{"id":8843,"date":"2014-11-01T17:29:46","date_gmt":"2014-11-01T17:29:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/visakanv.com\/1000\/?p=8843"},"modified":"2017-05-13T18:01:41","modified_gmt":"2017-05-13T18:01:41","slug":"0185-a-list-of-what-ive-learnts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/visakanv.com\/1000\/0185-a-list-of-what-ive-learnts\/","title":{"rendered":"0185 \u2013 A list of “What I’ve Learnt”s"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had a list of old prompts lying around in my Evernote since forever. Finally, on a day where I felt full of writerly energy, I wrote out medium-length answers and elaborations to most of therm. This happened a few weeks ago. I’m tidying them up and assembling them here.<\/em><\/p>\n

What I’ve learnt from being in a long term relationship<\/h3>\n

I\u2019ve only seriously dated one woman my whole life, since we were young and stupid. We\u2019re still young and stupid, but now we have a house and two cats, and we\u2019re building our lives together. We met when we were 10, got together when we were about 13, separated for a couple of years when we were 17, got back together and got married when we were 22. We\u2019re 24 at the time of this writing.<\/p>\n

What have I learnt?<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. I\u2019m really bad at relationships. I like to think that I\u2019ve gotten better, but I haven\u2019t gotten better nearly as much as I ought to, in a way that matters.<\/li>\n
  2. The main reason me and my wife have been together for as long as we have is that we\u2019re both really stubborn and we refuse to let our relationship fail- there are some people who would be very happy to go \u201cI told you so\u201d if our relationship fails, and we\u2019re not having any of that.<\/li>\n
  3. Hate the same things. It\u2019s okay to not like the same things. What actually matters is that you hate the same things. There is a certain lasting comfort and solace in the arms of a person who hates the same things that you do.<\/li>\n
  4. It\u2019s about cooperation more than anything else. Can\u2019t remember who said that- it might have been some actress in a movie- but it rings true for me. A marriage is a partnership. The whole \u2018love\u2019 thing is nice to have, and something that you can re-create over and over again. Couples that last know how to do this. I highly recommend Esther Perel\u2019s \u201cDesire in long-term relationships<\/a>\u201d talk. That\u2019s some real shit.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    What I’ve learnt from\u00a0playing in a band<\/h3>\n

    Playing in bands is actually really fun, really pleasurable. It can be a bit messy and challenging, but when you get it right it\u2019s really lovely. I haven\u2019t done it in too long. I should do it again soon. Maybe I should really bring my guitars to work. I should probably do that. Yes.<\/p>\n

    Sleep experiments<\/h3>\n

    Sometimes I like it when I\u2019m awake really, really late at night. I remember enjoying those late night cigarettes. The world would seem quiet and wistful and silent, and it was all mine. Those are things I will remember on my deathbed. I will also remember what it was like to be in an office playing music, I will remember what it was like to be in a security room for the Singapore Air Show, I will remember my route march in NS, I will remember my first kiss when I was in a library in Tampines, how excited and edgy I felt- I remember thinking wow, this is what adults know that kids don\u2019t, this is what growing up is about.<\/p>\n

    I love waking up really early in the morning. It feels like you start before the world does. I managed to pull this off for a couple of days, and it felt really good. Wake early, sleep early. I think a part of my brain almost feels like I don\u2019t deserve to do that.<\/p>\n

    Learning to draw<\/h3>\n

    I\u2019m so jealous and impressed by people who are amazing at drawing. And I suppose by people who are amazing at music, too. But I used to think about it in this really\u2026 (I want to say \u201cAmerican\u201d, or \u201cAsian\u201d) competitive, possessive way. I want to have those skills. I want to impress people. I want to be powerful and amazing and rich and all of that.<\/p>\n

    It makes a lot more sense to focus on expressing yourself. Mastering yourself. Drawing and playing music aren\u2019t ways to impress people (though they can be impressive), they\u2019re ways of exploring reality. Ways of making sense of reality. Ways of mapping and modelling reality. And you get good at it to paint a richer picture of reality so that you can understand and appreciate it better.<\/p>\n

    Maybe not everybody else feels the same way. There are some more straightforward utilities to art- like playing music to club to, to lose yourself to. But even that I\u2019d say is a kind of mapping of the reality of our own primal, tribal desires.<\/p>\n

    I used to want to draw to impress people. Now I want to draw because I think sometimes it might be the most succinct way of communicating a concept, and I want to communicate useful, effective concepts in the most effective way possible. Because we need to do that if we\u2019re going to expand the consciousness of the species, and if we\u2019re going to go to space, become multi planetary, etc.<\/p>\n

    Facebook shenenigans<\/h3>\n

    Facebook is an amazing utility that adds a lot of value to my life, and to everybody else\u2019s too. We tend to take the good stuff for granted and focus on the bad. I think it\u2019s okay to focus on the bad so we can mitigate it, but it\u2019s healthy to also think about the benefits. The optimal outcome is to get as much good and as little bad as possible.<\/p>\n

    The scariest thing about Facebook is that your profile co-creates you just as much as you create your profile. You start taking photos and going to places etc just so you can have specific profile pictures and cover photos. It\u2019s all one big game of identity performance and it can be rather exhausting.<\/p>\n

    I think it\u2019s pretty sad that people spend so much time arguing on Facebook. I think worrying about what happens on Facebook is a horrible way to live. I think we should all sit our friends down and agree once and for all that anything that happens on Facebook isn\u2019t particularly serious, that we\u2019re all prone to missteps and misunderstanding, and that nobody really changes their mind about anything on Facebook. We should instead use Facebook as a utility for private conversations via PM. The best things that have happened to me on Facebook all happened via PM.<\/p>\n

    Being in debt<\/h3>\n

    I was in debt for a while. It was one of the worst experiences of my life. This was despite the fact that the person I owed money to was an understanding friend who could afford to lose the money.<\/p>\n

    Starting a business<\/h3>\n

    I already wrote an entrepreneurship rant that covers most of what I\u2019d like to say about it. In a nutshell, don\u2019t take stupid risks. Take the tiniest little risks you can, things with little to no downside but some unknown upside. Spend as little money as possible, as little time as possible, and expose your work to as many people as possible. Iterate as much as possible. Have a common understanding about what you want out of it, and discuss it together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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