How to do Stuff

2024-10-03

I have a lot of trouble doing stuff. Unfortunately, this world demands stuff be done. Even opperating at a bare minimum capacity, as a hikineet, eventually you will run out of plates to eat off and have to clean, eventually you have to cook, eventually etc. Even if your personal hygeine standards lie below the socially accepted average, you still have to do stuff. Those things constitute "chores". Chores are stuff you don't want to do. But even stuff you do want to do is hard to actually do sometimes. This is a post about what that means and how (maybe) to do that stuff.

I'm not sure if I have adhd or whatever. The doctors recomended against going through the process to get a diagnosis, since I am already diagnosed with autisim, and apparently having both is very rare. This sounds like bullshit to me just from meeting people, and it also sounds like bullshit from me who has read that "50 to 70% of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) also present with comorbid attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8918663/. On the one hand if I were diagnosed with adhd I might be able to get some medicine to help. On the other hand who gives a shit.

This is not a post about adhd or whatever, this is a post about 2 things. Firstly, the difference between wanting something, and wanting to want something. Secondly, how that barrier might be crossed.

But first, we have to talk about parallel universes. No actually we have to talk about doing stuff. I believe that it's very rare for people to be able to do stuff just by doing stuff, in other words, through force of will. In this case let's say stuff reffers to tasks requiring long term consistency. The common ones are probably dieting and working out. That kind of stuff. No one does that just by force of will, supposedly. The opinion seems to be that you need to "make it a habit". You can find a million self help nonsense posts and books and podcasts and whatever else about forming "healthy" habits. I'm not convinced I've ever formed a habit that wasn't chemical in my life. Tooth brushing is often touted as a habit that everyone has. I don't have that as a habit, I have to remember every day, and it feels like a slog every day, and I forget to do it, and sometimes I skip it on purpose and I feel completely fine. Perhaps washing my hands after I go to the bathroom is the only real habit I posses. It actually fits the description of habits that I've heard, that you do it "automatically", and that you might feel "weird" if you don't do it. So building habits is never going to happen. I can do something for months using a phone alarm or some other method which forces me into a certain behaviour, and it doesn't ever become like washing my hands, the second I take away the external factor it goes away. So willpower is out, habit is out, the only thing that remains is "passion".

I think this is the real way to do stuff, you just have to be genuinely passionate about doing that thing. Of course one can loose passion about a certain thing. It's definitely happened to me before, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. It seems passion is a fickle thing. Well that's inconvenient. Also, the extent to which one gets to choose one's own passions is slim. It seems like they somehow appear from the ether at random.

This is what "wanting to want something" is. More accurately it might be split into two sub-types, "wanting to have done x", and "wanting to be the kind of person who wants x". For example, I genuinely want to be the world's greatest demoman player in team fortress 2. In fact I want it so bad that I played that game far too intensely and put far too much pressure on myself to improve and succeed, to the point where it was having negative effects on my mental health and I have made the decision to stop playing that game for the time being. On the other hand, I want to have lost some weight, but I don't actually want to lose weight, because I don't want to go through the process of dieting. Although in that case, I'm actually presently doing somewhat ok on that course so it might be a bad example (focussing purely on portion control is what's helped). And on the other other hand, I want to be the kind of person who wants to play old jrpgs, but the thing is that I've played a few old jrpgs and I haven't really had much fun doing it. But I want to be the kind of person who enjoys those games.

This is not helped by the fact that I'm the sort of person who likes to dive into the deep end on anything I do. I find half measures a little condescending. I'm gonna make a weird comparisson here, but here it is. When trying to get people into anime, often times people recommend this new viewer to watch cowboy bebop, akira, and studio ghibli movies. The thing is, if they watch and enjoy those things, then congratulations, they are now into anime that is absolutely nothing like the vast majority of anime. You tried to ween them in on the stuff that is "traditionally good", that represents the aspects of the medium most familiar to popular western media, when that is absolutely not representative of the medium as a whole. So they're not really into anime at all, they're still just into western media. I want to recomend people the most average but fairly popular show that is actually representative of anime as it exists. Not sure what that would be it would depend on the person but do you see what I mean. That's how I got into anime (the first show I watched was chuunibyou demo koi ga shitai). So when I want to dive into jrpgs, I think I should start at the level of jrpgs that actually represent the medium properly, but are also appealing to outsiders. Thankfully, Dragon Quest XI exists. But not everything in life has it's respective Dragon Quest XI.

The thing that I've coming to realise is that passion is not as out of our control as I had thought. The way you control your own passion is through the time honoured adage of "fake it till you make it". If you want to be the kind of person who wants x, just pretend to be the "x wanter" person, and act as they would. It's easier for things that don't suck. I can immagine the kind of person who cleans their house more regularly than me, they have a whole different set of social pressures that I don't have. They might care about their reputation when inviting people over, they might invite the kind of people over who would judge them for having an unclean house. I lack that social pressure. This makes it difficult.

I used to be very averse to "pointless melodrama" or "unearned pathos" in anime. But I started to change my outlook. They must keep doing this because people like it, let me just pretend to be the kind of person who I immagine would become emotionally invested in that kind of highschool melodrama storyline that does nothing for me. So that's what I started doing. Rather than demanding the story change for me, I tried to change for the story. And it partially worked. After a while of doing this, these kinds of anime tone shift highschool bullshit melodrama were much more tollerable and sometimes quite enjoyable or emotionally affecting. So pretending have passion might be the way to do things.

Again it's hard to actually say, and even harder to actually do, but that's just the discoveries I've made so far. Slowly emotionally manipulate yourself into feeling passionate about something and if you roll lucky, you might actually develop that passion. The issue is that passions fade, and they can be hard to rekindle. Especially on the "chore" side of the stuff spectrum. I have not solved this problem yet but I will let you know when I make progress.

t. a man who recently bought an excersise bike for way too much money and is trying not to let that purchase go to waste.