Issue 22: Flex Your Chromatophores
Holy smokes, we're already into December.
I had set a goal to ship a new app by Q4 of this year. I've barely made a dent in the product planning, never mind any of the actual coding.
That's fine, as I'm focusing much more on the day job and family matters — though I guess I need to update some copy on the app's landing page and social accounts.
I had also set out to rebuild my habits and routines, with a goal of focusing on social, physical, intellectual, and emotional well-being. That didn't turn out so great, either.
Again, that's fine. I've made some steps in the right direction.
Maybe it's just me, but when I get bored/upset/negatively affected by some situation, my instinct is to run towards some kind of major reset. Task manager full of stale items? Nuke it. Email inboxes overloaded? Archive it all. Lower back pain and shortness of breath? Jump into a six-day-a-week fitness routine.
As you might guess, the fix pretty much never sticks. The high from planning the fix —trying out a new app, kicking off a new side project, finding a new workout— is amazing, but the execution hits a wall when I realize that it (for whatever it might be) isn't really a fix.
It's a distraction.
— ❧ —
To change colour as quickly and precisely as they do, octopi have to contract muscles connected to chromatophores under their skin — small, stretchy sacks of pigment. If we were capable of doing the same thing, the energy expenditure required in those couple of seconds of colour change would be about the same as going on a 23-minute run.
Making huge changes to your habits, your diet, your life —i.e., your self— require similarly huge amounts of effort. This makes sense in the context of survival for the octopus, but it's a lot harder for the average human that's seeking to make change without a clear goal in mind.
But boy howdy, is the internet ever ready to sell you a solution. We're reduced to a profile of engagement metrics that are so good at predicting our behaviour, that it's trivial to prey on our insecurities and sell us snake oil.
This isn't news.
Joan Westenberg —one of my favourite writers— shared thoughts in a series of posts on Mastodon on how social media is designed to break our resolve. A couple of months ago, I wrote something similar in relation to my Apple Watch and the seduction of its telemetry.
At a high level, this is about authenticity. Authenticity is about moving in the direction of your moral compass, and course correcting when you get off track. And what gets us off track? What is it that distracts us from living our values?
It's fucking hard.
The less often we do hard things, the harder it gets to do hard things. But doing hard things is what keeps the promises we make to ourselves.
It's why it's easier to add a bunch of menial tasks to your to-do list than it is to dig at and resolve the deep-seated stories you tell yourself. Stories that take you off course. Stories that keep you from growing.
The work is hard. The promises can feel easy to deprioritize. But the result is important.
Flex those chromatophores.
Around The Web
Former colleague and all-around great person Margarita Noriega writes about how journalism has adapted as social feeds went from reverse-chronological to algorithmic, and how it will have to further adapt as curation is handed off to AI. My feeling is that while social feeds will continue to make us stupider/more distracted, there are going to be huge opportunities here. New metrics won't really be new, but they'll be harder to validate; human curation is going to become more and more important for people that seek signal over noise.
Maria Popova shares notes on a wonderful children's book, My Very Own Special Particular Private and Personal Cat. True love involves recognizing each other's unique needs and identities. Ultimately, to love others fully, one must first learn to love themselves — the whole put-on-your-oxygen-mask-first-before-helping-others principle. Also, cats.
Thought Of The Week
Love and hate are two sides of the same coin: passion.
The spewing of vitriol on some topic tends to create more engagement, sure, yet it goes nowhere. It's a bunch of spiteful voices raging at each other.
But have you ever noticed how goddamn engrossing and easy it is to learn from someone who's talking about a topic they love?
Be in love with things.