2024-03-17: I find myself wondering, maybe this post should be retitled “why are you tired?”, in comparison to “why were you late?“
The exhaustion funnel is a simple concept that I wish I encountered when I was much younger. It puts a name to a phenomenon that I repeatedly experienced throughout my teens and 20s. I would say that at 31, I’m still just beginning to get better at managing this. Here are some thoughts and notes.
So the important idea here is that… well, there’s a funnel. Getting exhausted is kind of like getting drunk. The worse it gets, the worse it gets, and the more incapable one becomes. You have to adjust your expectations as you go.
My experience of exhaustion in the past has been, the less I get done, the more I feel compelled to “make up for lost time”. But if I reflect on the phenomenon of the exhaustion funnel, it becomes clear to me that that’s just not possible. It’s like hoping I will be more sober after another drink. The “only way out” is to call it a night, accept “defeat”, fold the hand. Cut your losses.
But this is hard to do. I think it’s a little easier to do once you can zoom out and see the big picture, and realise that you’re digging yourself deeper and deeper into an exhaustion funnel.
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I can’t remember where I found this one, but I must have been searching a few related phrases like “fatigue spiral”.
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one of the big ideas i’ve developed in recent-ish times (2022?) is the idea of emotional knottedness… this should probably be a standalone post since it’s a sticky concept
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Try Softer
2025jan20 I’ve been trapped in a prison of my own making, by trying to write frame studies as some kind of serious and important collection of essays. I don’t think that was necessarily entirely a bad thing because it got me thinking about things very hard from multiple angles. But I think the way forward for me is to instead set that aside and present a bunch of much more casual sketches
if you’re trying to do something, and it’s not working, it’s often a good idea to try something else. one cool thing about having written a lot for many years is that i can ask myself questions like, what was it like the last time something wasn’t working? and I remember a big one from about 2016 or so, when i was struggling really hard to try and write a really big piece. i got all knotted up about it. i was trying to do and say everything possible, and it just wasn’t manageable. now that i look back years later, it’s striking how many times i’ve set out on expeditions that were doomed to fail from the start. there’s a relevant nietzsche quote about that… people whose talent seems slighter because they bite off more than they can chew, basically
Varieties of tiredness (2025apr8)
I’ve been very tired lately. I’ve been many kinds of tired over the years. I don’t think my friends would describe me as a tired person. It’s complicated. Let’s get into it.
I generally always had the capacity to stay out late longer than most people. In a group setting, like in the military, I’m often the last to fall asleep. I often woke up in the middle of the night- this hasn’t happened much recently.
The earliest I remember feeling tired enough to notice it was probably in secondary school, when I was about 15. I have memories of drifting to sleep in the middle of class. Often this was because I had stayed up late at night on the family computer, surfing the web. At the time I felt bad about this, but I think I’m now at peace with it. It really worked out for the best.
I remember being tired from my long daily commutes to work.
Parenting is a different kind of tiredness. It’s exhausting to have to attend to a child for hours at a time, seemingly indefinitely.
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To be continued