Get your motor runnin’
Head out on the highway
Looking for adventure
In whatever comes our way
Yeah, darlin’ gonna make it happen
Take the world in a love embrace
Fire all of your guns at once
And explode into space
Born To Be Wild, Steppenwolf (1968)
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Get your motor running. How? Reinhabit what got your motor running in the past. Look around at stuff you like. Relevant Nietzche quote here. Figure out your throughline, the line of action that runs through you through the things you care about and further outwards and there will be clues about what you oughta make, wanna make.
Creative motors run almost by default. The same way your heart beats, and the way you breathe without having to think about it- though can consciously choose to inhabit the breath. You’re probably noticing your breath now. That’s a rather magical thing, that you can drop into awareness of something that you might not have been attending to a second ago.
Children tend to know what they want. You seldom see children who are creatively blocked, unless they’ve been unfortunate enough to have gotten feedback from their environment that being creative is somehow dangerous or wrong, displeasing to adults and authority, or their peers. A lot of what we think of as socialization is sadly about negative reinforcement: what you’re not supposed to do. Don’t behave like that, don’t act like that, don’t touch that, that’s wrong, improper, nasty, disgusting. Some of it is quite important. A lot of it is nonsense. It’s hard to tell the difference
Civilization can be thought of as iterated potty training
People don’t actually stop being creative. If we’re not creative in making things, we’re creative in making excuses. We’re creative in our inhibitions. We find all sorts of ways to explain why we can’t do something, why something isn’t possible, why something is bad and wrong. And we could be right about those things! And there’s a seductive pleasure in being right about things. (Notes from Underground?)
So it’s funny. Get your motor running is a way of saying “get creating”. But we are always creating. There is a sort of shadow motor that runs on fear that inhabits the motor that runs on love. Ideally these two are balanced. But a lot of people are out of balance. My suspicion is that it’s because fear is easier and cheaper to mass produce. I think I want to explore that in some future essays
Motor running… long games. You know them by the roar of their engines. Remaining a public figure is a choice, because people decay out of it. You find out who is serious by who sticks around. And sure not everyone who is serious is *able* to stick around,
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There’s something funny and humbling about how, even after about two decades of writing, I don’t really have a lot of clarity about my own creative process. I take solace in the fact that someone like Meryl Streep has said “I’m so inscrutable to myself” about her own process. Which isn’t to say that I think I possess Streep-level talent, but rather that I’m relieved to learn that one can possess Streep-level talent and still be a mystery to oneself. And I’d like to think that some mystery keeps things exciting, compelling, interesting. Wouldn’t it be boring if creativity were a completely mechanical, predictable, “solved” process? There’s something about transcending the bandwidth limitations of communication to convey something profoundly universal. I’m not going to argue for ignorance, I think it can be good to learn as much as we can, but it’s important to not get swept up in the pretense of knowledge. Real humility is having the honesty to know what we know and feel what we feel.
I also find myself thinking about a conversation between Jerry Seinfeld and Dave Chappelle, where Dave is talking about how it’s the idea that drives the car:
Dave: “Like, if I had an idea, it’s the driver. It’s like, “Get in the car!” – I’m like, “Where am I goin’?” – the idea says, “I dunno! Don’t worry, I’m drivin’…” and ya just get there.
Jerry: The idea’s driving.
Dave: Sometimes I’m shotgun, sometimes I’m in the fucking trunk, but the idea takes you where it wants to go. And then other times, there’s me, my ego. and I go, “I should do something.”
Jerry: I should be driving!
Dave: Yeah…
Jerry: …and that’s not good…
Dave: …because there’s no idea in the car! It’s just me. That formula doesn’t work.
Jerry: If the idea’s in the front of the car, honking, Let’s go! Pulls up in front of your house going, ‘Let’s go!’ [That’s how it works].
Dave: That’s exactly right.
Jerry: You’re in your pajamas,
Dave: “I’m not ready,”
Jerry: “I’m not ready!”
Dave: “You can go like this.” “Where are we going?” “Don’t worry about it, you’ll see!”
I laugh again with recognition upon rewatching it. So many times that I’ve written something good, I hardly feel like I was there at all. I felt like a witness. I was shotgun or in the trunk. And every time I put myself in the driver’s seat, it doesn’t work. I have hundreds of pages of drafts, dozens and dozens of drafts, all of which have me in the driver’s seat. It doesn’t work. I have to let the idea drive.
tbc
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felt sense of freedom 2023jul21 I wanted to write a substack post at some point with this prompt but I got tired. wanted to remind myself to include this picture. might revisit it at some point
we’ll see
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I know I have a draft of this… let’s check…. here, 2023jul05
freedom is such a funny thing.
what does it mean to be free? i don’t really want to be talking about abstract philosophy, though there’s a strong chance that we’ll end up in that territory. But what I mean is that I want to begin with feelings, with an internal sense, bodily awareness… laying all of that out too will be a bit tedious so lets just tell some stories
the question to begin with is, when have you felt the most free? a few things come to mind. one was the last day of military service. another was the last day of junior college. I have such distinct memories of those days, which i will get back to in a second after listing out other things
school holidays felt fairly good
I remember it was a big deal to me when I was in secondary school and in junior college to find ways to express myself and my identity. having a pierced ear was one thing. Boys aren’t allowed to wear earrings in public school in Singapore, so I would keep a stud in my wallet and put it on after school hours. There were regulations around socks and shoes too.
