ï»żE89 Transcript
Something comes up a lot when I talk to makers about why they're not in the studio more, why they donât feel like theyâre making progress, what is standing in the way. Why the practice has gone quiet. Why the pursuing we talked about last week feels impossible right now.
It sounds something like this. I'm just exhausted. Everything feels heavier than it used to. I don't even know where the energy went. Iâm tired and my mind is just not into it. I canât focus. I canât seem to get anything done the way I want it to go.
And I believe them. Whole heartedly believe them. The exhaustion is real. It is everywhere. It seems inescapable. I am not going to argue with that for one second. Our world seems upside down chaotic.
But what I am going to argue with is the diagnosis. Because I think most people are exhausted but not for the reason they think. And you can't push through this particular kind of exhaustion. It doesn't respond to willpower. It doesn't respond to rest either - at least not the kind of rest most people reach for. But there is something else you can do about it. And that's what weâre talking about today.
Let me start by making a distinction that I know, for sure, matters more than almost anything else in this conversation.
There are two completely different kinds of tired.
The first kind comes from meaningful effort. And that is-Deep, hard work. Physically demanding activities. A long session in the studio on something that required everything youâve got. A physically demanding day. The kind of tired where you look at what you made or what you built or what you solved or what youâve accomplished and the tired feels earned. The body, the mind, the spirit is flat out whipped. That kind of tired responds to rest. Hydrate, shower, Sleep on it and you wake up restored.
The second kind comes from meaningless consumption. Hours of scrolling. Hours of doing nothing constructive. A day of passive absorption of content that wasn't chosen so much as served. The kind of tired where you look up and you're not sure what you actually did with the time. The kind of tired that leaves you feeling drained, apathetic and just plain numb. Not wiped out â numb. That kind tired does not respond to rest. You sleep on it and you wake up tired in the same way. Because the rest didn't address the cause.
And here is the thing that most people find very uncomfortable when they first hear it. Reaching for more scrolling to recover from âmind numbing scrolling exhaustionâ is like treating a hangover with more alcohol. It feels like relief for a split second. But it makes everything worse.
The specific kind of exhaustion most people are describing right now - the pervasive, persistent, I-don't-even-know-where-it-came-from exhaustion - is almost entirely the second kind. And the solution to the second kind is not more rest in the conventional sense. It's a different choice about where your attention goes.
Let's talk about social media specifically because me being vague and skirting the real issue isnât going help anyone.
Now. I know this is territory a lot of people are tired of hearing about. Some of you think the social media conversation is overblown. Some of you don't buy the algorithm argument. Some of you have heard it enough times that it has become background noise. Youâre basically ignoring it right now.
Fine. I'm not going to wrestle that limitation away from you.
But I will say this. If you've tried everything else - more sleep, more supplements, better routines, cutting back on commitments, the newest hack or the latest app, all of it - and the exhaustion is still there and you haven't accepted this particular piece, then what can I say. You've tried everything except the uncomfortable and inconvenient one.
So. For those who are willing to look at this honestly - here's what's actually happening.
These platforms are not neutral entertainment spaces. They are for profit businesses vying for your attention. They are not digital town squares where people gather to share information and connect with each other. That is the story they tell about themselves. The reality is considerably different and considerably more deliberate.
Social media platforms ALL OF THEM are engineered environments built specifically to capture your attention and hold it for as long as possible, as often as possible. Because your attention is their product. They sell it to advertisers. And the longer they hold it the more they can charge.
The mechanism they use to hold it is not joy. It is not genuine connection. The internal research at multiple major platforms, that shall remain nameless, has shown consistently that content producing negative emotional responses - anger, outrage, anxiety, envy, inadequacy, sadness, loneliness - drives significantly more engagement than content producing positive ones. You are more likely to keep scrolling when you feel bad than when you feel good. The algorithm knows this. It is built around this. Every time you open the app youâre entering a system that has been specifically optimized to make you feel something uncomfortable enough to keep looking for the solution. And it learns what you gravitate to so it can show you more posts and articles and ads based on what you have watched before.
Let me do a little comparison here because I think it's the clearest illustration of what's genuinely new about this.
For most of human history the comparison pool was local. You compared yourself to the people in your immediate environment. Your neighbors. Your colleagues. People you knew personally and had context for. You understood something about their actual lives. The comparison was manageable because the pool was visible and, for the most part, verifiable.
Now the comparison pool is global. Curated. And almost entirely constructed. By that I mean carefully chosen and thoughtfully organized to elicit a certain response. From the entire world, not just your own backyard.
