So I\u2019m trying something new today. I slept later than I intended last night, so it\u2019s now 1130am. I remember that the last thing I decided last night was that I should make writing my \u201cfirst thing in the morning\u201d task. And to do that, I realise that it\u2019s necessary not just to start writing when I wake up, but also to avoid any possible distractions prior to it. I know that my primary distraction is the Internet. As I\u2019m writing this, I know that I have new things on Facebook and Twitter just \u201cwaiting for me\u201d. And I\u2019m thinking now about how liberating it actually was when I was on holiday in India and I didn\u2019t have to bother with those things at all. Social media is really a hell of a drug.<\/p>\n
So we\u2019re back in the territory of principles and preferences. Should I have to \u201cdeny themselves\u201d (see how language is leaking meaning again?) something like social media in the morning? I don\u2019t want to say that there\u2019s a definitive answer, but hey \u2013 I\u2019m pretty sure that if I hadn\u2019t turned off my wifi and then closed my Telegram app, I would be scrolling through a bunch of newsfeed right now. Once I\u2019m already scrolling through Facebook, it\u2019s pretty easy to then open another tab for reddit. And then I can spend hours on that stuff, which is how lots of my time just slips away. <\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t intrinsically a bad thing if that\u2019s how I want to live my life. I think adding too much guilt and shame to some set of nations makes the problem worse because there\u2019s some sort of subconscious rebellion going on. It\u2019s okay to live one\u2019s life just coasting along and checking Facebook and Reddit every so often. The thing is, it\u2019s becoming clear to me that I can\u2019t do that AND simultaneously develop a large body of work in a surprisingly short amount of time. If I spend my social media hours writing, I would\u2019ve been done with this project by now and I would\u2019ve moved on to the next stage in my writing path\/trajectory. Wouldn\u2019t that have been cool? I think so. <\/p>\n
Here I find that I\u2019m in the same sort of dilemma as I was as a student \u2013 if I had studied hard and diligently instead of picking around, I would have had life open up its opportunities to me. I could\u2019ve travelled abroad to study, met all sorts of other interesting, driven people, and things would\u2019ve been so different. I\u2019m good at rationalising my current position and synthesising happiness. But I don\u2019t think I want to continue using this skill set for the rest of my life. I don\u2019t want to just invent stories after the fact about how things are really quite okay. Because I can already say now that life will be \u201creally quite okay\u201d no matter how it goes. I could end up in jail for some reckless accident and then spend the rest of my life reading and writing in jail and that would still be \u201cunfortunate but quite okay\u201d. If I lead a moderate family life \u2013 have a couple of children with my wife,continue working on my career path for the next 30 years without trying anything different or new, maybe just learn to cook a few more dishes, and read a few more books\u2026 that would be quite okay, too. I mean, there are lots of people who haven\u2019t even made it as far as I have, getting killed at 17 or 19 or getting childhood cancer. Not everybody gets to live a full life like Lemmy or Lee Kuan Yew or Oliver Sacks or Daniel Dennett.<\/p>\n
(I just felt myself tempted to open Facebook. But the wifi is off. Interesting catch. These things are pretty scary when you really get down to it.)<\/p>\n
Now I\u2019m thinking about how Oliver Sacks is no longer in this world. Prince and Lemmy and David Bowie. It\u2019s an interesting thing, death. Michael Jackson has been dead for some time. Lee Kuan Yew has been dead for two years. if you enlisted into Singapore National Service on the day he died, you would have ORD\u2019d a couple of days ago. Two years ago I was in Cebu with my friend Damien when we found out. Life definitely seems to move at a faster pace as you get older. Though maybe there are some variations. Time didn\u2019t even really seem \u201creal\u201d when I was in primary school. I didn\u2019t quite consider it. You had a birthday every year which was something you looked forward to, and new year\u2019s, and holidays and such, but that seemed to be about it. As someone on reddit said \u2013 the Christmases you experienced from 6 to 12 were just pure happiness with no baggage, no guilt, no shame, no worries or cares, just magical. Something like that. But that isn\u2019t something we should be yearning for (although we all probably secretly will \u2013 there\u2019s a hero\u2019s journey aspect to it, there\u2019s a Freudian aspect to it.) <\/p>\n
[2nd FB impulse]<\/p>\n
It\u2019s interesting how meta and recursive everything gets, and how challenging it is to ever come up with a set of points that adequately reflects this, without turning itself into a sludgey mess. I think it\u2019s a challenge I would like to attempt to solve in my lifetime. Just for fun, out of curiosity. I do think it can be done with words. Or maybe in film, or animation. I need to watch that anime with the crazy cuts. Maybe I need to experiment with word vomits with crazy cuts. Which would be an interesting sort of \u2018full circle\u2019 \u2013 my early vomits were about me trying to talk about many different things to fill up the space. Along the way I tried to focus and stick to the matter at hand, which I think I\u2019ve gotten reasonably decent at doing. And now I\u2019m thinking about how I can bring up multiple things to talk about the same thing. It\u2019s an evolution. I\u2019m thinking of Dave Chappelle\u2019s standup now, where he told multiple stories while also telling 4 little stories about the times he met OJ Simpson. It was just a clever, interesting bit of structure. One of the Ender\u2019s Game sequels did that too, by using bits of a conversation between two characters as introductions to chapters. It makes me realise, as I\u2019m writing this, that something seemingly straightforward and simple can be made interesting based on how you pace it, how you set it up, how you tell it. I don\u2019t think I quite appreciated that enough as a creator. And it really reveals that even though I\u2019ve spent so much time writing words, I haven\u2019t spent any time telling stories at all. I should start doing standup. I should start doing video. And I should start writing shitty fiction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So I\u2019m trying something new today. I slept later than I intended last night, so it\u2019s now 1130am. I remember that the last thing I decided last night was that I should make writing my \u201cfirst thing in the morning\u201d task. And to do that, I realise that it\u2019s necessary… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[350],"class_list":["post-10489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-word-vomit","tag-self-respect"],"yoast_head":"\n