{"id":10784,"date":"2018-05-20T18:00:38","date_gmt":"2018-05-20T18:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/visakanv.com\/1000\/?p=10784"},"modified":"2019-09-25T19:28:08","modified_gmt":"2019-09-25T19:28:08","slug":"0703-output","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/visakanv.com\/1000\/0703-output\/","title":{"rendered":"0703 \u2013 keep producing output, the followers will come"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I just sent out my 4th tinyletter. I&#8217;m pretty happy about that. Just as I want to reach 1,000 word vomits, I&#8217;d like to send out 100+ tinyletters.<\/p>\n<p>At the time of writing, I have&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>608 friends + 718 followers on Facebook<\/li>\n<li>\n<div class=\"icon_action_bar-label\"><span id=\"__w2_OoSFT6x_text\">8,255 followers on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.quora.com\/profile\/Visakan-Veerasamy\">Quora<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>5,497 followers on <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/visakanv\">Twitter<\/a><\/li>\n<li>39 people subscribed to my <a href=\"http:\/\/t.me\/hellovisa\">Telegram channel<\/a><\/li>\n<li>66 people following <a href=\"http:\/\/tinyletter.com\/visakanv\">my Tinyletter<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Obviously, this stuff is not a contest. Having more followers doesn&#8217;t make you a better person. Getting lots of followers isn&#8217;t necessarily an ideal outcome, too \u2013 there are all sorts of issues that celebrities have to deal with. Bad followers are\u00a0generally worse than not having followers.<\/p>\n<p>That said \u2013 going viral on Twitter a few weeks ago and picking up 3,000+ followers has been a generally positive and exciting experience for me. There are some disagreeable, unpleasant people, but most of the new folks are quite engaging and stimulating. When I post questions, I get answers. People give me interesting and useful feedback. So if I could step on the accelerator and gain more followers the way I did before, I would absolutely continue to do it. Would that be up to some point? I&#8217;ll probably like the opportunity to stop periodically to acclimitize. Anyway, it&#8217;s a fantasy question, like &#8220;would you like more money&#8221;. Of course you&#8217;d like more money. But up to a point, maybe, because you don&#8217;t know what it&#8217;s like when you have so much money that you become a target. (At this point I found myself thinking that I should really write a post about celebrity\/fame \u2013 and I now have a todo list item for that. Hopefully this works out.)<\/p>\n<p>What should this vomit be about, other than followers \u2013 which seems quite narcissistic? It&#8217;s funny that I even care about narcissism in something like a word vomit project. Writing is intrinsically kind of a narcissistic, optimistic activity \u2013 even when you&#8217;re writing pessimistic shit. But there&#8217;s something about writing in public that makes me self-conscious about this. Like, you can&#8217;t be too direct about your narcissism. At this point in this essay, it&#8217;s probably okay, since I&#8217;ve already circled around this so much: Yes, I am somebody who is very interested in himself. Why is this a bad thing?<\/p>\n<p>I guess it&#8217;s not so much about whether you&#8217;re interested in yourself, but whether your self-interest is more important to you than the well-being of other people. Let&#8217;s look up the definition(s) of narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Is it important to you that you are admired? Do you lack empathy? Do you obsess about your appearance, power, success?&#8221; \u2013 it seems to me that a person can have a very active interest in themselves without being a narcissist in the social illness sense. You just need to have a similarly active interest in other people.<\/p>\n<p>I think I&#8217;m quite narcissistic. I&#8217;ve written about this several times, and the fact that I write at all is a part of it. I think I am an interesting person and I&#8217;d like to get to know me better, I&#8217;d like to dive into my brain and see what&#8217;s in there. I&#8217;d like to apply myself to things so I can see what I come up with. I&#8217;m curious to see all sorts of things that don&#8217;t exist in the world as far as I can tell, and I&#8217;m the person primarily responsible for enacting my own taste.<\/p>\n<p>Does it affect my social life? That&#8217;s the important question. Has my self-obsession harmed others? What do I damage out of neglect? I think I&#8217;m pretty decent with relationships \u2013 I have friends and peers I care about, and I think they care about me too, and I think I make more of an effort than lots of people do. Maybe most. I wouldn&#8217;t say I&#8217;m in the top 10% of &#8220;good friends&#8221; \u2013 but not in the bottom 50% either.\u00a0 I&#8217;m something like a top 30% friend, maybe. I&#8217;m great to talk with about certain things, but not all things. I don&#8217;t know, man. This stuff is messy. Peopling is messy. Lots of people are terrible at it. I used to be pretty bad, and I got better. And I&#8217;d like to keep getting better. I want to move through the world in an artful way, that people can point at and go &#8220;well damn, that was a pretty good life, that was an example worth following \u2013 in my own way, of course&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>So&#8230; how does all this tie together? Getting more followers, helping other people, trying to be interested in myself without being self-obsessed. I guess what I&#8217;m circling around saying is \u2013 I want more followers still. I want to earn it, and I want to make things that are deserving of a discerning audience. I don&#8217;t want to cheat my way to one. I don&#8217;t want one if I don&#8217;t deserve it. But I think my work does deserve to be more widely read and more widely shared. And so if it isn&#8217;t already happening, maybe my assessment is misplaced. I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s completely wrong, it just needs some tweaks that I am not fully aware of yet.<\/p>\n<p>I need to keep producing output. Sometimes my output engine stops, and that&#8217;s a damn shame because you can&#8217;t get people to listen to a song that you haven&#8217;t written yet. Why does my output engine stop? That&#8217;s the real question that I need to answer. I think it&#8217;s because at some point I started to feel like, this is something I can defer. I can put it off, I can write my 300 vomits next month. Which, of course, isn&#8217;t how it works. I have to be honest with myself about this.<\/p>\n<p>If I really knew with absolute certainty that I was going to write 10 word vomits a day and finish them in a month in 30 days time, I could rest easy. But I haven&#8217;t truly rested easy since I was a child. Because there&#8217;s always homework that hasn&#8217;t been done. There&#8217;s always some bullshit lie that I&#8217;ve made up to just push the problem out of sight, out of mind, so I can continue <a href=\"http:\/\/visakanv.com\/1000\/0397-living-life-stressfully-and-elephants-breaking-free\/\">playing stressfully<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just sent out my 4th tinyletter. I&#8217;m pretty happy about that. Just as I want to reach 1,000 word vomits, I&#8217;d like to send out 100+ tinyletters. At the time of writing, I have&#8230; 608 friends + 718 followers on Facebook 8,255 followers on Quora 5,497 followers on Twitter&hellip; <\/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":[65,10],"class_list":["post-10784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-word-vomit","tag-focus","tag-writing"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>0703 \u2013 keep producing output, the followers will come - 1,000,000 words by @visakanv<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/visakanv.com\/1000\/0703-output\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"0703 \u2013 keep producing output, the followers will come - 1,000,000 words by @visakanv\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I just sent out my 4th tinyletter. 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