Lately I’ve been noticing an internal reluctance to write and publish. I don’t think if it is a sign of ageing – that my cognitive performance is getting slower, or that the topics I wish to write are getting more complex. Maybe a bit of both.
I used to designate a specific day to sit down, write and publish in a short intense burst. It has been getting more difficult to do that as my writing ambitions become greater. I spent the last two days writing a review for one of my favourite books “A general theory of love“, and I became so mentally exhausted within an hour that I stopped writing for the rest of the day.
I realised this is partly because I am used to working in short intense bursts (which worked when I was young and sprightly). Sometimes these short intense bursts become long-drawn, and before I know it I’ve been sitting at the computer for like eight hours. It is of no wonder I burn out frequently. That is why the updates to the site and to the site’s library is so sporadic. I work on it in multiple intense bursts and then I am done for weeks, if not months.
As I age I think this is unsustainable, so I am going to try a new experiment. Though I frequently claim on this site that a leopard can truly change its spots, I am not confident in this case because this has been a chronic work pattern I simply cannot seem to break out of. But I am still going to try.
I will simply schedule an hour or two each day to work on my writing instead of trying to publish them at one burst. I may take longer to publish each piece, though in between I may publish casual, stream of consciousness pieces like this one.
Hopefully this will enable me to share more of what I’ve learned throughout the past few years. Meanwhile I am still relatively active on Instagram stories, and also occasionally I cannot help but tweet long threads:
I wanted to turn the above tweet thread into an essay, but this is an example of something that requires more detailed thought and nuance if it exists in long-form.
One of the more frustrating things in expressing my views is that it is difficult to communicate the relationships within an interconnected system:
…in a linear form like writing, but maybe this is something I can solve with time if I can manage to figure out how to work sustainably.