On Stress

I’ll read about the life of a great author and the narration will go something like “after being afflicted with smallpox and syphilis after his mother got hit by a runaway chariot, [writer] spent 2 years gambling at seedy bars before writing his first copy of Book on both sides of the toilet paper in debtor’s prison and succumbing to hemorrhoids.”

I’ll read that they were 38 when they started seriously writing. That they’d spend all their time doing public service and wrote only in their off-hours. That Porlock was a plague to the human literary canon. That they burnt their only manuscript in a fit of rage. And it pisses me off.

Well, what if you’d started writing one year earlier? What if you hadn’t burnt your only draft? How difficult can it be to write a few measly pages a day while under a heavy fever? What if you’d written even through your anguish? Clinged on to your words as your lifeline? Slammed the door on the person from Porlock? At least we’d have a few more pages from you! At least you wouldn’t be incomplete!¹

When you write so well you become a public good, it becomes difficult not me not to entertain these unfair thoughts. And so I think about future historians, who will make museums about us 8.1 billion ancient folk from Ye Old Earth, and how frustrated they will be that tonight, I am vomiting my guts out onto the sidewalk from nightclub exposure. They’ll be severely annoyed when I get crushed by a garbage truck after forgetting to look both left and right on the road. They’ll pull their hair out² when I get my wisdom teeth torn from my jaw Wednesday and decide not to write a single word for two whole days. They’ll kick a can a mile high when they learn I spent several years wondering whether I should pursue my dream instead of just doing it. The list of mistakes-I-made will be a dozen books long once they finish printing it in the guise of my biography. And so it is that every bit of output matters.

To type an extra sentence on the notes app of your phone, squirming on the toilet processing food poisoning as you may be. To save a thought as markup in the screenshot app, instead of consigning it to a fading cluster of soggy cells. To be sleepy and Twitter is right there but so is VSCode and you could push a single sentence to the website page if willpower is too onerous to your present self to do more;

This is all it takes to not be hated by historians. They are simple creatures, and broken pottery or feces is often enough to make their day. To extract value from calcified ashes is not so difficult as it may seem. To be an esteemed human in the eyes of those who count is, remarkably, a matter of plain common sense.