You are comparing yourself to or hearing news from someone in a country you have never visited, whose life you cannot verify, whose image has been filtered and staged and carefully constructed for maximum impact, and whose apparent success or beauty or happiness may bear no relationship whatsoever to their actual circumstances. They are only showing you want they want you to see and you have no idea whatâs going on behind the scenes. You are doing this hundreds of times a day. On a platform that has specifically selected this content for you because your emotional response to it - your envy, your inadequacy, your anxiety - is worth money to them.
Make no mistake. This is not entertainment. This is not innocent. There is specific intent behind almost all of it and that intent is to produce a feeling in you that keeps you engaged with the platform. The content is the hook. Your emotional reaction is the product. You are not the audience. You are what is being sold.
And every time you voluntarily open the app you are choosing. You are willingly choosing that situation, that exposure. With full knowledge - or at least the available knowledge if you want it - of exactly what it is doing to you.
Now I want to address something I hear frequently, and I give it the time it deserves.
That argument is that this moment in history is uniquely difficult. That we, as a society, are navigating something unprecedented. That the demands on human beings right now are greater than they have ever been and that's why the exhaustion makes sense and thereâs nothing that can be done about it.
I understand why it feels that way. Itâs partially true and I want to address what is actually new before I push back on the rest of it.
But first - let's look at what people have actually lived through and kept going.
The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 and 1919 infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide - roughly a third of the global population at the time - and killed somewhere between 50 and 100 million. In the middle of World War One. Where 20 million more people died in combat and the related famine and disease. And the people who survived went back to work. Built things. Raised children. Kept going.
The Great Depression of the 1930s produced unemployment rates approaching 25% in the United States. Real material scarcity. Not I-can't-afford-what-I-want scarcity. I-cannot-feed-my-children scarcity. Families lost everything. And people made things. Built things. Created community. Maintained dignity and standards in conditions that would be genuinely unrecognizable to most people living today.
World War Two. The most destructive conflict in human history. Tens of millions of military deaths. Civilian casualties on a scale that is difficult to fully comprehend. The Holocaust. The atomic bomb. And the people who lived through it - on the front lines and on the home fronts - functioned. Worked. Made things. Maintained standards. Went on.
The 1800s. Physical labor that would be unrecognizable as work to most people alive today. No climate control. No modern medicine. No labor protections. Child labor. Lifespans significantly shorter. And people built extraordinary things. Made extraordinary things. Created art and music and literature and scientific advances that we are still living off of.
None of those people had easier lives. By every objective measure their lives were harder. More physically demanding. More genuinely precarious. Less buffered by technology and infrastructure and medicine.
So what is actually different now?
They didn't have 24/7 access to a curated stream of engineered emotional stimulation competing for every available unit of their attention. When news reached them it came once a day in a newspaper. Once a week in some cases. The volume was manageable. The pace was human. And critically - most of what they received was verifiable in ways that most of what we receive is not.
Now we are submerged in it constantly. An unending stream of content - much of it algorithmically selected to produce maximum emotional reaction - available every moment of every day with no clear way to determine how much of it is real. Delivered through the same device we use to communicate with the people we love and manage our actual lives. And we have no historical precedent for what that does to a human nervous system over time because it has never existed before.
That is what is genuinely new. Not the difficulty of life. The specific engineered overwhelm of this information environment and the 24/7 availability of it.
And almost all of us are choosing to consume it voluntarily. Every single day. All day. We are choosing it because itâs easy. We are choosing it voluntarily out of habit.
So, letâs talk about what that actually produces in the body and the brain over time. Because I think once you hear this in plain terms, the exhaustion stops feeling so mysterious.
I hear it often. That effort feels unreasonable right now. Effort is too hard right now. That people feel too weak to put forth the sustained focus that meaningful work requires. That the studio feels too far away and the couch feels too close and the phone feels like the only thing that doesn't ask too much of me. Yeah â the lure of the easy option. The lure of I donât have to put out any energy. It a sweet, sweet looking deal isnât it.
And I want to say very clearly - that feeling is not proof that effort is unreasonable. It is a symptom of a problem and that symptom has a cause.
Think about what happens to a muscle that stops being used. It doesn't stay the same. It shrinks. Slowly, gradually, below the threshold of notice - until one day you try to do something that used to be easy and find it genuinely difficult. And that difficulty feels like evidence that the task has gotten harder. Suddenly the sugar got heavier, or the flour got heavier, or the trash can got heavier. The task did not get harder. I promise you it hasn't. The capacity has gotten smaller. You ability to do it shrank.
The capacity for sustained meaningful effort works exactly the same way. Use it and it builds. It stays strong or gets stronger. Stop using it and it diminishes. You hear yourself saying âthis seems harder than it used to be.â The diminishment of ability feels (from the inside) exactly like the effort has become unreasonable. No! The capacity has atrophied.
