Continuing the thread on the streak, I’d been reflecting on my own personal experience and learnings, especially around a comment that’s oft-repeated here on 200was, about being too attached to the streak, leading to not-so-pleasant feelings of perhaps guilt, disinterest or frustration.

Looking back on my own experience and reading from the posts of many others here, I think there’s 2 main reasons why we have these bad feelings about the streak, and how we should really only care about one of them.

1. Loss avoidance due to sunk costs

Anyone who kept a streak will know this. Once it hits a high enough number, the stakes get higher if you break the streak. That number varies from person to person, but generally it’s around 30 days I think. Loss avoidance is the horror of losing something you had, and that’s the bad feeling that motivates us to (try to) keep writing everyday and not break the streak. As human beings, loss fires off more neurons in our brain than gain, so we’re hard-wired to try to avoid it more than anything.

This bad feeling of potential loss is what makes the streak mechanism work. Without the disincentive, the streak mechanism will be lesser for it, or even, ineffective. 

2. Need to be authentic, not keeping up appearances with ‘writing theatre’

I think this is what most of us are talking about when we say we are too attached to our streak. I know, because been there myself, and still do on some days now. That after a while, the deep “why” of why we write here becomes a little hazy. We lose track of how writing serves us. For me, it came after I had written all that I initially had planned to write. What’s next then? I lost my initial “why”, and thus writing daily became to feel like streaking for streak’s sake, for appearances.

Unpopular opinion: Without a deep “why”, everyday we’ll be doing ‘writing theatre’ for sake of the streak, and that’s the thing that doesn’t feel good. Because there’s no north star. The writing doesn’t feel authentic. Your conscience is the reputation you have with yourself, and it takes a hit everyday. That’s the thing that doesn’t feel good. Not the horror of potential loss of breaking a streak. 

But the difficulty here is, sometimes you need a long runway to get to your “why”. So initially there will be seasons where you’re just doing it for the streak. It will feel fake. But in such a specific case, I think it’s ok because you know you’re working on untangling your slump to get to your “why”. It’s only when you stop working on getting to your “why” that it starts to feel really fake.

Your “why” can change and evolve too. What got you started may not be what sustains you. It changed for me, and I had to seek out my “why” after the initial few months. It’s still evolving as I write now. So it’s a never ending back and forth, of high seasons of authentic meaning-making and low seasons of fake writing theatre. Personally, I find that it’s a perennial task. My “why” keeps changing and evolving, precisely because I keep writing and learning from the writing everyday. That’s why I fall off it from time to time, and get back on.  

Conclusion: The streak doesn’t need to change. It’s us that needs a change.

So, it’s not the streak mechanism that needs changing. If the streak is making you feel loss avoidance, it’s working as expected. But when when there’s too many days in a row that we feel like we’re faking it, perhaps it’s time to work on seeking our deep “why”.