(2020-04-21) Murphy You Don't Have Writer's Block, You're Just Being Evil

Justin Murphy: You don’t have writer’s block, you’re just being evil. If you’re not having a stroke, you are not blocked.

“Boredom is the root of all evil―the despairing refusal to be oneself.” ― Soren Kierkegaard in Either/Or.

If you are not moved to write or speak about your observations and ideas, if you do not wish to express your affects or emotions, it is typically because you don’t want to share them. For instance, you find your ideas uninteresting or dumb. But how is that even possible?

The underlying problem is that you lie to yourself about who you are. You tell yourself you’re more profound than you are, so your actual ideas seem uninteresting. (cf mediocrity)

Lying to yourself about who you are is no less evil than lying to a friend about something important.

To escape the sin of intellectual boredom―to think and write and speak with great motivation, no matter what―it is only necessary to affirm what you are, or as Friedrich Nietzsche put it, to become who you are.

When you stop lying to yourself about yourself, what were once dumb ideas and unsophisticated feelings become the most interesting questions you’e ever encountered. For it is only now that You are, in fact, encountering them. (interestingness)