“Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
“Your personal experiences make up <0.0001% of what’s happened in the world but 80% of how you think the world works. When experiencing a fraction of what’s out there but using that to explain everything you expect to happen, you’ll be disappointed & confused by others’ decisions.” (@dineshraju quoting @morganhousel)
There are more people (8 billion) in the world than seconds in your life (2-3 billion seconds.)
I think its very important to be able to believe that there are people in the world who are different than you, who believe in different things than you, who function differently than you, perceive and experience reality differently than you, in ways you might struggle to imagine.
I don’t know if “important” is the right word to use there. Gratifying? Mind-expanding? Even the concept of “important” is just one way of thinking about things, and we are impoverished if that’s all we have. So… lucrative? Also a particular way of thinking about things…
Let’s suppose for the sake of creative playfulness that it’s NOT important, and NOT lucrative. It’s at the very least interesting. Compelling. Remarkable. Delightful. Awe-some, which is a word that’s been diluted from overuse. It is the nectar of the gods, to grasp the unknown. To be able to inhabit the joyful mind-being state of someone who has no connection with any of your worries and concerns, is a euphoric transcendence, a communion with eternity, the birthright of every conscious being.
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Transcript:
I saw a tweet that somebody said something like, “i was telling my friends about this part of twitter that we are on, and how i enjoy it,” and then his friends were like “oh what’s that? i’ve never heard of that”. “Oh you know, people who read uh slatestarcodex, people who read certain blogs, people who are involved in certain communities online?” and they’re like, “none of those words mean anything to me, i have no idea what you’re talking about”, and you know then people kind of mumble “oh you know we care about statistics and modeling and blah blah… blah” and then it’s just… you see that there’s no connection there, so what do you do? Change the topic and find some other point of connection.
I actually think that this is something that is interesting and cool and exciting about the world. that it’s so big. whatever it is that’s going on in your life, there’s someone else who has absolutely no idea about you. there are people in the world who don’t know. so okay if you’re american, i guess, everyone knows about america, but if you live in any other country there’s a good chance that there’s some other country somewhere where that somebody in that country doesn’t know of your country. i live in singapore, there are surely people in…
paraguay right like who who live who might not live in the major cities or whatever and who think who don’t know that singapore exists. and so someone like me does not appear in their mental model of the world and that’s just interesting and exciting to me in a sense, that there’s there’s still places you can go and be new right?
I think that’s part of why I enjoy YouTube, which is that I was spending so much time on Twitter. That, whether you realize it or not, you develop this model of what that space is about based on the people around you. And in reality, there are so much more people in the world than the ones that you’re using to kind of simulate a shared reality. And so, I’m excited about YouTube because it gives me a chance to meet new people who I haven’t, you know, like to talk to people with a different voice than I use on Twitter. And, you know, while I have been on it, you know, again, like talking about this is so complicated because if I say I have been honored on Twitter to have some amount of following, some people find, “Oh yeah, are you like, are you bragging? Are you showing off?” No, it’s cool to, in my small circle, right? So, I’ve been honored by this tiny circle of people with some amount of status, some amount of prestige. It’s nice to have… and it’s also small. You know, it’s like being the treasurer of a student council, right? It’s cool in that scene, but outside of it, no one cares. And that’s also liberating, right? And I want to get out into the world. Right? I want to, and for me, once upon a time, that was Twitter. For me, once upon a time, Twitter was a place where I didn’t know anyone and I was curious to meet new people and build relationships. And I did that, and I kind of formed the scene around myself. Sort of, maybe I was just in the right place at the right time, I don’t know. But now, I would like to try that again by going on YouTube and going on TikTok and finding new people who don’t know my old friends, who don’t know me, and that I can be open and fresh and new with and talk about different things and conduct myself differently and explore different facets of my personality.
And I’m just excited about that, right? So I’ve, I think I stopped writing in my thousand-word writing project because Twitter had started to feel more exciting for me. And now I’m kind of curious to go back to that and revisit and really experience solitude of the mind, where I’m not thinking about what other people are going to think in response to what I say. And yeah, I look forward to that. I think there’s something there that I need to do.
