Motherfuckingly locking In
I have been sleeping early these days not early but usually before or at 1:00 AM and now I am half asleep and all I can recall is gunshot, one call, chitchat from the ethiopian drill songs I consumed earlier and even today but none the less I want to talk about locking the fuck in, the art of locking in on something.
Here is the thing. I know exactly what I need to do. The work is clear. The steps are clear. The deadline is clear. And yet here I am, typing a field note at nearly midnight, avoiding the thing I should be doing with the same skill that an alcoholic avoids looking at their empty bottle. It is not that I cannot do the work. I can do the work. I have done harder work. The problem is that I will not do the work and I do not know why.
(this essay is the work I am avoiding. Meta as fuck. I am writing about not working instead of working).
I have been thinking about attention a lot. I wrote about it before Attention.
And here is the thing I keep circling back to. Running. Because that is what this is. I am not procrastinating. I am running. There is a difference. Procrastination is passive, a failure of time management, something you can fix with a Pomodoro timer and better habits. Running is active. It is a choice. I am choosing to avoid the work because the work requires something I am not ready to give.
What is that thing? I do not know exactly. Maybe it is the fear that the work will not be good enough. Maybe it is the fear that it will be good enough and then there will be more work, an endless treadmill of expectation. Maybe it is the fear that locking in means admitting that this is what my life is now, that the grind is not a phase but the actual shape of existence under capitalism and I have to make peace with that or break under it.
(I am not sure I want to make peace with it. Maybe the running is a form of resistance. A refusal to accept that this is all there is. But resistance that produces nothing is just masturbation with extra steps).
Maybe that is the real problem. Not the distraction. Not the lack of discipline. But the fact that the running is conscious. I know I am running and I keep running. There is no ignorance to blame. No external force to point at. Just me, choosing the door that leads nowhere, over and over, because at least nowhere is familiar.
(lock in, they say. lock the fuck in. but nobody tells you what to do when you are already locked in and what you are locked into is the act of running itself).