. Scribbling every mermaid scale by hand. Gillian Welch has a song lyric “We’re gonna do it anyway even if it doesn’t pay” (originally a pro-copyright screed and that part does not sit well with a copyright abolitionist like me, but that’s okay since it’s such a great song). Yeah, maybe we are. I just don’t feel like it and I haven’t felt like it in a long time.

Last time the world faced this problem, just over a hundred years ago, what happened was modernism. When the machine (the camera, in that case), mastered the means more than we could, what was left to us was pure ends, pure expression. Maybe this time around the machine has encroached a little bit too much on the expression part of things—for sure it has on the slop algo side of things, but that particular variety of suffering is optional—but maybe it can still become a vehicle, a communication tool for what we want to tell each other.

AI colophon

As I continue my self-racking of heart and mind to figure out why I hate smartphones and internet and screens so much, here’s one more reason I came up with and this one is not pretty. Kind of wish that I had stayed in the self-deluded dark and not figured this one out:

Once upon a time, a subconscious part of my own twisted mind must’ve realized that if it’s not possible for me to do something, that’s the best excuse for not having to do it. “Oh, I can’t go and check and fix and do all that for you now, I don’t have internet here.” “Oh, I didn’t see your email, I wasn’t at home.”

I can’t do that right now because I had to walk away from the tools.

I finally managed to track down this unknown impulse by thinking long and hard about just exactly why, as I’m trying out mods for Light Phone III, it’s so important for me to not be able to, for example, open browser or F-Droid or Termux on that thing. Like, I found myself uninstalling AntennaPod because of how it has an “open website” widget on podcasts that lets me, from there, access the open web. Other apps where I’m like “oh no from the help page or even log in screen I can break out into the open web so okay goodbye this app was good but I need to stay disconnected”. I had to ask myself why this mattered so much to me that I’m going through ridiculous hoops for it. And it’s two reasons. The biggest is that I just don’t want to spend all nights and all mornings online. It’s nice to do podcasts or audiobooks late at night as long as I then have to physically leave bed in the morning and get a tablet if I wanna go online, because I’ve found again and again that if I don’t, I’ll miss breakfast, I’ll miss the entire day. Or if I can go online in the middle of the night, I’ll wake up and do that. That’s right, the even bigger reason than my laziness is my lack of impulse control. Hmm, this essay is making me doubt my own awesomeness.

Secondary reason is the aforementioned shirking. Being offline as a way to get out of work. Apparently I have this hangup that “If I can do it, I’m gonna keep finding myself in situations where I ought to do it”. My conscious mind, my values, really do want to help and say yes, to the extent that my subconscious wants to protect myself by putting up these barriers. I’m not the type of person that can just easily say “no I don’t wanna” or “I’ll get to that later, I’m doing something else now” or “I’m gonna put it on airplane mode for a few hours”. But my other brain noped out for me, ahead of time, by making sure I don’t have internet in my pocket and making sure that online is something I can and do walk away from.

Now, to pull back from the self-deprecation for three seconds and try to figure out how this kind of antisocial shirking-through-disconnection sometimes actually can be the responsible choice.

It might be the case that I can do stuff more efficiently and faster by using batching and a more appropriate and capable device like a bigger screen and a real keyboard. If I can reply to ten emails spread out over the day in a way that adds up to forty-five minutes total or even more due to context switching and mindset and resources and thumb-typing vs touch-typing, that’s an overall loss if I otherwise could’ve replied to them all in one half-an-hour window.

The batching can also foster a more responsible selection of duties making sure society gets the most out of my limited spoons. If more requests come in than I can handle, batching them can help me get enough of an overview to select the most worthwhile ones. (Uh, that’s not to say that I’m good at it yet and if I’ve missed some of y’all’s messages that’s more likely due to a mistake on my part than a deliberate deselection.)

Even if it can’t, the shirking might be a vital rest and recuperation and acknowledgment of limited bandwidth.

This is also interbraided with the other reasons for going offline, like my frustration with the mental ice age of the corporate-owned, appified society. Maybe I can’t explain why I don’t want to go on Facebook but if I physically can’t because I don’t have a smartphone with me, I don’t have to worry as much about the other person trying to convince me or bully me. Nope, sorry, I just literally can’t.

I heard fourth hand with citations long forgotten that too much boredom can be dangerous, cause depression etc (and some sprawlbrained people like me are extra sensitive to that) but too little boredom is also unhealthy and is much more common.

So I’ve started practicing boredom a bit more. When I first started dumbphone I had a long-running, then–still-going meditation practice, and while at first I was listening to radio and music on the dumbphone, the headphone jack quickly broke leaving me bored when walking around which was horrible at first, then nice and I got used to walking without the headphone soma, then it led to me just walking less until I figured out how to hook up an old 2DS game console to play podcasts and gradually I got bored less often and when the contagion first hit my meditation practice also ended and then two years into that I got really sick.

And then two years after that, two years ago now, I got re-obsessed with the whole phone-hating thing, I’m hyperfixated on it, all that I eat and sleep and breathe is hatred of smartphones and of the modern web, and I am gradually getting into retro aesthetics even when it’s mostly larping and the for-show component is at least as important as the for-real part of it.

I got away from glowyglowy screens in favor of e-ink and RLCD and aural interfaces (radio and podcasts) and paper books both for writing and reading. Thinking all of that was my proverbial nicotine patch away from constant online and that actually facing the horrible silence would be the next step. And, it eventually was. It took me a while to get there but I’m dipping my toe in it now.

Not all the time and I’m not forcing myself too much. It’s more like (figuratively speaking) exercising, nudging myself a liiittle bit and then it feels nice. Maybe I’ll have headphones off on the way there and put them on on the way home or vice versa.

Being bored here in Stockholm (where I’ve lived for almost twenty years) feels like traveling. That’s a missed reference these days because these days traveling is the same as home. Your “For You”–page looks the same away as it does at home. But for me, putting away the book and headphones evoked a sense memory of travel, of more fully noticing the air, lamps, cobblestones, trees, trash fluttering in the wind, rain on the window.