You technically weren’t supposed to have facial hair, but I kept some anyway. There weren’t really any particular rules about what you wore inside your shirt, so I’d try to look for cool things that could peep out. Shoes had to be something like 70% white.
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- i would like to feel a felt sense of freedom / zest and gusto /get yer motor runnin/ i’ve achieved some of my childhood dream, what now? dream bigger dreams? what are those dreams? What compromises have I made? There’s something big to be said about not hiding your power levels from yourself, to believe what you believe, know what you know. who are you?? (black panther) I’m grateful to my friend Tiago Forte for writing a post about the psychological cost of working on a book. I was watching Tick Tick Boom yesterday, and I found myself flinching and cringing because I saw some of myself in Andrew Garfield’s portrayal of Jonathan Larson – and I imagine Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote it, put some of himself into that too. ok where is this GOING? well the main question and curiosity is, how do I experience MORE of the felt sense of freedom? well if someone else asked me, how would I answer? first i would ask, what does freedom feel like to you? when have you experienced it in the past? getting rid of things in this substack drafts doc would feel like freedom. progress feels like freedom.
- I believe it would be technically accurate to say that I am more free than I’ve ever been in my life. I have more money than I ever did. I have more free time than I ever did. I am free from several worries that used to torment me, such as “what am I going to do with my life”, “how am I going to pay the bills”, and so on. Having a newborn child to care for does complicate matters, but even so, for the most part I have more freedom than I typically feel, than I experience, than I perceive.
- rainmakers: from an energizing conversation with chorpharn… tie with outliers? some people just make things happen. how do they do it? first thought is that they actually give a shit. they are serious players. they believe that they operate in a meaningful reality where their actions matter. even if it doesn’t matter to you, it matters to them. (this is a fragment… mainly I’m saving it just to remind myself of a particular feeling)
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substack: interestingness on demand feels related
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2024jul22
In the shower earlier i was thinking about what i really want right now, amidst everything. and I think above all else I want to feel a sense of freedom. I remember writing a draft about this a while ago, and I reflected on the previous times I’ve felt it. I remember feeling it on the last day of junior college in 2009, when I ceremoniously dumped my uniform and my textbooks in the trash. I remember feeling it on the last day of mandatory military service in 2012, when I smoked two clove cigarettes back-to-back on the ferry back to the mainland, listening to Now We Are Free from the Gladiator soundtrack. I remember feeling it when I first got the keys to my flat in 2013, and it was empty and cold and hummed with possibility. I remember feeling something like it on the last day of work in 2018, making my tedious daily commute for the last time in 5 years, and seeing it with fresh eyes. All of those are very distinct events, marking transition states from one season of life to another. I also remember feeling it when I travelled solo from Singapore to San Francisco for the first time in 2019, and I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted, go wherever I wanted, and was fully responsible for myself.
I remember feeling other forms of it. There was something of it when I first set up my Patreon, something of it when I published each of my two ebooks. Each of those events felt like a crossing of a threshold, like I was becoming someone new. I remember feeling it when playing live music onstage as a teenage musician, losing myself in the rhythm, vibing with the crowd. And I remember feeling it while deeply immersed in reading– books like Keay Davidson’s biography of Carl Sagan, Lewis Thomas’s Lives of a Cell, Tor Norretranders’ The User Illusion, Balzac’s Lost Illusions all had that effect on me.
And– I think most importantly of all, I have sometimes felt at my freest when I’m writing. I reminisce particularly fondly of late nights pacing the stretch of floor between my kitchen and my living room, writing twitter threads off-the-cuff about whatever I wanted. Actually, even saying “whatever I wanted” feels like a slightly inaccurate description of it. I just wrote. I felt more like a witness to the process rather than the active agent Doing The Writing. It was a kind of effortless. It was flow. I miss that. It feels like it’s been a while since I was last in flow. I might be in a bit of it right now, but I’d better not get into my head about it. I’ll just reminisce about writing. Writing for me at its best has been something exciting, something compelling, something I simply had to do, without thinking “I have to do this”. Lately I’ve been thinking “I have to do this”, which is a sign that something’s not quite right. When I was a kid, I remember sneaking off to write. I remember writing on my family computer late at night after everyone went to bed, or early in the morning when I was supposed to be heading to school. I remember writing feverishly on my commutes on the way to work from 2013-2018 — sometimes that writing was desperately anguished, because I framed it for myself as a quest of utmost importance: I had to write to keep some spark of my creative spirit alive, to avoid the worst fate imaginable for me: creative death.
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2024dec26 just a quick note here while going thru the meta process of revisiting drafts– i was getting disheartened that i kept writing drafts that weren’t working, but now i’m starting to feel some magic as i stitch them together. i’m rewatching paperman which feels thematically appropriate– it’s not about romance with a person for me (I’m happily married), it’s more about… the muse. everything is about the creative process for me, lol. i’ll be back here I’m sure.