Avoidance Is a Short-Term Loan with Predatory Interest
The 3 Horsemen of Not Doing S**t
🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.
While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.
You can buy my book Permissionless here.
Nothing we avoid ever actually goes away. You can duck and hide, you can run from it, you can lock it away in a box, but it’ll still grow roots.
It’s a small task today (no matter how daunting), but it’s a soul-crushing source of anxiety tomorrow. It’s one shitty but fleeting moment today, but it’s a debilitating Achilles heel in a year, worse in two, worse in three…
We hide from ourselves, too. It’s not just the things we do that define us; it’s the things we don’t get around to.
They constitute the people we never quite become.
Or just the people from whom we fail to evolve.
It was Joan Didion who said,
“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise, they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
I’ve written my share of productivity posts, but that’s not what this is. Productivity advice will tell you to use the right timer, color-code your calendar, eat the frog, and remain unattached to the geolocation of your cheese.
I want to talk about something that makes me far more uncomfortable: why I avoid the things I avoid. And why avoidance feels so rational in the moment, even as it rewires my psychology, and even as it costs me far more than I can afford.
