On Decreasing Mental Stimulation - #31
Hello Maiyah (and friends)!
Welcome to my next (and hopefully last) format change to this newsletter. I’m moving the newsletter to Substack, an all-in-one free publishing platform. It’s a cleaner, more readable email. It’s a lot less ugly than Wordpress, and I don’t have to use that annoying middleman called Mailchimp. I can add gifs, so if you put your email in the subscription box, you’ll get a cool Super Saiyan / Chappelle Show crossover gif. Pretty sweet.
Also, I’m sorry to announce today, but I’m officially changing the name from “The Maiyah-Don ‘Shoot the Sh*t’ Wednesday Thread” to simply “Shoot the Sh*t Wednesday”. First off, if I put my opinion here, to an outside observer it would look like Maiyah agrees with it, and I don’t like that confusion. Second, it’s no longer a “thread”… more like a “newsletter to keep up with friends”. Lastly, who has the time to read the whole f*cking title?
On Decreasing Mental Stimulation
1,460 words | 05min 30sec reading time
I understand this may go against the ethos of being a creative, but lately I’ve come to the conclusion that my issue with creativity is not so much about thinking all the time, rather it is an issue with craving stimulation.
I’ve mentioned this a few weeks ago when a friend, who I’ll refer to as {A}, told me in an email reply to calm down, take a breather, stop thinking on all cylinders from morning to midnight. “Have you thought about being bored?” she wrote. And she linked me to a TED talk that spoke about boredom - though it was on the premise of people always being connected to their phones and stuck on social media. It wasn’t exactly the message she was looking for, she admits, but it was on the right track. I know what {A} was talking about, yet it was still somewhere in the fog; you know, like that thing we all do: “I’m feeling… I’m feeling - oh, what’s that word? Not ‘hungry’, a little less than that…” and your friend chimes in and goes, “Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean, yeah… uhh…” - snap, snap, snap, points finger in the air - “F*ck, what’s that word?” And by the time you both figure it out, you’ll be a lot hungrier than peckish.
This idea of my mental state always being in top gear, always going to Mach 9, definitely made me, ironically, think. Yet I didn’t know specifically why until I found this TED talk through the pestering YouTube algorithm. It’s about 16 minutes, so I’ll spare you the quarter-hour; Chris Bailey is a productivity consultant and writer who puts productivity experiments to the test. He’s in the same vein of these other human guinea pigs like Tim Ferriss, A.J. Jacobs, and Morgan Spurlock. , Chris’s thesis is that it’s not that our brains get distracted, but that it actually craves distraction due to the “novelty bias”, a tendency for the mind to reward us with that crazy pleasure chemical called dopamine whenever it finds a novel experience - like a distraction. This is why our modern-day brains, mine included, always seem to fly in this hyperstimulated headspace from dawn till dusk.
What do I do? Chris said the biggest culprit was social media. I’ll get this out of the way: I don’t do social media. Yeah, I’m on it and might post something about a broken plate or whatever, but I avoid “The Scroll” with its endless stream of ads and influencers I don’t give a sh*t about. I was aware of this, so I thought, right from the beginning, that I was in the clear. Hahahaha…
So here’s the real question I asked: What do I do that fills the void of social media? And the world made sense.
All the content. Podcasts on business, screenwriting, science, law, politics, news. Books that I only half read, physical paperback books or even digital pdf books ripped from online file lockers; some books I barely even started, yet have the audacity to put a dumb bookmark because I tell myself “I’ll come back to it soon.” Newsletters from a million different bloggers, writers, historians, journalists, news sources - New Yorker opinion pieces! “Wow, better catch up with the New Yorker humour column!” Hey, Tinder, why not! And let’s not forget my definition of social media not including Reddit. “Oh my gosh! Look at all the interesting subreddits! r/dankmemes has pretty cool memes. r/DeepintoYoutube has esoteric sh*t. r/me_irl cures depression! r/YouTubeHaiku! And let’s not forget r/screenwriting!” - a subreddit with a banner that literally says “where writers go to blatantly avoid writing.” Great.
All the apps. Look at how f*cking dumb my phone’s app drawer is. No, look at it, seriously. It’s a Where’s Waldo of applications, three-quarters of which I haven’t touched since downloading them.
And YouTube. I remember watching so much YouTube at one point that I tried to uninstall YouTube. I’m a lot better today than I was before, but I still catch myself in the Youtube rabbithole. I watch SO MUCH YouTube, I have a dedicated playlist of videos I’ve watched simply labeled “Think of this”. Yes, you thought right. It’s a playlist that was originally made to jog my mind for ideas. I rarely rewatch any of them. “Just in case,” I tell myself.
As of this writing, my YouTube stats show that I am subscribed to 236 channels. I haven’t cleaned up my channel subscriptions since account creation. Nor do I even watch any of those 236 subscriptions except for maybe a few. I also “like” 3,849 videos. My average video length is 3 minutes (I guess), so I watched about 192 hours of content. That’s 8 days of my life, and that’s a conservative estimate.
