Consciousness Is The Most Expensive Accident

Here you'll find my attempt at a post with the aforementioned title, as suggested by Adam via our post title trade! Read more about the initiative, or contact me if you'd also like to trade!

I currently have…around 53 bookmarks in my browser. Each one a promise I made to return to it later. Among them are countless personal websites I've found through The Forest, video essays that looked interesting, Melonland Forum threads I've been meaning to respond to, services I want to experiment with, lists of books to go through, and tutorials to read.

It's exhilarating. And exhausting.

The cost of being awake is noticing everything.

All these ideas, they arrive wanted yet unwelcome, always when I'm far away from a notebook or an Obsidian file! I'm brushing my teeth, and suddenly I'm designing a zine about the dream-pop genre. Or I'm walking to the post office, and I'm paragraphs deep into a post on my favorite words.

So many things that don't 'need' to exist, but 'could' and my goodness how I want them to! The curse of consciousness is it generates faster than it executes. And I don't know if I'll ever catch up.

Take the files on my computer, for example. As I write this, I have notes ready for ~400 books I've read I want to review. I've got eight folders in my 'sites' one, and three are projects I've started yet haven't finished, and one needs subsuming into the other one. I've got 40 art pieces for a portfolio.

And that's just my projects folder. I haven't talked about my miles-long idea list in Obsidian.

It's the same-old, somehow despicable but infinitely interesting cycle: my brain presents an idea, I get super excited, so my hands move faster than my head. Then I opened VSCodium and started writing HTML, spent ages researching, or made lists. I'll see it so clearly it might as well already exist!

And then…I'll see something else. Another idea, tab, or folder.

The original project? Don't worry, it's still there. I've gotten over my propensity for hitting delete. But it's still 'gathering dust', waiting, and unfinished.

I keep thinking it's a failure of discipline. If I just try harder, I can focus and complete what I begin.

But I suspect it's something else: perhaps just what it means to be someone who's always noticing.

The cost of consciousness (at least, my version) is perpetual distraction. But the gift is wonder.

I don't know how to stop starting things, nor silence my brain.

But I'm learning to be gentler with myself about it. And maybe, for now, that's enough.