I <3 Solitude
I knew that I was in for some solitude this winter, and I assumed that I’d get lonely at some point. I was curious how much solitude it would take for me to get lonely, so I chose not to pre-solve the problem and just let it happen.
It never happened.
I’m an introvert and I've always had an above average tolerance of solitude, but even so I was surprised. It’s not the case that I tolerated solitude this winter; I loved it. I ate it up and soaked it in. I wrapped myself in it like a cozy blanket by the fire.
(It occurs to me that some friction in previous revs of Tyler might be attributable to a large delta between Solitude Actual and Solitude Needed. I was getting drops of the stuff when I really needed buckets. Why don’t selves come with instruction manuals, cutsheets, specified nominal operating ranges?)
Parallel Projecting Is My Jam
I read half a dozen books at a time. It takes me a while to finish any particular book, but I read about one book a week (I don’t keep track but that feels about right). If I try to read only one book at a time my absorption goes down and I get frustrated.
I realized I prefer to do the same with projects, and I think I know why.
Most of my projects are ‘novel’ to me, meaning, I’m either designing them as I go or I’m learning a new skill (or both). I have to think about every step. These novel projects demand focused attention, otherwise I’ll make a design error or screw something up. And I can work faster than I can think. So I can think my way through 1-3 hours of work at a time, and then do that work, and then I need to stop and let my brain catch up.
It’s like I’m having a conversation with reality. When I design something in my head, that’s my side of the conversation. I’m saying things like “I’ll run the conductors through the conduit” or “I’ll build a bridge between my shade structure and the studio.”
And then when I go try to build/make that thing, that’s reality’s side of the conversation. Reality tells me things like “It is difficult to push a five-conductor bundle through thirty feet of conduit with an elbow at the end” or “the shade structure is two feet lower than the studio and there are no good places to sink lag bolts, how will the bridge attach?”
When I have conversations I am genuinely interested in what the other person says. I hate being interrupted, but I also rarely talk at length. I prefer to say something as concisely as possible, ideally with a question at the end, and then I’ll shut up and listen closely to what the other person has to say. I love this. Good conversations are a collaborative creation process between two or more parties. At the end of a particularly good conversation it feels like we made something worth making. I love this.
Projects are a conversation with reality where we (reality and I) make something. And spending more than 1-3 hours a day on any given project often feels like the conversation is unbalanced. I can only absorb so much information coming at me from reality: I start to forget what she told me at the beginning of the conversation. It becomes overwhelming.
Happily I can switch to another project and it’s like a fresh conversation. It seems that I can work on 3-6 projects at a time as long as I’m not stressed about getting any one of them done on a deadline.
Obviously it takes a long time to finish a project that you only spend an hour or two on a day. But if this multiple parallel project workflow is kept up consistently, just like my book reading, the overall rate of project completion remains high.
A lot of my project stress over the winter is attributable to having the sense that some of my projects had deadlines, which pushed me to either spend more than 1-3hrs/day on the ‘urgent’ projects, or feel guilty that I wasn’t. Going forward, the more I can design my life so that nothing I do feels like I ought to spend more than a few hours a day on it, the better.
It’s time to bet on my own projects
I say ‘yes’ way too much and take on responsibility for other people’s vision. I’ve never spend a long period of time consistently working exclusively towards my own visions. I wrote about this more in Self Sovereignty and Sabotage.
To address this I’ve devised Project NOPE, a year of saying ‘no’ by default to anyone else’s project that’s over the scale of a weekend holiday build.
Alcohol is an expensive performance inhibitor with long term negative health effects
I still want to learn to homebrew at some point, but choosing to not drink this year is going really well. I wish I’d begun this ages ago.
I’ve decreased but not eliminated my money FOMO
I am accumulating evidence every month that I can live a good life on very little. My ttmCOL (trailing twelve month cost of living) is about $7,300 and it’s headed in the direction of $5k by the end of the year. The longer I continue to really like how my life runs on a very low burn rate validates my runway numbers, which are 5-10 FU cash and 20-30 total.
Moving cash into ‘safe’ vehicles like HYSAs, CDs, and iBonds, and developing an asset management system also helped decrease my FOMO.
Still, I’m not used to being this free yet. It’s not internalized.
An idea for making money will occur to me (*cough* artisanal bespoke composting toilets *cough*) and I’ll feel like I need to run out and make it happen urgently.
And then I'm like, but would I do that if it wouldn’t generate income? No.
And do I need to make money anytime soon? Also no.
Is it easy to make money if I decide I need to? Well yes.
And are some of the other things I'm going to do simply because I’m intrinsically motivated to do so possibly going to throw off some money before I run out of FU$? Yes probably.
Okay so chill, self, seriously.