Monday: half day

It’s been a nice, relaxing morning. I mean, there was the tantrum when R. was trying to get A. to move a little quicker. _This never speeds anything up._ I came downstairs and rather than add to the yelling or point out the Extremely Obvious (this never speeds anything up), I instead talked in a very low and calm tone of voice to R. about how being in the now is the only important thing and it’s completely okay to be late and being late will not make traffic at the school worse but rather better and his anxiety to get going and his response to that anxiety is an echo from what happened to him when he was young and how he can take this opportunity to be compassionate to himself and feel that pain and then let it go.

We’ll see if that works better. It’s a new approach, anyway.

I went back to bed and got more sleep (as did he after he dropped her off). I’ll be picking her up in a bit since it’s a half day, and R. will still be playing bridge online. I baked a loaf of bread. I started it yesterday with bolted Turkey Red, and then fed it some King Arthur Special Patent before going to bed. It was really nice when I got up, albeit kinda pushing at the silicone “lid” on the crock. I took a little bit out because it was a bit more volume than I was confident would work in the loaf pan, and did a half height english muffin with it (I also had my usual out of the regular crock). As is typical, slashing this just doesn’t work quite right — it’s a little too wet. But it turned out really nice. I’d like to get to this point with all Turkey Red, but it’s kind of a lot of work to sift that much.

I watched NCIS:LA and The Equalizer from last night on Paramount Plus. Once again, when I looked at what recorded, something caused a massive delay. But you know, that’s fine. I have an alternate approach and it lets me avoid ads, too.

I see that in addition to the SEC telling Coinbase it was going to be taking action against it, this morning the CFTC is suing Binance.

Of course this is really just the beginning of something that will likely take years to resolve, but I’m very relieved to see that regulatory authorities which took years to build their cases are taking advantage of This Moment to move forward on them.

The Rest of the Day and Anti-Goals

I walked over to the school and got A. We had a nice chat as we walked home, then she went upstairs and spent a couple hours in the bathroom and planning her outfit. At that point, I insisted she wrap up the outfit planning and do some homework. I have book group tonight and I wanted the homework done(ish) before that started, as R. will be doing an indoor bike ride overlapping with that so no one would be available if she had issues. Also, she should be winding down for bed at that point. I want to be clear that I did all of this _before_ listening to the Art of Decluttering podcast about anti-goals. And yes, Dear Reader, those were all anti-goals.

I listened to the rest of the Speaking of Psychology podcast about bipolar disorder. It is interesting that 25-30% of kids who look like they are cycling wind up being fine, even without being on medication, in their 20s and 30s, and they don’t really know why.

I tried listening to an Odd Lots with Betsy Cohen recorded on the 11th about SVB, but it didn’t age very well. I gave up in favor of trying a new podcast, The Art of Decluttering. Australian accent! So that’s interesting. It was about anti-goals, which I had never heard of, but which seem to be taking seriously the idea of You Know What You Don’t Want So Plan to Make It Not Happen. This comes under the heading of Tied up in Nots for me, however, apparently the kind of inversion works for some people. There’s a 2017 Medium article that might be an origin point:

https://awilkinson.medium.com/the-power-of-anti-goals-c38f5f46d23c

I wouldn’t call these anti-goals? I would call this boundary setting, learning to say no, making sure you understand the purpose of the unpleasant things you are doing (sometimes we really do have to do unpleasant things but if we don’t know why we are doing them, there is _some_ kind of problem going on). I think, however, that a lot of people attempt to adopt as goals things they don’t actually want, but they think they should want. And then they are not especially motivating. In general, these people are much clearer on what they do NOT want than what they DO want. I guess this is a starting point?

I’m not — this one time! — going to do a lot of links to random blogs and videos and whatever about anti-goals. It’s _really clear_ that a lot of people name goals they don’t really want (!!!) and they describe planning processes that are fundamentally unhinged (figure it all out in detail and then Life Happens).

Meanwhile, a comment on an earlier post pointed at a particularly apropos twitter thread about being motivated by anxiety, not enjoying the anxiety, getting it fixed with meds or whatever then suffering performance declines. Very Clear that people are in fact motivating themselves with anxiety. And once I realized that, I quit trying to fix anxiety and started working on an alternative approach to getting things done (obviously, going to be a streamlined GTD or similar, with 3 goals, one of which is taking care of one’s own basic needs, and one of which is knowing what the next step on the taking care of one’s own basic needs is, leaving an open slot for Whatever Else You Want To Do). As I am nibbling at bits and pieces of that project, it is become so very clear just how great the need for something in this general area really is.