A Labour of Love
"...a writer is one to whom writing comes harder than to anybody else."
Young men blessed (cursed?) with milder forms of autism typically display two distinct failure modes. One involves playing video games, watching porn, smoking weed, and insulting communists on Twitter. The other is depression.
Good mental health looks a lot like the first state of mind, but the obsessive-compulsive energy is channelled into more worthwhile pursuits—reading books, writing poetry, writing code, lifting weights, talking to girls, and insulting communists on Twitter. This is the Middle Way.
Worthy hobbies are hard, almost by definition—hardship confers value. Much of the discourse around mental health is homed in on finding meaningful things to do, but you can’t tell meaningful activities from meaningless ones when you’re stuck in the limbo of dopamine highs and troughs.
Instead of looking for meaning, find something difficult to do that isn’t likely to harm anyone, even if it feels meaningless at first. The more sociable the activity, the better. Get better at it—hone your skills little by little. The pain of enduring adversity will slowly turn into pleasure.
When Thomas Mann wrote that “a writer is one to whom writing comes harder than to anybody else”, he didn’t mean that writers find no pleasure in writing. Quite the opposite. It’s that writers relish the hardship of putting words to paper just as lovers enjoy overcoming hurdles to meet one another.