Avoiding the world
I’ll have to admit it: reconnecting with the world is turning out much harder than I’d hoped. I’m still a bit stuck in avoiding the world.
To give a practical example, back on Monday, I started a post for here that I expected to get done within the day. I wrote the intro, and the first full paragraph, and added a suitable graphic. And then I stopped.
The problem was that I stayed stopped. Every time I came back to it, time after time, I immediately switched to do something else, some kind of avoidance. Usually scrolling through YouTube, hour after hour. Nothing useful, anyway.
Given that I really do need to get back into action, back into engagement with the world, that’s not good. Not good at all.
Yes, in part it’s just a known bad habit of mine, a known fear-response that I’d described here in a post early last year: futzing, dithering, sort-of-moving but only from side to side, to avoid facing the actual issue at hand.
Sure, on the surface, it looks a bit like laziness, that all-too-common definition of ‘power’ as ‘the ability to avoid work’, to offload the work onto others. Yet it’s seemed so reflexive, so instant - switching away from the task within seconds of each attempt to restart it - that it seems clear there’s something deeper going on there. What am I so afraid of?
It isn’t just me, though. I see so many other people doing the same kind of thing, each avoiding the world, yet in a huge variety of different ways.
What’s going on?
From watching myself and others, it seems that one of the most common elements is that it’s a response to overload. When there’s too much going on in one’s own world, it drives towards a chaotic-collapse in responsibility, in its literal form as ‘response-ability’, the ability to choose appropriate responses and act on those choices. And yeah, there’s a lot to worry about in the wider world right now, with a lot of really foolish idiots rampaging around in ways that are making some genuine existential risks a lot more real right now than they were even a year or two ago.
Note, though, that the onset of those classic fear-responses - fight, flight, freeze, futz - is only the first stage of that kind of collapse. If we get stuck in that response, then yes, we do indeed we risk falling into a full feedback-loop spiral into complete collapse, and yeah, less and less ‘ability to do work’ becomes available, at any level from personal to global and beyond. When doomscrolling seems too much like a wiser move than facing what’s actually going on, no wonder that too many of us get stuck in a state of avoiding the world.
But it doesn’t help, of course - and that’s the real point here.
So what would help? What can we do when we get stuck, in the way that I’d done with that intended post?
The mistake I’d made was simple enough: in trying to rush straight in to getting everything going at full speed again, I’d driven myself straight into overload. That risk should have been obvious right from the start - but wasn’t, to me at least, in part because I was feeling so guilty about letting everyone down over the past year that I ended up missing every overload-warning that came up. Hence, inevitably, a kind of inverse of that classic Biblical phrase about “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” - in this case, the body might have been up to the challenge, but after that year-long struggle towards recovery, nothing else was up to it. It ain’t just the physical muscles that get weakened in a long yet near-invisible malaise….
What’s finally - today - got me at least somewhat beyond the debilitating ineffectiveness of that futzing-loop, was remembering the core principle of this Substack: practice on the small changes to get ready for the big ones. I stopped trying to force myself to write that other post, and instead set down to write this one. Yes, I fell back into the doomscrolling-loop at least twice since I started writing this some three hours ago - but I’ve instead managed to lead myself back here, without force, quietly, gently. And each time I’ve done that, the ‘response-ability’, the ability to do the work, likewise slowly returns, ticks up just that little bit further.
The crucial difference has been a small change: Whenever I get stuck in writing - which, yes, does happen a lot - I don’t just sit there and fall back into doomscrolling. Instead, I get up and do a brief back-and-forth walk around the house, a couple of hundred steps each time, and then sit down again to get the work done. I still can’t focus on that other post yet - in part because I still can’t yet find a way to simplify the underlying ideas into a form that might make sense to others - but I do know that with this change, I will at least get this post completed and out there before this morning ends.
Again, I know it’s not just me: so many other people I know are also caught up right now in their own avoiding the world in one way or another. All too understandable, as I know all too well, given the mess this world is in. Yet this is a time, perhaps even more than any other, when we all need to be engaging with the world as best we can, in whatever way we can.
Given that, in what way would this kind of avoidance be true for you too? And if so, what small changes could you make in your own context to help you re-engage with the world - and likewise help others re-engage with the world as well? I’d really welcome your comments and ideas on that.
I’ll stop here for now, anyway, but there’ll be more to follow soon. Happy Chaos, all!
Hi, Tom. Long time, no speak with. I'm still recovering from a massive heart attack which occurred several years ago. You made a 'small' comment which effected me: "I’ve instead managed to lead myself back here, without force, quietly, gently." Well, I am now in a revelatory zone. Such action has now become obvious to me. But, you offered the seed for the becoming. Deep thanks!
Feels like you wrote this one for me today. Thank you.
For the past few months I've been slowly working on a book about AI capabilities and limitations and how we need to govern our use of it (rather than pretending we can align it with our interests) and I too find I'm near-continuously dancing on the edge of overload. Some days I feel hugely tempted to find a quiet place in southern Tassie where I can mostly avoid the world and just write fiction instead of dealing with the mess. On those days I don't know what else to do but be gentle with myself and let the feeling wash through.
Most days, though, I've found that walking around a bit helps me, too. At least enough to take another swing or two at the writing I feel response-able to do.
What's your other post about?