(dec2021 thread) throughout my life I recurringly find myself thinking the thought “nobody explained this to me the way it ought to have been explained”, and when I find a frame I like, it turns out to be something other people really like too

so it seems like one of my major vocations in life is gonna be “explainer/describer of things”. turns out you can actually make a living doing this (if you also solve for distribution)

for example, my current favorite explanation of friendship is that it’s “a shared understanding”. And I don’t mean it in a superficial sense, I mean it can get as deep as you want it to be. At the deepest level it might be shared values. But you see how you can use this frame…

1, to evaluate (and deepen!) your existing friendships

2, to seek out new friendships

it can start superficial and grow deeper– then you ask, well what can I do to deepen my shared understanding with X?

I try to do this with all of my ideas. Every word is a talisman. What is a talisman? Any object that has meaning! And you can charge a talisman with more meaning by being thoughtfully deliberate about it. You could say this is shaman’s work; shamans are meaning-workers

Another one I’m really proud of is: what is a project? I think the dictionary definition (“an individual or collaborative enterprise that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim) is weak! I define a project as any undertaking too large to be completed in a single session. So a project requires collaboration. By definition, IMHO! Even if it’s just with yourself

like “friendship = shared understanding”, “project = anything which requires collaboration” is a useful frame, because you can use it to evaluate how your own projects are going. how can you get better at collaborating with yourself and others?

and this bore unexpected fruit for me: I realized that people feel powerful or powerless in proportion to their project management skills. if you struggle to collaborate with yourself and/or others, life can feel small, frustrating, like a cruel ordeal, full of suffering

whereas if you’re good at collaborating, with yourself or others, you can be a part of larger things, whether it’s writing a novel or playing in a band, and these experiences are deeply humanizing. collaboration is humanizing! simple and profound.

and here’s what’s even cooler: now that i have this frame, I can do a “from:visakanv collaborate” search to check this, and I can confirm that, yup, collaboration is [chef’s kiss]. it’s the joy of life. to share your labors. to build shared understanding. (“An underrated quality of young children is that they give other people an excuse – including total strangers! – to collaborate in an impromptu production of “lets help this kid have fun”)

so you see I’ve figured out a way to experience tremendous delight all the time, in my own head, just by thinking to myself about what things really mean. It did take some agonizing in the early years when nothing seemed to make sense, but at this point it’s joy after joy

and then I can share my understandings with other people, freely as a gift, and sure some people will call me names, but others are delighted to receive it, and they offer to show me around their hometowns when I visit, which is the most beautiful honor I am blessed to receive

currently most of my “figure out explanations” energy is being expended on the book i’m working on, but when I’m done with it, next year I intend to write a hundred essays exploring and explaining various ideas