The Sixteenth Cousin of a Bloke I Knew in 1998

Last month I sent you a note about a ten-week-old baby and an on-call that felt like one too many. I sat on it a fortnight, convinced it was self-indulgent before sending it as I felt it would explain exactly why I built Tagore.

Amazingly (to me) almost nobody unsubscribed. And so many people wrote back about their trauma, and why they started writing, but never finished: A retired teacher in Melbourne, up at 4am, forty years of it. A woman in Ohio with three chapters and no fourth. And, again and again, the same sentence: I want to write about it, and I can’t.

I know that sentence from the inside. I had two years of it.

I wasn’t idle. I was scrolling. I would open my MacBook, feel the thing rise, and be gone: forty minutes into the Wikipedia entry on the American Civil War, then whether the first English settlers to America really sailed from Blackwall in 1606 and if I’d ever walked past the spot, then, God help me, deep in the Facebook photographs of the sixteenth cousin of a bloke I knew in 1998. Very busy. Wrote nothing.

Then Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl explained Me to Myself in a paper from 2013. Procrastination isn’t a timetable problem. It’s a mood problem. The task makes you feel something unbearable, and putting it off kills that feeling instantly, like a switch. My brain files it under tomorrow afternoooooon, and tomorrow, as we know, never comes.

The scroll wasn’t laziness. It was anaesthetic.

And here’s the part that stopped me. Avoidance isn’t a side effect of something terrible happening to you, it’s the main symptom, one of the actual criteria doctors use to diagnose post-traumatic stress. Your nervous system learns a rule and keeps it faithfully, like a good dog: don’t go near that. Which is a filthy trick, because the writing is the way through, and the writing is the exact direction your body has decided is on fire.

There’s an old adage about writers being writers because of the trauma they’ve suffered in early life. In 2018 Paula Thomson and Victoria Jaque studied 234 professional performers and found those reporting four or more adverse childhood experiences also reported markedly stronger creative experience: deeper absorption, a transformed sense of self and world.

Now the trick the tech industry uses: In 2021 the ethicists Vikram Bhargava and Manuel Velasquez set out the machinery in Business Ethics Quarterly: unpredictable rewards, the fruit machine trick, and the deliberate demolition of what they call “natural stopping cues”. A record ends. The Sopranos ends. A feed does not end, and it doesn’t end on purpose, because an ending is a door and you might walk out of it. Somebody was paid very well to take the door off.

So: a nervous system trained to bolt, holding the finest escape hatch ever built. You were never going to win that. It was never a fair fight.

Which is the whole brief for Tagore.

No browser. No feed. No sixteenth cousin.

You cannot be pulled away by an interruption that never arrives.

Three years and two hundred thousand dollars for one prototype. The Kickstarter decides whether it becomes an object or an anecdote.

You are not lazy. You have been standing guard over something, very diligently, for years. The book is still there. Somebody wins the Booker in 2031 and I would quite like it to be you.

Imran