Word Vomit

0026 – meeting older friends + singapore/overview effect

visakanv
January 4, 2013

Just spent 53 minutes watching a Dave Chappelle special that was “recommended for You” that I didn’t particularly enjoy. That wasn’t a particularly fruitful use of my time. The guy tells a few funny stories, but that’s about it. Nothing stratospheric. I wasn’t paying attention the whole time, so maybe I missed some of it. Multi-tasking is a bad idea.

Multi-tasking is a bad idea.

Today I spent time with my family and then I met some older friends for beer and a walk at east coast park, and it was really great. They talked about their projects and their work and their experiences and general stuff and it was just exhilarating to witness all of that, to sort-of participate in it. They make me realize I still have so much to learn, there’s still so much I don’t know, and there’s so much more that I want to be a part of, that I want to contribute to.

I think above all else, above any specific piece of info or data, the most powerful thing that these people did and will continue to do to for me is to give me positive energy. It’s just so powerful. I know I sound like I’m rambling- time and time again it’s becoming clear to me that I get less and less articulate the longer I spend time meandering around purposelessly on the internet. Tonight it was about an hour. Or two. God damn it. At least I’m writing this now. I have to finish this and then I’m going to bed. 1/4 through. Sometimes I finish with time to spare and I cross well into 1,200 words- this time I’m kind of drawing a blank.

Oh yeah, I was thinking- young people ought to systematically meet older people. By that I mean to say that we need to have relationships with people slightly older than us, because they’ve experienced things that we’re about to experience, and they can better prep us for it. It simply doesn’t make sense to spend all your time around people of the same age group. But that’s what life does to us these days- I don’t think it’s a universal phenomena, I think it’s a consequence of the industrial era education system we have. We educate people in batches, so they form ties with people of the same age, and then they go to work at the same time, so their peers are all the same age- and people get cliquey around people of the same age… all of that is balls. We should all seek out older friends. There is no substitute for wisdom or experience.

I suppose it’s also useful to seek out younger friends, because they bring a certain youthful curiosity and interest to the table that can heal a jaded heart, and in trying to express to them what we feel needs to be shared, we become clearer about what is important to us. I remember Neil Humphreys writing something about how his daughter teaches him patience and love. I liked that. We’re all here to learn. We learn from each other.

It’s been impressed upon me that I’ve been very Singapore-centric, and maybe overly so. I do not know exactly HOW much overly Singapore-centric I am (god that was grammatically wrong but I’m too sleepy to bother trying to fix it and I need to make up words to fulfill a word count so I use this stream of consciousness style to keep going and going… I am totally gaming my own system for my own selfish ends and I’m not sure if i’m losing anything in the process but FUCK IT something is better than nothing, and I wasn’t expecting all 1,000,000 words to be pearls of wisdom anyway, quantity quantity quantity as long as it’s not completely incomprehensible it will somehow be useful to me. HURH.)

anyway I need to travel and to get some different perspectives. I’ve been thinking too long and hard about Singapore and I haven’t actually thought about what sort of global impact I might be able to have. I mean, I’ve fantasized about it, but you need to leave the earth to see it for what it is (the overview effect) and similarly I think I need to travel to get a better sense of what I care about, what’s important to me.

Also, I need a massage, and to go for a run, and to play lots of guitar, and to write god damn fucking shit to write to write and write about every damn thing that’s on my mind- mindless websurfing is the fucking death of me and I need to go to bed ASAP so omg 250 more words what

this is not oneo f my proudest days- my mind is constantly in front of itself- I’m actually writing this way faster than usual, I still have 6 minutes left on the clock which is much more time than I usually have

here’s what i’m curious about, does the content of this particular word vomit somehow suffer from this edgy obsessiveness or whatever this is? this edge-of-seat ok-sorry-gotta-run-bye kind of thing? I think it would only suffer if I did this for each and every word vomit, because then you’d never get any deeper or slower insight, but maybe sometimes we ought to write too fast so that we know what comes out when we’re going too fast

we need to experiment with different styles and different speeds so we learn about ourselves… when you go fast you appreciate the need to go slow… maybe when you play a million notes and you use a million words you will learn the power and value of a short phrase and maybe when your sentence runs on and on when you’ve still got about 30 words to go you will learn to say what you need to say in a far more succinct and cogent manner

maybe then you will say more with less

not because you want to but because you have to

✱

notes on the overview effect

The Overview Effect

The Overview Effect is the mind-expanding experience that astronauts have reported having when they go to space and physically look at the planet from an outsider’s perspective.

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