Where do YOU get your Happies?

In defense of instant gratification... sometimes.

Let’s face it. Work is hard. Writing is hard. People are hard. Working out is hard. Sometimes even sleeping is hard. Especially if you’re a child of immigrants, you’re probably more than used to being shunted from school to Kumon to swim practice to foreign language lessons to a required visit to that Auntie who keeps pinching your cheeks and commenting on your weight. It can seem really unfair to be an adult and be stuck on almost exactly the same hamster wheel, and this time you can’t blame your parents for it.

Instead of school, there’s work (and let’s face it, not that different). Instead of Kumon, you write, except the words won’t always come. Nobody’s making you go to swim practice, but you’ve got to choose between the shame of not fitting into your clothes and the pain of exercising, and the cognitive overload of that decision is a LOT. The Auntie is still there, and she’s got even less filter now that she’s old, and maybe you have kids and a spouse to boot. So you’re keeping the foreign language (or music) lessons, because it’s the one part of your day that allows you to imagine a different life for yourself entirely.

Then there’s the world out there, which seems more absurd and terrifying every day. Layoffs abound, women’s rights are shriveling, the stock market is crashing, it’s unclear which passports will provide any security from the apocalypse, and work in the era of Gen AI is like trying to figure-skate during a hurricane. Writing is meant to provide an escape from all this, but between writers’ horror stories of 20+ years of rejections on their stories or spending $11,000 dollars marketing their debut novel (don’t do this), it can seem as if there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, only more rocks waiting to crush you.

It becomes all the more important then to find your Happies, especially to avoid fixating on the things above, which a writer friend appropriately calls the Crappies. So, this Easter weekend, I’m making a list of the things that give me the Happies and keep me writing:

1. Coffee with chicory

My mother sends me specialty coffee with high chicory content. Besides the warm-fuzzies of being sent this, chicory coffee is remarkably good for gut health, while providing a softer, less acidic (and less anxiety-inducing) high than regular coffee. While I love coffee, my natural energy levels are so high that even decaf can have me fidgeting and almost manic, and that’s not actually conducive to creative output.

Creation isn’t about making something out of nothing; it’s about taking the input and feedback from the world and making something beautiful or meaningful out of it. We talk about “chewing” or “mulling” on ideas, which suggests that creation is a kind of digestion. In that sense, it’s an organic, biological process, and keeping my biology in good condition is critical to my creative process. So, almost every morning, I have chicory coffee and write.

2. Clearing the house, closing tabs

I have a theory that minds are similar to computers in that short-term memory is a scarce resource that must be aggressively managed. If you don’t, clutter destroys your capacity to think until your mind is running as slowly and jankily as Internet Explorer. Right now, there are 13 books on my coffee table that weren’t there last week. What are they? Where should they go?

Clearing out visual clutter reduces cognitive clutter. As I put things away, close tabs, make and check off TODO lists, I start to feel energized and ready to focus on the things I actually want to do. Even better, I sometimes find treasure when doing this. e.g. that slip of paper at the top of the image above:

It says:

• Careless, human mistakes create tension and believability.

• He could not have known the futility of this action — smallness of humanity.

• Separate agendas and POVs — reader knows most.

• Explanations: metaphors and simplicity.

These thoughts I had while on a business trip are ready to find their true home, now that I have the mental space for them.

3. Getting into Flow — even for a little while

When I first learned about Flow, I thought it was pseudoscience. I mean, even the relatively sedate Wikipedia descriptions of what Flow is sound magical and infeasible:

• "the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity”

• “complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting transformation in one's sense of time”

• “melting together of action and consciousness; the state of finding a balance between a skill and how challenging that task is”

• “effortless attention”

Seriously, who are these people and how are they doing it? There was one coworker I saw who had mastered it. She could bike 40 miles in to work, write her code despite being interrupted by meetings, and was always relaxed into her work, rather than doing it with any anxiety. Then she disconnected from her work completely when she went home.

I struggle with this. Sometimes, I’m thinking about work problems or plot problems while I’m in the gym or while I’m getting a massage. When I write, I can get distracted easily by a message on my phone. But with years of practice, I sometimes achieve Flow intentionally, even if it’s just for a few hours every day. e.g. I make it a point to write my Substack posts in one sitting, without distractions.

Flow is usually the best part of my day. Which means that even seeking Flow is enjoyable, because I’d rather get close to what I want than not at all.

4. Sinking into the scene, no matter where it takes me

I chatted recently with the author Kia Abdullah about her book, Truth be Told, which blew me away. We talked about how I sometimes feel self-conscious about writing extreme scenes — car-chases, fights, and the kind of dangerous stuff that is expected in genre fiction like thrillers. The stakes for my characters are usually subtle and internal. Her advice was to avoid self-censorship. The genre is extreme, and however wildly implausible I might think a situation is, that’s the whole point of fiction.

I followed her advice and wrote a scene I never would have otherwise. I stopped second-guessing (Is this really how someone would react if they got hit in the head with a glass bottle?) and just let myself be in that scene. It wasn’t just immense fun to write (I got into Flow!), three days later it’s still holding up.

5. Sharpening the Saw

If you’re a creative person in any capacity, you likely have two things that are a source of joy.

a) The creative output: the novel, the illustration, the product, the photograph, or whatever that you brought into the world.

b) The creative tools: these can be tangible, like software you use to do your art or write your code, or the camera you use to take photos, but they can also be intangible, like your imagination, or language itself.

In a hyper-capitalist world, it’s easy to focus only on (a) as having intrinsic value, while (b) only has value insofar as it helps produce (a). But this takes away from the joy of learning, which can often far exceed the joy of doing.

This weekend, I have a lot of learning scheduled. An editor is working with me on one of my upcoming novels, I’m still working through that HBS course I mentioned last time, and I’ve got a ton of craft time planned as well.

It’s easy to find your happies when you let go of the outcome and focus on how much you enjoy the effort. If you don’t believe me, check out this Instagram post. This hairstylist is the epitome of enjoying both (a) and (b) to the utmost, and is a great reminder that ultimately, the job of a creator is to bring joy and hope to others.

krewkutz

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