February 13 update.
Hi! Still working on writing more frequently. Let me dive right in to an issue I'm letting hamper my creative and personal work: rarely do I feel like it is the "right time" to do so.
I wake up pretty early. Usually around 4 or 5 a.m. or so. I struggle to get out of bed quickly; in the winters it's cold, in the summers I just don't feel like it. So there are no pressing issues, but I'm still waking up.
When I do get out of bed, the cat is usually quick to wake up and demand my attention. I like him, but he's very distracting. He wants to go outside all the time. I get that it is dull being stuck inside the house, but neither of us actually wants to be outside in the cold weather. So I'm distracted, and if I try to address that distraction directly I'm either in poor conditions or a poor mood.
Sometime after then, my partner wakes up. Usually, we spend time together in the front room; they're working and I'm handling morning chores. But for some reason I just don't like working on personal things around them. So... things don't get done then either.
I could go through the whole day, but honestly that's enough to get the gist. I keep finding excuses to avoid working on personal things. That's the root of the problem -- insisting that there is a "good time" to work on things. There are better and worse times, sure, but I can't keep putting off shit I care about because "now's not a good time".
I've mostly just been trying to keep active and keep reading. Just finished Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory. As indicated by the title, it takes the form of an extended conversation between Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi. Basically, they work together to define capitalism and put it in a historical context. Then they set about determining ways to effectively critique it, and from there, dig into how we might go about confronting it. I really should take some notes on it or write a summary. I think it's a pretty solid work with many useful tools that I'd like to pick up for later use.
I think the idea that's stuck with me most closely so far is Fraser's view of three "tensions built into the capitalist social order"; the "three Ds": division, dependence, and disavowal. Essentially, capitalism institutes a division between production/reproduction, economy/polity, "human" society/"non-human" nature... it emphasizes the formers of these pairs and obscures its dependence on the latters, which it then disavows, implying a lack of connection to them.
A pull quote: "capitalist economies constantly siphon value from these realms while simultaneously denying that those realms have any value. The upshot is that capitalists assume the all-but-infinite availability of social reproduction, public power, and natural inputs. Treating these things as free gifts, they don't concern themselves about replenishing them. They undermine the very inputs on which they rely."
What results from this is a tendency toward self-destabilization along its lines of division that is structured into the very essence of capitalist societies. Fraser argues that this inherent tendency towards self-destabilization results in capitalism, as a social formation, outright being crisis-prone.