The Temple of Juno in Agrigento, oil on canvas, Caspar David Friedrich (1828-1830)
this feels like an important essay to publish and to really get right, to really feel the resonant heart of it that lets me let go of notes that no longer serve me
;;;
Elsa’s popularity… the grief of kids. this could maybe go into grieving lost media, actually
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It might surprise some of my Twitter followers to hear this, but I think of myself as a rather sad person. I’m always kinda sad somewhere. I’m always grieving. I’m always carrying the memories of the broken hearts and souls of my predecessors, and of innocents who have suffered. I’m always dealing with a form of survivor’s guilt. I’m sad that the world can be so cruel.
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Ruins / mess
I’ve had a handful of data loss pains in my life. Diary X. A journal I kept while I was in the army. And my own WordPress blog
There comes a point where I have to ask myself what all the mad archiving is for. i’m so afraid of losing something. i guess i’m a bit of a hoarder. first thought is that I don’t want to admit it. second thought is, well i’m a content professional. if all my stuff was in an office rather than in my home, it wouldn’t seem very messy at all.
What is a mess, exactly? I remember thinking the thought “my house is a mess”, and then thinking “that’s such a vague statement”. How many objects are there? I know there’s a ribbonfarm post about messes but I don’t really want to look at it right now, I want to think my own thoughts first and maybe revisit it afterwards. My notes are a mess and I’d like to sort them out more than I’d like to Get Thinky about messes
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I’ve always had a fondness for ruins, paintings of ruins, poems about ruins. There’s a lovely quote from Ellen Ullman that goes, “We build our computer (systems) the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.” It speaks to me deeply even though I’m not a software developer. I just can’t help but see how it applies to all complex systems. We build languages the same way. And philosophy. And anything substantial, like a writer’s body of work. I’m reminded now of my friend Arden’s framing: we are all systems, and we are all programmers.
In a previous essay I used the metaphors of matryoshka dolls and trapdoors to talk about “openings” that lead to interesting possibilities, and how I wanted to be more deliberate about seeking that out in future essays.
Life is full of mysteries. There’s a ‘meta-mystery’ about how we don’t see it, we don’t typically go about our days feeling mystified. This seems to be largely a quirk of human psychology. Our minds are really good at making things seem like they make sense to us, even if upon closer examination, they don’t. We often deal with this by simply not looking too closely at anything. Which tends to work pretty well, until ‘extraordinary’1 circumstances force us out of our comfort zones, pull the rug from under us, and suddenly we’re faced with something startling, unexpected, overwhelming. (One of my favorite anecdotes about this is by Mark Miodownik, author of the book Stuff Matters, who was inspired to become a material scientist after being stabbed with a razor blade shiv by a robber on a train platform in London.2)
At any given moment, your life is likely full of mysteries, too, even if it seems perfectly ordinary to you. The point here is that everybody’s life feels ordinary to them. I can always be called upon at any moment to gush about how incredible existence is. Everything from the age of the universe to the nature of galaxies and solar systems, to the improbability of Earth’s existence, and life on Earth, and people, and consciousness, and language, and writing, and technology… it’s all incredible stuff. It’s incredible that I’m writing words on a laptop right now, and publishing them ‘to the internet’. It’s incredible that you’re reading these words, and that you will in some sense understand them. If you take a step back and really see what’s going on, everything is absolutely amazing.
But we don’t typically see it. That’s my point. We have obligations and responsibilities and bills to pay and tasks that are overdue. We have old griefs and heartaches that we haven’t finished feeling, and new anxieties about all manner of things. There’s an inconceivable volume of stuff going on competing for our attention– and that competition has produced Olympic-tier attention-grabbers– and it would be hard to resist even on a good day, let alone when we’re tired, busy, distracted, overwhelmed.
Trapdoors. Possibilities. Mysteries.
I want to spend my hour(s) of writing today reflecting on a mystery in my own life, and particularly in my own body of work, my notes which I often describe as a junkyard.
[[[ blog history: my main blog, currently www.visakanv.com/blog/, has been on quite a journey. a long time ago it began as visakan.diary-x.com. when diary-x got destroyed, i started over at livejournal. eventually i started visaisahero.wordpress.com, which took me a while to find my footing, and then i migrated that to visakanv.com/blog/. the blog itself has been through many seasons, many iterations, changing templates. initially i wrote personal updates for my friends. later that became facebook status updates. i went through a phase where i sought to emulate some of the mid-00s bloggers like tim ferriss, leo babuta, seth godin and so on. at some point i was writing almost exclusively about singaporean news and politics.]]]
DX From the ages of 10-16 or so, I used a somewhat obscure blogging platform called Diary-X, abbreviated dx for short. It had great vibes, a lively community, and the whole thing was run by one guy Stephen Deken, on a server with a single hard drive with no backup. When that hard drive crashed, all dx users lost all their blogs irretrievably. It took me quite some time to switch to livejournal and wordpress and tumblr, but none of them ever quite felt the same. but isn’t that always how it is? nothing is ever the same. nothing can ever truly, fully replace anything. there’s always some idiosyncrasy, some surprising little detail that you might not have even noticed in the first thing, until you notice it’s absence in the next.