Ironic given that Stockholm, specifically, I first started visiting only after I’ve gotten hooked on headphones. I’d always put on the Way Beyond Blue album on the repeat-all mode when I was here so if I want to evoke a feeling of traveling to Stockholm specifically, embracing the headphone life to the tunes of sweet Catatonia would be the ticket for that. But that’s not what I meant. Just that sitting at the deli counter with headphones off made me more aware of the world is all.

Being bored is scary, and for good reason: the brain wants to have fun, fun things makes it easier to learn and be happy and connect. But physical exercise is similarly scary-for-a-good-reason; instinctively I don’t want to give up precious, hard-won energy on unnecessary, unplayful, duty-bound movement. Conclusion: right now, as in the past few weeks, I’ve finally re-discovered the joys of boredom, along with the pains and dreads of it and how holding on through that pain is sometimes rewarded with how alive everything is and other times is just why-am-I-even-doing-this?

The existential dilemma of boredom is wasting time vs tasting time. At the end of all things, what will deserve the most regret? The mystic, the ascetic might think “Dang it! I should’ve embraced my curiosity, my desire to explore, I should’ve scrolled down for more videos, I should’ve let my brain cyber up and go discover and get recommended more and more and more stuff online.” And the screen junkie might think “Why did I waste it on this compulsion, this digital sugar, this junk, why did I never ever look up from this pervasive trash can I had my head stuck in all this time?”

Knowing whether boredom is good or bad becomes a pretty important question. I really wish I had the answer to that because that’s an angel I’m in a particularly nasty no-holds-barred cage fight with.

Until I figure out an answer for this, here’s a temporary answer, a cop-out, a Gordian solulu sidestepping that question:

Let’s say for the sake of argument that the experience-rich life is the better option over the staring-at-the-wall shikantaza yawnfest. Buddha don’t at me because that’s not where I’m gonna land, this is gonna be rhetorics, it’s the null hypo that we’re postulating and putting a pin in. Like in a sudoku, we’re just saying if this is an eight, would that cause contradictions elsewere? We’re not painting in the eight with ink just yet.

Now, the next question becomes what kind of experiences we’d want to fill that experience-rich life with. Actually doing stuff? Helping other people? Doing meaningful things? Not drowning in procrastinating and self-hatred and compulsive behavior? Okay, so step two then is thinking “we postulated how awesome and truly great the TikTok-drowned life is compared to the paint-dry life of just sitting. But it’s only the second best compared to all the stuff I wish I could be doing instead.” With me so far?

Then step there becomes: okay, okay, what if some amount of deliberate boredom is what’s gonna help you get away from that second best thing into the best thing? If the anti-boredom compulsion is what’s exacerbating procrastination and leaving us unable to get going on the things that really would matter to us, and overcoming the fear of boredom is what’s gonna unlock creativity, problem-solving, even regain a tiny bit of executive function? If that is true—and I don’t have the answer to that yet—then boredom is not wasting it. If that is true, boredom becomes win-win:

In the one branch of the dilemma where boredom is awesome and boredom means savoring life-as-it-is, here and now, boredom is already the winning ticket, and in the opposing branch of the dilemma where fun and busyness and jamjamjam is the ideal, boredom is still a stepping stone right into the best version of that richer life that helps us sift signal from noise.

Please don’t conflate that with that myth of how supposedly Warren Buffett at one point said “make a list of your 25 most important things, now circle your five most important ones. Done? Put the remaining twenty on an absolutely-do-not-do list.” That is fake, that doesn’t work, I’ve tried it, he never said that, I wouldn’t wanna emulate him anyway. Here, I’m not saying “step away from the 20 other appealing things in order to somehow magically receive focus and motivation and energy for the 5 best things”; instead, I’m saying that perhaps stepping towards some amount of boredom might give you the tools to better work with the more important things.

To what extent all this philosophy applies more to mainstream-headed folks and is a complete mismatch to sprawlbrains like us, that’s an unsolved question for me. It could be that this boring structure was made specifically for us and is vital lifeblood for us scatterheads whereas the plainjanes don’t need it as much, or it could be the other way around where I’m barking up the wrong tree altogether and I should try to find a more fun and entertaining toolbox to get through the day. I’m gonna keep exploring this path for a little while longer. It’s early days yet for me. And heaven knows I’m grasping at straws at this point. 😭

“Doomscrolling” originally specifically meant scrolling through bad news and only later was generalized to all compulsive scrolling, all kinds of scrolling where you afterwards, when to the sessions of sweet silent thought, summon up remembrance of things past and wonder why the heck you spent your precious hours on the dreck you just waded through.

I do think this generalization of the word has merit, that it was driven by a growing realization that it’s not just sad and overwhelming news that make us feel this bad after scrolling. Partly because compulsive behavior almost always feel so much worse than intentional behavior but mostly because what’s out there really is depressing even if it’s the umpteenth cat video or true crimes thread.

But that’s not to completely discount the doomery origins of the word. I feel guilty for how I contribute to that with my own posts since intermixed with all my charming li’l semantics and library components I want to raise awareness of urgent political issues and I often do so in a sublimated exasperation or sad rage. (Because of the “slot machine effect”, the mix of glad&sad might be worse than if it was all doom all day.)

I’m in a bit of a bind since I also believe that people—especially those in power—are more underinformed about the problems than they are overinformed. Both are problems and lead to apathy in their own way, one through not knowing about the problem and the other by being overwhelmed by and scared of the problem, but talking to people and listening to politicians I more often get the impression that they completely underestimate the issues.

It’s like if a friend needs to get going with packing up by moving day. On the one hand it’s really good to be gentle and break things down and say things like “just do one box today”. On the other hand it’s not good if they believe moving day is the twentieth of May when it’s really the twentieth of March.

The whole reason why I keep going writing these texts, why this blog still exists (it started as a place to post my paintings and some Unix advice) is because I care about these political issues.

But I question that often, when I think about the doomerism in doom scrolling, especially since I live my own life so filteredly, only exposing myself very few very short headlines once or twice a day and the occasional rarer deepdive into specific topics.

In my local circle of friends I can’t be the one who quits reading news. In some constellations I’m the one most on top of things, in others we need to help each other keep our gullibility in check. Widening the network to more faraway friends I do have a friend in Malmö who does a good job at looking out when I need to take a break from news for a few weeks.

