The Coalescence Method

The following is adapted from an article I originally published March 28th, 2020, (archive.org link)

Background 🪞

I’ve been inspired and plagued in my life by a constant stream of interesting ideas and creative diversions to which I have given my full attention for a time, usually to be pulled in a different direction almost all of a sudden to the next one or drawn into the demands of mundane reality or what-have-you. Over the years and decades, this means that in real terms, I’ve got a litany of only half-realized projects and a sense of real wanting in my overall progress as an effective creator.

This feeling became even more pronounced after I became a dad. I instantly had less free-time, less focus, less self-care, less energy, less risk-taking, less motivation…

In a review of my various projects, be they music, apps, games or manifestos, I realize that many of them had perennial themes (for me that is) and that my problem isn’t actually that I am discarding the old ideas in favor of the new, but that I’m cycling through a series of interests and concepts and the real problem is that by taking so long to return to my ideas, I just lose the momentum needed to see any of them through in the window of time I’m focusing on them.

Now of course, I could accept that I should just pick the most important one and see it to completion, but I have tried telling my brain to do this before and it doesn’t really work. I can believe it will for a while, but it just doesn’t hold. And without making excuses for all the reasons why, after nearly half a century of living, I’m finally more interested in how to work within the personality I’ve got than trying to force myself to be something I’m not and feeling bad about not achieving that transformation directly.

An integrated continuum of imagination 🪢

So I had an epiphany of sorts, but it didn’t come by sitting quietly and surveying my life. What actually happened to me is I had a little idea for a story. It started out as just a premise and some imagery in my head, and then I sat down to try and write a bit of it and soon found it spiraling out into something much more.

As I looked to fill in details and flesh out my vision, I began to realize that the universe which was opening up in my story was big enough to “hold” nearly all of the other random concepts and half-baked projects I’d ever started. In concrete terms, what I began to do was put these things into my story as elements and I was able to give them a life that they would never have in reality.

What’s weird? It suddenly didn’t matter that they were "real" or not.

It didn’t matter that they weren’t finished; now they were alive. They had virtual lives, perhaps, but these felt much more hopeful somehow than their real lives as inert, unproven, unfinished drags on my self-esteem. I became unburdened by the sense of failure in not getting them done, because what was exciting now was plugging them into something and giving them meaning.

I call this "The Coalescence Method" (TCM) because that describes for me the nature of the way the different concepts come together, connect and strengthen each other.

What was the icing on the cake about this approach is that, now, my story, my magnum opus, is being fed by all these disparate projects and interests of my life, has become big enough and meaningful enough that it has essentially occupied my full creative attention for more than a year. This is an absolutely unprecedented level of staying power for me for a single idea, and it has been very positive for my sense of purpose and optimism about reaching a place I can ever be comfortable enough to open up and share an intimate part of my usually very internal self with the world.

An aside: the project I've been pouring all of this effort into is called Hello World Eater and I'm really looking forward to sharing developments on it as soon as possible.

Now you try 🙋‍♂️

I am writing this to share the positive nature of what this approach has done for me and to recommend to anyone else with similar struggles, having a million different projects, all unfinished, with the same kind of desperation at feeling like they’ll never get finished or launched or whatever. I am writing this with a suggestion:

Try to write as many of your unfinished ideas into a single made-up universe and watch them become more real. Feel good for a minute about what you have devised and what resolution you have already put into them in your head. See how they take on new meaning and if it lifts your burden. See if doing so can drive your focus in a more fulfilling direction.

Good luck and please share if you’re trying this or something similar and what you’ve learned!