90wks When I was in the military, ages 19-21, I got really excited about the idea of ‘turning my life around’, really ‘getting my shit together’, cultivating good habits, becoming more functional, generally becoming more skilled at everything I cared about, including the skills of caring and the skill of becoming more skilled. When I had 90 weeks left in my 2 year mandatory stint, I started “the 90 week experiment”, where I would meticulously track everything in a paper notebook that I carried everywhere with me. About 60-70 weeks into the experiment… I lost the notebook. I was absolutely devastated. I didn’t have a smartphone yet, so I hadn’t thought to take pictures. I did have a scanner at my parent’s place and I scanned a page or two here and there3, but I hadn’t even considered the possibility that I might lose the whole thing.
There’s one more thing I feel like I ought to mention alongside dx and the 90weeks notebook, which is that… so after those two things, eventually I found some sort of decent cadence of writing on my wordpress blog– which was initially visaisahero.wordpress.com, which i later redirected to visakanv.com/blog. I wrote all sorts of things on it, and it started to feel clunky and overwhelming. So I did what I thought was a clever thing to do, and… wrote a 4-part summary of all of the posts on my blog, and then deleted most of them. The summary was worth writing, but deleting the posts… I have come to regret.4 I find it so funny-sad in hindsight that it’s not even like I had some dramatic reason for the deletions, it’s not like I had something to hide or I was running for office or something. I just felt it was really messy, and I suppose I might’ve been inspired by some Minimalist(TM) content.
These 3 experiences are representative of what I think is a deep-rooted grief I’ve been carrying with me my entire adult life, as an author and archivist. When Diary-X was destroyed, at the time I mostly felt shock at the loss of something I had gotten so used to having around, like losing a friend– but as the years go by and I get older, I increasingly feel sad about having lost years of records of my earliest writing. I’m forced to try and piece together meaning from mere fragments. (A random detail: I was really into Radiohead in my early teen years. Much more than I remember. It feels ‘memoryholed’, in that it doesn’t seem to be a casual forgetting.)
It’s sad. And painful. And I don’t think about it a lot day-to-day. But it’s such a big deal. They are some of my ‘canon events’.5 And I think… if I am to make ‘progress’ at the thing i’m trying to talk about here, i have to revisit these events, fully, clearly, openly, honestly. this is the trapdoor i need to step through right now.
“The cave you fear to enter, holds the treasure you seek.” – Joseph Campbell
Am I afraid to step through this particular trapdoor? I’m inclined to say no, and yet I must admit that I ‘got distracted’ from this blogpost several times, such that I’m probably not going to publish it in a single sitting because I’m now starting to get really tired and sleepy.
What else do I have to say? i’m tired i’m gonna sleep on it. but i guess i want to remember to be sorta grateful? if not for these pains, would I have ever become the mad twitter librarian that i became?
questions for me are things like, what are my notes really for? what is the actual desired outcome? what are the messes of my intentions? can i get to clarity of intention, honor all the different parts of me, and find a more elegant configuration that serves all my selves better? how would i act differently once that is the case? the essence of GTD is to have a system you can trust so that you can stop having to worry.
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there’s something i wanna say somewhere about overcorrections and this feels like the place to say it
i used to feel like i spent too much time just bumming around unproductively with friends and i overcorrected that by not spending time with friends at all
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- missed connections. lost connections. i’m always grieving these. maybe it’s easier to romanticize than to do the painful work of reaching out to people to try and rework through a painful misunderstanding. but sometimes it’s not even a misunderstanding, it’s just a difference in values. I’m thinking of Nietzsche’s quote about star friendships, people passing each other like ships in the night. That was something that Cory Barlog mentioned re: how some players were deeply emotionally moved by playing God of War.
- looking through old travel notes/pics, old threads, etc and I get this bittersweet sense of like how… lots people seem to have a temporary phase of openness, often seems to wrap up by the time they’re maybe about 35 and then you don’t see them again
- Feeling like I missed some connections with internet friends. missing some people who aren’t around much anymore. boop, galef. lim for a while.
- former friendships. painful, sad. i’d like to write something beautiful for those friends. signal fading, battery depleting. I miss all of you. missed connections. lost connections. make some noise is a lot about lost friendships
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1 I put ‘extraordinary’ in quotes because what is extraordinary depends on your frame of reference. what is an ordinary for the spider is an extraordinarily bad one for the fly. Our concept of ‘ordinary’ is informed by our experience of reality, which is extremely limited.
2 Here I could branch into writing about rugpull incidents, but I’m undecided about whether I want to do that. I’ll leave this stub here and return to talking about mysteries. I suppose real quick I’ll just point out that basically every Hero’s Journey has an inciting incident that pulls the rug from under the protagonist, leaving them scrambling to figure out what to do next.
3 just including a link in the footnotes: some scanned pages from some of my old notebooks
4 I do suspect that I had exported an archive somewhere, but I have no idea where I kept it. It might be in one of the external drives my wife and I have lying around that we haven’t plugged in in years. While writing this post I also came to discover that, unlike the dx posts, quite a number of the wordpress posts are available via archive.org. God bless archive.org.
5 the phrase ‘canon event’ had a big moment after spiderverse2 when it became a tiktok meme, that moment has kinda passed. but i’ve been thinking about how the biggest canon events in a person’s life are often probably underacknowledged and underdiscussed, especially if they involve painful emotions. actually this is probably true for larger entities too, not just people but organizations, communities and nations. “we don’t talk about bruno”