But applying that mentality to the wider word is hubris. I’m never gonna do a better job than something like Skeptical Science.

There is a “clever” personality type, I’ve had several in my life, that become more susceptible to propaganda and myths when they are presented as some kind of secret insider knowledge or a way to get a leg up on what the general public knows.

Like our climate discussion group in my old hometown fell apart when one of the more driving members suddenly switched overnight to the “well actually it’s not gonna be a problem because peak oil is coming soon and that’s gonna be a bigger problem” myth. That was 20 years ago and no, climate change by far was the way bigger driver of calamities during those two decades. Keeeping his focus on that would’ve been much more important and saved more lives and also the solution to climate change includes leaving it in the ground which includes becoming less oil-dependent which also addresses peak oil automatically whereas the peak oil hysteria didn’t come with a solution beyond sky-is-falling hysteria fueling a carter-doctrine style “oil interests” panic grab at immense cost in human lives.

When a lie is being presented as an obvious truth, it can still fool a lot of folks. But to a certain “clever” kind of personality, a lie that’s presented as a secret truth becomes much more convincing. When it’s wrapped in “well actually” trivia. When it’s “if you memorize this fact you’ll know something most people don’t know”, that becomes tasty to them even when that fact is an outright lie.

Last night I dreamed that I traveled far and wide through many distant lands. What did I see there? A scientist named Professor Meme and his friend, who went by Joe or Jake or if it was Robert—you know how dreams can get fuzzy—and their buddies, a couple of clown comics of yesteryear.

They explained to me that “Everyone in this land is sorted into one of two categories. Evans, who have an even number of teeth (usually 28, 30, or 32), and Prims, who have a prime number of teeth (usually 29 or 31).

Evans have higher salaries and love vanilla and comedy and yellow clothes. Prims do all the housework and love chocolate and drama and orange clothes.”

Through the life-changing magic of dreams I had been granted the super power of “vector space analysis” (which is how I knew it was a dream because in real life I can’t do those things) so I traversed their realm and saw that yeah, for the most part, those traits did cluster together. Usually. But there were plenty of chocolate lovers who told me in confidence that they wouldn’t mind a good comedy every once in a while. And the whole thing about lower salaries turned out to be a pretty big point of contention! There were a lot of traditionally-minded folks clad in orange who said they were glad to do the housework, they were better at it than their yellow-draped companion who always left the butter out anyway and broke plates.

Because yes. Prims and Evans were usually paired up in constellations of one of each. That had actually been the largest political issue of all time just one generation ago; whether two Prims could shack up together, or an Evan with an Evan. And why always groups of two? That’s what you get with dream logic… I found a trove of old newspaper articles that proclaimed the collapse of society if two Evans were to partner up, and to vote for the Traditional Constellation Party that would protect everyone from that (the same party that incidentally also wanted to steal from the poor and give to the rich) or the proverbial sky would fall.

That battle had been lost and in some areas of the land I did meet some Orange+Orange couples and some Yellow+Yellow ones too.

Professor Meme and Joe/Jake/Robert didn’t seem to mind that as much as they were fighting a “new” menace: people who didn’t neatly fit in these two categories.

Actually… talking to them about it was quite confusing in that dream way where things tend to shift and morph, because when I said that the salary/housework thing seemed a little unfair, they said “of course! We fight for the rights of Prims, and these reactionary category straddlers are muddying that issue with their performative housework and parodic chocolate-gobbling. It’s disgusting!” In all my stay in this faraway land I never saw them actually talk about the rights of the Prims; in fact, time and again I saw them side with factions that wanted to constrain Prims even further, even lower salaries for Prims, even more housework. “Don’t you see?” they said angrily. “We’re prioritizing their right to even be a Prim. Isn’t that the most fundamental of all Prim rights? And now all of a sudden it’s under attack after being completely static throughout history.” (I actually saw in museums there that a couple of hundred years ago, everyone was wearing orange regardless of which ice-cream flavor they were eating. I also saw that the vanilla-eaters were all strictly wearing velcro shoes and all the chocolate-eaters were strictly wearing laced shoes, and I saw that when the first chocolate-eaters had dared to put on velcros just a few decades prior, they had been fined and jailed, but these days I saw all kinds of people—including Professor Meme and Joe/Jake/Robert—wearing velcro shoes with completely no reaction from anyone because it was completely normal now. But each younger generation thinks they’re the epitome of punk and each older generation thinks they’re the sentinels of eternity.)

There were three kinds of people that this duo and their clown comic hangers-on hated. The first were those who blurred the lines. A vanilla-eater who loved drama. A comedy watcher clad in orange. This was the worst thing. “No! No! You’ve got to stick to your tooth-given lane!”

The other kind where those who sought (or provided) dental care. Pulling of wisdom teeth, dentures, fixing cavities, repairing crowns. People who had after dental care ended up with a different quantity and/or quality of teeth, and reregistered as such in the National Dentist Registry and applied for a new passport. This was also the worst thing. Whether or not they then sought to associate with the traits associated with their new dental parity group or not. Dental care was called “mutilation” and “grooming” and several laws were on the docket to outlaw it.

So one of the most confusing parts of the dream was how they hated the some of the “cluster transgressors” for being too visible and they’d yell “we can always tell”. They hated others for being too invisible and they’d yell “stop confusing us, put on your orange clothes, you’re being deceitful”. There was no winning with them. You’d think sticking rigidly to a thin line between these two ends would’ve made them happy but those who tried that ended up getting both kinds of hate since those hatreds overlapped by quite a margin.

Looking back through the history of the land had told me that while conflicts between the orange-clad and yellow-draped had been an issue for ten thousand years, this latest batch of category-separation hysteria had started out as quite a minority, an issue only a few people had known about or cared about.
That’s when they came up with their stroke of genius:
Sports.

They brought up how in some sports like championship flossing, the 300-yard brush stroke, and pie eating contests, different teeth were likely to perform differently, and they then generalized that to all sports like long-distance running or Omaha hold’em. And this did become popular! Even the emperor of the land would as a complete non-sequitur bring up how ridiculous he thought the idea was of an Evan participating in the Prim sports category. Of course, this emperor was a strong proponent of the steal-from-the-poor-give-to-the-rich politics that the dental parity traditionalists like Professor Meme and Joe/Jake/Robert had sided with so he saw a chance to make hay while the sun shone.

