Fascination Procrastination
Hi everyone,
Let me tell you about a problem I have that I suspect a large number of you share, at least from time to time. If you don’t share it, hopefully this will still be interesting.
Do you have ideas for things that:
Are really interesting and exciting.
You know you can do with a merely reasonable amount of work.
You absolutely cannot bring yourself to do.
‘cause I sure do.
For me this comes up a lot in the more research-based end of my work, but it also happens with programming more broadly and writing fiction, but it also comes up in a huge number other areas of my life.
Why does this happen?
I suggested on Twitter a while back that it’s often useful to ask “Do I not want to do this or do I want to not do this?”. The distinction is this: In the former case what you are lacking is the drive to do the thing. In the latter case you may have that drive but in some way be stopped from doing it by some underlying aversion. For example this is often how anxiety plays out - you do want to do the thing that is making you anxious, but you’re also too anxious to do it.
(This is an instance of the accelerator and brake model)
I propose that in this scenario almost has to be the latter: The idea is great, you know you can do it, and you are not doing it, so it’s unlikely to be the case that you don’t want to do it. Instead, there is something stopping you.
This might be something specific to the idea - it might well be anxiety about something “easy” that the idea involves, it might be that it would solve problems that you don’t want to admit you could have solved all along (cf. Easy Changes and Uncomfortable Reflections), or any number of other reasons.
However, I think there is also something intrinsic to interesting and exciting ideas that makes us not want to implement them: It is enjoyable to think about interesting things, and by implementing the idea it becomes uninteresting. The process of executing an idea inherently makes it less interesting.
The thing about implementing an idea is that as a result of implementing it roughly one of two things will happen:
The idea will not work.
The idea will work.
Both of these can destroy the interest of the idea but, perhaps surprisingly, it’s the latter that does so most reliably.
Failure is Interesting
I suggested in Maintaining Niche Interests that a key feature of interest is that the subject is worth thinking about more. A failed idea may become uninteresting if it fails for some reason that is just so crushingly stupid that you feel slightly bad for having had the idea in the first place (which doesn’t feel great when it happens) but, at least for me, more often it fails for reasons that feel like I could have solved them if I were better at something or had the right clever idea, or if the problem were slightly different.
For example, my current exciting line of research comes from an idea that I describe as “A really natural and interesting idea that has two small problems: It performs terribly and it produces poor results”. Every time I tried to implement it the conclusion was the same: This idea does not even slightly work. It’s a bad idea. But it’s a really neat bad idea, so the fact that it kept failing didn’t stop it from being interesting, so I kept thinking about it and returning to it and eventually figured out how to apply it in a way that avoided all of its problems and solved a problem that was hard to solve any other way.
(If you’re interested in niche technical details, the idea is the one I describe in Getting Test-Case Reduction Unstuck with Automaton Inference)
When something fails, you have learned something, and often the fact that it has failed indicates that there is still more there to learn. As a result, if they do not dispirit you often increase rather than decrease your level of interest.
Success is Boring
The problem with success is that it requires you to actually understand the idea well enough to implement it. You’ll find all its rough edges, the bits where you have to compromise on its purity in order to make it work in the messiness of the real world.
You’ll also find out how well it actually works - most ideas that are exciting are exciting because they promise great and wondrous things. Then you implement them and the reality is… pretty good.
The result is that whenever you compare an ideal, fascinating, idea with its working real world implementation, the real world version is higher cost and lower benefit.
In addition, by implementing the idea, you’ll have understood it better, because you’ve learned the contours of the problem and how its parts fit together in the course of making it work in practice. The idea is no longer new and shiny, it is more comfortable and familiar.
Unfortunately ideas which are comfortable and familiar are boring. You know their ins and outs, and you don’t really need to think about them more. They are no longer interesting, and so no longer serve as objects of fascination.
It is easy to experience this as a loss: Success means that a source of interest has been taken away from you, and that feels bad.
What to do about this?
So we are avoiding implementing a good idea because we risk it either not working and feeling foolish as a result or working and taking away a source of interest. How do we stop doing that?
Personally I’ve found that just noticing that I am doing this is often quite helpful all on its own, because honestly it’s a pretty ridiculous thing to be doing.
If that doesn’t help, the thing that sometimes does help is to realise this: Yes, this idea will become uninteresting, but there are always going to be more interesting ideas to have, and indeed many of those ideas will only become possible to have through trying to implement this one. Either I will implement it, and it won’t work, and I will learn something about the problem by the fact that it doesn’t work, or it will work and it will expand the space of things I am capable of, which gives me access to new problems and new solutions to old problems.
A thing that I feel should work but doesn’t seem to for me is to remind myself that there are good things other than interest, and that having the thing working will be good in and of itself, and it will be pleasing to have achieved. Yes, the idea will no longer be interesting, but it will have become a tool I can use, and that’s satisfying. In general, to focus on the positives that offset the idea.
I think this doesn’t work for two reasons: The first is that, for me at least, interest is one of my favourite emotions, so it’s really hard for mere satisfaction to compete - it’d have to be really satisfying before that was a good trade off.
But the other reason why this probably won’t work, and I think this probably means this approach can’t work, because ultimately this sort of solution is about trying to push harder on the accelerator, and when this is happening you already want the outcome. The problem is that that the break is also on. This means that the solution has to be something that makes the bad parts of the outcome (the world is less interesting) less bad (actually it’s just differently interesting) instead of trying to want this outcome more.
Working on cultivating other sources of enjoyment is, of course, also worth doing, but that’s because it increases your enjoyment of the world, but solving this problem requires reducing rather than increasing conflict.
Postscript
This is entirely unrelated to this letter, but my friend Lisa McNulty will be running an online course “How (not) to think like Sherlock Holmes”, about what Sherlock Holmes tells us about good and responsible reasoning by not doing it himself. It will be starting on Thursday July 30th and running for five weeks. I think it’s going to be really good, and I’d encourage you to buy tickets.