What a long period of defaulting to the easiest available option actually produces - over weeks and months and years - is a genuine reduction in the capacity for the kind of focused sustained work that produces the outcomes we talked about in the last two episodes. The flow states. The effort-based rewards. The deliberate practice that compounds. All of those require a capacity that is being quietly worn down every time the engineered alternative gets chosen instead.
And here is the thing the platforms are very careful not to mention. The solution they offer is also engineered to be addictive. It's not just that the content is designed to produce negative emotions that keep you scrolling. The act of scrolling itself - the variable reward mechanism, the intermittent reinforcement, the possibility of something interesting just one more swipe away - is modeled on the same psychological principles as slot machines. It has done its job extremely well. The exhaustion and numbness from the consumption drives you back to the consumption that caused it. That loop is not an accident. It was designed that way.
But here is what that loop canât do. It canât make the choice for you. It canât levitate the phone, slip it into your hand and swipe for you. It can make the choice very tempting, but it canât do it for you. And thatâs where you will always have control.
You must choose something different if you want anything to change. Not can. Must. Because wanting things to be different while continuing to make the same choices is the definition of the problem we talked about last week. Wanting is not a plan.
The choice is available every single time you reach for the phone. Every single time the algorithm serves you something designed to make you feel inadequate or anxious or outraged. You can put it down. You can choose the studio instead. You can choose to make something rather than consume something. Those choices accumulate - the same way the depleting choices accumulated into the exhaustion you're feeling now - just in the other direction. The choices to do something creative in your studio will accumulate into a stronger, more capable creative and sustained work muscle.
So here is what I'm actually asking you to do. For real. Not in theory.
And this is where I stop being diplomatic.
Stop that crap!
You know it's draining you. You know itâs worthless. You've known for a while. And the fact that you're still doing it anyway is not a mystery or a flaw of some sort - it's a habit that was specifically engineered to be hard to break. I get that. I really do. But at some point knowing and not acting on what you know is just choosing. And we covered that last week.
So, before we get into the specifics - the first thing on the list is not a strategy or a system. It's a decision. Stop consuming the thing that is making you tired and numb. Not forever necessarily. Not cold turkey if that's not realistic. But deliberately. With the full understanding that every time you pick it up you are choosing the exhaustion over the alternative.
Now. Here's what that actually looks like in practice.
Audit where your attention actually goes in a day. Not where you think it goes. Where it actually goes. Most people significantly underestimate the time spent on social media and therefore significantly underestimate the time available for meaningful work. The numbers are usually surprising and not in a good way.
Pick a specific time each day that is for making and protect it the way you would protect a medical appointment. Not "I'll make when I have time." There is never time. You make time or you don't make. Put it in the calendar. Show up for it even when you don't feel like it - because we established in episode 87 that the feeling follows the action not the other way around.
Remove the easiest access points to the platforms that drain you. Not necessarily forever. Not necessarily completely. But make the choice slightly less automatic. Move the apps off the front screen of your phone. Turn off the notifications. Add one small piece of friction between yourself and the scroll. Make it hurt a little more so you arenât as tempted to do it. It gives the part of you that truly wants to choose differently an extra split second to actually make the choice.
Notice what you feel like after a session in the studio versus after an hour of scrolling. You already know the answer. But actually paying attention to it - naming it, registering it - makes the choice more conscious next time. The comparison is not subtle once you start making it deliberately.
And when the exhaustion feels overwhelming and the studio feels impossible - don't try to push through. Do something small. Pick up a project. Handle one piece of fabric. Thread a needle. Sit at the machine. The behavioral activation research we covered in episode 87 is unambiguous about this. The feeling follows the action. You don't need to feel ready. You need to start.
Okay, Iâll get off my soapbox to say - The exhaustion is real. I am not arguing with that. You are tired. You are numb. You are spent.
What I am arguing with is what's causing it. And what you're doing about it.
Because most of us - and I say us because I am not exempt from this - are voluntarily consuming something specifically engineered to make us feel bad. And then wondering why we feel bad. That is the unvarnished truth of what is happening. It is uncomfortable to say and more uncomfortable to hear. But if nobody says it then nobody gets to do anything about it. So, I guess I am willing to stand up and be the buzzkill.
Remember the paraphrased saying: An object in motion stays in motion. An object at rest stays at rest?
The second part of that is â unless acted upon by an outside force.
You are going to have to be that outside force in order to get back into motion.
Youâre not stuck. Youâre not uniquely burdened by an impossible moment in history. Youâre drinking something you know will make you sick and then wondering why you feel sick.
Put it down. Go make something. Not because you feel like it. Because you know what happens when you do.
That choice is yours. It has always been yours. It will always be yours.
Iâm right there in the fight with you. Fighting for my sanity, Choosing for my creative life.
I'll see you next week.
