I came up with the idea for INTROSPECT sometime in 2018 or so, even before I thought of writing FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD (which I choose as my debut ebook). INTROSPECT has been through multiple drafts, iterations and rewrites. In retrospect (hah), I had to write some of the earlier versions of the book just to figure out what the book should really be. Here’s where I’m at now, and I do feel like this is close to the final conception:
It started with boredom
I first wrote the book because I wanted to investigate and resolve my own boredom. Boredom seems like a ridiculous experience – there is so much to see and do in the world! Why then do I sometimes feel bored? Through lots of reflection and reading, I assembled a very specific 4-part explanation for the phenomenon of boredom. And to me, the very fact that there are at least 4 variables is itself a pretty compelling explanation for why boredom happens: because humans are generally very bad at dealing with multivariate problems.
So here it is: Boredom is what happens when…
- a tired mind, meets
- a cluttered space, with
- unrealistic expectations, and
- poorly-defined utility functions.
The first 3 variables are pretty well understood, and much has been written about them. If you’re tired, you need to rest. If you’re in a cluttered space, you need to declutter. If you have unrealistic expectations, you need to revise them. The 4th variable is a strange and complicated one. You can sort of reduce it to “poorly defined goals”, which is more intuitive, but the word “goal” has a lot of baggage and connotations that I’m not a fan of. You could also maybe describe it as “unclear purpose”. I ended up going with “lack of clarity about what you want”. And as I went on, I even found myself thinking – if you don’t know what you want, what’s the point of anything else? Why rest if you don’t know what you’re going to do with a well-rested mind? Why declutter or manage your expectations? What is it all for?
What do you want?
So okay, to solve boredom, we first need to figure out what we want. How do we figure out what we want? This was what the first version of this book was going to be about. And I had so many questions to navigate by. I must have assembled a hundred questions about desire. What does it mean to want something? What if you want multiple things at once? What if you don’t want anything at all? What if you want bad things? How do you know if something is what you really want, or merely what you think you want, or want to want? I started trying to answer all of these questions, but something felt flat and “off” about the book. I liked being able to have answers to all of those questions, but it didn’t seem to be what the book was supposed to be about. I wasn’t having fun. I felt like I was filling in background details for a cinematic universe that didn’t have any truly compelling reason to even exist in the first place.
So then I started to agonize– alright, what is the job of a book really? A book has to take a reader on a journey from point A to point B. Technically, a book about figuring out what you want should take you from not knowing how to do that, to knowing. And I realized that a bunch of details about “cliches worth examining” (which was a whole section of the book) wasn’t actually directly relevant to that journey. It was all background filler.
Experimenting with Instructions
I tried to get back to the heart of the book. There were two things that leapt at me. One was a blogpost I had written about my career in marketing, titled “instructions I wish I was given as a newbie startup marketer”. I remember thinking, hey, I wrote that blogpost years ago and it’s still useful to this day. It’s something I periodically share with people who are in that situation. I would like this book to be that. I would like it to be something I can share with people who are in the early stages of my journey. So I tried to write the second version of the book as a set of instructions for my younger self. This deceptively felt correct initially, probably because it was structurally familiar, but as I expanded the book it started to feel wrong, too. I realized it wasn’t the heart of the book either.
“Instructions for newbie marketers” is relatively easy and intuitive, because there are all these assumptions baked in about what you want there – you want to be good at your job, you want to have a successful career by all the conventional metrics. You want to impress your boss and colleagues, you want to do great work. “Instructions for introspection” is a significantly more convoluted proposition, because a lot of what you want to do is question your assumptions. I could probably write a blogpost about it – I mean, I do have all the material – but it doesn’t seem quite right to make the book about that. A book of instructions… who wants that? I wouldn’t have wanted that. (So what do I want? Do you see how hilariously meta and recursive this entire endeavor gets?)
Returning to sketches
The other thing that came to mind was that I ought to revisit the Twitter account (@introspectVV) that I had started for the book. In the early stages, I was thinking out loud and sketching out threads for what the book might be like. The first thread was about the 4 variables of boredom I mentioned earlier in this essay. No surprises there. The second thread, however, was about storytelling. I’m looking at it now – the first tweet talks about how it’s easy to empathize with characters and to root for them when it’s clear what they want. Batman wants justice in Gotham, because it murdered his parents. Daenerys Targaryen, at least in the early seasons, just wants to go home.
