22jul2024 distractions
I’ve been kind of embarrassed, maybe even ashamed, to note that there have been many instances now where the following happens: I get my baby to fall asleep, I clean up around the house, take out the trash, shower, get in bed with my laptop, start writing something… and then switch tabs and check on Twitter. This has happened dozens of times now. It feels like the visitation of an old friend. I had some form of this problem when I was a student who hated school, and again when I was a working adult even with a job I liked. Since them, I have approximately achieved what many struggling creatives would consider The Dream, and yet I find myself repeatedly distracted from The Dream. When I’m unkind to myself, I imagine them looking at me with disgust, “Look at that guy, wasting the opportunity that he has.” I know! I’m sorry!
But if I manage to meditate a little, zoom out and see the bigger picture, I can see that I my understanding of The Dream is a little warped, and I think unfair. It becomes clearer when I separate myself into the maker-self and the manager-self. The artist who doesn’t want to care about anything other than the glory of making art, and the manager who has to steer the artist such that he doesn’t gloriously throw himself (and by extension his family) off a cliff. I’m casually comfortable expressing confidence about my skills as a writer. I don’t feel similarly about my skills as a manager– particularly as a manager of myself. I did manage some people when I had a job, and those colleagues have said some pretty nice things about me– I’m good at offering support to other people, helping them manage their expectations, asking them useful questions and so on. Come to think of it, that’s a big part of what keeps drawing me back to Twitter. It’s the temptation of a quick hit of helping someone out with a problem they might be having. Or seeing an opportunity to respond to something or quote something in a way that people find entertaining. I’m remembering now that in the earliest days of my job, I would be posting quite a lot in the company’s general/random/casual chatrooms. My boss noticed, and asked me about it. I think I said something like, “oh, I thought it would be a nice thing to do, to entertain people, it’s good for morale isn’t it?” And he responded with something like “That’s true, but if you really care about morale, the actual best thing you can do is to achieve great results in your role, which would benefit the whole company.”
I saw that he was right. Banter is nice, but not nearly as nice as being on a winning team. And I’ve been feeling lately that I’m in the same situation now, even though I’m no longer working for somebody else. For starters, I work for me now, and it would be great for morale everyone at Voltaic Publishing (me) if I actually published things. I know this from my past experience publishing things. It’s more satisfying to publish things than almost anything else. Theoretically it might be possible to publish so much that I start feeling satiated, but I don’t recall ever having reached that limit. Furthermore, I do have other people around me who associate with me, who would benefit more from witnessing me flourish, than they would from hearing more of my banter. (They’ve already heard so much of it anyway, such that they could probably generate most of it themselves by simply asking “What would Visa say about this?” Though now that I think about this a little longer, I’m reminded of past instances in which I’ve asked people to write-as-me, and most responses are always a little tepid and underwhelming. EVEN SO. As I established in The Tavern and the Temple, I don’t think tweeting more will get me to where I want to be).
I — Beginnings: moving slowly
START I’m setting myself the intention of writing for about 60-90 minutes. I don’t have any strong expectations or goals. I do have a vague idea I’d like to explore, which is connected to many other ideas and questions and curiosities I have going on. But let’s take it a little slow. I think part of why I’ve felt so knotted in my writing lately is that I’ve been approaching it wrongly, trying too hard to do too much too quickly, and it all gets constricted or overwhelmed. So let’s take it slow for a change and see what happens.
MEMORY When I say slow, I don’t necessarily mean “typing slowly”. I’m still typing at a fairly normal pace for me. I mean something more like, moving slowly. Like in a walking meditation. Which reminds me of what it felt like when I had just finished my National Service (mandatory conscription in Singapore). For a moment, I no longer had any responsibilities, nobody to report to, no trouble to get into. I was free. I felt truly free. Simply bringing to mind the memory of that felt sense of freedom is relaxing my body, I find myself taking deeper, slower breaths, I feel some muscular tension melting from my face. Why don’t I take a moment to do this every day? I’m so often in such a worried, harried rush. And it doesn’t even help all that much. Perhaps now would be an opportune time to reintroduce some sort of meditation practice. Which… writing is, for me. Or it was. It can be, when I let it be.
IDEA ON MY MIND (COMPLETION) The topic on my mind is “completion”. Closing the loop. Finishing something. What does it mean to finish something? I feel like I could go on for hours about how everything is unfinished. We are born unfinished. We die unfinished. Between the two, we live unfinished. Nothing is ever final except perhaps the heat death of the universe, and even then, who knows? Perhaps that is when everything begins all over again. Such vast scales can be enticing to contemplate, and they can dramatically recontextualize one’s sense of self and being in relation to the world, but those are not the scales at which we live our lives. We live our lives in smaller, ‘ordinary’ scales. In witching hour writer patternsI quoted Christopher Alexander, who said “If I consider my life honestly, I see that it is governed by a very small number of pattern of events which I take part in over and over again.” I’m thinking about it again. (Amusingly, it does seems like “consider Christopher Alexander’s quote about the small number of patterns of events” might be one of my pattern of events. Ah, recursion, how is it that you find me everywhere?)
Patterns. Completion. Unfinishedness.
