Compulsion as a Tool

What I learnt crossing Sweden by bike

I spend most of my time writing or thinking about physics. Or doing my day job.

But last summer, something compelled me to do something quite strange. By my standards.

I cycled five hundred kilometres across Sweden alone. I didn’t take any public transport. I started from a town called Helsingborg and cycled up the coast to Gothenburg. I then took a train back down and flew back to London. I stayed in peoples’ sheds on AirBnB.

I cycled seventy kilometers a day. I carried about fifteen kilograms of load. Most it was dried pasta, nuts and fruit to snack on whilst I made the journey. I packed stuff in two bright yellow penniers that made it obvious to others what I was trying to do. My most valuable item was a Garmin GPS that my dad chipped in to buy from an Evans’ cycles.

There is a narrative amongst people in their mid-twenties to ‘live life to the fullest’. Vaguely, I think this means traveling, or doing activities, or pursing new things. This is similar to the idea of ‘making memories’.

Most of my peers are now well into their careers. They are not so focused on shoring up savings anymore. As such, they have started to take the ‘living life to the fullest’ narrative more seriously.

Cycling a long distance probably fits in with this idea too.

But I do not subscribe to this narrative at all.

For the most part, I don’t really think about ‘living life to the fullest’ at all. I don’t have a strong ambition to seek novelty, or travel. In fact, I am usually am extremely anxious about travelling. And holidays often stress me out. I like routine and calm. My usual wants are coffee, reading, writing or physics. I am also quite frugal -pProbably overly so.

I usually want to stay at home. I have a lot of stuff in it. My computer. A work station for tinkering with electronics. A clarinet. Books. Also a huge bar setup where I can do pull-ups from the convenience of my living room. It’s evidence that I don’t tend to enjoy travel - even to my local gym.

Also, I am relatively un-athletic. I don’t cycle much at all. Especially relative to my industry where it feels like everyone is about to do their next triathlon.

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So then why do a strange thing like travel alone and cycle? Well, why do people do follow up on strange ideas at all?

I remember when I had the idea to do this. I was at the kitchen dinner table with my sister. And it just popped into my mind. And from there, I felt really compelled to do it. I have no idea why. It reminds me of what Haruki Murakami wrote in his memoir ‘Novelist as a Vocation’. He recalls being at a baseball game and then suddenly thinking ‘hey, I can write a novel’, after hearing the sound of a bat hit the ball. We don’t understand much about the brain. But there is definitely some stochastic physical process there can compels people to do random things.

This got me thinking about compulsion, or urges. That’s what I would describe this as. I think compulsion can defined as the sudden desire of something that you don’t actively want. Paul Graham once wrote about an idea similar to this before:

There are things we actively want because they are part of a big logical chain to something we want more. Like wanting to get a good job because you want make money. I call this genuine desire.

But there are things we want for no real reasons - often suddenly. This is compulsion. Compulsion could be the reason why someone does something weird and unrelated to their personal ‘theme’. I have seen this often happens on a small scale, like a vegetarian pregnant women suddenly craving anchovies. It can also happen on a larger scale, like Forrest Gump picking up running. It can happen in my case where a fairly un-athletic guy tries to cycle across a country.

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I was pondering this and I realised something. I can use feeling of compulsion to my advantage. I can use it to get things done.

I used to try to set goals and do them. This is the traditional way of achieving things. But this has never really worked for me. I just can’t stick to them. I have thousands of notes trying on ‘goals I want to achieve’. But it doesn’t work, and I’ve been trying for two decades.

Compulsion on the other hand, seems to be the only that works at making me do things I don’t think I enjoy.

That sudden wave of energy you get from being compelled is like a pain-killer. It makes you forget that you dislike something. It makes you forget that you are bored. I get this about cleaning my house. I hate cleaning, but when the compulsion hits, I can clean and sort for hours. My ‘mode changes’. Same with running, I really hate it. But then sometimes I feel compelled to run randomly and I can run for miles. Or doing textbook problems in physics.

Because of this experience, I now think that doing things when I have the random compulsion makes it easier to swallow than using willpower. Maybe even enjoyable.

But there is an obvious problem with just using this feeling of ‘urge’ as a way to get things done. You can’t control it! I used have to wait, maybe years, for something to boil inside me that compels me to do something. Or in the case of cleaning, maybe a week (much to my girlfriend’s dismay). It took me a year to find the compulsion to write again. Imagine if I could harness the power to make my body feel urged to do something at will.

But then I thought, what if my body is like an antenna which has many random compulsions to do thousands of different things, channeling and flowing through it all the time. And all that was happening was that I wasn’t noticing it?

Well it turns out that it’s kind of true. I think.

After trying to simply just listen to what my body compels me to do, I realised that I have the urge to do a lot of different things quite frequently. I’ve noticed that I have the urge to cycle quite often. Maybe it was being masked by my ‘willpower’ to achieve other things like career goals.

I am trying to notice this feeling more and then ride the wave when it hits me. Sometimes, when I’m at work, walking, or just doing nothing, I ask myself - ‘what do I feel the urge to do right now’.

Now, I feel compulsion all the time. Maybe noticing these random urges has made them come more often. Or maybe, I’ve always had them and now I am just better at noticing them. Now, I write only when I feel compelled to. Like today, I randomly felt compelled to sweat a bit by running in a thermal shirt outside and listen to classical music. Now all I really have to think about is how to get that ‘compulsive’ feeling to do things more often. Being bored and staring into space also helps.

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Temperature and Lawns

Ok, that was a huge digression about my weak sense of willpower. Whilst I was cycling, I came across a few societal ‘oddities’ in Sweden that caught my eye.

On my trip saw a lot of beaches and woodland. This kind of nature was presented alongside perfect, square neighbourhoods with large gardens. It felt like nature was trying its best to fit in with the orderliness of the buildings. The light made it feel like I was in the world of a pinhole camera. Light blue hues everywhere.

Most houses were bungalows. Every house had a large garden, very well maintained. I would say one in three had a robotic lawn mower. When I was in bed at night I was startled by the shadow of one of these automatic grass cutters outside. I was impressed again by the orderliness of homes.

One thing that I noticed was temperature. I find myself quite sensitive to temperature. I am from a country in South East Asia, where I find humidity difficult to live in. But here, the temperature was perfectly balanced, to the point where I didn’t notice it. It was almost as if one of my senses (the sense of heat) was being taken away to feel other things.

People didn’t lock their bikes when they rode into town.