It begins to dawns on me that INTROSPECT is a book about storytelling. Nobody gives a fuck about your instructions if you can’t give them a good story. This is true within a single individual, too. You can’t coerce yourself into doing things if you don’t want to do them. Coercion is unsustainable, it typically leads to resentfulness, frustration and despair. (I’m… writing a whole separate book about this.) You have to inspire yourself to action. To do that you have to have a sense of what inspires you.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
– Antoine de Saint—Exupery (allegedly)
And so, looking at the stories I love, I found myself thinking that the book should really follow a classic Hero’s Journey structure. Never mind that it’s conceptually cliche – it’s as old as time because it works. And all my past structures have failed me anyway, so why not go with something tried-and-tested? This is just my second ebook, I can be creative and experimental with structure later in my writing career. Anyway, so I started piecing together my notes and fragments into the classic monomyth structure. Call to Adventure, Supernatural Aid, Trials, Abyss (Death & Rebirth) and so on.
The Call to Adventure
I found myself thinking, what is this journey really about? I had some of my favorite superhero movies in mind – thinking of Iron Man, Moana, Black Panther, Thor and so on… I think Moana in particular struck me as a vivid example. Moana starts out on her island where everyone seems happy to be self-contained, but she feels a calling to go beyond – and she discovers that her ancestors were in fact voyagers who sailed the open sea. And here I get to thinking about Joseph Campbell’s quote about intentionally achieved psychosis – how the mystic and the schizophrenic both plunge into the same inward sea, but the former does so skilfully, whereas the latter is drowning. Okay, great. I have this sense of a voyage, a sense of challenge… the reader, the introspector is Moana, and they have to leave the island. How do you leave the island?
What “is” the island? A bunch of it is the superego or the inner critic, the socially inherited constraints on one’s thinking, imagination and so on. I personally experienced my Supernatural Aid in the form of books and media, authors and artists, and my ex-boss – and my goal with the book is to function as the guide for others in turn. A bunch of the trials become clear: what do you do when you’re scared? What do you do when you’re overwhelmed and confused? What are the problems you’ll have to confront? What if you don’t feel like you can trust yourself? Now these are far more lively questions than “let’s give you a bunch of instructions” or “let’s examine a bunch of old cliches”.
And then the big question: what is the climactic moment? What is the death-and-rebirth moment, on the journey of introspection? And it hit me: it’s the image of the self! It’s about narcissism and self-loathing. Which is, amazingly, something that I have a LOT to say about, and have been struggling to find the right context or frame to talk about it in.
Which brings me to a summary I tweeted earlier in a thread about my frustrations while writing this book: I’ve been finding out that to address your boredom you have to address your desires, and to address your desires you have to investigate your self-concept, and to investigate your self-concept is to annihilate yourself. at the end of self-annihilation is renewal and rebirth, and when you get there you forget what you were bored about in the first place. Sometimes you pull a little thread because you’re bored and you accidentally unravel the universe.
Anyway, so that’s where my book is at right now! I’m pretty confident now that I’ll finish it by the end of February 2021. You can pre-order it at gum.co/introspect if you like.
(July 2021 update: hahahahaha)
0.3 More caveats
I’ve spent a long time agonizing over this book. Why? Why am I writing this book? I first started feeling compelled to write it around 2018. I had repeatedly encountered several ideas and motifs in my “idea vicinity”, in the conversations that my friends were having around me. (And even this is something interesting to examine, because there’s always a lot going on in my “idea vicinity”, and this was something that kept “sticking out” to me – meaning there was likely something in me that was picking up on patterns.) I was curious to better understand boredom, and after working through what I believed were the variables influencing boredom (tiredness, clutter, perfectionism and a lack of clarity about oneself), I decided that the fourth variable was the most important, and least understood, least written about – at least, in a way that I thought was accessible and compelling. So I set out to write about that. Largely to understand it myself. And I did write a bunch of twitter threads and blogposts about the topic. Still, I felt compelled to assemble it all into a book.
What is a book? What is the purpose of a book, why should a book exist? I believe that a book should really only be brought into existence when tweets and blogposts don’t quite suffice. A book to me is a comprehensive reading experience, a meaningful journey from A to Z. A book is a “big ask”, even if you don’t charge any money for it. You’re asking for people to pay attention to an ordered set of words that go on for dozens and dozens of pages. And if you’re going to make a big ask, there better be some good reason for it, something useful and valuable in it. Otherwise you’re just wasting people’s time and attention, and one of the worst sins in my book (ha ha) is wasting people’s time and attention.
I’ve found that most of the time I spent agonizing on the book was time I spent not even looking at the drafts. (And I had several drafts – I have re-written the entire book from scratch at least 6 times.) I was asking myself questions like, what if it doesn’t work? What if it ends up being counter-productive? The subject matter of the book is one that can be quite heavy and personal. If it’s not the right fit for someone, not only might it waste their time, it might take them on a wasteful wild goose chase that discourages them from attempting anything similar. That’s quite a heavy burden to bear. There’s a good chance that I might be overestimating the damage I might do to someone with a bad book, and yet it felt necessary to me to be as responsible as possible. So I continued to defer writing and publishing the book until I felt I had more clarity about what I’m really doing here, why I’m doing it, who I’m doing it for, what I’m helping people to accomplish.