The capacity to tolerate minor discomfort is a superpower
Hello there :)
Welcome to issue sixty of Manufacturing Serendipity, a loosely connected, somewhat rambling collection of the unexpected things I’ve recently encountered.
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Part I: Things I’ve Encountered Online (well, kinda)
This fortnight I attended Oliver Burkeman’s Designing Your System for Creativity course (over Zoom).
You may recall that I attended Burkeman’s The Art of Imperfect Action course, and wrote a bit about it back in January. Much like The Art of Imperfect Action, his Designing Your System for Creativity course is aimed at people who want to work on some sort of “big thing”, but are struggling to actually do so.
NB I mentioned this back in January, but I think it bears repeating: that “big thing” could be anything — a creative project like writing a book; something to do with your own health or fitness; preparing for and giving a talk; or possibly your “big thing” is figuring out what the hell your “big thing” might be.
Anyway, I thought that the Designing Your System for Creativity course was ace, and I learned a bunch of things which doubtlessly I’ll share in future editions of this newsletter. But, today, I just want to talk about a specific moment on the first day of the course, when Burkeman said (something like*) this:
“The key skill you need to develop is not time management, it’s emotion management.”
*I say “something like” this, because I suspect I’m paraphrasing — this is what I wrote down in my notebook, but it’s likely not precisely what Burkeman said.
Dear reader, I heard this, and suddenly a whole bunch of things made sense — I realised that time management isn’t really a problem for me. The problem for me, is one of emotion management.
What on earth does that mean?
I think this is easiest to explain with an example:
Imagine you’ve set aside a small chunk of time, let’s say thirty minutes, to devote to working on your “big thing”.
Before you embark on these thirty minutes of work on your “big thing” you feel pretty good — this is exciting, you’re finally going to get a chance to work on this thing — YAY!
But then you actually sit down, and all of a sudden you don’t feel so good. Working on this “big thing” is not like you imagined it in your head. You thought you’d be super-productive, and engaged, but actually your mind is all over the place.
Possibly it’s that doubt is creeping in — is this “big thing” really a good idea? Should I really be working on this? Is this “big thing” even going to be possible?
Possibly it’s the real world that’s creeping in — you’ve just remembered that thing you said you’d do, but you forgot to do, and it’s kind of urgent, and you feel like you should stop working on your “big thing” and go do that other thing instead.
Maybe you deliberately left your phone in the other room, but suddenly you have an overwhelming urge to go and get it, because maybe someone’s messaged you, and maybe it’s important, and even if they haven’t messaged you yet, they might, and if your phone is not right next to you, you won’t see the message. You think to yourself: I definitely need to go and get my phone.
Maybe, without even fully realising what you’re doing, your fingers (which have a mind all of their own) have opened up your go-to social media platform, and now you’re scrolling your feed.
Maybe it’s all of these things, all at once.
The thing is, none of these are time management problems, (you’d set aside the time, and you’d actually sat down to spend that time you’d allotted on your “big thing”) — the problem here is one of emotion management.
I think that part of the problem here, is that how we imagine we’ll feel when we’re working on our “big thing”, is rarely how we actually feel.
Sure, sometimes working on my “big thing” feels totally brilliant. I am fully engaged, and excited, and the work feels great. I love those days.
But most of the time it doesn’t feel like that: it feels uncomfortable (for all the reasons I outlined above, and sometimes other reasons too).
The important thing to note, I think, is that these uncomfortable feelings are not actually intolerable (even if they feel intolerable at the time) — in fact they are the reverse: they are pretty easy to tolerate.
Feelings of self-doubt, for example, frequently arise in me, but provided that I don’t feed them, and spiral out, most of the time, these feelings quickly fade.
What about the real-world urgent-feeling stuff? Well, whilst I might tell myself that there’s no way I can focus on my “big thing” until I’ve done that other thing that feels urgent; the truth is that thing that feels urgent can wait half and hour; AND I CAN focus on my “big thing” right now. “I won’t be able to focus” is just a lie I tell myself to avoid working on my “big thing”. Sure I might experience a little discomfort, or even guilt, but those feelings are entirely tolerable.
What about the pull of my phone, and/or of social media? They are just distractions, right? They are compelling simply because giving in to them is easier than sitting with the discomfort of actually working on my “big thing”.
Maybe you can relate?
If so, possibly you’re thinking: OK, how do I get better at dealing with this discomfort?
