2. the beauty of continuity — what makes something beautiful? how are elements arranged harmoniously? how can continuity introduce harmony? (Miles Davis: “It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note – it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.”)

clinging on to hope of a beautiful rearrangement — all the elements in harmony — what are my elements?

2025feb26 One of the big ideas I’ve been fascinated by for a long time is the idea of continuity. I’m interested in it at many levels. There are some personal-level questions like, how does a person’s sense of identity persist? How do we maintain some sort of homeostasis in multiple aspects of our lives without having to consciously think about it? And then there are broader questions like, how do some projects– such as businesses, tv shows, stories, careers– persist when others fumble, fizzle and fail? How do you find the strength to keep going? How do you stay happily married for decades? How do younot quit? How do you keep things interesting? I remember there was a 2019 interview with Kobe Bryant where the interviewer asked him off-hand about Taylor Swift, and Kobe said he was a fan of Taylor:

“I think it’s important to listen to people who do great things. It’s not just genre-specific… Taylor has been at the top of the game for a very, very long time. How, and why? How does she write? How does she get into that mental space to be able to create things, over and over and over? It’s a lot of pressure for her to follow up a number one album with a better album, and then follow it with a better— I don’t care if you like her music or don’t like her music, look at what she’s doing. It’s frightening– it’s unbelievable to be able to pull that off, over and over and over again. I look at things like that to try to learn from them as much as I can… she was a sweetheart to my girls, even before she blew up and became Taylor Swift… but you can’t have that level of consistent success and not be a killer.

How do you be consistent? I think one of the core things is having a story that matters to you, and tending to that story to keep it alive. One of the things to understand about the puzzle of consistency is that we wake up every day as slightly different people. Oftentimes we’re even different people over the course of the day. We might wake up excited, energized and motivated, and then endure a couple of setbacks and frustrations and be ready to throw in the towel. Broadly speaking, one of the reasons it’s difficult to stick to New Year’s Resolutions or other sort of behavior change goals is that the person who made the resolution and the persons who have to follow throuh on the resolutions are, while in the same human body, rather different people. So to be consistent at anything, we have to find a way to collaborate between different versions of ourselves, including the versions of ourselves who are frustrated, annoyed, overwhelmed, grumpy, unmotivated, disengaged, you name it.

What do I mean by “keep the story alive”? Living things are not static. They have an ebb and flow to them, they’re dynamic. So… if you’re trying to work out to get fit because you’re upset with your ex and you want to make them feel bad for dumping you, that might work for a while, but sooner or later you’re going to encounter a situation where you just don’t care about your ex all that much. Here you have some choices. You could try and revisit a picture or a text or something to try and get yourself fired up again– this does seem to work for some people. But in my case, I find that I need more reasons. I’ve never been very good at maintaining an exercise habit so I probably shouldn’t use this as an example. The one thing I’ve been broadly consistent about is writing over and over again. And here I think my story goes all the way back to early childhood, to how books were there for me when nobody else was, and how they gave me a sense of belonging, and how I wanted to participate in that exchange, to give back to that cycle, and pay it forward to the next kid. That’s part of it. In George Orwell’s 1946 essay Why I Write, he listed out 4 reasons: “Sheer egoism”, “Aesthetic enthusiasm”, “Historical impulse” and “Political purpose”. All of these resonate with me. The last time I talked about this essay, I talked about an additional 5th reason, also espoused by Montaigne, which is to connect with a true friend.

The great thing about having multiple overlapping motivations is that if any of them ‘run out of fuel’, you can switch to another mode, and it can feel somewhat fresh. Even at a purely technical level– as a musician, for example, if you get bored of working with melodies, you can switch to working on your rhythm, which creates a whole different texture of experience.

I don’t feel qualified to talk about the Kobe/Taylor level of consistent success– I wouldn’t describe myself as ‘a killer’– but I have been consistent in a couple of domains, and I would say that… the domains that I’m consistent in, are the ones in which I know better how to have a good time. Even playing video games– which people might think of as “pure entertainment”– is actually something that takes some amount of skill to properly enjoy. There are lots of videos and such of people saying that they’re bored of all of the games in their library.

