Coming out of a melancholy period [down phase]

I’m want to continue investigating my blogging pattern as I’ve discussed it in my recent 3 Quarks Daily article, Melancholy and Growth: Toward a Mindcraft for an Emerging World. This time I want to my daily activity for October and November.

This chart shows my daily posting activity during October and November. It’s been sparse during October, with many days where I didn’t post at all.

I had 30 posts in October, 15 in September, 18 in August, and 61 in July. So, I started going down in July, hit bottom in August and September, and started back up in November. Starting on the 15th I’ve posted every day – and I’m continuing to post daily in December.

That’s not all. I’ve gotten relatively little sleep for the last few days. I’d wake up during the night, start thinking, and then go to the computer and look around, maybe even write some stuff and do a post or two. Then I’d go back to bed. Maybe I’d sleep, but maybe I’d just lie in bed and think, sometimes on my back, which is not generally how I sleep.

[Note, by the way, that the practice of sleeping straight through the night is a cultural convention, not a biological necessity or preference. It’s called “segmented sleep.” I’ve got a number of posts about it.]

There’s more. During some of those night sessions I’d make a post on Facebook indicating I was awake. This started on November 22, where I posted a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial from the 1980s. This is one of those commercials featuring an owner of a Dunkin’ Donuts who awakens in the early morning, uttering “Time to make the donuts.” Here’s a list of those posts: first the time, then the date, and then the content of the post.

3:37 AM 11.22.24 – [Post a Dunkin’ Donuts TV commercial]
2:07 AM 11.24.24 – Again, I'm waking up in the middle of the night and thinking. What's next? Writing?
3:24 AM 11.24.24 – I’ve thought. Now back to sleep.
4:35 AM 11.24.24 – Back at it. More thinking.
11:31 AM 11.24.24 – I’ve spent the last two hours immersed in a remarkable line of thought. More later.
11:37 PM 11.25.24 – It’s been a productive day.
4:18 AM 12.1.24 – Awake in the middle of the night. Good thoughts. All’s well.
3:22 AM 12.2.24 – Middle of the night. Awake. Good thoughts.
4:02 AM 12.3.24 – 4:02 AM Tue 12.3.24 [I simply noted the time]
4:30 AM 12.4.24 – Just another marker.

Note that I’ve highlighted two of them. The content of the posts is like that of the other posts, but the first one went up late in the morning while the second went up late at night, after my normal bed time.I believe that first post, on the 25th, is when I began thinking about the implications for splintered career paths as AI becomes more deeply embedded in society.

The thoughts and ideas I have been having during this period are new and different. In particular this is the period where I decided, first, to write a 3QD article about my blogging habits, and second, to actually write the article. That article is a substantially new kind of intellectual activity for me.

If, as I’ve argued in my 3QD piece, those down-times are for the kind of mental reorganization that precedes a creative phase, one would expect new things to emerge [tumble out] at the start of an up-cycle.

Has this happened at the beginning of every up-cycle back to 2010, when I started blogging? I don’t know. I’ve not been keeping those kinds of records. I could go through the blog and take note of the content of every post to determine whether or not new stuff shows up immediately after every down cycle. That would take time, but I’m not going to do it now. I’ve got other things to do.

But looking at my blog posts won’t tell me anything about changes in my daily routine of the kind I’ve reported above. But I have been through this kind of thing before. It’s not new to me. It will slow down – it already is – it always does. And there are other night-notices scattered in Facebook, going a few years back. But I’m not going to look for them now.

Things to do.

More later.