I’m not convinced I’ll ever be able to “solve” this problem, but I have found a couple of things helpful:
Adjusting my own expectations — I now expect that sometimes working on my “big thing” will feel great; and at other times it really won’t. So, if when I sit down to work on my “big thing” and it doesn’t feel great, I’m not surprised.
Recognising that any discomfort I’m feeling isn’t actually intolerable* — as I said before, sometimes I might feel like my feelings are intolerable, but when I take a second to actually acknowledge whatever it is I’m feeling, often the feeling fades and/or I quickly realise that what I’m feeling is entirely tolerable and I’m actually fine.
Put a sensible time limit on it — most days I only spend somewhere between 15 minutes and an hour on my “big thing”. I vary my scheduling depending on whatever I’ve got going on that day, I only spend the allotted time, and I force myself to stop when that time is up (even if I feel like I want to continue). It means that even if I’m not feeling great about what I’m doing, I only have to feel not great for a short timeframe.
*There are limits of course. If a “big thing” I was trying to do, consistently made me feel unbearably awful, I feel like I’d probably sit down and try to figure out whether or not this was actually something I wanted to pour my energy into.
I’ll leave you with one more thought on dealing with discomfort from Oliver Burkeman. On the course he suggested that it’s possible to build up your tolerance for discomfort gradually, i.e. spend small amounts of time regularly working on your “big thing”, and then, over time, you’ll likely find that your capacity to tolerate any discomfort you might feel will gradually increase.
On that note, here’s an excerpt from his last column for the Guardian: the eight secrets to a fairly fulfilled life):
“The capacity to tolerate minor discomfort is a superpower.
It’s shocking to realise how readily we set aside even our greatest ambitions in life, merely to avoid easily tolerable levels of unpleasantness. You already know it won’t kill you to endure the mild agitation of getting back to work on an important creative project; initiating a difficult conversation with a colleague; asking someone out; or checking your bank balance – but you can waste years in avoidance nonetheless. (This is how social media platforms flourish: by providing an instantly available, compelling place to go at the first hint of unease.)
It’s possible, instead, to make a game of gradually increasing your capacity for discomfort, like weight training at the gym.”
Moar serendipitous finds:
This twitter thread is ace:
When I wrote this, you could click the tweet to read the thread; but because Twitter is increasingly unstable and frequently borked I’ve copied and pasted the content from the thread below:
“The “teen girl” or “ditzy” *like* is not stupid. And it’s not insecure. It’s a brilliant little linguistic multitool. Let’s look at just one of its many uses — its most maligned, probably…
The kind of “like” exemplified in this sentence: “She isn’t, like, really crazy or anything, but her and her, like, five buddies did, like, paint their hair a really fake-looking, like, purple color.”
That’s a real-life example from linguist and ventriloquist Muffy Siegel’s paper about "like." She gets technical, but I wanna share 3 simple things from it…
ONE: When asked, Like-sayers can explain what they mean and why they used “like” like that. For instance, one kid who said, “There’s, like, every book under the bed,” later paraphrased themselves as meaning: “There are a great many books under the bed, or the ratio of books under the bed to books in the rest of the house is relatively high.” That’s not stupid! Like-sayers aren’t dumb. They could say what they mean a different way… if they wanted.
TWO: People say that using "like" too much shows insecurity. But when do we feel most insecure? In uncomfortable or formal situations, right? And Siegel cites three studies that show words like “like” — discourse particles if we’re being fancy — are used *least* at those times.
In fact, she couldn’t directly interview her subjects, because *taped interviews with a professional linguist* are a formal situation, and people weren't saying “like” enough. “Like” is used the most in informal settings around friends. It flows freely when the speaker is comfortable. That’s the opposite of insecure.
THREE: This kind of “like” is meaningful. It’s not only a filler. Siegel quotes Linguist Lawrence Schourup: “Like is used to express a possible unspecified minor nonequivalence of what is said and what is meant.”
She then digs deep into that for like 50 pages. But here’s a very simple example: If you say “He has, like, six brothers,” he might have five and you’re still correct. But not if you remove the “like.”
Now, Siegel’s work isn’t an opinion piece, but *I* got an opinion — Being anti-like is like being anti-minivan or anti-living-by-a-train-track. It’s a matter of taste and circumstances, making outside criticism of it irrelevant and rude.
Could like-sayers use words like “kinda” or “about” or “approximately” instead? Sometimes, sure. But why? Why should they have to? There’s no script. Life is improv.”