And what started in sports soon extended to all facets of society. Going to the restaurant, going to the grocery store, even going to the powder room! Leaving your apartment in any way would induce scrutiny and accusations and paranoia, for everyone. All for the greater good of the Olympics!

This sudden sports-mania ushered in a new law: you shall be categorized as Prim or Evan at birth. I know, I know, babies don’t have teeth. And neither do old people. That’s just how crazy this dream was! The doctors (the few remaining doctors, since dental care was under legal attack) would just take their best guess. And that was the parity category you would stick to for the rest of your entire life. Problem solved easily and perfectly.

That created a third kind of people for our diligent duo to hate on. For example, there was a boxer… or maybe it was a runner. The doctors had categorized them as Prim at birth. Which they were happy with. They loved orange. They loved chocolate. They loved drama. All was well. Until they won. Didn’t their mouth look kind of even on TV? Something about the cheeks, the way they moved… an invasive dental counting procedure was promptly ordered and it turned out they had… I forget if they had two teeth (both prime and even) or 27 teeth (neither prime nor even) but out came the hate, long before the mouthcount. That’s how it was in this land. They hate you if you transgress your medically assigned dental parity cluster and they hate you if you stick to it. They hated everyone until there was no-one left and darkness and decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

You see, they were scientific and rational.

And in their rationality and science-mindedness, they had come up with all manners of slags and mocking names to apply to everyone who didn’t stick to their lane. “Oh, so you’re stick-to-your-laners?” I asked, and they boiled over with anger. “How dare you utter such a slur?!” they screamed, “We’re just normal people!”

After a few years of this, they came up with the term “cluster-critical” for themselves. I thought that didn’t make any sense. Weren’t they the ones who were more strongly than anyone else trying to really enshrine these societal clusters of traits into two immutable granite-carved groups, and erase all outliers and overlappers? How is that being cluster-critical? They slapped me with a splintered ruler and said “You dolt! You clod!” and explained that the whole idea of speaking more generally about the two groups as being mere “clusters of traits” was “propaganda of the cluster movement” which they opposed, which they saw as denying the biological tooth of dental parity, denying how almost everyone has either an even amount of teeth or a prime amount of teeth. How that’s a natural fact. (Question marks on how that 27-denying factoid, even if it had been true, would apply to ice cream flavors, clothes color, or TV genres.)

I asked them if is this what they spent all their time fighting about? What about climate change? It has already killed millions of people. They just looked at me stubbornly, and started to explain, once more, from the top, something about the delicate flavors of vanilla.

You would think that in this land, everything would’ve been teeth-forward. Everything would’ve been all teeth teeth teeth on billboards and t-shirts and mugs. But actually no. Teeth were a very private thing and had been so throughout the ages. Ogling teeth was considered vulgar, and was sometimes done in an exploitative way. You’d see a poster with teeth in a workshop or a pair of rubber dentures hanging off the back of a truck, for shock value, but normally people covered their mouths when they ate. When a movie scene featured bare teeth, usually a “tooth stunt double” subbed in for the actor, or dentures were worn. Asking each other about their teeth was a big taboo.

Under a mossy stone in the deep, dark wood, I found a file showing that before they came up with this teeth-counting business, they had been counting people’s nose hairs. Everything had been all about the nose hairs. Until they discovered that the teeth thing had a three percent stronger correlation with the socially created cluster roles.

So if you’ve ever wondered why some wear yellow and others wear orange, now you know.

I’ve retraced my steps trying to remember how I became such a screentime hater. It started with me not wanting to be on board with Facebook or other proprietary apps. But after a few years years of this I got so sick of being a FOSS weirdo which no-one could understand or respect or see why it was important or mattered. Like people hate, really super duper hate on vegans but at least they understand what it is.

I think that’s why I wanted to unplug entirely instead. Somehow people understand ludditism waaay more than they understand GNU slash Lin slash ux or “I don’t have Google System Frameworks” or why I can’t open their doc files or whatever. That, they can’t get, but someone showing up with a dumbphone, that makes more sense.

But sooner than I would’ve thought, I internalized this ludditism and it became part of my identity, it became one of my things or at least aspirationally—I get sucked into online rabbit holes every now and then, like everyone else. To the extent that I often almost forget where it started.

I crawled back online after a few months of pandemic isolation and “joined socials” IRC at first, then Gemini and Fedi two months later. I had been on hobby forums all along like Story Games, BGG, or WRNU.

And it was great at first (and I got talked into ending my 22 year long streak of being FOSS-only, via an awful iPad) but then I got into my head that my health issues was exarcebated by screens after I took a couple of digital detox vacays and really enjoyed them and felt really healthy and serene. Going back on and off different kinds of screens I’ve found that some health problems do seem to correlate and others not at all. I got really really sick December 2021 and stayed sick for many many months.

Maybe I won’t ever be able to sustainably capture the “offline mindset” in my day-to-day and I’ll always just succumb to procrastination and temptation but I dunno. Gonna keep pushing on just a little bit longer.

In Stockholm, traffic lights have a push button that pedestrians are supposed to press when they cross and all the type A personalities that’d press the button even when it had already been pressed and lit up used to bug me, an annoyance that persisted in me for maybe six months or so after I found out that no, it doesn’t “reset” the pushing and we don’t have to wait longer. It’s just a redundant, safely idempotent extra press for no benefit or effect. It’s fine.

These days I have the opposite problem: people who don’t press at all, even when it’s unlit! Almost no-one seems to know that they need to actually press the traffic light button!

While a lot of this is due to people being distracted phone addicts and I’ve seen again and again someone arriving at a traffic light, not pressing the button but instead immediately whipping out their phone and then keeping it up from then on even as they absentmindedly cross the street.

