Self-Knowledge and Deferral

I want to start today’s note with an observation. Sometimes, knowledge of ourselves coincides with inaction.

For instance: I have a writing deadline to meet. I keep getting distracted and am unable to begin working. I vent about this to a friend: “I know I need to work,” I say, “But I can’t pull myself together to get started.”

c. Melancholy, Edvard Munch

I want to examine the connection between this type of knowledge — the knowledge that we need to work, but that we are having trouble — and our not working. Is this sort of complaint itself a means of ‘pushing away’ the task I need to complete?

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It will be helpful to begin somewhere else. Imagine for a moment that we are the friend. Someone close is venting to us, saying that he cannot pull himself together in order to begin working.

There is a response available to us that is almost guaranteed to be unhelpful. Namely, we could tell him that he needs to get his act together and work. Maybe, for instance, we will tell him to try spending 30 minutes just staring at his word-doc.

To us, to someone who is not having trouble working, this advice will seem perfectly right. Though, as we said, it will not be of much use to our friend. He will, of course, respond in the following way:

”Right. I don’t disagree with you on this. I know I need to work, to ‘lock in.’ But I can’t, I just can’t focus.”

We might then feel bad about ourselves. We gave poor advice, after all. And worse, it is not clear what else there is to do. Our friend doesn’t have a practical problem—he knows what has to be done, he knows that he needs to work, he just can’t do it. Advice, then, is out of place. Perhaps, one might think, the best thing we can do is listen to him vent.

As tempting as this will be—and though it may be helpful with respect to more general problems—my experience has been that this won’t be that helpful for our friend either. Venting becomes another way for him to avoid doing the work, a catharctic alternative to scrolling on TikTok. But, unless we end up solving the problem, it will more likely than not remain following our vent-session. The only thing lost will have been the time spent venting and not helping our friend overcome his road-block.

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This is an interesting point to pause and notice. Our friend’s self-knowledge has quite an odd effect here. Because he knows what he needs to do, that he is suffering from writer’s block and can’t write, it is almost as if all the practical advice we could give him becomes useless. There is nothing he can do. Rather, his focus shifts to the thing he has self-knowledge about. The thing preventing him from writing: his tendency to get distracted, maybe.

Part of the problem, then, is that one can focus on that—a tendency to get distracted—for quite a long time, likely to no avail. After all, such a disposition is not something that can be resolved or gotten-to-the-bottom-of within the constraints of a deadline. It is a project that spans a period of one’s life (I, for instance, have struggled with it throughout college!). Yet, if our friend’s abiltiy to move forward then becomes contingent on him solving this problem, it is virtually guaranteed that he will not move forward within the constraints of his deadline. The problem is too large, too fundamental, to be solved in so short a time.

I do not think this is an accident. It seems too convenient that the supposed solution to our friend’s writer’s block has the same impact on his life that his writer’s block otherwise would have.

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It seems then, that the proposed solution: ‘getting to the bottom’ of what is preventing him from working is less of a solution and more of a compromise. A compromise with the writer’s block. Our friend disavows it, rejects it, attempts to move on from it, but still, ultimately, suffers from it. In its new form it has a different name, one that sounds better and more psychologically ‘deep’: self-knowledge.

Yet, this is ‘self-knowledge,’ in a weak sense. Namely, it exists purely to distract our friend from the practical advice we had offered him in the first place. To keep him from doing anything but thinking about himself and why he cannot work. It is a poetic affliction: he spends so much time thinking about why he cannot work that he does not.

So his self-knowledge is just his writer’s block in a new and shiny form. But how is he to move forward? We can only hope that the knowledge of this new, sneakier form of repression will mean something for him. Perhaps it is precisely by coming to see that his self-knowledge is, in fact, anything but that he will begin to look upon practical solutions in a better light.