Wait, you're starting a blog because you couldn't sleep?!

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I’m lying in my bed, tossing and turning. I’ve been trying to fall asleep for hours. Try as I might, sleep eludes me. My mind just won’t stop thinking.

I'm not a stranger to sometimes having trouble falling asleep - for me this usually crops up when I'm nervous for the next day, say because of a coming exam or interview 😅

However, that pattern does not hold today. Tomorrow should be a perfectly normal day - the plan is to go to a cafe and work from there the rest of the day. My brain has no reason to worry about tomorrow. So, what gives? Why am I not able to fall asleep?

This is where I’ve slightly click-baited you, dear reader. The reason I was tossing and turning hours after getting to bed is not because of any stress, but because my brain is relentlessly churning out one idea after another. A couple of ideas regarding one project, then my mind shifts to another project and I think up a few ideas for that too. Ad infinitum.

Normally, I heartily welcome such ideas. Hell, I’ve even built a few workflows to quickly capture ideas just like this. However, right now, what I should be doing is sleeping, so this is a bit suboptimal.

The culprit? My phone ran out of battery earlier in the night so I kept it on the charging stand. Because of this, the podcast I generally fall asleep to is not playing. Turns out I’ve gotten into a habit of tuning out my thoughts by self-medicating with this sleep aid, and without it, I can’t sleep.

Now, dear reader, I would love to be the sort of person who, upon realizing the issue, forces themselves to sleep without this crutch. But alas, 2-am-me is not that strong-willed. He pulled out the phone from the charger, turned on the podcast, and then promptly fell asleep 💤

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(Next day slightly-groggy Baibhav writing now…)

Taken in isolation, only being able to sleep with a podcast on the background is not that big of an issue. I think it is a good-if-you-can-fix-it-but-ultimately-mostly-harmless habit. (I would like to take this moment & extend in advance an apology to my partner who will have to listen to Hank and John Green when trying to sleep in the future)

The actual issue is that this tuning out of my thoughts through overconsumption of media has gradually become a recurring pattern in my life. Every free moment of my day has slowly ceded ground to being the perfect opportunity to listen to that podcast or that audiobook. I’ve accidentally stumbled into a life where I spend every waking second consuming information, and no time at all spent actually thinking. This is why, I hypothesize, my brain capitalized on the first moment of silence it got (aka no podcast playing when sleeping), and went into overdrive, churning through the open loops in an almost hysterical pace.

This realization left me crestfallen. For a long time, I’ve prided myself on sidestepping the bad parts of “normie” internet infinity pools and skinner boxes (aka Tiktok & Instagram). I also thought I was maintaining a good grip on my vices (Twitter and Reddit) via software which blocks social media till 2pm every day. However, I now realize that I was just replacing one addiction with another, and that I was still a slave to over-consumption, just in the form of podcasts and audiobooks.

I am sure you can think of a lot of reasons why this is pretty bad. Here I will focus on the main issue for me: This lack of free time has meant that I have not been actively thinking about my life, my work, my relationships and how I want my life to be. In other words, I have not been living intentionally.

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“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” - Blaise Pascal

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Given any problem, my mind naturally jumps to possible solutions. In this case, my first thought was that I should extend my app block list to also include my podcast and audiobook player apps. So, Pocketcasts and Bookplayer would automatically be blocked till 2pm every single day. That is actually not a bad idea, and will probably be an integral part of the solution - by passively leading to natural small blocks throughout my day to think.

However, I think there is space here for a more active solution, and this is where writing a blog (this blog!) comes in. Or more generally, writing long-form. You see, I have been thoroughly writing-pilled: people I really look up to mention writing as one of the most valuable things one can be doing with their time.

I will probably not be able to express it as good as they can, so I will appeal to authority here and share some of my favorite writing-related quotes:

“A good writer doesn’t just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing. And there is, as far as I know, no substitute for this kind of discovery.”
- Paul Graham, The Need to Read

If you want to deeply internalize something you’re reading, the best way I know is to write about it
- Andy Matuschak, in his Working Note “Write about what you read to internalize texts deeply“

One of the more profound benefits of having developed a serious writing practice is that I’ve been made aware of the abysmal depths of my ignorance. Ideas that seemed solid in my head—ideas that I based major life decisions on—have fallen apart when put on the page. This is a good thing. When you notice that you are wrong, you can change what you are doing for the better. People used to be certain that everything in the universe was made up of wind, fire, air and earth. Then some got confused and felt that was perhaps not right. Now we can cleave atoms.
- Henrik Karlsson, in a substack note

“That’s the promise: you will live more curiously if you write. You will become a scientist, if not of the natural world than of whatever world you care about. More of that world will pop alive. You will see more when you look at it.”
- James Somers, More people should write

A short (1 minute) Jordan Peterson clip on why you want to learn to write:

In summary, writing is rad, and in many ways, writing is thinking. This makes it the perfect active part of my solution to the problem of not introspecting enough.

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However, just solving the problem of not introspecting enough is not the full story of why I’m starting this blog. Actually, I have wanted to have a blog since forever, and this recent incident is only the final push I needed to commit to it. In the interest of not making this post super-long tho, I will mention the other reasons in a list:

• I have long been an avid reader of blogs, and I think they are one of my favorite mediums. Some blogs authors I love that come top of mind right now (in no particular order) are Scott Alexander, Kevin Simler, patio11, Paul Graham, Aaron Swartz, Ben Kuhn, Simon Sarris, Henrik Karlsson, Gwern, Visa, Alexey Guzey, Shane Parrish. I think they are all super cool and want to be more like them.

• I’ve had a number of friends start blogs or write on the internet, and I’ve always really liked and admired their efforts. I think they are also super cool and want to be more like them too.

• Right before my cant-sleep-too-many-thoughts incident, I had been reading a few blog posts on why one should start a blog (ref: guzey, kuhn) and those primed me to consider writing as a solution to my does-not-spend-enough-time-thinking habit.

• I want to try out more experiments in my life, and doing experiments then writing about them sounds like a virtuous cycle which could work well. (the earlier James Somers quote about writing leading to a life lived more curiously also resonates very much with me)

• I hope this blog will in time act as a friend catcher. I am not that good at making friends IRL, and so hope that this medium (and my twitter) will help me meet, interact with, and learn from kind, friendly and like-minded folks.

• I have been paying for a personal domain since quite a few years now, but have always procrastinated on actually building my site 🤣 (btw, this procrastination, which generally manifests as me debating which is the perfect tech stack for my blog, is why I chose the solution requiring zero technical decisions - Substack)

So yeah, as you might’ve guessed from the content of this first post (genesis post? post 0?), this blog will be what it says on the tin - Baibhav’s Ramblings. The current plan is to write about anything I find interesting - this could be anything from my productivity experiments to etymology to programming languages to neurodivergence and Aphantasia. I want to write about the things I build and how I went about building them. I want to write about my experiments improving my autobiographical memory. I want to write about a book I just finished reading and want other people to read. I want to write about what interests me the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.

If this sounds interesting, please consider subscribing to this blog so that you receive new posts in your email. If you’re currently stuck in a content-over-consumption situation like me, I understand and forgive you for not subscribing (tho I hope you will come back in the future!)

Here’s to new beginnings 🥂
(and to the hope that my second post will not require as much time/effort as this first one 🤣)