But I have two other stories about this both from within the past three days and neither involved phones for the most part. First, there’s this one crossing where there’s roadwork being done so one side of the street have a metal bridge to safely walk on but they cannot reach the push button and I walked from that direction. I had no way to reach the button. On the other side of the street two women arrived; the one nearest the button had a dog in a leash and a paper tote but could reasonably easily have pushed the button. After a while even more people arrived (some of these latter arrivals were phone zombies, breaking the theme of this essay, which is about the more general trend of absentminded lack of awareness even when phones are away) and they weren’t carrying anything at all. I tried gesturing to them to push the button but they didn’t. They stood and waited for a while without pushing the button and after a while they just started crossing the street jaywalkingly, even though the light still said don’t walk. So I gave up and do the same. And of course Murphy being a 🐝, that’s when cars wanted to turn in on that there and almost hit us. Because of the construction the sidewalk was way closer to the cars than normal so using the traffic light was even more important than usual. I was so salty that they just didn’t press.

Later that same evening at another intersection on the same busy street two men in their fifties were walking ahead of me; along the same street as me just ahead so they arrived at the traffic lights first. They decided to just cross the street immediately without pushing no sissy “traffic light button” but after just a few step as cars roar by they reconsidered and stepped back. And they didn’t press the button. They just stood there until I caught up and could press the button. It eventually turned green and we all could cross. We could’ve crossed way sooner if they had just pressed the button and then it would’ve been green by the time I got there. Patience? Yeah, yeah… how long will that take?

I saw a docu about a nun who’d spent 25 years in a Carmel cloister. Which for Sweden is unusual. Obv I was fishing for info about digital minimalism but the docu didn’t deliver what I wanted in that regard. She says at one point “We don’t have radio, TV, or newspapers, and we use internet very sparingly”. I was like “Internet?! Deets please! Exactly how many times a day do you refresh Antenna or sync your newsgroups? What’s your IRC bouncer, how’s your milter pipeline?” to no avail.

And while for her that’s a 25-years-and-counting journey, for the lady next to me in the theatre even the 100 min runtime was too long to forgo checking socials apparently. I don’t blame her; that’s just a sign of how addictive these apps actually are. (Okay, I do blame her a little but I try not to.)

So while the movie was slim pickings for my monomaniacal obsession with offline living (which for me has become increasingly theoretical since I got tablets to suck me back online after switching to dumbphone eight years ago), the devotional side of it was more rewarding. I love “The Interior Castle” and have read it a couple of times. But at the same time these are the folks (and her fam def belonged to the most reactionary faction) that fight against reproductive autonomy and affirming care—not just for themselves but in legislative chambers around the world. That subtext stayed sub, glossed over, unexamined in this film. Overall a worthwhile watch if you can complement it with your own political awareness and ability to recognize efforts to bind the outgroup.

Virtue signaling is great actually.

Clearly communicating our values can prevent a lot of grief and help stand up for what’s right.

Early on before I started writing more explicitly about politics I got a couple of “I love your blog but why don’t you write more about the supremacy of the Aryan Race?” and I’m like oh no, down the line something went wrong and I’d better make it more clear how I feel about the world and why. Everyone is welcome to read and since I have a lot of opinions on everything, some of them wrong, I don’t expect anyone to agree on everything but if I can make someone see the world a li’l differently that’s great.

In discourse lately I’m seeing a gap where on the one hand we have straight up apology for evil, excuses for abuse, for sexism, for racism, and DARVO attacks on “woke” and on “virtue signaling”. On the opposing hand we have self-proclaimed saints who have never (or at least never since they proverbially woke up) had a kyriarchal or jealous or problematic thought or notion. And when these saints fall they fall very far and very fast.

What’s missing is a way to cultivate awareness of our shortcomings and in order to better ourselves. I’d trust “I sometimes have racist thoughts that I try to catch and see through and examine and not get fooled by” over either “I’ve never been problematic (or I haven’t since I became a born-again intersectional feminist)” or, worse, “here’s a 39 chapter book on why racism is good actually and anything else is virtue signaling woketry”.

The former camp, intersectional social justice, y’all know I love you and this isn’t a slag on you but what I wanna add to that worldview is a bit of solution-orientedness and awareness practice. I have thought, said, and even done things I would wanna cancel myself over but treating each other right is a process.

I think this one example of this that’s easy to understand just for how ridiculous it is, is how sometimes new vegans can forget how up until three months ago they themselves were among the meat-eaters they now attack.

We’ve all been there, so I don’t blame them, it’s just illustrative of how sometimes it’s so easy to see the motes in our fellow humans’ eyes while we ourselves are so deep in timberland we don’t even notice the forest.

That’s not an apology for bad things; it’s a reveille against bad things, against the bad things in us all.

People hated meetings and phone calls and even answering machines so our current world of short text messages is one we strived for years in order to finally build.

People hated reading books, too, that was for eggheads and nerds. So boring. And even watching TV was boring. Even after they made 500 channels the meme was “500 channels and nothing good on”. So today’s world of tailor-made, algorithmic For You pages is a godsend by our corporate overlords.

We have finally built the perfect life and I hate it.

Of course I hadn’t really planned on all this infrastructure becoming co-opted by a handful of corporations quickly becoming the richest in the world nor that our newfould decentralized politically liberated media would immediately get gunked up by a bunch of nazis and climate denialists.

I had a hard time getting along with the people around me (still do) so for me the digital world was a paradise. All positive. It wasn’t until Facebook won the internet that I wanted out. And heaven knows that I want out. I’ve been fighting to get out for a long time. First of October was my eight year anniversary without smart phone. A decade prior to that I spent one year without internet at home, only at work (and that, 2007, was before I got smartphone, which I got in fall of 2009 and had for eight years until fall of 2017).

As I rail against The Internet, I have to remind myself that people wanted it. I wanted it. Yes, I didn’t want the Meta-owned Google-goopy AppStore-locked prison toy internet full of brownshirted redcaps but I shoulda coulda woulda seen the writing on the wall. The network effect is a helluva drug.

But… now we have options? We have Fedi, we have Gemini, we still have e-mail, we even have Jitsi and XMPP and IRC (kind of). We have Marginalia and XXIIVV and The Internet Phonebook.

Why do I still want out? Can’t I just shake this hangup and keep on rocking on the free net? Yeah, maybe! It’s just that: I’m not happy with where I am in life and I am trying to make changes. And I’ve been trying for a very long time now. More than two decades. Where I’ll end up after those changes, I don’t know. In the grave, most likely, with the battle unfinished and unwon. One day at a time, my friends.♥︎

A friend of mine has that same attitude and it always bug me because if me and him woulda read one book each and then teach each other what we learned, that would’ve a lot of the time end up saving both of us time, and we would’ve learned things better and being able to bounch ideas off each other and help explain things. Even more so if we were three people who read one book each and taught each other as opposed to reading three books each.

