stop editing the post PLEASE
Today's thingy: an LLM exhibiting an aspirational lack of care about being wrong.
I keep going back to my last post (my first post) and editing it; a little tweak here and there each time because some small thing suddenly reads weird to me, or maybe I should be consistent and use lowercase for all my titles, or maybe it's weird I put that GIF at the bottom because it wasn't related to the post, or any number of things that ultimately amount to the statement, "it isn't perfect."
I know perfectionism is a huge problem for me. In fact, through years of delving into my own workings, it's my understanding that searching for certainty is the defining problem of my life. I want desperately to build something bigger, prove myself on my own terms that I'm as intelligent as I feel I am, and somehow exist in the world more than as a passive consumer of it, but I'm held back. I feel like a dog on a lead, running forwards but not going anywhere, the lead so taught it almost rings. I feel like its owner, feet firmly planted, watching the dog's desperation but not untying it for a second because I don't trust it not to run straight into the road.
It's kind of the reason I wanted to start a blog in the first place: having some kind of public-facing thing which I shouldn't be changing that much.1 I think there's a permanence I value which comes with posting something online, like it's carved in stone and not yours after it leaves your hands. I enjoyed doing something similar in my teens; I used to be that person who would use Instagram captions to post essays, often exceeding the word limit and continuing in the comments. It was what I was good at, and writing came so naturally to me, but at some point I got self-conscious and it feels like I've never been good in my life. But those posts are still there, sitting in a dead account for me and my friends to visit if we wanted, and in that transitional space2 became far enough removed from my present self that I see it as a complete object of which I am an observer rather than something on my side of the wall which I can endlessly improve. No matter how much "better" I could make those posts, I'd be ruining their value to me by doing anything to them.
So, it's funny now to think about the fact I can't really leave my posts alone yet. I'm still working on doing that, but I'm not going to scold myself too much over it. I know it's a part of me, this need to have the perfect system, and do the perfect thing, so I'm just going to pat myself on the back for doing anything at all. Writing itself is already exposure therapy for this, because it feels l like putting down any words at all is an exercise in accepting imperfection—when there are no wrong answers, there are no definitive right ones either. Scary!
Interesting side note: I have a 5-year diary spanning 2023 to 2027, and my entry in 2023 yesterday was eerily similar to my entry in the present, having just started a site (it was a Substack) and intending to use it as a tool to combat my perfectionism. I also stressed about analogue vs digital note-taking, and I can promise I've had these exact thoughts two years before then too.↩
I learned this yesterday in the module The Social Life of Things, "transient or transitional spaces, such as attics and basements, where objects can be left before being permanently disposed of (Hetherington, 2004; Thompson, 1979), or hidden from sight until they are rediscovered or start spilling out of these spaces." Cherrier, H. and Türe, M. (2020) ‘Value dynamics in ordinary object disposal’, Journal of Business Research, 116, p. 222.↩