• This post is kind of a continuation of “It’s never the right tool for the job”
• This is kind of a rough read. I don’t normally do in-depth editing on these posts, so if I contradict anything I say please just tell me and I’ll update the article

Introduction

This post is going to be written very bluntly. I am writing this from the perspective of someone who has both read self-help and has tried a multitude of different apps/services in the name of “improving myself”. I have seen is both help and destroy productivity, and I think people often get disillusioned with doing what other more-successful people are doing because it’s “right”. But when they see another successful person doing something else, they hop on that, and then the next guy, and then the next guy…

Do you see where I’m going with this?

[DISCLAIMER] Self-help isn’t bad

Before I get people upset, I want to say this outright: I am not against self-help, nor is this post necessarily about people who write self-help books. We live in a world where we absolutely need money to survive, and sometimes writing some regurgitated self-help slop is what can help pay the bills and create more financial freedom. I will never be against that. Go chase the bag.

I still don’t like the idea of a lot of slop and clutter filling up the space, but there’s nothing that can really be done to remedy that. Those who are most popular are popular for a reason, and you have to figure out why they are and made your own opinion off of that. But that’s another story for another time.

ADHD

I think before anything, it’s important to talk about my ADHD. If any of this resonates with you and you also swap “solutions” on a regular basis, this is a sign to continue reading LMAO.

Your justification for experimenting is the most important step that is overlooked pretty frequently, at least by me. I have ADHD (shocker) which is often misrepresented in society. The acronym “Attention- Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” is pretty disingenuous since it implies that we have no attention and are always off-the-walls. Although this can be the case, I would say for the majority this is inaccurate. People with ADHD have trouble managing their dopamine, creating lots of inconsistencies with mood and ability to keep attention to things. That’s why people with ADHD are prescribed what is essentially “medicinal meth”.

I would always think there was something wrong with me and that I was broken because I couldn’t focus on things like my friends. I would get really stressed not understanding something because it wouldn’t appeal to me immediately. Then I would switch to try and find the next thing to latch on to. Something that definitely contributed to my ADHD was internet addiction and my addiction to dopamine, but that’s another story for another time. All you need to know is I was addicted to chasing dopamine highs, caffeine and didn’t sleep well because of it. When I got into bettering myself I realized how much this has taken control of my life and has acted as self-destructive behaviour.

The purpose; What makes me upset

What upsets me is seeing people who have fallen down similar paths that I have already lived through. It’s difficult because I have trouble seeing things from other people’s perspective, and I hate when other people make the same mistakes of me. I hate redundancy/repeating myself in any form (something I’m working on remedying).

It’s this hard realization I came to recently where I have to stop thinking everyone is like me. Everyone is their own person with their own passions and interests, hobbies and skills, tastes and talents, so on and so fourth. I’ve spent a VERY good part of my life projecting what I think is “right” onto others which hasn’t ended up well, and I was never consistent. I would switch IDEs, text editors, browsers, OSes, keyboards, mice, everything. Every new thing and recommendation I had I swore by and thought was “the best new hot thing”.

Distro-hopping was an especially dark-time in my life, along with swapping between Mac, Windows, and Linux during my first 2 years of University. I’ve now gotten that all out of the way and am a lot happier now, but I know others aren’t me. I have to recognise that, and reminds myself that there’s no shame in experimenting.

The target audience for this are people who are on a similar boat who constantly switch life management tools, study methods, programs, etc. all in the name of “experimentation”.

Clones of clones of clones of …

I am on r/anki and I swear to god every other week someone else has made some new Anki clone. Someone else has made a new “life-management program” or a “revolutionary habit tracker” or a “hip new way of journalling with markdown”. 9/10 times they’re all the same, and they’re not great. It’s annoying. Create your own programming projects, that’s cool. I have nothing against it. I just hate seeing it. It’s very unjustified for me to hate on people that make personal projects, and it’s me projecting my insecurities onto this idea of them I have in my head.

In my head, I imagine people that do that are struggling with their own shit and instead of actually trying to address the root problem for why they’re feeling this way, or finding a new system that works, they instead try to reinvent the wheel to make something that they’ll probably never use and they’ll go back to using their moleskin notebook.

So again, am I projecting? Yes. 100%. LMFAO

In order to grow and experiment with new systems, you need to have time, patience, and you have to be willing. You try new things to try and solve something in your life, to try and reduce friction. But if you notice that in of itself causing a lot more friction, unless the long-term payoff is 100% worth it and/or essential, just stop it. If you are spending more time developing a solution to a problem that could have been fixed a long time ago, you aren’t doing yourself any good. You’re lost and you’re coping.

There will never be the perfect tool

Before reading this section, I would like to iterate the following since I think this might be lost on some people: I am not against trying new things, but it has to be with a purpose instead of doing it for the sake of doing it. If you already have a really good system, you don’t need to swap to something new for the sake of it. If you’ve solved the problem, why create more? Why continue chasing the same issue you’re creating for yourself? It’s like chasing a carrot in front of a rabbit on a treadmill.

I have spent time using a lot of different apps and systems. As soon as I saw the new shiny thing to learn, I would hop on it and try to make it work for hours or days. It was this quick chase of dopamine, of learning something different, that has caused so much clutter and static in my life. I think the biggest example of this was when I tried to use emacs over the winter break.

I follow DistroTube semi-frequently and have watched SystemCrafters talk about emacs before in the past. I always think about going to it purely because of Orgmode and daemonizing your emacs-client, but I never found a use or purpose. But either way, I would sometimes spend 1-2 days in a month just trying to get it working, frantically scrolling over forums to find “my answer” to my question, the specific line of code that I needed to get things working, the quick and easy answer to solve my problems. It wasn’t just that I was swapping note-taking tools pretty frequently at this point, but also I was rushing/manic to get something working. I have done this for as long as I can remember, and it’s only cause harm.

Years prior I would try doing the same, and again recently tried using different “notetaking solutions” on Neovim since people recommended them to me. Where did that go? I am using none of them and I wasted a bunch of time. I never ended up switching to emacs, and every time I think about last winter break specifically I remind myself how I really don’t need to use it. I have to remind myself and keep myself accountable because there’s no one more there for me than me.