The thing about knitting is itâs much harder to fear the existential futility of all your actions while youâre doing it.
Like ok, sure, sometimes itâs hard to believe youâve made any positive impact on the world. But itâs pretty easy to believe youâve made a sock. Look at it. There it is. Put it on, now your footâs warm.
Checkmate, nihilism.
This is a powerful positive message..
Iâm literally reading a book right now (Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski) that says this is scientifically sound.
There have been studies done on rats and dogs where they develop learned helplessness in the animals by giving them impossible tasks. Eventually the animals stop trying, even when the task stops being impossible. (I.e. put a rat in a maze with cheese it canât get to until it develops learned helplessness, then put the cheese somewhere it can get to it and it wonât even try.) But once they show the animals they CAN do something - i.e. physically moving the rat to the cheese - the learned helplessness goes away.
No one can move you to your cheese for you, but the book says DOING something - which they define as âanything that isnât nothingâ can help. Make a food. Work in the garden. Clean a thing. Do a favor for a friend. Call your elected officials.
Knit a sock.
If you feel overwhelmed by existential despair, do something. It doesnât have to be big. It just has to be anything that isnât nothing.
This is really good advice for ADHD people because when executive dysfunction gets bad itâs easy to fall into this pattern of thinking. Do just one thing. It doesnât have to be your homework, or a chore. It can be something small, it can be something you enjoy. But do just one thing to remind yourself that you can.
This is what âhumans want to be productiveâ really means
We want to make things. We want to do something and at the end of the process see that something has changed. We want physical proof that we did something. We want to be able to point at something and say âI made thisâ. We want to be creators
