Caught in the Drag
Trading paralysis for play
What you’ll get from this article: An argument for bringing Play into your life as a way to stop punching yourself in the proverbial dick.
No AI was used to write, edit, or otherwise modify this article. Which may mean the article is worse, but at least it’s genuine.
Sometimes I have a disconnect between my brain and body, which causes me to lay uncomfortably on the floor or to sit on the couch while my insides pace a hole in the floor.
“Just DO something!” yells my brain, but my body remains paralyzed.
Brain has 50 directions to go and distinct actions to take in every direction, and body is buzzing with energy to make things happen, but as a whole, I’m just stuck.
I call this feeling ‘The Drag’ and I bet you’ve all felt it too. The Drag is such a frustrating paradox, because it’s painful, but it’s absolutely self-inflicted. I can feel myself getting aggravated with my own stupidity, but inherently unable to just get up and do the damn thing. It’s a crisis of action. It’s basically this comic:
It’s not been uncommon for me to have a task, have a 20-step plan to do it and all of the resources lined up, then just be unable to move my hand. For example, when I was in late grad school, I wanted to be a VC, so the simple plan was to 1) stay on top of all biotech company funding through public listings, 2) keep track of data and draw patterns, and 3) write them up to show that I could analyze data and infer new information. But sometimes I got flummoxed at the start of things and The Drag would be too heavy to shake off, so I maybe did 30% of the work I could have ever done, and wasted 70% of that time on fighting a battle with myself that guaranteed I was the loser. But I have managed to find a way around it, so that the feeling kind of washes away, and my brain can stop punching me in the proverbial dick.
The answer is Play.
The way to get The Drag to shake off and slink back into the shadows is to bring a sense of Play into my life (capitalized to give it the respect it deserves, since it should be a full-on pillar of existence). Doing anything that felt like work had the bonus of potential failure, and a plate already loaded up with Very Important Things could certainly not handle any dominoes falling when things were already pretty shaky. I just couldn’t take any more L’s, so Brain decided to just throw everything in neutral and I guess just wait around until I died or something.
But I have to still do the Very Important Things (I guess unless I did die, but that’s not my favorite option either) so I decided to reframe the output side of the equation- the potential for failure. I decided that nobody really loses in a sandbox, the sand just takes form, crumbles, and gets rebuilt again. I had to make it less about achievement, less about quantitatively measuring my effort, and more about just messing around in the dirt.
The less I cared about the outcome (and really at the core of it, other people’s perception of the outcome), the more I could bring curiosity and experimentation into the mix. I could build something up and not care if it toppled, because I just wanted to see if it would topple or not. I stopped needing everything to succeed or to make me look cool, and instead just decided to have fun with it.
This tactic is not always easy, it’s as much of a muscle/routine as anything else. I had to build the link between recognizing The Drag -> realizing I was paralyzed -> choosing to bring some play into my work. I had to do this dozens of times before it became a top-of-mind reflex, and it’s still not my automatic response. But it’s definitely a larger side of myself now. I say this a lot, so you’ll probably read it more if you continue to read these essays, but I think humans should always be defined by our second thought. The first thought is whatever our monkey mind, our upbringing, and our biases are programmed to make us say. The second thought (and the one that should be said out loud) is the version of ourselves that we choose to be. And I am choosing play.
Even with this writing, I can bring the fun literally anytime I want to.
Like what if I decided to give myself a cowboy perspective in an essay? Or line up the first letter of every line to spell naughty words? Or even something as harmless as seeing how many commas I can fit into one page? I am in the middle of an endless sandbox, consciously shedding the shame of societal expectation that keeps me performing normally, and free to move in a dozen dimensions towards whatever calls me in the moment.
There is also a sense of presence in play that adult life often doesn’t have. Everything in an adult’s life is constantly bean-counted for the downstream effects, with us weighing the consequences, counting the dollars, etc.
Kids kind of just play. They don’t hold back because they’ll go too hard on the monster trucks and might fall asleep during their favorite show later. Could they be mad if they do fall asleep and miss the show? Probably, but man, it did not stop them from going ham with the trucks. There’s a freedom and a grace in that, and it gets lost a bit the more you count the beans.
So I’m reclaiming it, to bring back some color and some devil-may-care freedom to my life. Play is the opposite of The Drag, and it’s available whenever you feel like enjoying yourself. And if you can’t seem to find it, just start with the easiest game for any toddler, and ask a bunch of questions.
Why am I doing this? Why can’t I do it this other way? What happens if I stack a bunch of this together? It’s like mixing every soft drink together or holding your breath the longest. Eventually curiosity will bring the play out of you.
With love, from me to you,
Alec