In a posi­tion to invent my own respon­si­bil­i­ties, and to realign them on whims, I don’t get very far. Even if I remain pro­duc­tive, it’s a frac­tured, dif­fuse, direc­tion­less kind of pro­duc­tiv­ity, com­posed of many tiny islands, sealed in vac­u­ums, free of con­text or import. Mean­while, every­thing that I’m not doing screams with an urgency that what I am doing can never match. Being fucked with by the sparkly allure of things in my periph­ery, even the most worth­while sparkly things, under­mines all the effort.

Of course there’s always some­thing arbi­trary to how you choose to spend your time. Which is prob­a­bly what a lot of peo­ple mean when they say they work well under pres­sure — it’s not the threat of a dead­line that fos­ters pro­duc­tiv­ity, it’s the con­vic­tion with which you act, know­ing fully that this is exactly the cor­rect invest­ment of your time and energy. For the moment, you’re free of that respon­si­bil­ity, of choos­ing what to do, left only with the busy-work of doing it. And that’s a huge relief.

And the prob­lem with hav­ing goals as ill-defined as mine is that there are no loom­ing dead­lines, only a vague under­stand­ing that this is going some­where, even­tu­ally, assum­ing out of neces­sity that none of it is in vain. And worse, the grat­i­fi­ca­tion, the pay­off, is not just delayed; that would make things a lot eas­ier. It’s more than delayed, it’s prac­ti­cally invis­i­ble, the result of infin­i­tes­i­mal accu­mu­la­tions that never accel­er­ate or burst with final­ity, but just col­lect like sed­i­ment, like that big jar of sub-quarter coins. And nobody would ever dream of work­ing for that jar, much less ten jars. When you’re emp­ty­ing your pock­ets at the end of the day, which jar do you choose?