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2024sep11 What is beauty, really? I want to approach thinking about it not just as an observer or a consumer, but as someone with an active interest in creating beauty, for myself, for others. Maybe let’s narrow it down to writing, for starters. I think I’ve written a few beautiful sentences here and there. I have a few tweets that I think of as beautiful. (Well-arranged words rearrange reality.) And I think I have some awareness of what beautiful essays and books could be like.

2024jul24 A hope that I’ve clung onto like a flimsy raft in a stormy sea, is the hope that I will at some point find a way to rearrange the chaotic, scattered elements in my life into something beautiful and resonant. I will be the first to acknowledge that this might be a kind of ‘copium’. In fact, maybe the way I’m clinging to it isn’t actually helpful. It rhymes a little with the copium of my youth, which was the idea that “I would do well in school if only I actually bothered to study.” It provides a kind of short-term psychological safety at the expense of actual progress. To this day I’m still quite conflicted about whether or not it would’ve been worth my while to “actually bother to study in school”, because it was the things that I did outside of school that have come to deeply define who I am, and shape the circumstances of my life, which I do mostly cherish. But my current situation is actually more straightforward. If I rephrased the belief, it would be, “My life would be beautiful if only I actually bothered to make it so.” And in this case, I don’t think I actually have any argument against. At least not any conscious ones. Maybe there are subconscious ones. Maybe there’s a part of me that’s afraid of beauty. I do think this is plausible, because I’ve witnessed it in some of my marketing clients. Beauty makes you more of a target. Beauty draws attention to itself, even innocuously. Beauty even triggers self-judgement in others, which then gets projected outwards.

Above is an image of the “Mayan V” by Hutchinson Guitar Concepts. When I first encountered it, I was stunned into silent revery. I’d seen all sorts of custom guitar jobs before, but nothing as beautiful as this. All of the elements are in harmony. The width of the border is perfect. The details (a direct homage to King Pakal’s sarcophagus) are vivid and stunning. Even the knobs are appropriately detailed.

I’ve been marvelling at this picture for ~7 years now, but until writing this post I never thought to consider what it would be like to actually own it, and to actually play it. An instrument so beautiful feels like it deserves to be wielded by someone who can do it justice, an artist who has a commensurate beauty in their artistry.

And I’m contemplating now how maybe that’s also true of having a beautiful life. Some part of me cringes at the notion of being an incompetent musician fumbling with a beautiful instrument. There’s a part of me that does genuinely believe that the concept of “deserve” is fictitious, that nobody deserves anything and everybody deserves everything, that you can do whatever you like, and if you want to buy a beautiful guitar to play it terribly, that is your prerogative. But there’s another part of me that is conscious of status games, and how people cringe, and how unpleasant it can be to be perceived as ‘out-of-touch’. Even if “deservedness” is fictitious, we live in the social fictions of others… and those can have very real consequences… of course we can then get into, “what consequences are truly real, vs imagined-real?”

It’s risky to be beautiful

I’m reminded now of a bit from Jacqueline Novak’s standup special Get On Your Knees… (reddit)…

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I’m often fantasizing about things that don’t quite exist yet. one thing i particularly fantasize about is my body of work being “more beautiful”. I’m not sure how to begin to explain what I mean by that, even to myself. Which sounds like a challenge. An interesting and consequential challenge. I accept this challenge from myself, on behalf of myself, for myself. Let’s see what we can do.

WORDS CAN BE SMALL AND BOLD

First of all, what is my body of work? There’s a lot of stuff. There’s over a quarter of a million tweets. There are over a million words worth of longer-form writing. There are hundreds of videos on youtube. What is it all for? What is it all about? I’m always hesitant to summarize things, partially out of fear of being excessively reductionist, and worse, internalizing that reductionist definition and confusing it with the actual complex reality.