And yeah, so that’s my thing for today, right? Think about how big the world is, think about the world outside of your sphere, right? Your family and friends, the city you live in. Even within the city you live in, there are surely spaces that you have not been to, you’ve not seen, you’ve not spoken to people from who will surprise you with their fresh perspective. I remember once, I was just feeling so exhausted from work, where, you know, working on marketing all day, talking to marketing people all day, looking at the stats and numbers and whatnot, and one of my co-founders from my t-shirt company invited me to go to a film festival. And it was just so refreshing for me to be in that theater at the time, to witness these filmmakers who I had no idea of, didn’t know who they are, didn’t know what they do, and I got to see their passion. And they were having a conversation about, you know, like, they were having there was like an award ceremony of some kind, and they were talking about the filmmaking scene in Singapore, which I had no idea about. And it’s just so interesting to see…
“To inhabit a different universe of sorts, and you see what’s in common, you see what’s different, and it’s just also fresh and also new, and life somehow big. Like in just being in that space, you feel like a like a child, like a tourist, right? And maybe I’ll make a separate video about how every child is a tourist in our our world because they are new arrivals, they are migrants, them alien migrants to human society. And so, you know, we treat children and travelers like good travelers, the same way we want to help them have a good time, we want to make a good impression on them because they are making their first impressions. And it’s possible to be a tourist and a traveler in many ways, especially now. So now, like Covid makes it impossible for me to, makes it very difficult for me to get on a plane and go overseas and then I’ll come back to get on the quarantine, it’s the whole mess. But what are the ways in which we can be travelers in our own lives, right? I ate eggs this morning, which I don’t normally do. I tend to wake up, drink coffee, and shower and start writing or sitting on my computer and tweeting. And eating eggs this morning, like having consuming protein first thing in the morning, that was something new for me, some and it was a way of experiencing a slightly different reality than what I’m accustomed to, which is like it’s just like I’m being a tourist in someone else’s world, right? There’s maybe another version of me all right, so maybe there’s another visa that’s an alternate visa who consumes a lot of protein, and I got to experience his life for a day. And I think I’m gonna stay in that space a bit longer and try it again tomorrow and see how it feels. Keep want to keep this short done.”
Hey friends, I’m up earlier than I usually would be because I went out to attend a meeting of sorts with a bunch of people that I don’t usually get to chat with, which was an interesting experience. You know, I think it reminded me, and I always get reminded of the same thing, which is that the people that I spend time with day to day online are not representative of the world, right? The world is a very, very big place. There are a lot of different people with a lot of different interests and a lot of different priorities, and they see different things, hear different things, care about different things. And it’s really very easy to get swept up in like a bubble of sorts, where you know you think that things are not worth say. You might think, “I found myself thinking several times that things are not worth saying because everyone already knows that, sure.” And it’s not fun to kind of repeat yourself in the same space over and over again, and everyone around you is like, “Yeah, we’ve heard it.” So you’ve got to go to new places to meet new people to have conversations with them.
And I just want to make this video real quick to remind myself that one, I should be making videos more often because YouTube videos, I think, have a better shot at reaching a wider audience of random people passing by who might not be exposed to some particular ecosystem or another, you know?
So I do have this ecosystem on Twitter where a bunch of people who are familiar with each other talking about the same things over and over again, which is good, I believe. I do believe that we are kind of incubating and workshopping ideas. But the point of all of that workshopping is to share with the wider world, right? I believe that, and not everyone believes that, so that can be a point of conflict.
Some people feel that, “Oh, you know, this part of Twitter is where, where like some small group of us came here to talk about ideas with each other, and now there’s all these other people showing up, and I didn’t want all these other people to show up.” But, you know, if you have an idea that is consequential in some ways, other people are going to show up. You have to, you know, you can you can get mad about it or you can face the reality of it, and, you know, we’ll see how it goes. And you know, I do feel for some people, and I think there’s a whole separate conversation to care about that. I want to focus on the fact that there are conversations that we should be having, or I feel that I should be having, with people who I have not spoken to yet (that’s a very long sentence).
And, yeah, I’m excited, I guess. There’s this stuff I want to think about, stuff I wanted to talk about that emerged when I realized that when I think of a different audience, when I think of people that I haven’t spoken to, and I think of people who are not familiar with what I’m familiar with. And that’s that. I just want to get that out, and I’m just going to publish this, and I will get back to working on my book, which I want to finish really soon.
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thread about far-fetched
Tin makes me think of an old ribbonfarm post
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i would not be able to make a living doing what I do if I were trapped in a local market. god bless the internet. world is big.
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the variance in dating success is shocking. I think the variance in almost every domain is shocking. I have a friend of a friend who can run 5km faster than I can run 2.4km. things are only shocking because our expectations are miscalibrated. Thought experiment: imagine someone who loves everything you hate, hates everything you love, and is nonetheless happy and well-adjusted
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