My energy ebbs and flows. I have good days, bad days, and runs of each which last weeks and sometimes months. Every time I have a few good days or a few bad days in a row I feel like I’ve figured a bit more out about how I work, how to optimize and improve, and perhaps gradually approach a better version of my life by trial and error. I’ve also been thinking about studies with giving animals rewards on a random schedule, and the weird random irrational behaviors they began to exhibit as they tried to determine how the reward was ‘earned’. How much of self-improvement boils down to superstition, to trying to behave the way you did that one time you felt good instead of the way you did that time you felt crappy? Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between wearing a lucky t-shirt and getting 8 hours of sleep. They’re both supposed to help, and proponents have a way of writing it off when they don’t.
Okay, yeah, I suppose this is what science is for, analyzing empirical evidence while accounting for secondary factors, but that’s really only helpful for analyzing trends across a population. When it comes to what works for me, what makes me feel better or worse, what makes me more or less productive and satisfied, I have a sample size of one with an unknown time delay between input and output. There’s a lot of noise in my signal, and it takes a lot of samples before I can be satisfied that I feel shitty and tired because of something I ate, something I did, something I failed to do – any and all of that may be just background noise on top of a signal which may just indicate that maybe I just feel bad sometimes.
Trying to debug a system that you live in is difficult. It’s difficult when it’s your body and it’s difficult when it’s your culture. Everything you change changes you, and everything that changes you changes your capacity to observe the system. It’s easy to get discouraged. The only advantage we have is the depth and quality of information we receive: We don’t have to wait for something to break, we can just tell when something feels wrong. In some ways that really sucks, because it means we spend a lot of the time feeling something is wrong without knowing what. Sometimes we’re afraid it’s nothing – sometimes it is nothing. Usually, though, if we feel there’s something wrong, there’s something wrong.
Many people prioritize the logical over the emotional, deriding those who would say that something just ‘feels’ wrong. A lot feels wrong at this point – another thing making the systems we live in difficult to analyze. But telling people to ignore these feelings is as shortsighted as telling them to ignore any other pain – pain is an indication that something is cut or broken, and even if we sometimes experience it for no good reason there’s never a good reason to ignore it.
Just because there is noise does not mean there is no signal.