One way I know of to fight off encroaching reductionism is to describe things in paradoxical terms. (BEAUTIFUL TENSIONS.) Two or more terms in conflict with each other creates something ‘generative’. The phrase ‘friendly ambitious nerd’, which is the title of my first book, does accomplish that pretty well. And I’m still working on that book. I’ve recently been very proud of the phrase “the lotus of ambition”, because it does an incredible job of conveying the difference between my model of ambition, and more mainstream assumptions about ambition (as defined by the pursuit of prestige, trinkets, accolades).

Similarly, people often think of introspection as a kind of simplistic self-soothing navel-gazing. The phrase that has emerged for me here is “the sword of introspection”, which conveys the decisiveness (the word decide literally means to cut off) that I have in my model. I’ve written 300 pages expanding on what I mean, but it’s really satisfying to have that one phrase, even if it’s imperfect by itself.

Which I suppose gets me wondering, what other phrases could I conjure, that would have similar effects about my dominant ideas? And here we arrive back at “what is my body of work” in a different form: what are my dominant ideas? How am I to determine them? One approach I like is to list them out from memory. If they’re important, surely they’re salient? But that might not always be the case. And important to who? My most popular ideas aren’t necessarily the most potent. But at the present moment, I don’t particularly feel compelled to either make a comprehensive list off-hand, or to go looking for some of the lists I’ve compiled in past attempts at reviewing my ideas. What do I feel compelled to do, then? I want to… go to my blog.

My blog feels like something that’s torn between worlds. If all of my writing, both public and private, were somehow erased overnight, and I had to start over from a completely blank slate, would I start a new blog? The first thing I’d be tempted to do is to start a new twitter account and follow my friends back. But if I take a moment to think about that, I realize, wait. There’s an opportunity here…

sidequest/digression: what would I like to write?

I haven’t really had the time and space to think for myself away from the madding crowd… what would I write if I were completely untethered from my current path? If I didn’t have any of my existing audience to write for? The thing is, I’m not entirely free from constraints in my own life. So if I lost all of my writing and audience, I suspect I would likely feel compelled to do some writing that I could sell. I’d probably be writing more about the controversy of the week, at least for a while, while also trying to elevate (in my view) the quality of discourse around those topics. What if I didn’t have to worry about money and short-term attention, though? This is a question I’ve been almost shy to ask myself lately, I think in anticipation of a frustrated response. It’s like asking someone who desperately needs to pee, “What sort of nerdposting expeditions would you like to go on?” It just seems like an inappropriate intrusion in the moment. But sometimes life can get to a point where intrusions are unavoidable, and it’s kinda worth practicing making them, graciously. Here’s a version of that issue I’ve dealt with in the past. I’m basically always behind on my work, because I’m always biting off more than I can chew, and really bad at the ‘portion control’ part of project management. And there’s also some legacy issues still left over from childhood when I used to always be behind on homework. If I tell myself, “I don’t deserve have any rest or recreation until I’ve completely caught up on work,” then that sets up a kind of internal civil war within myself, where the parts of me that need R&R will find increasingly grotesque ways to wrest it from the incompetent authoritarian-tyrant project manager self. The result is a protracted misery that I don’t wish on anyone. With encouragement and introspection, over time I’ve found healthier ways of being with less extreme swings. Turns out it’s often okay to rest and relax even if not all your work is done. In fact, if you go too long without that rest, your capacity to do work diminishes, which puts you in a worse place. There are many examples of wretched spirals like this, which I’ll get into more detail about in a future essay.

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I had to take a break there for undisclosed reasons and I had some time to think about where this post was going. The beauty of what? The what of beauty? What is it that I want for my body of work? What’s “wrong” with it? What do I find displeasing about it? Sometimes I feel like the best way to describe the defining quality of work that “makes the cut” for me is that “it has animating spirit”. That feels correct, which is somewhat useful for me, but it also kinda kicks the can down the road. What is animating spirit? Well… it makes you feel something, basically. It feels alive. It might feel like the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Or maybe it’s just some part of the whole that feels super energizing, and I might choose to leave in the other parts because it feels like they’re a collective that belong together. There could be any number of reasons. I haven’t been able to reduce this down into something simplistic, discrete. It feels like there’s something irreducible about it. I don’t think it’s supernatural; I think it can almost always be explained “computationally” in retrospect, but it does feel mysterious and mystical how the resonance happens when it does., often as a surprising confluence of unexpected elements.

