observation:
- nobody has the time to do everything they want to do
- the people who take the trouble to prioritize what they want, and then focus on doing whatever is most important to them, are almost never the ones who are anxious about (1)
it’s interesting because there isn’t actually an immediately obvious reason why this would be the case
A person who is prioritizing is still not succeeding at the impossible task of doing everything they want to do, and so they would still have the same reason to be anxious
so this suggests to me that the model is wrong. (all models are wrong, yea yea)
people aren’t anxious because there’s more than they can do. people are anxious because they aren’t doing what they know is their best. if you know that you’re doing your best, you sleep pretty good
(lots of caveats apply: you could have anxiety for other reasons, you might be a bad sleeper for other reasons, but I think the broader thing I’m gesturing at here is directionally correct. It’s a relief to work on what you sincerely believe is most important to you)
he done his damnedest (harry s truman quote)
for context I get a lot of anxious people in my DMs who are overwhelmed by how many things they want to do the interesting thing though, and I say this with love, not judgement, is that they are never the people who are already working their ass off on some project.
like there’s something here, kind of a magic thing maybe, about the anxiety-alleviating effect of focusing on a task, maybe even an arbitrary task i’ve seen people talk about this re: lifting weights, writing, making music, cooking, it doesn’t even seem to matter what it is.
the thing is you gotta get out of your head & get your body into the groove of whatever it is that you’re working on even… doing sudokus, or playing chess, which are very cerebral activities, I think has a way of staving away “there’s so much to do” anxiety, at least for a bit.
ofc when you think about this it becomes pretty clear that these aren’t… lasting, big-picture solutions, they’re more like… quick state fixes. and this is what a lot of people do with video games, right. you access a flow state for a few hours to get away from your problems
so the idea then is to use the state-fix to quell the anxiety, and then use the diminished-anxiety state to articulate what’s important to you, make a list, prioritize, and then take some baby steps in the direction of working on whatever it is that’s most important to you
lol when I step out of this train of thought and look at it, I realize you could say “visa is advocating workaholism!” oh god 😂💀 laser beams in every direction. uhhhhh. yeah sometimes the problem is actually existential despair. fun stuff!
no amount of workaholism will stave off your existential woe… but I do think it’s easier to grapple with The Big Bitch-Ass Void when you have a little $ in the bank + some useful skills that you’ve developed from doing things. learning to express yourself well especially slaps
just some thoughts, idk
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relevant threads/posts: mario castle problems, introspect,
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the most important thing
I have an uneasy relationship with the concept of prioritization. I recognize that it can be powerful. But I think it can also be dangerous. It’s not always immediately obvious what the most important thing is. So if you’re overzealous about deciding that something is most important, you might end up optimizing incorrectly, and end up somewhere less-than-ideal. But is that bad? Not necessarily. Nothing ultimately matters. At every moment we get to decide for ourselves what is meaningful, how we want to live, what we want to do with the time we have.
One of the things I admired about Steve Jobs was his ability to be ruthless in prioritizing. But that wasn’t all he did. There’s a great anecdote from Good Strategy, Bad Strategy where he talks about how he was waiting for the next opportunity…
there are all these frameworks. the eisenhower matrix – list out what is urgent, what is important, and do what is important.
gtd says if there’s anything you can do in 2 minutes, do that first. yeah that makes sense.
well. what is the most important thing for me right now? as I write this, I think the most important thing is to publish some substack post. and I don’t think it should be this one. I think it should be the other one, about the junkyard of intention. so if I wrote this post I would be writing about the most important thing, but I wouldn’t be writing the most important thing I could be writing. So to do justice to the spirit of this, I have to temporarily abandon it
but I do think this post is a clever idea because I’m going to use the phrase “the most important thing” a lot in a lot of essays and it would be useful to expand on that…