That’s actually one of my biggest regrets in life. That I didn’t have enough of a community to learn from and teach. Trying to learn art for example, and programming, was insanely hard. For art I was on my own, for programming everyone was so freaking macho that we weren’t really teaching each other (and when we started doing it just a little, things got better not worse). Same goes for roleplaying with that awful cult of GM secrecy in the nineties making sure everyone stunk at GM:ing and no-one getting better. And making music? There I did have a lot of people to learn with and ask and answer to and lo and behold I got a lot better at that a lot quicker than the toughing-it-out-alone type skills.

And when I belatedly hopped online due to pandemic-induced loneliness in 2020 even at the old dog trick age of 40 I rapidly learned more at a greater rate than I had ever done before and I hope others have been able to learn from me also.

So while a curious mind and as stack of man pages can go far, a group of curious minds working together can go even further.♥︎

People cancel each other for one of two things, right? Either they’re suspected of having done something bad, something they’re denying but the allegations are credible. Or, and this is so starkly different: they are pundits baldfacedly spouting evil. They’re using their platform and their megaphone to stoke the flames of hate and persecution and oppression. They’re not denying it, they’re proud of it. We can’t treat these two things the same.

But from that second in the garden, we humans were all cursed with foot-in-mouth disease. People say misunderstandable things or there’s hearsay or there’s “can you believe they allegedly said such-and-such (or so I’ve been told)”.

These categories aren’t clear cut. I’ve seen people be canceled for supposedly having said the opposite of what they are really saying and fighting for, while the most vile demagogues manage to slither away with dog whistles and transparent “I’ve just got a few concerns” slogans.

So being a thinking human being isn’t easy. There is no silver bullet and we always have to case-by-case it. And it’s only with the full awareness of how we’re condemned to case-by-casing it and our lack of a universal solution that I put forth the following rule of thumb that works sometimes:

Argue for or against the idea rather than against the person. That’s not to say that every idea should be debatable in some cacophonous “marketplace” of random junk. See, this is what I didn’t want. Overstating things.

I believe good intentions IOR good results is okay. I’m calling it iorist ethics. Ior for the logical gate of inclusive or, and, it’s an initialism for intentions or results.

Consequentialists are like:
Good ints, good rez: 👍🏻
Good ints, bad rez: 🚫
Bad ints, good rez: 👍🏻
Bad ints, bad rez: 🚫

And deontologists are like:
Good ints, good rez: 👍🏻
Good ints, bad rez: 👍🏻
Bad ints, good rez: 🚫
Bad ints, bad rez: 🚫

But I’m like:
Good ints, good rez: 👍🏻
Good ints, bad rez: 👍🏻
Bad ints, good rez: 👍🏻
Bad ints, bad rez: 🚫

The bar for evil gets really high because you need to both mean ill and do ill. The world’s nastiest actual cannibal if he fails at eating you and ends up saving you? Complete hero, gets a medal on Yavin.

Now, don’t worry: even if you actually are evil by meaning ill and doing ill, like you’re acting selfishly and duplicitously in a way that hurts others, there’s still a way back through forgiveness. You can become good and stop being evil. Don’t misinterpret that as an out to deliberately keep being evil knowing there’s forgiveness waiting for you. Instead be inspired by the forgiveness and change your ways immediately! Or stay good if you’re already good.

Now, just like consequentialism and deontologism, what actions actually count as good or bad, just and unjust, fair and unfair, cool or dorky is another question entirely. This is just about what “layer” the ethics operate on. Whether good intentions really pave the road to hell or if they’re cool actually even if you accidentally mess up.

Existentialist ethics?

But Sandra, haven’t you pledged allegiance to existentialist ethics before? Yup! Like deontologists, they are all about intentions; unlike deontologists (who are rules-based), the existentialists are all about using your own head & heart and case-by-casing it. I still love that approach over consequentialism. I’m just adding some celebration for the accidental heroes who mean ill but end up doing good by mistake.

It’s an open question in philosophy to what extent ends justify means.

In the twisted world of “Hockey Jersey Ethics”, the team justifies the means. This mentality acts as if no act is too evil if it’s done by your own team. Stopping and asking if we’re the baddies is derided as a lack of team spirit. “Good” they define by who’s doing it, not what they’re doing. The end goal? They lost track of that a long time ago. It’s forgotten.

Inside of me there are two wolves. One is called “I ought to” and the other is called “I don’t wanna”.

Sometimes it’s “I ought to” running the internal monologue, the “school speakers in my brain” so to speak, and verbalizes things that I ought to do and gets frustrated and surprised that they do not get done.

Other times it’s “I don’t wanna” that’s set out to rest and calm the heck down but can’t because there’s a gnawing guilt.

So it’s not that one is always “the conscious” and the other is always “the subconscious”. That can change. (I know calling it “sub”-conscious has fallen out of vogue in psychology but I wanna bring it back, I do think it’s a great name for it, bubbling juuuust under the surface, you can barely feel it out.) But they’re both in control; they equally affect what I actually do.

Belatedly discovering this phenomenon in the mid 00s was a huge step forward for me. It was something I wish I had understood much earlier. (The first 25 years I lived on this planet I had severe procrastination issues. That’s why I write so much about that.)

At first, I didn’t understand that they could switch places. I thought “I” was “I ought to”, and that I was wrestling with the laziest angel of all time. But even that level of awareness of the other wolf was a good step forward.

I couldn’t “hear” it yet but I could try to deduce from how it influenced my actions and inactions what it really wanted and try to comprommise with it, or be clear to it, or just validate it.

In that era, a powerful technique when it was really hard to do something and I just didn’t know why I’m procrasting so much was to sit down and let wash over me the thought of how much of a hecking schlep the task is going to be, really fully feel how much I don’t wanna do it. A lot of the time, after doing that, I’ll feel myself rise from the chair and go do it.

That was “I don’t wanna” feeling fully heard and validated, and wordlessly being like “Damn, sis! That was all you had to say! I was worried you weren’t hearing me and that you weren’t taking into consideration my warning that this was going to be a huge pain in the neck!”

