Not Having Done

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6 minutes

It’s been a bit of a crazy week. Getting things buttoned up and/or over the line before we go on holiday in the early hours tomorrow morning.

We’re off to Lisbon for a couple of days and then Barcelona where I’m looking forward to hanging out with Huw. The weather doesn’t look that great in Portugal, but this trip is a city break and it always rains when I visit a city. If I was going to a resort I’d be lived. lol

One slight concern is that I’m returning to absolutely no freelance work or paid obligations at all. The last few wild weeks in the UK economy has pulled a lot of things out of peoples budgets. 🙁 <(GULP).


Thanks to everyone that has already reached out about my podcast this week.

Apparently ‘The Dream’, ‘The Doing’, ‘The Having Done’ is a good framework for thinking about one’s creative pursuits.

Those three terms are really just ‘thejaymo’ reformulations of advice thats in The Artists Way‘ and The War of Art. Both books that changed my life in different ways.

It’s funny, I posted a podcast / wrote an essay about how I enjoy ‘Having Done’. Then within 30mins received a message from a friend saying: “If you enjoy Having Done so much, why do you have a hard drive full of hundreds of thousands of words of shit you haven’t finished?”

Well… good point. Thanks for that. This is something I’ve moaning about before LOL. I feels like recently but it was nearly two years ago that I said I wanted to Plan To Finish. What I think happened is that ‘the planning to finish’ became part of ‘The Dream’.

I’ve recently discovered a way of working with my laptop which has resulted in a consistent average about 1000 words produced in 20mins. I want to write about this, but I think it might be better as a short film for youtube.

There’s an example of the the problem. Thinking it would work better as a film changes the scope of the dream, and means that it probably won’t ever get done.

I feel like I’ve reached a point in my creative life where I need to get more clear about what it is I want to do and want to achieve. I usually have a Dream and then think it would be cool to do X, Y, Z with it once its done.

What I need to do (I think) is just execute on The Dream and then figure out X,Y,Z. Get ‘The Thing’ done before I figure out what to do with it.

Really, this is what I’m planning on using this holiday is for. Not doing *anything*.
Then using that open time and mental space to get to grips with where I’m at.

Perhaps the mental shift upon my return isn’t so much “There’s so much I want to do” but instead “There’s so much I want to get done”


Permanently Moved

The Doing

The biggest problem a creative person faces is that between ‘The Dream’ and ‘The Having Done’ is ‘The Doing’.

Photo 365

271/365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

  • Began figuring out how to use my 3D scanner. (Detailed post at the link)
  • Been thinking a lot about ‘The Protocol’ might make a film or a podcast about it at some point
  • Contacting guests about coming on the New Show
  • Writing more about BAYC
  • Working on the Metaverse talk. Was explaining to Benedict about how the metaverse is the fusion of two twin strands of 19C Seeing Like a State mentality.
  • Sorted out ‘The Campaign’ for the rest of the year. Hygromantiea magical timings baby.
  • Getting read for holiday next week.

Dipping the Stacks

Best-Selling Author Jeff VanderMeer Finds That Nature Is Stranger Than Fiction | Audubon

The novelist attained fame with gripping works of eco-fiction. How hard could it be to rewild his own backyard?

Meet the Zoomers – Matt Goodwin’s Substack

Zoomers, in other words, are coming of age amid the growing influence of what academics call ‘education-based polarisation’, where typically younger and often female graduates are steadily drifting apart —politically, culturally, economically— from their non-graduate and often male counterparts.

How To Overcome The 7 Worst Habits For Your Brain – Durmonski.com

The daily activities we engage in that have a negative impact on our cognition and therefore sabotage the way we think.

Why Have Most Men Stopped Wearing Hats? | History of Yesterday

There is one more reason that people never take into consideration and that may be the straw Hat Riots of 1922 where many people ended up attacked by gangsters just for wearing hats.

Spotify keeps making it harder to listen to music – The Verge

As the company explores new lines of business, Spotify’s app is getting cluttered and overleveraged

Reading

I finished reading How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live: Learning the Alexander Technique by Missy Vineyard. I tried one of the ‘key exercises’ in the last chapter and failed spectacularly. It was a bit of a shock feeling sore the next day after lifting my head up off the floor by one inch. It seems that the core muscle in my back have definitely atrophied after the long pandemic years.

I started reading Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. First night reading it I ended up staying up super late and burning though the first 14% of it on my Kindle.

I have nearly finished listening to Awakenings: An Astor Sabbathiel Audiobook by George Mann. Once the confusing flashbacks merged into one timeline the book improved a lot. It became very much ‘one thing after another’ which is how I prefer my stories. About half way though the book it occurred to me that Mann is the same author that wrote The Affinity Bridge for Snowbooks way back in 2008.

Music

thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist

Darklife – deaths dyamic shroud

I listed some of the albums I was going to listen to this month two weeks ago. This was one of them.

If it’s possible to capture a zeitgeist, Darklife does that. It’s incredible. The question i keep asking myself is, does it sound like the last 5 years or the next 5?

This album has everything from vapour wave, gorgeous stings, hits of glitch and breaks, all the way though maximalist hyperpop. Sometimes all on the same track.

Judgement Bolt

My mate John said on signal that this album sounds like ‘Internet Brain’. Not a bad description at all. This is in part I think due to the way it captures the zeitgeist. It sounds like a lockdown fever dream.

Missing Person

This album is one of the best produced things I’ve heard this year, and absolute flex from the two artists involved in the Darklife project.

Either all pop music and movie soundtracks are going to sound like this by the mid 20’s or we’re going to see the continued growth of pop-punk and guitar music as a reaction to hyperpop, 100 gecs etc. Let’s see how things shape out.

Remember Kids:

By @worry_lines on instagram

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