2024apr29: I think this wants to be a more substantial post about attention. consider my recent conversation with dinesh about focus and epistemology… letting go of preexisting frames and assumptions, being genuinely open and curious
I never really understood the whole “empty your cup” and “unlearn what you have learned” thing until maybe a couple of years ago. Like, intellectually it sorta made sense, but… is it really that big a deal?
It actually is, IMO, and I’m wondering now how I learned to see it
I think it might‘ve been a consequence of being exposed to a much larger number of people and having lots of conversations – over time I noticed that some people were bringing all their baggage to every conversation, while others were listening intently
“never be looking so hard for something that you fail to see what is there” – there’s a quote like this and I’ve seen people retweet saying “ah it’s about journalism” and others saying “ah it’s about scientific discovery” and “ah it’s about parenting” ~It’s about life~
If you start looking for it there are tonnes of gems throughout the history of art and culture and storytelling that try to convey this. In TDKR, Batman couldn’t make the leap until he let go of the rope. A metaphor for letting go, more broadly, in general
We can probably graph this in some way. When we’re holding on to preexisting ideas abt what we’re looking for, who we’re talking to, etc – there’s a sort of Procrustean effect. We mostly only see what we’re looking for. It makes us slow, stupid. We fail to notice nuance, surprise
We might *feel* fast and smart, but we’re only fast and smart within the narrow bounds of the game that we think we’re playing. When we are fixated on the game we think we’re playing, we close ourselves off from playing a bigger, better, more interesting game
Circling back to “active listening” – that’s another thing that sounded dumb to me. I hear what you’re saying, why do I have to be all… wooey… about it? But I’ve grown to realize that words they say are like ~20% of what’s being communicated
The best questions you can ask someone is in that space where you’re paying close attention to them – to their face, their expressions, their body language, and you notice that they’re holding back in some way. They might not even realize themselves that they’re doing that!
This is true for regular conversation too, and I think it’s true of comedy, wit, and of business – IMO I almost always want to be willing + able to drop my current routine/pattern instantly in order to respond quickly and nimbly to what’s in front of me
At the heart of this, I think, is a question: do we allow life to surprise us? Bc everything we think we know is a *tiny* fragment of the world. The world *will* surprise us, in both good & bad ways. Emptying your cup is about refusing to be in denial
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(dec2022 thread) a tragic thing is the dozens of exchanges i’ve had with acquaintances over the years where they’re struggling with something and imo they basically need a reality check but i’m not the right person to deliver it to them because we’re not that close
it’s kinda meta too, it’s usually a thing that’s keeping them from experiencing closeness with other people
or a thing that’s keeping them from getting to the next level that they think/say they want to get to, but their demeanor says otherwise
this is what I mean by “their demeanor says otherwise”. they have a glazed over look, yup. they’re not really listening. they’ve already decided. to get them to listen would require a kind of magic-trick class “shock to the system” which is a LOT of effort for me to orchestrate
there comes a point in conversations where people can tell if you’re really listening or if you’re not. this cleaves outcomes into two camps, the people whose lives seem magically full of serendipity, and ppl who just cant seem to get anywhere
the problem isn’t that they don’t know the problem. the problem is that they think they know the problem. if they admitted they don’t know, we can help them. in fact, anyone can help them. even a child can help them, if they’re really listening.
this is what Empty Your Cup is about
you can see it in groups of friends, in scenes, etc, when a bunch of people have Made Up Their Minds about stuff and they’re not interested in listening. and then there are other people who have decided to set up camp and have a fruitless conversation with the non-listeners
this is how we get sitcom dynamics
we cannot help people who are too busy to REALLY listen. not in the moment, anyway. we can try and leave them some breadcrumbs that they might trace back after some crash event
this is also what i was screaming about here (I cannot help you if you don’t fucking read!!!). knowing what words mean and reciting them does not mean you are actually reading
I get it, there are lots of reasons why people might be functionally incapable of listening or reading:
mostly just kinda sad to witness people blunder around with blinders on – and if anyone tries to intervene head-on, often they’ll fly into a rage about it, or otherwise be really obstinate and difficult and unpleasant to deal with. so their suffering will continue
10000+ interactions with people later, I’m actually fairly convinced that, in the general case, “give them breadcrumbs they can trace back after some crash event”, is close to the best move, in terms of bang for buck
the most intuitive/common version of this that people encounter is probably, your friend is dating someone who’s obviously bad for them, and they’re someone who doesn’t appreciate having their judgement questioned. so what do you do?
