David R. MacIver's Blog

I don't wanna

This post was originally published at notebook.drmaciver.com.

There’s a particular feeling that I think of as the “I don’t wanna” feeling. It’s a kind of sluggish resentment, of the sort you get when someone asks you to do something when you’re tired, or ill, or hungover.

It’s the sort of feeling where Woman Amazed And Horrified She Has To Just Keep Getting Up And Doing The Same Shit Again Tomorrow starts to become extremely relatable:

“This isn’t an actual problem,” this woman tried to tell herself. “The fact that I have to…do things to exist, that isn’t an actual problem.”

“Which, oh God,” she realized, “means there’s no actual solution.”

I definitely find the frequency with which this feeling comes is a depression sign. Feeling like this regularly and about regular things is absolutely not a sign that you’re in a healthy emotional state.

But I think it’s interesting to note the places that it comes up even when I’m not especially depressed.

For example, it’s often the specific feeling underlying procrastination for me. Especially on certain classes of task. e.g. I hate cleaning my room. I’m aware this is childish.. That’s often how “I don’t wanna” feels.

But another more interesting place it comes up is tasks for which it feels like this way sometimes. Writer’s block is a very “I don’t wanna” feeling for example.

It’s often possible to work past this particular instance of “I don’t wanna” with a sort of gentle self-coaxing, but it tends to be a bit like pulling teeth, with every step along the way requiring a constant level of coaxing. “You don’t have to do very much, just write a short piece” or “If you can’t think of anything, why not use this prompt…?”. These strategies work as long as I believe that you can stop, sometimes, but there’s a sort of low bubbling resentment at being made to do the thing throughout the entire experience.

One of the interesting things about the feeling of “I don’t wanna” is that it very much comes with a feeling that the thing being requested is too hard, but this is clearly fake. You can tell it’s fake because the internal response to making the thing easier is a sort of “Fuck you”, and because a great deal more effort than the thing itself would take is spent resisting it.

I think a more accurate reading of this “it’s too hard” feeling is “I don’t wanna do the thing, so I’m going to make sure that it’s too hard to be worth it”.

The feeling is also sortof recursively resistant to introspection. The feeling that comes up when I try to introspect an “I don’t wanna” is an “I don’t wanna!!”.

One of the things that’s interesting is how often the “I don’t wanna” isn’t exactly wrong and is more of an “I’m not ready”. There have been enough instances of having this sort of feeling on something - writing a thing, fixing a bug, etc. where all I needed to do was sleep on it and the next day was able to easily and fluently work on it.

Unfortunately, in the other direction waiting for the next day is often actively unhelpful, because it can let the I don’t wanna feeling really take hold and a long period of drifting can easily begin. That’s the sort of time when an I don’t wanna feeling is secretly depression. I don’t think my model of depression as a consistent bias towards inaction is the whole of the picture, but it does seem to keep rearing its head.

One place this feeling really comes up, no matter how depressed or not I am at the moment, is anything that feels like it’s trying to “force” creativity. If I’m in a creative mood, being creative is easy, but it’s not like I stop being able to be creative when I’m not in the mood - I understand creativity well enough that I have systems that would absolutely let me do it if I could bring myself to use them when blocked, but unfortunately most of the time I very much don’t wanna.