A Successful Self-Prompting
Thinking step by step
A few posts back, I listed a couple works of art that I should obviously consume, but hadn’t. One such work was free and readily available online: the fanfiction When I Win The World Ends, by Bavitz. I’d been seeing buzz about it on Tumblr, and it had various desirable properties for me in particular. But I hadn’t read it.
Anyway, I read it. On my own recommendation, because I said that I probably should. I’m fairly confident that I wouldn’t have read it so quickly if I hadn’t written, and therefore read, my own recommendation. So what the heck? Why did this work? If I already knew I should read it, why did I have to write it down and put it in public before I actually did?
Potential Reasons
Writing has many benefits, but one is to crystallize thought. Much like teaching something is a good way of determining how well you know it, writing something down is a good way of making it coherent. So maybe I had a nebulous thought that When I Win The World Ends would be good to read, but until I wrote it down, it wasn’t actually well defined. For example, maybe my mind contained the thoughts:
People who seem to have good taste keep talking about this work of fiction
That same work of fiction relates to one of my strong interests
But hadn’t actually connected these thoughts into “thus I should read the first chapter”. I don’t think this is literally true; it had occurred to me before that I might want to check the story out. But maybe actually seeing the words written down converted a vague feeling into an actual intention.
Or maybe, by putting the idea in a blog post, I shamed myself into reading. If so, excellent use of shame; reading the fic was a ton of fun. Basically, by telling the world the syllogism “if I had sense, I’d read this fanfic”, I created a pressure to actually read the fanfic, which my idle thoughts were insufficient to create.
Finally, the blog post might have registered in my brain as social proof. In other words, I may have thought “Oh shucks, Quaternion Daydream recommends this fic too? Guess I’ll check it out!” I do know myself to be susceptible to arguments in blog posts - this one by Scott Alexander successfully convinced me to give away 10% of my income indefinitely. On the one hand, it’s awfully silly to feel socially motivated to take my own recommendation. On the other hand, shucks, who’d know better what fiction I might enjoy?
I think probably the crystallization reason was weak here, and I mostly read the fanfic because of a combination of social proof and productive shame. It felt silly to say I’d enjoy something in public and then not try it, and it felt good to follow the recommendation of someone I like (myself).
So What?
I’ll take this as a small sign to keep blogging. Writing to crystallize ideas is valuable even if nobody else reads that writing, so that’s a value of blogging independent of broad readership. Also, there’s some evidence that saying stuff in public is motivating for me, so as long as I don’t blog about how it’d be great to sniff paint fumes all day, blogging may help me get around to actions I otherwise wouldn’t.
In particular, I now feel like self-prompting is an underrated feature of writing about the good life. Sure, I might motivate someone else when I wax poetic about taking some action or other. But even if I don’t, I’m extra likely to motivate myself! So I think I’ll lower my bar a little bit on violating my readers’ collective shifgrethor. Consider yourselves warned!