“nothing” is actually a solid workhorse of an answer. because the wrong answer can ruin the friendship. I’ve seen it happen. (and, meta: at a higher level view you get to ask yourself, do you want to be friends with people like that? there’s no global right answer, its up to u)
like how in some video games you need high charisma etc to unlock the more interesting conversational options – stuff that works well here is socratic questioning IF YOU CAN PULL IT OFF WITH SINCERE INTEREST + WITHOUT CONDESCENSION
I do this with friends I care about, but with acquaintances its like, do they even want that conversation? seldom. I’ve had mutuals unfollow me over situations where I ask them questions, fairly gently but persistently, that they then take 2-3 years to come around to themselves
it used to be, “i can see how it plays out but i can’t do anything about it”, now it’s like, “I can see how it plays out, and I can help, but the cost/benefit on that is seriously not in my favor”, which in some ways is more bleak,
but so it goes, such is life, lol, ayy lmao
i know that the adversarial read of this is “visa has a messiah/savior complex and thinks he was put on this earth to solve people’s problems”, to which, oof, touche, i’m working on that lol, but also yeah I have helped loads of people with their problems and hammer/nail etc
having made a tremendous positive difference to some subset of people can be a bit of a mindfuck to experience – this has you veering towards the Excruciatingly Meaningful part of the equation and you gotta steer back
— 2. —
oceanic? 2023feb17
Words spill out of me. Every day I wake up and I write a bunch of tweets. I don’t consciously plan these. They just happen. They happen almost in spite of me. Not all of them are good, but some of them end up being better than I imagine possible. The challenge for me as I see it is to do the same with everything else, especially these essays
Every day I wake up and I find myself in a different mood. It’s been raining for about a month in Singapore, it’s relatively cold and dreary, and I found myself frustrated because it felt like it was “interfering with my process.” But I also find myself thinking, “The world isn’t consistent, darling, so why do you expect yourself to be?” In the video game The Outer Worlds, there’s a scene where a character Vicar Max goes on a sort of vision quest and encounters an idealised version of himself, who chides him – “I don’t exist, yet you compare yourself to me, why?”
I have many idealised fantasies about all sorts of things. Hundreds of drafts of essays that could have been. There’s nothing wrong with having drafts. The issue in my case is that, when I’m not careful, I stumble into this needy affliction of trying to make an essay happen when it doesn’t want to happen. This is completely different than how I do my tweets. Maybe there’s something about the scale and scope of it. A “failed tweet” doesn’t cost much, doesn’t mean anything. A while ago I cleared out hundreds of draft tweets – typically I started typing something and then I lost interest in it midway, I got distracted, or I wasn’t feeling it, and I abandoned it.
A part of me feels obliged to lay out all of these drafts on paper, to go through them, to do them justice, to keep them in my heart and to weave them into my work. This is a nice gesture, but it’s often overwrought. Some of that endeavor is helpful, but I expect too much from it. Realistically, my most powerful work happens when I allow “the spirit” to move me. The word “inspire” originally meant something like “to breathe”, and I know that I have tweets and notes about the folly of trying to rely on fossilized inspiration. It’s like hoping for different weather. It doesn’t work. Not directly. Sometimes if I’m lucky I might encounter some piece of fossilized inspiration from the past that happens to be relevant to my current situation, and that’s always wonderful when it happens. But I can’t count on it happening. Rather, I have to face each moment fresh, anew.
was reading a thing recently about a successful woman who’s struggling to find romance. And to project my own thoughts and feelings onto a bit of text, I think a lot of the issue is that she seems so compelled to bring up her success when talking about herself. And I have sympathy for that, I imagine it comes from a painful, difficult place. It might be that she was diminished and dismissed when she was younger, and so she needs to prove herself, maybe mainly to herself. And she describes men as being intimidated by her – and there may be a truth to that – but I wonder, and really again here I’m wondering about myself – I wonder if really they find her exhausting or tedious to deal with. “They’re intimidated by my brilliance” can be a great cover story for “I am bad at relating to people in a way that doesn’t lead with me demanding validation for my accolades and accomplishments.” And when you dig deeper into that it gets pretty sad. Which isn’t to say that brilliance isn’t intimidating! I once read someone say “It must have been as difficult as it was wonderful to be Montaigne,” and I think she’s right. But dynamic brilliance learns to manage that difficulty. If you’re so smart, why haven’t you learnt to subvert the process by which people are intimidated by how smart you are?
There’s a great scene in The Dark Knight Rises where Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne is trying to climb out of a subterranean prison. He previously had his back broken, and nitpickers here might be gleeful in pointing out that there’s no way anybody could recover from a back injury like that from doing pushups and whatnot. But the whole thing is really meant to be symbolic rather than literal. One of the critical messages of that scene is that, to make the leap, to make the climb, the hero has to leave behind the rope that they were carrying with them. They have to arrive “naked”, unprepared, no rehearsed remarks, no drafts, no list of past successes and accomplishments and accolades. You see this alluded to elsewhere too – in How To Train Your Dragon, our boy Hiccup has to toss the instructions and trust his intuition in order to enter a symbiotic state with his dragon Toothless.
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I got my first tattoo after publishing my second book, Introspect, when I was 31 years old. I’ve been nerding out about tattoos for many years. I’ve been thinking about the kinds of tattoos I might want to get even since before I was old enough to get one. At the same time, I was a bit of a “perfectionist”, especially knowing that tattoos are permanent, I really wanted my tattoos to be deeply, profoundly meaningful to me. I wanted my tattoos to be talismans. And I know that not everybody feels that way. Some people get a bunch of tattoos just for fun, and I respect their right to make that decision, and I can even see how it might be an excellent decision for them. So it’s hard for me to articulate my general philosophy of tattoos, because it’s more like a dozen stray philosophies in a trenchcoat. They might loosely map onto something like archetypes or MBTI, but I wouldn’t fixate too much on any particular system. Really the point is just to understand that variety is a thing, diversity is a thing.
Too little butter scraped over too much bread, is how I feel about a lot of my past drafts. A part of me is tempted to try and recreate all of them from scratch, without looking. But that’s not very strong for me right now. I can respect that sometimes that impulse makes sense, but right now I don’t think so. Right now I’d rather… go through each thing, summarize it into a bunch of bullet points…