I did a thing a while ago where, for fun, I decided to map out my “memex” – ie the things that I talk about a lot, repeatedly. I was able to do it quite quickly, I think maybe because I’ve written so many word vomits and I’ve tweeted so much. In a way, this was me trying to re-create the learnings of my word vomits in a relatively small amount of space and time.
So now that I’ve made this, what do I do with it? I find myself thinking that the act of compression has forced me to figure out better ways of expressing the fundamentals, and now that I have well-expressed fundamentals, I can re-expand them into proper essays. That’s something that sounds a little daunting and scary, so it makes sense to do them as word vomits instead. So here we are.
The first decision I have to make is – which ‘dehydrated crystal’ do I water first? And the one that jumps out at me is “make friends”. Everything is connected, but “make friends” feels like the most important thing to me at this point in time.
I was born a blasphemy, and I grew up as a minority. As a tall dark kid with a weird name, I’ve always been an outsider and a misfit, in many ways. And so… a lot of my life has been characterized by me feeling like I don’t belong anywhere. Most people from around the world, when they look at me, assume that I’m from India. Except Indians, who can tell immediately that I’m not Indian.
I’m Singaporean by nationality. Singapore is my city and my home – and yet I’m not entirely at home here either, even though I was born and raised here, love the food, most of my IRL friends are here, I did my mandatory military service here, I own a HDB flat here. And yet… my values aren’t very aligned with my own country’s. Which may be part of what drove me to the library as a child, and then subsequently to the Internet. I am most at home when I am online, I am most myself when I am online.
Most people aren’t like me. Most people don’t behave online the way I think people should behave online. I believe that the #1 thing we should be doing online is making friends. I think the #1 thing we should be doing in *life* is making friends.
I feel more strongly about this than most people, maybe partially because I have had to painstakingly build my social graph brick by brick. I can’t take for granted that any ingroup is going to take care of me or look out for my interests. I have had to build that group from scratch, by myself.
Wonderfully, I have found that, while the work can be tedious, it is incredibly rewarding. Relationships that you build, rather than fall into, have a way of being much more nourishing and robust. What started out as something I had to do out of desperation has grown into something that feels like a superpower.
It does take years to build what I have. But the years are going to pass regardless! You can spend years arguing with idiots and assholes, or you can spend years making friends. It took me my whole life up until now to get to where I am, and it was a process fraught with lots of trial and error, lots of failure and heartbreak.
But I don’t think it should take that long, and I don’t think it should cost so much. It took me longer because I had to figure a lot of it out by myself. A thing I would like to do with my life is to help other people do it better, so that they too can build good communities, and feel like they are wanted, like they are loved, like they belong.
I was having a conversation with my ex-boss recently (a friend and mentor who I owe a tremendous debt to, for making me a better version of myself), and we talked about this – how the desire for social capital is one of my strongest motivators. It can be expressed healthily and it can be expressed unhealthily. In my earlier blogging days, I fell into a trap of obsessing about numbers. It made me feel like I was ‘relevant’, like I was a part of something important, a part of something bigger than myself. Some readers good, more readers better, right?
As it turns out, no, not really. There are a lot of people in the world, and you can get a lot of eyeballs on you in a way that is not nourishing. Because those people are looking at you, but they don’t really see you. They don’t really know who you are, and they’re not even interested in getting to know you. They’re mostly just using you – sometimes maliciously as a pawn in their games, often innocuously as background characters in their own self-centered stories and games.
What is to be done, then? How do you navigate it? You navigate it by making friends. Surround yourself with a diverse group of smart, thoughtful, kind friends that you respect, and conduct yourself in a way that earns their sincere respect in turn. This to me is the simplest and most effective way to live your life. I’ve come to believe that even my ethics are really just derivative of my desire to have great peers.
I believe that we are deeply, fundamentally socially creatures. I believe it’s quite possible that we were social creatures before we even learned to think of ourselves as individuals, possibly even before we learned to think at all. This simple fact about people explains so much about how the world is. A 16-year-old kid told me that they got into MAGA because it made them feel like they were a part of something greater than themselves. I told them that that’s what motivated me to get involved in my local music scene, too. I wanted to be somewhere that I belonged.