The Sober Buzz

The mind-altering effects of getting deeply invested in something

A few weekends ago, my wife went out of town on a girls trip with her friends.  Not only did she go out of town, but she took our dog with her.  The girls were heading upstate where the dog would have plenty of space to run around and do all kinds of dog-like activities that aren’t possible in a New York City apartment.  That meant I would be alone, without responsibility to anyone or anything except myself, for an entire weekend.  I am not exaggerating when I say I get one, maybe two, weekends a year like this.  I was determined to make the most of it.

When I told friends and coworkers about my impending free weekend, they all made the same kind of joke.  It typically involved me laying around in my underwear the entire time, drinking beer and eating pizza, looking like George Costanza in the Summer of George episode of Seinfeld.  

I didn’t have the heart or the courage to tell them my weekend would look nothing like that.  I wasn’t interested in the typical activities that a married man partakes in when he’s left unsupervised for days on end.  I didn’t want to eat like shit and drink booze and let the apartment fall into disrepair.  As lame as this sounds, I wanted to work.

Let me be clear.  When I say “work” I don’t mean my job.  I actually took that Friday off so I could have more time to myself.  What I wanted was to take the time to work on projects that were meaningful to me.  In my normal life, between my duties at work and at home, I don’t get as much time on my own as I would like.  There’s more I want to do with this blog, and a few other projects I want to work on, but unfortunately I only have so many hours in a day.  It doesn’t matter how early I wake up, the clock always runs out at some point.  So once I saw this opportunity to maximize my free time, I seized it.

What exactly was it that I wanted to work on?  First, I wanted to finish my Everybody Wants Some!! piece.  That meant rewatching the movie and finalizing the essay, making it fit for publication.  I also wanted to spend a lot of time reading.  For me, reading falls in this weird liminal space between leisure and work.  It calms me down and relaxes me, but I’m also always reading with a purpose.  I want to absorb new points of view and ideas, and then augment my worldview with what I’ve read.  Reading broadens my perspective, makes me a more critical thinker, and allows me to find connections between seemingly disparate concepts.

My big project for the weekend, however, revolved around social media.  I wrote a couple weeks ago about getting back online to promote this blog and my need to create the materials I was planning on posting.  I knew this would be a big undertaking, requiring me to not only build the designs from scratch, but replicate them many times over so I would have two weeks worth of posts to work with.  I was prepared to spend a lot of time testing designs, editing layouts, changing fonts, and all of the other annoying little nuances that come with the graphic design process.  I just needed to get started.

Getting started is always the hardest part.  Before I even opened my laptop, I was anticipating all of the frustration that was going to come with this task.  I knew I’d have some ideas that would fail, and I’d have to go back and revise them.  I was certain that aggravation was in my future, which is enough to stop anyone in their tracks.  The only force stronger than my aversion to potential frustration was knowing that I would feel even worse if I didn’t start the project at all.  If regret over not doing the work was x and the frustration of doing the work was y, I just needed to get to a place where x > y and I’d have enough motivation to begin.  There’s always resistance at the beginning, you just have to find an energy source that pushes you forward with enough power to get through it.

So I got started, became annoyed, and kept going.  Before long, I found myself absorbed in the work.  My eyes were locked on the screen, tinkering with buttons and testing methodologies to get the look and feel that I wanted.  The frustration that I was anticipating did appear, but it only lasted for a short while.  The challenge of completing the work, and the joy that comes with accomplishing a difficult task, became so motivating that I couldn’t even comprehend the notion of stopping.  I wanted to keep going until everything was done.  And although the process was difficult, I felt great about doing it once I got started.  I understand this is kind of a silly statement to make about creating graphics for social media posts, but I felt inspired enough to spend 6+ hours on a Saturday working on this stuff.  That has to mean something.

Experts usually call this something like “Deep Work” or “Being In A Flow State.”  I call it “The Sober Buzz.”  It’s that feeling of being so heavily invested in something that the rest of the world falls away.  You forget about eating, sleeping, or even needing to go to the bathroom.  Most importantly, your negative emotions don’t hold as much sway in this state.  You don’t really feel boredom, frustration, or anger.  If you do, they are motivating forces, pushing you forward instead of holding you back.  It’s a unique euphoric feeling, generated completely by you based on the effort you put in.  It’s one of my favorite mental states to be in, and I don’t get to experience it enough.

The older you get, the more responsibilities you have to take on.  This is ultimately a positive development, but it’s not without its drawbacks.  I have responsibilities at work.  They allow me to receive a bi-weekly paycheck and health insurance, as well as opportunities for advancement in the future.  But when I’m on the clock, I can’t get that feeling I described above.  I like my job well enough, but I do it out of a sense of duty and obligation, not because it moves me on a deep level.  Microsoft Excel does not give me The Sober Buzz.  And I can’t just go fuck off and work on an essay or some other creative project during business hours.  One, it’s not fair to my employer, who’s expecting a certain level of commitment from me, but it’s also not fair to the creative project.  I can’t get into that Deep Work/Flow State if I have to check Slack every 10 minutes to see if a coworker or a client needs something from me.

The same standard applies to my home life.  As a husband, I have a responsibility to my wife to be present in the few hours at night we have alone together before we both go to bed so we can wake up and head back into the office for another day of work.  She deserves my time and attention.  Much like my job, I can’t just go off on my own all the time, working on whatever I think is important.  I have to be there for her.  That’s table stakes, the bare minimum, in a marriage.

The only solution I’ve been able to come up with is to find these little windows where I can focus on myself and the work I want to do.  A lot of time, that’s early in the morning.  I can get an hour, maybe 90 minutes of Sober Buzz time during that period.  On certain nights where my wife goes out for a work event or to spend time with friends, I use that time to work on something meaningful.  In those cases, if I’m lucky, I can get anywhere from 2-3 hours of Sober Buzz.

But it never quite feels like enough.  I’m always conscious that there’s a deadline I’m bumping up against, a time where I’ll have to drop what I’m doing and return to my real life.  That’s why I was so jazzed about my free weekend.  My deadline was measured in days, not hours.  And it went better than I could have hoped for.  

I got everything done that I wanted to get done, and I had some additional free time for completely mindless activities like playing EA Sports’ College Football 25 (I’ll admit, I had bought a PS5 a few days before my free weekend knowing that I’d be able to play a handful of games in Dynasty Mode in between my windows of necessary work) and Star Wars Jedi Survivor.  Even though I primarily wanted to use this weekend to work, I knew I had to have a little “Summer of George” time in there to reset and refresh my brain.  

I wish I had more time.  I wish I could “do it all.”  And I know that my time is going to feel even more constricted once my wife and I have children.  This is just the reality of being a modern day office worker with a stupid email job who also wants to cultivate a creative habit.  But I think this constriction is also what motivates me.  It’s the law of supply and demand.  I don’t get as many chances for Sober Buzz time as I would like, so the time I do get becomes more valuable and important.  I’m motivated to capitalize on the few opportunities I have.  It’s what makes me want to spend my few free weekends each year buried in Canva and Substack, trying to create something I’m proud of.  All of this work is difficult and extremely frustrating at times, but it’s better than not doing anything at all.  The variables x and y have become constant, and x always wins out.