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The answer that came to me when I asked “the beauty of what?” was “the beauty of continuity”. I can’t be certain that this is the final answer, but it came up, and it resonates, and so it will do for now. Another related question to “what is my body of work” and “what are my dominant ideas” that I’ve been looking to answer is, “what is a uniquely visakanv point of view?” or, “what does visakanv do that nobody else does in the same way, to the same degree?” My twitter is a fun example to look at, even if the reason I’m looking is to try and figure out the answer to a puzzle that’s off-twitter. Twitter is “supposed” to be a short-text-messaging site, it’s supposed to be ephemeral, immediate, not that serious. Twitter is a rowdy tavern. And what I’ve done over the past decade is subvert that somewhat, with my lengthy threads that endure over time and reference each other. (As I write this, It occurs to me that this obviously isn’t my first encounter with this meta-idea. The phrase “HREFgopuram” has come to me repeatedly, and I’ve repurposed old twitter and tumblr alts to that name, although I haven’t yet come to a clear understanding of what that’s supposed to be.)

One of the reasons I enjoy Twitter so much is that I have a sense of continuity in what I’m doing. All my tweets add up to a greater whole. I have some sense of that whole, even if I wouldn’t be able to reduce it into a soundbite. I suspect that I would have a much better time on substack if I had a clearer felt-sense that each of my posts are contributing towards a greater whole. Several of my posts have been of the “frustrated creative psychoanalyzing himself” genre, which I know people do like, but I flinch from it because a part of me feels like that’s a limiting trap. I want to be something other than merely that. And here I’m reminded again of an anecdote in Sylvester Stallone’s documentary, which I’ve brought up several times…

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there’s a couple of other things i’d like to weave into this post to feel really good about it. one would be to go through my blog and weave things together. another would be to weave in existing substack drafts. i know i have one on messes. one on grasping. each of those things could maybe be individual posts, but i want to weave them in.

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cluttered intentions, 2024 september 14

i feel bloated with stale, vague, cluttered intentions. my workspaces are a mess. the hard thing about messes is that they are not just messes of objects, but of intentions. every object represents some intention. that’s what makes them hard to tidy.

for me every note typically implies some intention… the tricky thing is that intentions can decay over time. there’s at least two parts to this. one is that feelings fade over time. two is that contexts fade from memory. maybe they’re intertwined. part of the reason feelings fade and part of the reason that contexts fade from memory is that there are always new contexts.

even my intention to write this post, which began in the shower a couple of hours ago, quickly faded as i scrolled through my twitter timeline and encountered all sorts of information, some of it relevant to me in ways that get me flitting to different intentions. a novel intention doesn’t necessarily invalidate an older one, but it can distract from it because of urgency or salience. i just spent a bunch of time distracted by the latest bella hadid adidas ad controversy, and then by a conversation with my wife about what she’s working on. i never regret hanging out with my wife, but realistically i probably don’t really have much to get out of the adidas nonsense. in a few months i’ll probably have forgotten about it entirely. which strikes me as a minor tragedy, since the intention that i was cultivating and focusing on in the shower was something more enduring, something that i believe i’ll be interested in revisiting for months and maybe years to come. today i was lucky enough to catch this while it was happening, and i’m making an effort to return to it. but most of the time this happens, i get lost in the sauce.

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53 drafts

• Beauty/sexiness is a theatre production. acting in a movie, being part of the marketing campaign, etc, will make people revise their assessment of your attractiveness upwards. It’s so interesting to me how actresses end up in perfume ads, luxury brand ads. Actors too, but that doesn’t seem as “important” somehow? there’s a culture angle to this and also a media angle. hassan minhaj. tomlinson
• **beautiful things** – I think it’s good and important to surround yourself with beautiful things. I don’t mean being a consumer just purchasing whatever people tell you is beautiful and then building a massive collection, but rather identifying things that personally speak to you, move you. this is a process of articulating your own stories