Anytime I do something for shits and gigs, I find myself trying - inexplicably - to make it better, and actually good.
Even if I’m trying to do something crap, I try to optimise the crap into being the most crappy crap possible.
Just today, I wanted to write something just for fun and to relax my brain from working hard on writing assignments and fiction for hours every day. But after I’d been writing for a few minutes, I found myself rereading it, going back over and over, changing words here or there to match the consistency of the rest of the document.
Did I find this optimisation particularly fun? Not really.
So why did I still do it? It’s just what I do.
What started as just a silly little experiment/exercise morphed into another micro-project. It happens every time without fail, like a subconscious mechanism.
It does make me wonder: is this the result of how I grew up? Some past traumatic moment? Or is it something I’ve just placed upon myself?
I figure It’s actually a mix of all three of those, but not in a very direct way.
Some Context…
From when I was young, my parents didn’t really push me to be the best or anything. The most they’d do is encourage me when I did well, and tell me to study (which I never did) when I did bad (which I also never did, for most of my early life).
Even when they got upset at me for not studying, they’d never force me to start. The most they’d do is set up goals and give me rewards for doing so, and of course I felt kind of weird about it since according to all my friends that sort of studying was the bare minimum, and I was being rewarded for it.
Drawing Lines
I think that not having that hard line made me start drawing my own lines, and that ironically made me my own greatest critic, a thing that any writer or perfectionist knows to be a terrible thing.
Though, I would never describe myself as a perfectionist. At least, not in the traditional sense.
I don’t want things to be perfect, I want any of my output to be completely a result of my own input, or otherwise completely out of my hands.
When I fail, I want it to be 100% my fault (as in, preventable) or 0% my fault (as in, inevitable), not anything in-between.
Control
Not to psychoanalyse myself too much here, but I also think it has to do with control. I came to this realisation recently too; what human doesn’t want to be in control.
Responsibility aside, control itself is something everyone wants in a vacuum, because no control means no form of safety. We are biologically wired to want that stuff.
At some point in my life, maybe early high school, I must have come to the emotional or logical conclusion that the world and the people in it should not be under my control.
So what did I do?
I learned to control myself as much as possible, which meant doing anything I set out to do in the most intentional way possible.
Even now, I’m writing this rant in such a structured manner even though I originally set out to just get my thoughts out there.
I started building a kind of mental fortress because whenever I controlled my output, I could feel like I was never truly at the mercy of the world.
Like, “I can’t control if X person likes me, but I can control how precise I am when I talk to them.” or “I can’t control the chaos of a videogame, but I can control how well I respond to that chaos.”
Sure, this sounds good in theory, but it’s also an exhausting way to live.
When everything I do is separated into “something I can control” vs “something I have no control over”, it forces me to start thinking in hard lines and feel like an extra-large failure whenever I don’t do perfectly in “something I can control”.
Apparently, most people are comfortable with a certain amount of intentionality, and the rest is left up to vibes. I don’t feel that way, because even when I think I do, in reality I’m just finding an optimised way to be unoptimised, which is just another form of optimised.
But I’m fairly sure I’ve thrown my entire collection of hats into the metaphorical ring. My tolerance for error is essentially zero, which sounds like perfectionism, but it’s actually just my vying for control over whatever I can, which feels increasingly like nothing at all nowadays.
That’s because yourself - your own mind and your own body - are things you really can’t control 100%. Especially the latter.
Not to say you are unable to control yourself when you choose to be aggressive or say something mean - those are controllable. What I mean is that the feelings you feel and the physical reactions you have to things aren’t things you can change in the moment, or ever if it’s part of you that thoroughly.
Basically, I think I’ve realised that my desire for control has caused me to grow a deep obsession with doing things intentionally, which has lead to me to accidentally optimise everything I do, even when I try to do something badly.
I’d rather have failed completely because of myself, than succeed by accident, apparently.
Real-life HUD?
I can’t help but think that life would be a lot easier if I had an actual visible bar somewhere in my vision or inside me that let me see how much of my ego has depleted.
Ego depletion is a psychology theory popularised by Roy Baumeister that suggests that self-control is a finite resource - that “will” is like a battery you use every time you make a decision. Basically, a small bit of your mental energy is burnt away whenever you choose something over another thing.
Suppressing feelings, acting social, forcing a crappy project to be perfectly crap? All small little drains adding up over the day until I’m exhausted by the time I get actual free time. Which sucks, because that’s when I also feel most motivated to work. I’m just too tired to do it.
And sometimes, my ego battery will run dry before I even finish the school day. I’ll just feel the most basic feeling I know - melancholic - for the rest of the day no matter what I do, since by that point I’m just too tired to make any intentional decisions.
Plus, I’ll have that tightness in the chest, the short temper, the sudden inability to answer questions about non-factual matters. Any nagging feeling becomes a scream, and I just want to start meditating but never do because I don’t think I deserve it.
It’s a pretty vicious cycle, I’ll admit.
The Incomparable Joy of Failing on Purpose
One of the hardest things I ever had to do was get a 16/25 in my last two assignments for Digital Solutions. That sounds pretty crazy, right? After all, a B and a C is a passing grade. But to leave my assignments sitting there for time I could have been working on it if I had wanted to, even if I knew I’d hate to - it was agonising.
There was no real obligation from my parents, teachers, friends, or anyone else to do well in it. I had explained everything to them, and they knew I was deprioritising Digital Solutions because I hated the assignments and it was my lowest scaling subject.
Despite that, I had to repeatedly rationalise my own productive laziness, such that I was often left nearly as tired as if I had actually done the work anyway.
And at that point, I’d just be thinking, “If you’re gonna feel so bad about it, why not just do it?”
And then my brain would kick itself and go, “No! The point is exactly that; do not do it, so then you can know what it’s like to be truly free.”
And again, “Stop thinking about this, it’s wasting time and energy. Do your other work since you’re not doing your digital solutions. Lazy bum.”
Then, “Right. Yes, I’ll get back to work. I shouldn’t worry about something I’ve chosen not to worry about.”
But in the end, I got that solid C, and I was satisfied. Maybe slightly uncomfortable, but satisfied. Because I proved to myself I could didn’t have to be at my best all the time. That when it wasn’t necessary, I could do nothing at all.
Such a damn backwards problem to have…
Sometimes life demands you give up, and it’s important that you at least consider it.
Because no matter how long you’ve lived in your own head, even you can’t know everything you think and feel. The most intentional thing you can really do is acknowledge that you’re also allowed to not be yourself.
It’s funny writing all that out quiet, ha.
Thanks for reading!