I came to see “I don’t wanna” less as an impish monkey on my back and more like a cute monchhichi I needed to take care of, make sure it was heard, acknowledged, taken into consideration. “I” still was “I ought to”, or so it seemed, but I tried hard to not overextend myself, to get rest in, to add food and sleep to the mix in with “I ought to”’s desire to hack the world and write The Great Pan-Galactic Novel.

Mid ’10s, I found out about how psychologist and roshi Marsha Linehan uses two Euler circles for what I’m calling two “wolves” here; and for actions and inactions that the two can agree on, things that are in the intersection of her two “circles”, she calls that the “wise mind”.

By then I had just about figured out how it’s not always the procrastinating, inactive side that’s lurking under the surface. That the two wolves can and do switch who’s on the mic. To no avail because what we tell ourselves what we’ll do isn’t always what we will do.

And that “I” am not the two wolves. Or I am both of them and more. Or there is no clear atomic delination between what’s one person and the next in this cloud of microbiotics and signal substances and neuron fire. Eww, that got trippy.

Back to the practical tips. One technique I’ve discovered only a few months ago has been to offer some choices. “OK,” the wolf-on-the-mic will tell the other. “Option one: you can lie here and if so put a sleep mask on because it’s bright. Fall asleep or don’t, I don’t care which. Or, option two, go up and make oatmeal. Either of the two options are fine by me. It’s fully your choice and I’m happy either way. Video games can wait because I’m tired and I’m hungry.”

PS

I don’t usually think of them as wolves, it’s more like “I don’t wanna” is some kinda frog monkey and “I ought to” is a stern teacher, but I thought that the wolven imagery might be more readily understood because of this meme.

I like that it makes them more similar to each other than different. That makes the picture clearer.

That meme story is telling you to feed one and starve the other. That’s not me. I’m with Linehan, either wolf can give you some pretty bad and destructive ideas. Listen to your heart fully.

If 40000 people have a problem it’s not very helpful that a thousand people are loudly and repeatedly clamoring that they don’t have that problem. That’s true whether that’s 40000 out of 50000 or it’s 40000 out of 1000000. ​ Maybe it’d be slightly less true if it were 40000 out of 1000​000​000​000​000​000​000​000​000​000​000​000 but there aren’t that many people in known space so maybe be a li’l more respectful when reporting how you think all’s well and there’s no issue and the problem absolutely does not exist.

Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.

So when you’re a kid it feels like a single week holds more life, more drama than an entire year later in life. Later, time feels faster. I’ve lived in the new apartment for over a year and it feels like that just swooshed by.

You might’ve heard or realized that one reason for this is that a year as a kid is like one seventh, one eight of your life up until then while a year for psycho biddies like me it’s like one forty-fifth, barely an inconvenience, a little over two percent. So time passes faster and faster because a day is a smaller proportion of your experience. Not sure how that would literally affect your experience of the passage of time. It’s not like your shoelace is tighter or looser for the first loop, or your bookshelf has less room on the left or you get more tired after the first step on your walk. But just to stave off any arguments, let’s say I do accept this factor as a partial explanation.

There’s another factor which causes this effect even more strongly. Routines make life go way faster than when everything in life is new. That’s why the fastest, most whooshed-by period in my life was senior high. Monday to Friday school school school, and I had gotten used to school and I had moved out from home and I was addicted to IRC and email and video games. Life in my twenties when I hung out with all those art weirdos was a much slower and richer time. Every day back then is like half a decade now that I’ve sorted things out with Laundry Monday, Vacuum Thursday, Socials Saturday. I’m lonelier now, too, which also causes this time–speed-up effect.

To slow down time, I’ll make room for some new experiences and for actually hanging out with real people. Although not sure that’s a good thing; life as a kid was not exactly easy. Time passing more quickly because we’re dealing with problems that are more familiar and solved, with horrors that are not as fresh and raw, that’s not entirely a bad thing.

寸阴尺璧
分秒必争

Uh-oh.

This does not seem good.

No scheduling, no easy toggling, no time outs (like “don’t disturb for the next N minutes”), no allowlist for specific numbers to punch through, no “if they call twice let them through”.

The two options for “new activity icon” are a bigger problem. You see, the problem for us caught in the “check-check-check” mentality is that the activity icon is like a slot machine, crack-a-pack, treasure chest, gambling, choosing a scratch ticket over bread, dopamine injection! “Ooh do I have a li’l hug waiting for me if I unlock?”, that’s what the asterisk says. That damage would be minimized if the lock screen gave just a little bit mit more info about what’s going on instead of all activities (no matter how trivial or disappointing) showing the same li’l light-up Christmas star.

And turning off that alluring lootboxy li’l asterisk is a thousand times worse because then the entire phone becomes a constant, never-ending slot machine. I can’t know whether or not I have anything without going through that li’l addictive “unlocking” ritual. Unrapping the pack, flipping the ante, scratching the ticket, pulling the slot machine lever… and unlocking the phone. Those extra hoops ironically is what makes it more addictive.

Hark, y’all: once upon a time there was an unusually cruel animal experiment. One group of the li’l critters got unlimited amount of food. Anytime they wanted food, they could just go and get it. No risk of ever running out, just a constant cornucopia of li’l treats. The other group, they got a contraption that they could engage with that randomly, sometimes, if you’re lucky, it gave you food.

That first group with easy-access food? They thrived and lived healthy and cozy lives. Post-scarcity for the win. No anxiety about where the next hug’s gonna gome from once you know there is love.

That second group with the gambling contraption? They got hooked. Hooked with a capital every single letter: H O O K E D. They eanded up eating way more than the group that had infinity food. And they died and it was pretty awful.

Now, everyone’s different and that’s great but I know that I’m super susceptible to these li’l dopamine habits. That’s just my personality (and/or it’s a messed up prefrontal cortex causing executive dysfunction but uh, let’s go with the personality story instead, I like that better). I get into all these li’l mostly-unconscious habits and behaviors and obsessions.

Now, there’s a lot of talk about dark patterns and how the tech companies hire psychologists that are literally trying to make this stuff even more addictive. As insane as that rumor sounds and as broken a human needs to be to sign up for that task, I stills have every reason to believe it’s true. (Market capitalism has a couple of flaws, it turns out.)

