From 2026-01-31 Why A B U is so useful for me:
- Now that I have this term (which I invented, shout out to me1), I can foreground the fact that… I can go months without learning anything significant and new, that updates my world model.
- I have a “bad habit” of listening to my favourite comedy podcast on repeat. I’ve already listened to all the episodes like 3+ times. This is something I’ve done throughout my life (e.g., rewatching Conan clips, rereading Harry Potter, etc)
- Because like, it’s fucking hard to find a new A. The times I’ve discovered a new thing to become obsessed with, I’ve gone hard on that thing for ages, and it’s very unlikely that I’ll find something that hits the same way. E.g. if I’m like “ok well I’ve already listened to this podcast I love once all the way through, should I try a new one, or relisten to this one?”, it’s actually far more likely that relistening to this one will provide more enjoyment, because it really hits my exact sense of humour
- And it feels similar with learning skills/fields too. Should I learn to code properly? Well, I don’t know, it feels like it’s a lot of drudgery before I’ll get to the “good” bit. So I guess I’ll just stay in my local minima… and then years go by…
- So, I can live through longgggg A Droughts. It’s hard to know where to find the Next Thing that would be amazing and life-updating. It’s really hard to know how to move past your A Ceiling. So I plateau. We live in a world where it’s very unusual to have a mentor or teacher, often you’re just slumming it on your own, and what to do next is absolutely not apparent, so ok, I guess I’ll watch some more Conan clips, guess I’ll continue to walk the same neural pathways, getting more and more entrenched, rigid
- So, I don’t know if this will help me have less A Droughts, but at least I have a clean term for this now. “I’ve been in an A Drought”
- This has been fitting in with thoughts I’ve been having about Kegan 5 and becoming more flexible, less stuck in habits and local minima
- Relevant recent tweets 👇
- 👆 this was before I had the term “As”. So this was still something that I couldn’t cleanly/easily think about!
- So yeah, to me these tweets all point at the thing of like, “my god have I been in an A Drought, how the fuck do I get out”
Footnotes
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Of course, all I did was take ORI’s “A”, and then realise that I can go a long time without any As, and then I “invented” “A Drought”. It’s not exactly sophisticated, but still! ↩