You're not lacking creativity, you're overwhelmed
newsletter.thejorgemedina.com
newsletter.thejorgemedina.com
Until recently, when I was doing something around the house, no matter what, I was listening to music, podcasts, or books.
I found that it seemed like it was taking for ever for me to do the simplest tasks. After a while... I figured that I must be going slower because I was always doing two things at once. After a few weeks of doing the dishes without ear buds in, I don't think I'll ever go back. I am not able to focus better and get things done.
If you are like I was, and you are always inundated with some distraction, try moving through the world without it.
The concept I was missing basically since smartphones become a thing was this thing called “solitude”
It basically agrees. We get some good things from solitude.
I think this is part of it; aside from basic system 1 stuff (like breathing) we're actually flipping between 2 or more things constantly. Sure I can listen to music while I go for a walk, but I spend 2 minutes getting set up before I start, and I slow down whenever I need to change anything.
This is actually related to one of my pet peeves. I hate when people say they are good at multi-tasking.
You aren't. Multitasking isn't real. You are just good at switching tasks.
I keep having this argument about multitasking not being a real thing but I'd love some concrete research to back it up. I get the sense that people just feel more productive when "multitasking" Rather than recognizing the true cost of constant context switching.
I listen to The Daily and variety of others when I do dishes. When I'm certain I want to really ingest a podcast, I listen during dedicated time.
So, I think we're just conflating a bit - ok to have something in your ear while, in reality, you focus on just one thing - dishes. Just remember that you're not going to remember the thing in your ear all that much.
Might be my imagination, but I think it's made a difference.
I find it less harsh and it seems to drown out office talk much more.
What's the difference?
The nature of the sound is still noise. To an untrained ear it might be hard to detect the different frequency reasponses and it is highly dependent on the quality of speaker you're listening to it on as each speaker imposes a frequency response curve on top of the noise itself.
If you want to detect the difference i'd recommend wearing headphones and switching back and forth between the two. There, you should be able to hear a difference assuming it's actual brown noise.
I use a website called mynoise.net which allows you to select from a variety of noises, one of which is white noise. The key to mynoise.net is that it includes an equalizer that allows you to "tune" your noise to the environment. When working in a loud library i will sit there with my headphones and mynoise.net on white rain and pull each equalizer knob up and down until it perfectly covers the noise around me. I do that for the entire frequency table and I've got a perfectly tuned white noise/sound blocker for the people's voices around me. It's honestly amazing
The mynoise.net link is one that has never showed up when searching for white noise sites, so .. thanks :-)
(Either my search-fu is really that poor, or google really is that bad).
(I get 3M ear classic NRR 33 earplugs 200 pairs at a time)
I've also heard that people who participate it memory contest will use blinders so they can better focus on the task at hand.
I otherwise find it awkward to have random people working in my house for a few hours a week at a total cost that isn't trivial either.
Where does "deserving" enter the picture? People do work for pay, not based on whatever they deserve to do such work or not (except in the sense that they have the skills to do it).
It's not like a housecleaner or a burger flipper "deserve" to be doing what they do. A paid task is not an award or a punishment, it's something people do in exchange for money, because they have the skills for it and not for other stuff, or because they like it, or because for whatever reasons they can't find other line of work.
Besides, "it shouldn't have been done or added to our plate in the first place" doesn't necessarily mean it must be done by someone else. Perhaps it's just busywork, or we can just not do it and make do without whatever it was supposed to give us. Or find a way to achieve our existing goals without it.
If you're the kind of person that can change themselves to appreciate everything in life, good for you. Otherwise changing the experience (including multitasking) is a more simple approach.
What James Clear is really showing is that writing coaching books is the real path to success.
That quote might be half flying above my head, and it feels a lot like a caricature to me. I got through the original speech and it still doesn't resonate, but I'm also not a Kenyon graduate and don't share any of that background.
But I appreciate having been exposed to that corner of culture.
being an american undergraduate has very little to do with it, or to my original point, which is that finding the transcendent in the mundane is a good idea.
from Auden:
“Not to lose time, not to get caught, Not to be left behind, not, please! to resemble The beasts who repeat themselves, or a thing like water Or stone whose conduct can be predicted, these Are our common prayer, whose greatest comfort is music Which can be made anywhere, is invisible, And does not smell.”
It first and foremost hurts our ability to focus, work, live our private life, pay attention to our partners, family, and friends, be aware politically, and so on.
If it works for you, that's great, but I don't miss doing dishes manually.
The past week I've been getting burned in meetings, and just a whole lot of "to-do". And I'm just not as creative anymore because I don't have the room to be bored and ponder (which I like)
I'm bored everyday at work and it never motivates me. Boredom drives me towards the easy things just to kill time. The outcome is usually waiting for the cause of boredom to end. (Work)
I myself do a bad job of being bored, even when freedom is provided. My reaction is reinforced due to how often I am compelled to deal with boredom without freedom.
I'd submit that it's boredom plus constraints that equal creativity. You're forced to think around your obstacles.
It's why bands and authors suck once they make it big. Once they have tons of time and money, output suffers and they stop delivering. The threat of starvation no longer forces them to make something that works on their broken keyboard.
As someone with a somewhat creative job, and a creative hobby on the side, the concept resonates with me. But maybe it's not universally applicable.
Maybe later when my focus or responsibilities have changed, but that runs the risk of keeping a library of curated content that I can't validate at the time I capture it (_because I will have to validate that content later when it aligns with whatever-later-task-is-relevant_).
And this says nothing about the creativity that's sapped by the organizational inefficiency, the clumsy handoffs, the incomplete understanding of what is truly wanted and/or needed at the end of a creative endeavor, and all of the other things that are the sources of hundreds or thousands of cuts at your psyche.