And little projects! Meaningless, bullsh*t projects. “Word of the day.” “Caption this painting.” Any of my Instagram content. Anytime I make a meme for Reddit. I believe I’m doing genuine work. I’m not. It’s shallow work and it’s meaningless. It doesn’t make me better at comedy, and it’s especially cluttering the path to my goals, like writing.
Chris says that when we are in a state of constant stimulation, we neglect this special mode of thinking called “scatter focus”, which is usually called “wandering”. It’s a state of mind that allows you to come up with ideas and think about problems.
Yet this doesn’t happen for me as often. When I’m in the car, “Hey, kick on a podcast!” Brushing my teeth? “Hey, let’s watch the migration of the Monarch Butterfly.” Sitting on the couch, snacking, watching television? “Hey, I can text this girl, while looking at dank memes, while listening to a podcast. I don’t have to watch the whole show attentively; I’ll just catch up on the details over on r/Westworld.”
And this practice of juggling stimulating apps and content has unfortunately spilled into my writing sessions. I would be trying to write something, like screenwriting or writing a post like this, and then the following avalanche of bullsh*t starts: “I need some music to make me think.” - opens Spotify tab - “type, type, type, type - wait a minute, did something like this occur?” - opens Wikipedia, then Quora, then from there a Google search, a YouTube video - “Great, now I know exactly how Napoleon dominated Egypt! Where was I?” - _head back over to Evernote or Fade In - “_Sh*t, where was I?” And I’d find myself with 30 tabs open and no work done at all. A wasted evening of “writing”.
Some of you may now be thinking, “Don, are you sure it’s not ADHD?” I’ve thought of that before. However, last time I checked symptoms on the internet, it apparently showed that I have ADHD, ADD, Asperger’s, Autism, Schizoid Personality Disorder, Depression, and OCD. To which I looked at this mental hospital takeout menu and thought… “Maybe I’m just bad at time management? Maybe I’m way overstimulated?” There was a time when I wasn’t on social media, or on my smartphone all the time: Senior year of high school to Sophomore year of college. I got a lot of sh*t done between the class assignments, part-time work, helping at the public access station.
Today, my brain finally reached a point where it’s telling me to “STOP, STOP, STOP - I can’t take it anymore!”
I only recently realized this problem and decided to take action. I now force myself to write in complete silence. I throw my phone into the other room. I purge words out of my fingers even when I have little to no idea how to make out a scene or a paragraph. Any temptation that is along the lines of, “Wait a minute, is this really how it works? I’ll just open another tab and-”, I catch myself. “No Don, you can not just open a tab. No Google for you. That’s for round two. Finish round one.” If I’m writing a lengthy email or passage, I purposely seek out writing applications that have little distraction. I hate Microsoft Word and instead will use a site like calmlywriter.com to minimize this stimulation. And I keep writing regardless of how the words are churning out. I don’t answer texts, emails, DMs, PMs, whatever. People can wait. Gotta keep the keyboard hot.
I keep trying meditation. I gotta stick with it this next time around. Maybe one of you can throw me a link or something.
I’ll leave on this. I listened to a Neil Gaiman interview on YouTube last year where he gave his most important writing rule:
You can sit here and write or you can sit here and do nothing… but you can't sit here and do anything else.
Which is why I stickied that sh*t to my computer.
It’ll be quite a road to decreasing mental stimulation. Yet, it’ll all be worth it.
News.Video.Poem
Whistleblower: Wall Street Has Engaged in Widespread Manipulation of Mortgage Funds - Incredible read. We should pool our money and invest in credit default swaps. tl;dr - Loans that are gathered into pools whose worth can exceed $1 billion and turned into bonds sold to investors are known as CMBS (for commercial mortgage-backed securities). In theory, CMBS are supposed to undergo a rigorous multistage vetting process. But according to John Flynn, a veteran of the CMBS industry who filed the whistleblower complaint, numbers are being adjusted — inevitably to make properties, and therefore the entire CMBS, look more financially robust. Some expenses were erased from the ledger; some profit margins were exaggerated. Most changes were small; but a minor increase in profits can lead to approval for a significantly higher mortgage. He began to see patterns and what he calls a massive problem: Flynn has amassed “materials identifying about $150 billion in inflated CMBS issued between 2013 and today,” according to the complaint.
Silly Sh*t
Have you ever put a week into researching a short film project and right as you’re about to start writing the first draft, your buddy pulls out and goes “nah brah, idk”? And you put all this time into learning about Great Flood mythology and boatbuilding. And the Epic of Gilgamesh. And the psychology of conspiracy theories. I could go on. Now I have all this unnecessary information about skiffs and schooners. Here’s my Reddit post.
I don’t know when I’ll return to Los Angeles. Maybe around June 2nd or 3rd, I don’t know. My temp agent said temp office work probably won’t kick in till July, so who knows. I’m on unemployment and lost money on the stock market. Yaaay me.
Bought myself a pair of yellow Allbirds. I’ve started Mewing. Yaaayy me.
Best,
Don
As always, you can reach me at dnrtldg@outlook.com