16th oct

How do you quit smoking? How do you become a responsible person? How does change happen? I know books are written about this- I’ve been meaning to re-read the Heath brothers’ book- but for the most part the cultural narrative we like to spread is that you just need to believe, you just need faith, you need to read the right thing, be inspired the right way, watch the right movie…

At a first-order level, this ia obviously wrong to some degree- otherwise there would be no need for new self-help books to be published. The canonical self-help book would be out, everybody would read it, everybody would be wise and make great decisions henceforth- everyone with great careers and relationships and bodies. Even if just about 30% of people got this, the resultant peer pressure would eventually change the whole world.

I might be wrong in the projections there but I think we can say with some certainty that our general ideas (and subsequently our behaviour, if inspired by them) aren’t anywhere close to what works best. We always prefer the best story, sometimes at the expense of the truth. I thought this was well contained in the juxtaposition between a superman comic about a jumper and an smbc comic about superman as a transitional power source… I’m getting ahead of myself here. I shoulf have written that separately when I had the time.

There’s something about the smartphone that makes it a lot more receptive to vomits than time actually spent at the keyboard. I think it’s because it’s that much harder to open a new tab and start surfing the net for “research”. Clearly I’d boost my work productivity if I stop multi-tasking. I have to experiment with this. I have to acknowledge this as truth and bind myself to it. Maybe I need to further bite-size work into pomodoro chunks of deep-distraction-free-writing. It absolutely doesn’t make sense that I get more writing done in my commutes than at work. So I need to change something. Maybe I should incorporate write or die into my work. That worked for me for a while when doing my vomits.

Feeling a little anxious and overwhelmed with more information coming through me than I have the ability to transcribe. It always makes me slightly nauseous. I remember getting this when reading a book by EDGE- it might’ve been “what is your dangerous idea”, or “what do you know but cannot prove”…

I will get disjointed and unhinged for the remainder of this, I think it’s the only way.

Clearly monotasking is the only way forward. I knew this to varying degrees in the past but have always repressed it, just add I have repressed meditation and structured guitar practice and god knows what else. Why? Because it’s uncomfortable? Inconvenient? That’s silly! It’s always silly when you hold these inner workings to the light of scrutiny- irrational, clumsy, clunky, childlike, immature. It’s embarrassing to reveal it initially, but then it becomes a huge relief… but if you let yourself get carried away by the relief, relapse is imminent. It takes several relapses to learn.

I’ve quit smoking many times. Sometimes several times in a day, as the joke goes. But this is I think the first time I really truly feel my heart bursting with anger and frustration and resentment to what cigarettes did to my body and my life. Ah but wait- that’s not an entirely new feeling. It has crossed some invisible, unknowable threshold, but the feeling has been building and growing for a long time. It’s like that native american story about the battle of the wolves inside you- the one that wins is the one you feed. And you have to feed it and nurture it for a very long period of time, enough so that it can cross the Dip. The Dip is long and dark and treacherous. As an explorer you have to be willing to lose sight of the shore.

Not very articulate today. Feeling this strange undercurrents of emotion. It’s like being overwhelmed beneath the surface, so not really overwhelmed. Is there a term for this?

The world is so much brighter and richer off cigarettes. I will seek pleasure from completing work and sticking to my word instead.

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I have often been interested in body modification. I haven’t actually done it much myself. I once bleached my black hair brown, and I have a ear piercing with nothing in it. I tweeze stray unibrow hairs, but I don’t bothee styling them. I sometimes fantasize about getting an outlandish hairdo, like a big mohawk, but it seems more trouble than it’s worth. It’s more of something I’d like to have had done- something I have a cool photo of- rather than something I want to maintain and live with.

Yeah, we’re inevitably entering identity-construction and performance territory again.

Anyway what triggered this was me seeing an smrt staff lady with a made up face and an eyebrow piercing. I thought she looked kinda cool. As cool as you can look working for smrt, at least. And this got me thinking about self-image. (Contrast: Paul Graham does not give a damn about how he looks. Have you seen him in his shorts and slippers? Oe maybe he wants to communicate that he doesn’t give a damn. I’m guessing it’s more of a comfort thing though.)

When I was in secondary school we used to care a lot about the shoes we wore, and our hairstyles and our schoolbags. Maybe not THAT much- I’m probably exaggerating this on hindsight. But several of us would face disciplining for our attempts to make fashion statements, to accessorize with fancy shoes and hair. Many of us spent a lot of time waxing and styling our hair. There was a lot of debate and argument about acceptable footwear, acceptable sock length, what you can or cannot wear around your wrists, neck. I had a white belt I proudly wore in secondary school, and a studded belt I wore in JC. I’d hide them under the fold of my shirt. I liked the belt partially because it was easy and comfortable to wear, but it was also a sort of cosmetic defiance of authority. I thought rules against belts and shoes were silly and I enjoyed finding ways to subvert them. We’d wear colourful boxers and slogan tshirts under our shirts.

On hindsight, the best way to look good is to work out, eat healthy, take care of your skin and get your school uniform tailored to fit you nicely.

A bunch of malay guys liked to taper their pants, wear ostentious caps… it was all very interesting, this preening. I knew a tamil guy with massive Elvis Presley sideburns. He made it work for him. Racial harmony day was always an opportunity to do something subversive. A guy dressed in a sari. Another as an arab, knowing that others would make the “terrorist” connection. Very smart, actually.

But the best thing you could do I think was to be a star soccer player or athlete, or a great musician. Those were the guys with a quiet aura of confidence. (Alternatively, be good-looking and popular with girls. Having a girlfriend that others found attractive is/was a huge source of social capital.)

I think it’s interesting how badly some kids want to assert their individuality. I was one of them. I would have liked to have better observed, studied and understood others who weren’t like me. What motivated them? Why were they so comfortable falling in line? Was it a bargain/choice, or did they just not see any alternatives? Was I different intrinsically, or was it just what I was exposed to? I don’t think I’ll ever get a simple or clear answer to that one. People are different.

What’s interesting is how schools suppress this identity-creation/performance/projection. The cynical answer- which I will always be eager to present- is that schools exist to standardize kids. To pigeonhole them, assess them, sort them out. They need to turn them into interchangeable cogs with minimal autonomy.