But here’s the thing. Even without deliberately trying, these “dark patterns” arise. Because design is difficult. Endless scroll was designed because someone thought it was convenient and less of a chore. Likes and stars were invented because people were sick of the “I agree, well said!” posts that plagued Usenet in the Eternal September era. It wasn’t made to hook us and mess with us, but since, uh, mistakes were made, that’s what ended up happening.

Our best hope is to iterate, to notice these behaviors and try to fix them with better design. Designing for convenience has backfired and created addiction. But so has designing with deliberate hoops and obstacles.

More is less

Scheduling can be part of the solution. Like, growing up, we read the paper every morning. We were “addicted” to that habit but it was an addiction that couldn’t really grow. If we wanted more paper, we still had to wait until next morning.

We want less stress, right? Sometimes more design can lead to a simpler life.

Tempo, a proprietary (boo and hiss! Long live FOSS) email app that I never personally used but I saw videos, had some really good ideas there. You’d have an allowlist of friends and fam who got to reach you right away, and other email you got to see in scheduled batches, and the main screen was a todo list, not an inbox. Yeah, sometimes sites will be like “we’ll send you a verification code over email that’s valid for the next thirty seconds” or your boss will call asking for some sorta special turnaround, so Tempo did have a “let me please peek at my future email even though it’s not time for the schedule” feature, and it did have plenty of “are you sure? hold the button for so-and-so-many seconds” hoops in place really meant to safeguard you that could easily become an addictive scratch ticket, but the main safeguard was that since there was scheduling, you could tell yourself “Okay, I really really wanna peek but I’m gonna wait until the schedule comes around with one hundred million angels singing.” and that, in combination with the allowlist that gets let through right away, might at least alleviate that itch.

Tempo is an example of “more” design, since instead of just a simple “here is box, mail come here, Hulk smash”, it was more elaborate with different tabs, different categories of mail, but that setup would hopefully lead to a state of “less”, to fewer bad habits for you. “Hey”, another proprietary app (with additional baggage on top of that, apparently, but that’s a story I don’t wanna go dig out of /dev/null) similarly has a more elaborate workflow with stacks and separate inboxes and a multi-reply-view, that’s all ultimately meant to hae you spend less time in email, not more.

Not that email is always bad

Two decades ago, Merlin did an interview with David Allen that I really loved.

It has many gems, but one thing I’ve been thinking about lately is when Merlin starts talking about some of this stuff like scheduling, batching etc to try to curb the checkmania, Allen pushes back a little, saying that for some occupations, the entire point of the job is to be on top of things costantly. Two of his examples are a “missile silo” and an OB/GYN as the two examples.

But Merlin and Allen quickly agree that if that’s not your job, it’s not your job. If your job is to actually think or actually do things (or actually not do things, as the case may be), having a couple of tiers of we get info can be a good thing. Not every message need to get to us right away.

But the more we can trust that the ones we do need will get to ous in time, the easier we can put the less urgent stuff out of mind.

Update

One mitigating factor in this specific situation is that it can only be calls or texts. So it’s a less random “slot machine” that’s hopefully more practical. I’d still prefer it if it said “three missed calls, four texts”. Not enough to leak data to someone else looking at your phone, but takes some steps for making it be less like a mystery gacha pull for you to decrease the gambling factor.

Also all I have to go on here is my own experience with this addiction. I’m not discounting that better studies could teach us even more about how to design this.

When GTD was first published one of the new ideas was to sort your “next actions” list into contexts like “Calls”, “Do at home”, “Errands”, “Do at desk” and so on.

This was great for two reasons. One: it’s more efficient to do something in one trip than in two, and that reduces overhead. Two: that’s also psychologically a motivator! It’s satisfying to “I might as well do this as long as I’m doing that”, that just feels good and unclumsy and elegant. And while it sometimes feels like it’s not worth making the schlep to do one thing, it might start to feel really worth it once you have a couple of things to do there to tip you over the top. (Although that’s a double-edged sword once a context gets full of so many daunted and dreaded things that you don’t even want to go there in the first place because then you’d have to do the totally dreaded thing.)

For many people, “contexts” have fallen of the wayside in modern GTD since they have the world in their pockets at all times so what’s the use? It doesn’t really add any efficiency for them, just more fiddliness with the system. And some of the contexts, like “Calls”, have become pretty dumb since I can’t really make multiple calls at once in this era of “please hold” and “we’ll call you back so keep your phone ready”.

But that’s throwing out the motivation baby with the convenience bathwater. The whole “I’m doing this while I’m here so I might as well do that” factor really did help me a lot.

Another benefit of contexts is … Okay, one of the problems my sprawlbrain has with navigating the world is what game nerds call “Sequencing” (from card games where it subtly but crucially matters in what order your draw your cards or cast your spells); a non-game example is if you’re gonna clean the floor and dust off the tables, it’s better to do the tables first in case you spill some table dust on the floor. Having just a context-specific subset of actions to consider makes it easier to do them in a good order.

Another ginormous benefit of sorting my actions list by contexts is how that subtly nudges me to consider what the actual practical next step is. That’s something normal people maybe can’t relate to but us sprawbrained weirdos definitively can: the core issue of what psych eggheads call “executive function” is separating “end goals” from “next steps”.

Before GTD: “‘Clean apartment’, yeah that would be nice, I’ll get to that any day now.”
After GTD: “Okay, so having a clean apartment is my end goal so I’ll put that on the projects list; the first step can be scrubbing my sink so I’ll get the baking soda out.”

This is something that the people-who-don’t-need-GTD can do automatically. They can get by with just a todo list because their brain automatically and instantly recognizes what’s the next step for their goals. Especially for chores they’ve done many times. (They might be out of luck if something unusual comes up that they don’t know how to deal with, where GTD has a more general problem-solving approach that can handle even unusual things.) “Automatisation”, this is called in the psych world.

Now, it’s easy to get carried away with too much “I’m gonna do this so I might as well do that” and take on too much work. That’s one of the pitfalls of GTD, you get too efficient so you do too much and then you die. The solution is to keep guard of what you put on your list in the first place.