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.