All of those items are presumably not noise, because I have consciously picked them to watch or read later. I'm just like a hamster in wheel, constantly seeing new good things and storing them in an infinite cycle, never to revisit.
As a lay student of Buddhism, there's a much more simple and effective route.
Meditate.
A clean, crisp, quiet break into your own internal fortress of solitude. Curating as a means of establishing a creative sandbox makes sense to me, when the creative process opens. But concentration and focus is a skill and it can be developed. Trying to develop it through consumption is very difficult and counter-intuitive.
Your own internal world can surpass any notebook. Have you heard of the Method of Loci? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci It's applied meditational creative construction, it's been used by Grand Master memory champions, and it's all inside. Even if you do not apply the projector in your mind to such purposes, simply meditating can make much of this process subconscious. You do less, think less and yet remember and "receive" more.
If you have exceptional executive function and memory, but a lot of people don't.
Two great speeches that it would be a shame to lose. Now, what was that about keeping up with digital clutter?
(I do need my phone to capture it)
and few paragraphs later the post becomes another marketing content with affiliate links and so on.
The web is getting flooded with this type of spam content and this post is part of the overwhelming. I came to HN to avoid being spammed with unwanted marketing things about this app or that app and I find this article as #1 in the homepage. Marketing camouflaged as cultural content.
On another note, I recently started using Obsidian and it really is as good as they say. I also use Remember The Milk for my daily TODOs.
who is "we"? how many people do you know who are informed on the matter? how can you expect society to revolve around this if it's still mostly overlooked?
They spent years on that stuff, mostly just meandering around the world or their country, letting their brain ruminate on the issue at hand slowly. They had actual hobbies that weren't related to their craft and a bunch of free time.
Very rarely were major discoveries done by working long days and just forcing it.
I think it has to do with the fact that you can't like if you're not a substack user. Also, I don't think it reached the top because most people agreed with it, maybe the opposite.
So they might be reading (i got around 7k views on it) but not liking it haha
> The sheer volume of content is overwhelming
> The mental effort required to evaluate and choose between many options can be exhausting
> Saving these links in a digital vault where they’ll most likely be forgotten forever
The diagnosis seems correct. We all experience this digital overabundance. Abundance is in principle a good thing. But obviously there is gross mismatch with the tools we have to manage this flow. You can overwater your plants and drown them.
But I am underwhelmed by the remedies proposed. My gut feeling is that nothing less than a ground-up reworking of the personal computing infrastructure will be required to restore an equilibrium that accomodates the nature of our information processing capacities.
We need to go back to the Engelbartian concepts of augmentation but drastically updated for the vast knowledge we have acquired in the meantime.
And of course this has to be done in a context that is seriously human centric. The people that will build this infrastructure need to somehow have their incentives and interests aligned with the average person. They should not see the dazed and confused online masses as product to be trapped and exploited.
That seems like an overstatement. Foremost? Johnson said that a writer may turn over half a library to make one book, but this article doesn't talk about doing anything with your collection after you've curated it. The creative act referred to in this article seems to be the curating itself. That's fine as far as it goes; curation is a form of creativity. But I'd say creators, broadly, are first and foremost people who make stuff, not people who curate other stuff. If you're too overwhelmed by stuff to make anything yourself, you've probably seen plenty already. Maybe shut off the firehose and try working on something before deciding lack of curation is the problem you face. This feels a bit like the impulse that tells you the reason you can't get any writing done is because you need to clean your office first.
Curation is only the first step of the framework i'm building called The Creative Flywheel. So you're right. It is not enough.
But the sentence you highlight means creators are very good curators. They learn from other creators and carefully select their sources of inspiration, then they ideate on their own, and finally create.
The cycle goes Curation > Ideation > Creation > Distribution.
That article is only dedicated to the first step. But I have another talking about the blueprint of creativity where I go over the 4 in less detail.
"Getting our focus back"
https://renegadeotter.com/2023/08/24/getting-your-focus-back...
Then you risk of closing yourself into bubble. I prefer to not use any kind of feeds manipulated by algorithms. No social networks at all. Instead use RSS.
Beyond the focus issue there is a subset: the mesmerizing issue. There is an overwhelming incredible stuff on Internet that is enough to spend your lifetime. It would be easier if the information available was only for trivial distraction.
The actual cure to that crap is to fill your day with healthier activities so that you’ll end up surprising yourself you hadn’t browsed Instagram today.
I find that it does shorten. Of course infinite scroll still happens but with a ruthlessly curated feed, it seems like after about 5-10 minutes of browsing there's a tipping point where relevance drops off a cliff. That's when I know to close the app.
(I open IG maybe 1-2x a week, FYI)
My point is that there's also good that can come out of social media. Completely disregarding any social media as useless and a waste of time is wrong, in my opinion.
My point is to start blocking so that you can turn whatever social media of your choosing into an enriching experience, rather than a doom scrolling one.
But of course, even if you do so, we should all keep a limit on our internet consumption as a whole.
Another good way to develop a healthier relationship with our content consumption habits is to meditate. It's not contradictory to suggest to read a book on the benefits of meditation.
Having enlightening experiences of learning requires effort. Anybody who wants to learn and thrive on any topic needs to make an effort to curate the sources he's consuming. That's not new. It certainly isn't an internet thing.
We've always paid to be entertained and educated. And money is earned with effort. When content wasn't as abundant, you needed to be selective with what you wanted to consume. You developed a taste, and continued to consume that type of content, hence basically becoming a curator of whatever your interest was.
The problem now, with all content being free, is that we pay with our time. And time is our most valuable currency.
So yes. Even though there's an initial effort curve to build a Second brain (or any other system you like), the end result is a much better internet experience.