“I hate caring about stuff. But apparently once you start, you can't just stop.”
Here’s what I spent the majority of my waking ours this week on: building a very simple call-and-response Discord bot that’s entirely filled with in-jokes. Is the bot usable by anyone that isn’t in my server? No. Did it take me far longer than it should have to work out how to make the simplest things work? Yes. Do I love this bot like I do my own children¹? Absolutely.
The process of tinkering with something—of sitting down and writing and re-writing code until whatever I had originally envisioned began to take (an admittedly quite ridiculous) shape—was one of the most soothing things I’ve done in over a year which, in retrospect, is both an incredibly sad statement and an incredibly joyous one, all at once.
See, here’s the thing: I learnt how to subconsciously strip the pleasure from most things I did at a very young age. Hobbies had metrics to evaluate progress, or were rewards for doing productive things, or were just a constant source of background guilt².
Somewhere between the first and third major burnouts of my twenties, I was looking for a new job and one interviewer asked me what I did for fun: a question that I found myself completely unable to answer. I think I told him I liked to read³ and he told me about how much he enjoys craft breweries. I did not get the job and I don’t regret it.
It took me another couple of years⁴ to realise that the strict metrics I measured nearly everything in my life against (and that I’d been failing to meet more and more) were perhaps no longer doing their job, and that I might want to find a different way to live. Because it’s difficult to let go of old habits (especially ones that come with really nice planners and journals), I started my new regime of not having metrics to measure success by …creating metrics to measure my success.
Here’s what I very proudly declared my non-metric life goals to be in 2018:
It lasted a grand total of seven weeks, based on the data collected and recorded in this journal.
I’m not really sure when I finally gave up on both keeping to the goals and not feeling guilty about failing to do so, but I’m really grateful for whatever finally pushed me over that edge and into realising that setting goals to do things I love was actively making me not love anything anymore⁵.
After I took the metrics out, the guilt began to sidle away too (although much more slowly because, as I said before, it’s difficult to let go of old habits), and all I was left with was this weird feeling of joy at the fact that I could be absolutely terrible at things, with no plans to get better, and indulge in them because I wanted to.
It’s probably a good thing that I figured whatever that was out before quarantine began, in retrospect. It’s meant there isn’t any crippling anxiety to precede me picking up my guitar⁷, or starting to (very badly) draw tired animals in inappropriate clothing, or stare at blank pages that just won’t fill with writing no matter how many ideas I have. It’s meant that I could get on the phone with close friends and record a podcast we’ve been talking about doing for ages.
It’s also become a lot easier to do things that I’ve been wanting to do for years. I’ve read more books in the last seven months than I had in over three years. I’ve happily given up on the books that didn’t grip me, too, just like I’ve put down the guitar after picking it up when I didn’t feel like playing more than a few chords, or discarded articles and story ideas that haven’t gone anywhere without (too many) self-recriminations.
Of course, all this is easier said than done. Yesterday, I told my wife that I needed to get this newsletter out and that it was hanging over me on my to-do list (because you can give some things up, but there’s no reason to live like an animal). She reminded me that I didn’t need to do anything (except the dishes⁸), and I ended up putting it off until I wanted to write again.
¹ I made both my cats come look at their younger bot sibling at one point. Neither of them were particularly impressed.
² There are jokes about Asian parenting that can be cracked here, but those jokes would miss the point of Asian education systems, of immigrant anxieties about productivity and success, and of how none of these things are unique to Asia, after all.
³ I did not tell him that all I had read in years was fanfiction, and the same seven or eight pieces of fanfiction over and over again, because he wasn’t my therapist.
⁴ My rotating list of fanfiction went up to around twelve in this time, though, so there’s silver linings everywhere if you just look for them.
⁵ The funniest bit is: there were stories in my rolodex of fanfiction that covered this topic and I still didn’t think to apply those lessons to myself. The moral here is, quite obviously, internalise all values you read on the AO3⁶.
⁶ This is a fandom in-joke and should not be taken seriously. I need to add it to the Discord bot.
⁷ Although, this has been replaced by guilt because Callette is inexplicably terrified of the thing. I don’t think I’m that bad, but she sees me pick it up and runs to hide under the bed.
⁸ The dishes are infinite.
The title is from the Murderbot Diaries. All murderbot wants is to sit in a corner, not talk about its feelings, and watch endless amounts of TV. There’s never been a more relatable protagonist in recent times.