Circumstances, attention and shifting interests

Over the last couple of weeks I have thinking about the fact that, for more than a year, I managed to publish five articles every week (with the only exception of vacation periods where family demands took precedence) but in the last three months I have not managed to write even ten (this is the first one in June). My analytical nature, however, does not allow me to stop at the simple confirmation of the fact, so I had to look into the matter in some depth to try to explain the reasons for the change. My conclusions are still a combination of observational and speculative, but at least they serve to placate my curiosity (and as grounds for this long-due article).

From a purely formal point of view, anything that happens requires both an opportunity and a cause: if I drop a glass and it shatters, it is not only because there are all elements necessary (a fragile object, a solid floor and some vertical distance between them) but also a trigger (the dummy who pushed the glass off the counter). In terms of human activities, the necessary elements are quite more complex, because they not only require an environment in which the activities happen, but also a set of skills and dispositions in the agent without which the activity just cannot take place. Arguably, neither my set of skills nor my dispositions may have changed significantly in such a short time, so the cause has to be traced either to a missing necessary element in the environment or to a problem in the trigger.

Photo: Dimo Fedortchenko

One of the peculiarities of the creative process, at least for me, is that it takes place in two steps: the formation of the ideas happens at a low-intensity level, often while other things are driving my train of thought, but, as long as a small amount of mental resources are free, ideas get constantly mixed and matched, most are discarded as irrelevant and only a few of them end up archived as pertinent to the matter in point. The second step, putting all these ideas into actual words and giving them a coherent structure, is a much more demanding endeavor: not only does it require essentially complete attention, but it just does not happen (not properly at least) if the environment is not favorable. For instance, while having music (even actual songs) in the background does not disturb the ideation process in any significant way, it completely destroys my ability to string words together. It is possible that, in order to write meaningful sentences, I actually need to hear the words with my mind's ear and that it gets overpowered by my physical one when subject substantial stimulation.

Comparing the situation then and now I cannot honestly say that I have fewer ideas or that they are less interesting, so that I would not feel inclined to put them in written. Most of my inspiration comes from situations that I experience or I read about and, if anything has changed with the relaxation of the corona measures, is that I do more things, particularly I meet a lot more people than I used to. Is it possible that these experiences are not as rich as I could get by browsing the internet? Yes, it is possible. Could the demand of mental resources by these activities limit somehow the time I devot to ideation? Yes, it is technically possible, but I do not think that the impact could be as big as to reduce the production rate from roughly twenty articles per month all the way to zero. In fact, squeezing my recent memory I have to admit that there are a member of ideas that I thought I could write about, but never got to. There has to be another reason to explain the extent of the reduction.

In the end, the only compatible explanation that I have been able to find is that the new situation has inadvertently shifted my interests. In other words, I am not ready to make the effort of putting a post together on a daily basis anymore. I cannot exactly establish whether it is linked to the physical and mental exhaustion of the working day or more to the reduction in freely available time. In the end, this kind of writing is both effortful and time consuming, so a change in the availability of any of the two resources can push it under the threshold of what I can achieve.

Of course, there is always the contribution of willpower: if I have a real interest in writing an article I should be able to make some time to write it, but also to push myself a little harder even if I am tired at the end of the day. And, being honest, I find the act of writing quite pleasurable when I manage to find a bubble in the space-time to exercise it. I guess I will have to put a little more attention at trying to accommodate it, because I do not want to give it up. I hope it will not take lene long to write here again. See you soon.