Weed Journal 10
I’m still getting used to the effects. I stopped smoking for a while, I made an honest try to give it up and work a normal job. I’d get going for a day or two applying to this place or creating a schedule for learning a new skill, then I’d fizzle out. In the end, it will all be necessary to learn, even if you fail you at least know one way to not go about doing things. I second-guess myself a lot, and the computer and backspace button makes erasing my past idea so easy. I’m starting to miss typewriters; later versions had correction tape, but before that, you’d have to white out the mistake yourself or trash the whole page. Psychologically, this changes your relationship with making mistakes.
If you could instantly redo any embarrassing mistakes in real life, you’d probably go for it. How we contextualize the mistake shapes how we react to it. Being old enough to remember typing up school reports on a typewriter is becoming a unique experience, but it also shaped my relationship with typing. I learned how to type on a typewriter, not a computer, and I’ve always tried to be more careful with my mistakes. I could write a lot faster if I allowed myself to glance over the mistakes and finish my current train of thought. If I have the germ of the next sentence I can write that down and return to a previous sentence. The entire editing process has changed from the time of typewriters to modern word processors. We develop habits over time that we become so accustomed to that we do them without thinking or noticing. Sometimes I’ll erase an entire sentence before I realize what I’m doing, I feel like I need to catch all my mistakes immediately and correct them as if I was still using correction ribbon. Using a computer I should be more flexible, skipping around and writing ideas to expand on later.
If you write down the wrong idea in the wrong place, you can always move the words around. This is a benefit of new technology that you should embrace, writing blogs on Medium doesn’t cost me anything, I can put up as many as I like, and if anyone asks I can prove that I don’t give up. Not forever anyway. Back up again.
Adulting doesn’t come easy, it’s not a switch that flips in your head that makes you start acting more maturely. Modern studies point to brain development being incomplete until age twenty-five. You can rationalize it as an excuse or you can see it as a contributing factor to the way people in my generation tend to grow up. We’ve always had an easy life due to the hard work of our parents, so the sudden weight of all the unexpected responsibilities hits us in different ways. I’ve always felt like a mess that barely held it together, but I could never string two cohesive thoughts together long enough to figure out what I really cared about. Life is an open-ended question, there are no right answers, just better or worse ideas based on values that vary depending on the answer. Any given idea will chart higher on several values and lower on others. Some people value achievability, others value popularity, or economic impact, or environmental impact, etc.
Thoughts tend to be scattered, I’m going for a more naturalistic approach to writing the blog, as much for my own curiosity as to develop my writing style in a natural fashion. Have you heard the tip about new sketchbooks? Scribble on the first page to remind yourself that the most successful and fulfilled people will fail far more times than they succeed, it’s a warm-up, a prelude to an experiment which may lead to success or yet more failure. Back to the idea of embracing new technology.
I’m also realizing my time management is a bit off, I’m drastically underestimating how much time I have left to write a blog post and get sidetracked with so many little projects. Productivity has a unique feeling, you get a lot of big things done while leaving a lot of loose threads here and there, but you trim them all down in the end. Life gets monotonous because it’s a habitual cycle of the same behavior repeated day after day. It makes people comfortable, they feel in control, because they know what tomorrow will be like. But when you become aware of the monotony on a macro scale, you become more sensitive to high-level problems you’ve ignored. Or maybe that’s how we rationalize it to ourselves to make us feel like we understand the situation. We’re all hurtling through space on a blue marble with luck or faith to thank for our moment-to-moment existence, either way, it wouldn’t hurt us to be more grateful for that fact.
