I know I’m guilty of this. You see a paper, you think, “I had this idea,” your brain immediately questions all of the decision pathways you could have taken to get to where you are now except you published this uniquely amazing idea first. Or perhaps you see a talk by someone from a very well funded lab and they have created some new amazing model and you think, why don’t I have such resources to pursue whatever I fancy? Or maybe Claude Code can write every bit of code you write each day for work but at 100x the speed of you and you feel like there is no more point to doing the job if it’s going to be automated away. There is a fear of missing out that ends up driving decision making and so you spread yourself thin hoping that one of the many different things you are trying all at once will hit at least once. But this doesn’t work. You might as well play every spot on the roulette table.
Recently I was chatting with Varya Bazilova, who studies mountain hazards, about all this and she said that the solution is perhaps to “be like a debris flow”. Unlike a flood which is mostly water and goes everywhere, debris flows have large pieces of debris and typically cut a narrow channel as they march down the mountain in a gravity fuelled quest for oblivion. I think she’s correct. If your anxiety focuses you on everything you will focus on nothing. So be like a debris flow.
