Writing as Psychotechnology (30/30)

I'm writing 30 posts in 30 days at Inkhaven. This is number 30.

This month I’ve been doing Inkhaven — a writing workshop in Berkley, California where you must publish a 500+ word blog post every day or they kick you out. This is the 30th post, published three minutes before the final deadline. This blog, Psychotechnology, is about to go radio silent for a while. It’s time to pause converting ever increasing doses of caffeine and nicotine into posts — and digest what I learned.

Inkhaven ended up being an interesting and rewarding experience. It was also much harder than I expected.

One reason is that I produced much longer pieces than I expected. I can write 500 words in a couple of hours. But most of my published pieces were 1000–1500 words, several times longer than the required 500.

Another big reason is that writing has been a process of emotional work and “shadow eating” — shining light of attention on cringey and rejected parts of myself and integrating them via producing sincere stories, e.g. “Writing Under My Real Name” and “Mephedrone is a Cursed Drug”. The process of writing ended up a powerful psychotechnology — a mildly psychedelic experience that made my mind come out much more self-aligned in the end.

There was a lot of fighting my neuroticism around producing quality posts. And a lot of ongoing renegotiation with myself what a “quality post” even means. Rarely there was a moment I didn’t feel the pressure of another deadline coming. As soon as I’d submit my piece, usually close to the 12 AM deadline, the internal clock in my mind would immediately start on the next one. I had to learn the skill of winging it — cobbling together a post trusting my own mind to finish it and make it reasonably artistic and craftful in the process.

The ”cobbling together” sounds bad. It’d also feel bad internally. But often this feeling wouldn’t match people’s reactions to the resulting product. On day 23 I was at the lowest point of the challenge — I felt like I ran out of things to say and wished for Inkhaven to be over thinking no one would need eight more posts from me. And on the very same day I published my most-read post of the challenge: “A One-Minute ADHD Test” — 10k views, 20 times the median amount.

Gwern, one of Inkhaven’s contributing writers/teachers, suggested looking at publishing as buying lottery tickets — you don’t know which posts will end up doing well, so it makes sense to publish a lot. Most days I would be losing 1-3 subscribers and gaining 2-4. But on the net I gained 107 subscribers going from 578 to 685 total. Some bigger lottery wins: “On Trying Two Dozen Different Psychedelics” (+18 subscribers), “A Nicotine Analogue I Had Known and Didn’t Love: 6-methylnicotine” (+17), “Do Nothing Meditation” (+16).

All in all, I produced a lot of work I’m proud of that I wouldn’t create otherwise. The practice of saying “fuck it” to myself and hitting publish was incredibly useful — if stressful and agonising most of the time. It also made me stronger. In the literal sense: yesterday I did my first pull up in 15 years. There is a gym onsite and on most days in the first three weeks I would go there to lift weights in order to burn off anxious energy and recenter myself.

Sharpening perception and amplifying agency

There is an idea I’m currently fleshing out in my head: writing as a psychotechnology for sharpening perception and amplifying agency. The brain builds the model of the world, but it doesn’t do this dispassionately, sampling everything uniformly. Writing helps you construct those models. Then you use these models to infer more interesting details of reality.

Great writers aren’t great just because they possess a technical skill of putting words on a page in appealing fashion. They actively lead interesting lives that become interesting writing. Hunter Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” is more interesting than an average person’s Las Vegas trip not just because he writes well. He arrives in Las Vegas with a deranged hyperpolitical model of America, a specific quest — understanding the American Dream — and willingness to act it out.

If an average Las Vegas enjoyer magically acquired a mere technical skill of Hunter Thompson, their writing would improve but they still wouldn’t produce writing of the same caliber. For a few months I’ve been meaning to write an homage to the book titled “3-MeO-PCE: Fear and Loathing in Amsterdam” about my trip to Amsterdam, but it just feels flat to me because I didn’t come to Amsterdam on a quest. At the same time another essay of mine “Can AI have a soul?” — A conversation with a Christian monk was much easier to write because it had a quest at its core.

To be an interesting writer is to live an interesting life. It is strange to look at a four-year period of my early life and see it become a mere 1500 word essay On Trying Two Dozen Different Psychedelics, when I could now produce two dozen essays of the same size about the past two years.

Case in point. Last year I started doing standup comedy and so far I performed it on stage 82 times. Stand up is an excellent way to alter your psychology, and I could write a dozen essays about it alone. If you speak Russian, you can see four existing ones on my blog on Telegram in Russian. English-speaking people will have to wait, in the meantime here is a video of my performance:

@eleweek

Sasha Putilin on Instagram: "45th standup performance from earl…

I feel like I wasn’t even alive in some important sense before I started writing.

The brain is a matrix for agency, a darwinian meaning-making machine. The process of writing doesn’t just produce inert essays. Each essay becomes a part of you, and one that actively influences your life. Each interesting essay calls for more interesting essays. Interesting begets interestingness.

And that’s why I’m stopping publishing daily. I need new input, not more output. It’s time to go on more quests. See you after the next adventure.