30 Day Focus Challenge: Day 13. In a Row. Quantified Self vs Calm

So, there’s always time to meditate—if I do it at the end of the day. Which feels dumb. I mean, shouldn’t I do it in the morning, and let the clarity and calm inform my fucking day? Huh? Shouldn’t I? What the fuck. Seriously.

But… there’s an appeal, to the gamification on my smartphone, to do it, so you can check it off there, and see a little streak.

What the fuck is that, exactly though?

So I am trying to tease apart the Quantified Self, aka total tech immersion, and use it for Good, not Bad. All these little things that turn into better health outcomes are worth, one would hope, this crazy intrusive wierd-ass smart watch smartphone dopamine machine.

Maybe. Or maybe it’s all methadone for my tech smack habit. Marginally better. Harm reduction. But don’t kid yourself. You are a barnacle on the ass of this big tech behemoth you helped dream into being. A citizen of Trantor gobbling down the Soylent Green and dreaming of the stars.

Still off social media. I think of things I want to say to someone, that are of interest to no one, that I used to post on feeds, figuring, eh, maybe someone cares. And now I think those thoughts and they float away without leaving a mark, and I find myself wondering, why does that feel like a loss?

Not writing them down?

Social media, I think, blogging a bit, turned me into a journal writer. The real reward of the challenges here is an excuse to write a journal. And my ego wants what I write to be read.

Sue Grafton, who wrote the alphabet mysteries that my whole family read, wrote two books at a time, one her book of the year, K is for Killer or whatever, and the other the meta book about the book filled with hugely boring details of the process. Some who read Grafton find her all hugely boring. Private detective work, and police work, is mostly boring–and she writes whole books of it, six to eight hours of boring shit, and then about twenty minutes of pulse-pounding action.

But yeah. You write a book for publication, as you write a boring book, that’s just you sketching, farting around, talking to yourself, because that is how you find things out, as they are written; every now and then some stuff goes from one book to the other, Grafton said, but not often. You mostly know which book you’re writing.

This is my boring book; I need to spend more time on the more interesting ones. What I am addicted to with social media is the instant gratification. I think many writers are. It’s a drug. Writing…. attention. BING! Dopamine! Instagram makes it even easier of course, you don’t even have to write something. Just be cute and take photos. BING! Eat a nice lunch. BING!

What I am fighting, learning to live with, trying to control, is that. The BING!

I’m terrible at this.

I met a tech writer at a company I was freelancing at once, and mentioned I’d sold a few stories to big-ish magazines, and he thought that was very cool. I wondered if I could do tech or business writing, and he said:

“Of course you can. Fiction is harder to write. If you can sell stories you can write anything.”

He’d tried to write fiction, and couldn’t sell much, and then he’d starting writing professionally in other capacities and he realized, he just liked typing about five pages a day; working on the five pages, getting them right.

It didn’t matter what the five pages were about.

I think of that, as I write my five pages a day. That anything not in the books, not in the novels, is eating that energy. This boring book is a more interesting book I’ll never write. So you have to find balance.

And do this as little as possible.