This is a brief article about a phenomenon I noticed in myself for many years, and have now learned is very common among creatives and hyperactive people. I’ve also learned a term for it that I think is very apt: life or death thinking.
Here’s a scenario. It’s 10PM, I am done with my main work for the day, and I am booted from my own desk to go work in the living room on my small tablet. (Long story, circumstances out of my control.)
I think: “Hey, I have an hour or two to just do anything now. Let’s check my list of absolute simplest game ideas and see what we can hack together!”
And so I get started on coding some very simple mobile game or silly web game. Maybe things are going well, and I get a basic game loop up and running far more quickly than I imagined. I am energized and I think to myself “I should do this more often, I am a great game developer, we’ll have a fun game before long!”.
Then I hit some roadblock. Maybe a silly bug, a mistake, a typo, a problem that I don’t instantly know how to solve. I have to Google, try, iterate, until finally getting over that small bump after another hour.
By now, my “free time to do anything” is pretty much over, and I’ve done nothing but get stuck for the last hour of my day. The game idea is far from done and I think to myself: “This was stupid, I am a terrible game developer and I should just give up, this thing will never be fun or done!”
This is life or death thinking.
A single success is like winning the lottery, and a single failure is like giving up completely and being worthless, and there is almost nothing in-between.
If I hadn’t hit that roadblock, the game still might not have been fun (or done), but I’d have gone to bed satisfied. (After loudly singing musical songs in the shower at 1AM and writing a far too ambitious to-do list for that little game this weekend.)
But now I go to bed feeling like I should just never try to make a game again, because I obviously can’t program or design for shit, and anything I touch just leads to errors, and I should just go live in the woods somewhere and become a shepherd or something.
Consistency as a solution
After all those years, I’ve noticed that a very large percentage of people with artistic/creative tendencies or ADHD have this same pattern or habit. It’s ingrained, somehow. We are dumbfounded when we see others being consistent, not getting carried away by success, nor caring the tiniest bit about failure after failure.
And yet, as you might have expected, that is exactly the solution: consistency.
Not consistency of result. No, no, that is exactly the problem! Life or death thinking comes from expecting consistent results, such as,
- “I made a game in one hour before, so I should do so again now otherwise I’m a failure”
- “The last time I tried to code this and it didn’t work after an hour, it never worked again, so I should just give up!”
But we can’t predict the future. Live is not consistent. Especially creative work is not consistent in result or output. And so reality is simply different than what we’d expected, even though that’s absolutely normal and no fault of ours, and we get into life or death thinking.
Consistency of Effort
Instead, I’ve had great success with consistency in work or effort. (Which is close to consistency of habits or mindset.)
I try to be an objective, rational person who bases beliefs and ideas on data. And despite my mind rebelling against this idea of consistency all my life, wanting to spiral into life or death thinking instead, the facts show that consistency of effort is the solution.
And so I remind myself, every time this happens. I am able to ward off the monsters of life-or-death-thinking most of the time, by simply not doing that and reminding myself of this very principle.
If I just consistently do the work, dig a little deeper every day or shave a little off the top of that pile of work, it will eventually be done or be solved.
The voice in my head literally says this. I look at my next failure, another to-do list that I won’t achieve today because I lack energy/motivation/inspiration, and my mind goes: “Keep chugging away at it, a little bit every day, and it will eventually be fine.”
I guess some would say: “Trust the process.”
If my code fails today, I can try a new approach tomorrow. If it fails tomorrow, I can try a third version the day after that. Crucially, this can continue forever. A new day, new energy, I know I can at least give it 30 minutes for my next try. If it doesn’t work on the 9th try, then maybe the 10th. But based on all my experience the past ~10 years, I know that you can usually get over the roadblock at just the second or third attempt.
Not just day-to-day tasks
I’ve framed this as a day-to-day productivity problem now, because that’s where it’s most apparent in myself and other people. Obviously, creative people want to be creative (and create masterpieces and all that), and hyperactive people want to be active. And so this mindset mostly occurs in people who really want to be very productive, and they either become ecstatic when they are, or feel like dying when the slightest delay occurs.
But this applies to everything, of course.
Take health or fitness, for example. Some days I feel weak or slow. Some days my technique is way off and I barely hit a tennis ball within the boundaries of the field. And so my mind comes running “Just give up, you’ll never be a proper athlete, this is a waste of energy, bla bla” And the only solution, truly, is to stop those thoughts immediately and tell myself that I will just put in the practice each day. And somehow, some way, after consistent effort, things will improve or be achieved.
