Water Cooler Killers and Doomed to Write
A.k.a. how to do ugly things.
Last night, I uncapped a pen and wrote Every word I type is fated to my whiteboard. I nodded, capped my pen, then promptly forgot about it. It felt normal. It made sense.
The point: to help me write. Like many writers, I suffer from Spontaneous Forgetaboutitism. It’s a terrible disease that saps your power to write. Frankly, there’s nothing to be done about it except haul ass to a keyboard and hope for the best.
But there’s a vaccination for this disease. Not a cure, but a preventive. It’s something I cribbed from the Waking Up podcast during a Robert Sapolsky interview.
To summarize: it’s fate.
Water cooler killers are silly
On the Waking Up interview, Robert Sapolsky says free will is an illusion. He says nothing exists in a vacuum, and actions have causal consequences.
Therefore, everything you do is influenced by things that aren’t you. And by influenced, he means determined.
He gives examples, but I’m too dumb to remember them, so here’s one of mine:
Imagine you’re lingering around the water cooler with your bestie. Around the corner walks your manager. He waves. He’s a nice guy, so you crumple your plastic water cup and attempt to shove it down his throat. Your friend screams, “watermelon!” and calls for pizza.
What is going on in the above scenario?
Chances are, you’re already puzzling together how a situation like this would come to be. Maybe the manager is secretly a terrorist, and your friend has Tourette syndrome, you think. Maybe you’re the psychopath in this scenario, and your friend is panic-yelling the safe word she told her kids to use when a stranger tries to force their way through the garage window.
In short, you’re being reasonable. Because everything happens for a reason, right? Even if it’s a seemingly-dumb reason, or one you’re just not prepared to puzzle out right now.
People don’t just do things for no reason. That’s not how it works. You’re a person; you would know.
It’s funny how our minds work, isn’t it? We’re always trying to make sense of the world, to find reasons and explanations. Even in the face of absurdity, we search for logic. It makes me wonder about the nature of choice and free will.
If everything has a reason, a cause, where does that leave our choices? Are they really ours, or just the inevitable result of a complex chain of events? It’s a mind-bending thought, and honestly, I’m not sure where I stand on it.
But here’s what I do know: thinking about this stuff messes with my head in interesting ways. Especially when it comes to writing.
You, but atomically different
If you’ve read Not-Cults, Dramaland, and Escaping the Twitterverse, you know that Atomic Habits and Gamechanger have turned my world on its axis.
Atomic Habits taught me that big life changes can feel like little life changes. You remain oblivious to their true nature until, months later, you’ve gone from using Twitter 3 hours daily to 2 hours monthly.
Gamechanger taught me that your identity — who you are — is separate from how you feel. You can feel one way and be another. You can open Twitter often without being a hardcore Twitter user.
Both Atomic Habits and Gamechanger taught me that to make changes, you start with your identity and work your way out. Your identity changes your systems, and your systems change what you get. It’s a radically different way of changing your life than the way I was taught — that is, set goals and just do them, you lazy bum.
If I’m not how I feel, then it’s fair to believe I might not have free will. Even though I sometimes feel like I’m making choices separate from my thoughts, feelings, or beliefs.
I can change my habits by changing my identity. So, I should be able to write more by identifying as Someone Doomed to Write.
Well, you can’t not write
The opposite of being unable to write is being fated to write. It’s a weird mindset that circumvents the typical I need to write impulse. I need to write pressures you into doing nothing productive. But thinking of yourself as fated to write gets the creative juices flowing. It’s not about choice. There’s nothing to choose. It’s who you are.
It’s a weird mindset to get into. It’s also how this article is being written.
It works.
I don’t think this is enough to get me consistently to the writer’s desk. But I think feeling fated to write is a useful component to building good habits. I think it will be a highly effective tool in my proverbial toolbox. It removes some friction, one of the eight methods Atomic Habits suggests to create good habits.
This belief is my ticket into writing often. That’s the only practical use I’ve found for it thus far. But if I can leverage fate to write more, I can probably leverage it to do other things, too.
We’ll see how this goes.