Originally published in 2022, this feels very relevant again thanks to the latest Republican effort to curtail students and teachers’ ability to freely discuss sex and gender, and legislators in states like Iowa and Indiana who are pursuing their own versions of the “Don’t Say Gay” laws.
“…the heterosexual agenda is the worst thing to happen to humanity ever. Not convinced? The Bachelor is in its twenty-sixth season.”
“…the campaign comes off the back of recent national survey results on the level of discrimination across all genders in the Australian gaming space, which revealed 83% of female identifying and 50% of LGBTQIA+ identifying gamers have directly experienced and/or observed offensive behaviour or language while online gaming, with 55% of female identifying and 67% of LGBTQIA+ identifying players admitting to turning off their microphone when playing to hide their gender and avoid harassment.
To shine a light on this, Maybelline has partnered with HERO to release an eye-opening film that follows male gamers into the female lived experience through voice-modification software.
The film shows prominent Aussie male gamers and content creators, Joel “JoelBergs” Bergs and Drew “DrewD0g” Warne confronted by gamer discrimination, seeing it literally through female eyes by playing a first-person shooter game with female-altered voices and fake female profiles.
Within less than two hours of game play with altered voices, the male players are bombarded with abusive comments…”
It Took Me Nearly 40 Years To Stop Resenting Ke Huy Quan
I loved this essay, by Walter Chaw:
“When Ke Huy Quan appeared in the most hotly anticipated film of my sixth grade existence, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, I was horrified by his Short Round character.
The day after its opening in late May of 1984, I knew my friends were going to want me to do the accent, to approximate the enthusiasm when I ran the lines. I knew this because John Hughes’ Sixteen Candles had opened earlier that month, and the week following it was full of my friends slanting their eyes and yelling “What’s happening, hot stuff?” at me in their best Long Duk Dong. I wasn’t being bullied; I was being recognized as a reflection of the only Asian representation available in American popular culture…”
How Loneliness Reshapes the Brain
I found this article fascinating — research suggests that loneliness actually alters people’s brains in ways that can hinder their ability to trust and connect to others:
“Neuroscience suggests that loneliness doesn’t necessarily result from a lack of opportunity to meet others or a fear of social interactions.
Instead, circuits in our brain and changes in our behavior can trap us in a catch-22 situation: While we desire connection with others, we view them as unreliable, judgmental and unfriendly. Consequently, we keep our distance, consciously or unconsciously spurning potential opportunities for connections.
[…]
The problem with loneliness seems to be that it biases our thinking.
In behavioral studies, lonely people picked up on negative social signals, such as images of rejection, within 120 milliseconds — twice as quickly as people with satisfying relationships and in less than half the time it takes to blink. Lonely people also preferred to stand farther away from strangers, trusted others less and disliked physical touch.”
Ai Weiwei’s Lego Version of Monet’s Water Lilies
“Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has recreated Claude Monet’s massive Water Lilies triptych with 650,000 Lego bricks. Spanning nearly 50 feet across, the Lego sculpture is part of Ai’s upcoming show at the Design Museum in London.”
Part II: Books I’m Reading Right Now
Space Invaders by Nona Fernández (translated by Natasha Wimmer) - a group of friends look back on their experiences during Pinochet’s dictatorship, in 1980s Chile. Told via a series of memories, dreams, and visions, this novella is a compelling depiction of childhood in dark times, and its lasting impact. Brilliant.
Part III: Things I’ve Been Watching
The Founder, Amazon Prime - This (close to the truth, but not 100% true) story of how Ray Kroc built the McDonald’s franchise business is really good — I’d recommend it.
Empire of Light, Disney+ - Mendes attempts to tackle a bunch of big themes in this story set in 1980s Britain, but sadly, he fails to truly engage with any of them. That said, the acting and the cinematography are great here, and I think it’s still worth watching.
The Gold, BBC iPlayer - is this drama series, (based on the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery) actually good? Honestly friends, I still can’t quite decide. Maybe it just wasn’t for me. If pushed, I’d say I skip it, but you do you.
Part IV: What I’ve been up to…
This fortnight, I attended Oliver Burkeman’s Designing Your System for Creativity course (over Zoom), and recorded a podcast episode with Jerrell Arkes which should be live in a week or two. I’ve also been working on a new project which I am super-excited about — more details on that next time.
What’s next?
Next week I’ll be attending a fiction writing course in Devon which I am *very* excited about.
That’s all from me for now :)
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Big love,
Hannah x
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