Or you can apply the idea to (personal) relationships. Time and time again, making one mistake, saying one wrong thing, breaking up once proves not to be a death spiral. People forget, people forgive, something you think is your most shameful moment ever has not even been registered by others. One bad disagreement with your partner does not mean the end of your relationship, nor does one beautiful passionate evening with someone mean you’re destined to marry and stay together forever. All you need to do, is stop that thinking and apply the same effort tomorrow to maintain/strengthen/salvage relationships.
Or you can apply the idea to work or career more holistically. When I first launched something (my first story or my first game), it was obviously a failure, because I had no clue what I was doing and made loads of mistakes. And so the life-or-death thoughts come running: “You’ll never be a good writer/game developer, just give up, don’t even try starting any new projects, bla bla.”
Looking at the mountain of work needed to complete anything, let alone a series of books or an entire career of work, it’s hard not to feel completely overwhelmed and out of my depth. I’d have trouble even getting out of bed, and then lose any wind in my sails again by the time I reached my computer.
In fact, I think our brains simply can’t handle that scale or thinking ahead that far, and it’s a bad idea to even try.
But now, based on years of experience, I know that if I just put in consistent effort that everything will be fine. A small step every day means huge leaps in a year. Nothing is ever life or death, it’s just the next thing to do.
If I have to create 10 images for the rulebook of a board game, sure, that’s a mountain of work that I hardly feel like doing. But I know that it will be done if I just make at least one every day. In practice, I still end up doing more and finishing the task in time about 70% of the time. The other 30%, though, it’s like a fever dream. You don’t actually remember working on something, but through consistent effort, at some point it’s suddenly … done? Hey, it’s done! Yay!
Similarly, as my introduction shows, I’ve been making tiny web games on a makeshift system (a tiny tablet, sitting in the living room amidst piles of boxes, etcetera). The ideas are very simple, but they are still new game ideas and they have challenges and roadblocks all the time. But I try to catch this life-or-death thinking before it gets a chance to grow by simply thinking: “Just do one thing this evening and you’re fine.”
Sometimes I end up doing all the 20 things from the to-do list, finishing the actual game. Sometimes I do that one thing and go to bed, which still means that 5 days later I have that same weird realization of “Hey, it’s done!”
Most of all, I shut out any life or death thoughts by completely shifting my train of thought to the new thing.
Conclusion
Anyway, this is my definition (and some personal examples) of “life or death thinking” and the best way that I’ve found to combat it. I hope this was helpful or at least relatable, especially for creative or hyperactive people like me.
Don’t expect or strive for consistency of result or output. Instead, make consistency of effort a habit.
If you hit a roadblock, no worries, you still put in consistent effort. Sleep well by knowing you put in your X hours on that project, instead of being angry with yourself because you didn’t actually achieve anything in those X hours.
Conversely, if the planets align and you suddenly finish something in half the allotted time, you are not “done” and there’s no time for ecstasy. Because, you know, you’ll be putting in the same amount of effort tomorrow, right? That’s consistency, instead of wildly swinging between highs and lows.
This is the flipside that many find hard to accept. The same way to deal with the lows of issues like this (the “death thinking”) will always inherently flatten the highs (the “life thinking”). And people don’t want to lose the highs, understandably, but they should. They prove that you’ve attached your self-worth and entire mind-set to having rare, hard-to-predict successes, which is completely unhealthy and unsustainable.
Almost every day, I tell myself once or twice to just “do something every day”, and eventually you will get somewhere. If I fail in some way, I just apply the same amount of effort tomorrow, and refuse to start life or death thinking. If I succeed in some way, I force myself to get away from the computer (after putting in my consistent amount of effort) and go outside. Or go to bed in time, instead of staying up until 3PM because I’m high on productivity or something.
Honestly, and this might sound strange, the result of that work stopped mattering to the point of being a by-product. I’m not sure if this is temporary, or just in my case, or actually the ideal end goal. I regularly just chug away at something, making it, deciding it’s done after X amount of effort, and moving on without really taking in the result or evaluating it.
It’s great productivity and it’s kept life or death thinking at bay. But I guess it might be wise to, you know, actually test the game I made?
Oh well, we’ll see what the future holds.
Until the next time, keep putting in consistent effort to reach whatever dreams you have, don’t let life or death thinking take over,
Tiamo