PATTERNS What is a pattern? It’s something discernable, something that has some repetition to it. I’m reminded of a newspaper columnist I used to read as a kid, Neil Humphreys– one of the clever things he would do in his writing was that he’d often end his column with something that was a callback to something he had set up at the start of the column. There was something rewarding about it. I remember I’d look forward to reading his columns in the paper, partially because he was so funny, and partially because I knew there was going to be a reward at the end of it.
CONTRAPOINTS (Which in turn reminds me of an interesting comment I saw on Contrapoints’ latest ~3 hour video about Twilight – someone said something like, “I can’t seem to find time to watch any episode of TV these days, but somehow I found time to watch this entire video.” Which is a fascinating description of a phenomena that I believe is worth studying. My belief is that basically TV is seldom well-written anymore, probably more because of the paint-by-numbers structure of tv show production than because of lack of writer talent. Writers probably aren’t given the time and space they need to really craft something good. Natalie, on the other hand, spent basically the last 18 months making this one video, and wouldn’t have had to argue with anybody other than herself to do it.
CREATIVE PROCESS ((And arguing with yourself as a creative can be an exhausting full-time job all on its own!! And is an important part of the creative process! Arguably it is THE creative process! Which does then bring us to questions about productive vs unproductive arguments, because one way of explaining why a piece of work is bad is that it didn’t argue with itself enough, and one way of explaining why it’s bad is that it argued with itself too much. How do you tell the difference? I’d say it’s about whether you argued about the stuff that actually matters. Here we might talk about the problem of designing-by-committee, trying to please everybody by making compromises that ruin the quality of the thing, pleasing no one. The parable of the Judgement of Solomon feels relevant here.))
BOREDOM Back to “I found time to watch this 3hr video”. I ended up writing my 2nd book Introspect in large part because I wanted to understand the phenomenon of boredom. From a zoomed-out perspective, it makes no sense to me that anybody is ever bored ever, considering that there’s basically infinite interestingness in the universe. And yet, I myself remember experiencing boredom all the time as a teenager. I spent a bunch of time analyzing my experience, and I came to a hypothesis. The experience of boredom is a confluence
;;;
I had to take an unscheduled break here because my son woke up, and I had a pleasant time playing with him, feeding him and talking with my wife about the essay that I’m working on. In the middle of that conversation it struck me that “this might be my Artful Incompleteness essay”. I don’t want to jinx it. A lot of my essays drafts are mired because they have a kind of recursion to them. the Artful Incompleteness essay needs to be artfully incomplete. The Obliqueness essay needs to be oblique. The Frame Stories essay needs to be within a frame story.
;;;
II — IN THE MIDDLE OF THINGS
“Are you done with work?”
bitch i’m never done working lmfao lolsob
Something about me that is both a strength and a weakness depending on the context is that I seem to have trouble sticking to “the matter at hand”. Given a task to perform, I often find myself questioning the source of the task, the context of the task, the intended outcome. As you can imagine this made me a very annoying student to have in class, bless the teachers who tolerated me. This wasn’t just an act that I put on in school, this is an expression of what seems to be my fundamental nature. I’m like this with everything. When I got my first job doing marketing for a software company, I felt that it was really important that I learn absolutely everything I could about all of the details around the business. I read up everything about startups and ecommerce and software-as-a-service. The thing I really want to get across is that I felt like I couldn’t do my job without all of that context. And, looking back, I get to ask myself: was it true? Well. It’s a strange and tricksy thing. The excessive research I would do about everything didn’t always necessarily serve me well in performing my day-to-day tasks, often it was a distraction from it. But from time to time, that excess knowledge would be tremendously helpful in ways I could not possibly have anticipated if I didn’t have it. I would say that it was an impediment to me doing good-enough work, but it allowed me to do great work. The single best thing that I did at work would dramatically outperform almost everything else combined, and it wasn’t something I was specifically tasked to do– it was something that arose from me following my taste and curiosity.
In The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel wrote about how people’s experiences shape their behavior– people who grew up witnessing their parents losing their savings in a big stock market crash tend to be much more conservative re: investing in stocks certain economic conditions have certain outlooks and assumptions, and people who grew up under different economic conditions have different outlooks and assumptions. One of the major lessons I learned from my body of work at work, and from my experience being online for about 25 years, is that power laws are real, their effects are dramatic, and it’s seemingly always possible to create something that’s better than everything else on the field.
But here’s the thing… living with this megahit-chasing process is tiresome and costly. That’s kind of what Moby Dick warns us about, right? Don’t go chasing white whales, it’ll ruin you.
III — ENDINGS
what does it feel like, to be at the end of things?
there can be a relief in doomsaying… we’ll all go together when we go
Some people die too soon. To be polite, we can say that everyone dies too soon. But it’s clear that some people died with more left to give, while others have a graceful exit, and others still overstay their welcome. It’s kind of uncouth to talk about that.
Da Vinci allegedly said “Art is never finished, only abandoned”. He was a terrible procrastinator with obvious ADHD
orwell said every book is a failure
fran lebowitz said words are easy, books are not
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on digressions
https://medium.com/@visakanv/beware-digression-62f8f304c6c (2016?)
https://visakanv.com/1000/0398-levelling-up-as-a-writer-less-digression/ (2015)