<!– dream interpretation
It has been a long and strange night, yet not really. I slept late, at 1am. Yet I am wide and clearly awake at 6am, and so full of thought and so well rested that it feels strange. If one can feel so well rested in 5 hours, why is it necessary to sleep more? The most interesting thing about all this was a clear single dream I had, which involved me going to London for some reason. My siblings were involved at my parent’s old home (but no parents). My wife was not involved, but my cats were. I bumped into two friends in London. Other friends were there too and they missed a bus in the rain. I had managed to get on. I tried to get the driver to stop for them but he just exasperatedly kept going and said something along the lines of “how am I supposed to run a transport company if people don’t make an effort to be seen?” Something like that. One friend is a friend from my teenage years who I owed lot. Another is a Kevin Malone esque (The Office US) type character from my National Service days, who really just wanted the approval of his peers and is a nice guy but is fat and unappealing. A great cog to take advantage of if you’re naturally nice to unappealing people.
(I think it might have been James Altucher or someone else who said that these are the people that nobody wants to fuck- and while people express outrage or dismay at such a classsification- they could go out and change history by fucking them… but nobody fucks them. So we’re hypocrites. Everybody deserves to be fucked lovingly and well but there are some people almost none of us will fuck. So clearly we’re shitting ourselves somehow.)
I remember having a funny interaction at the airport with some cashier- I boughr coffee for 2 pounds and thought that was surprisingly cheap and then realized I had conflated sgd with gbp.
–>
So that dream felt like a good 2, 3, maybe even 5 days had passed. In reality it was hours. I had gone to sleep reading paul graham’s essays with the wife. Paul’s essays would be near the top of my tecommendee reading list. I think I need to do some reshuffling of my Recommended page. Another person I find myself referring to is Venkatesh Rao of Ribbonfarm, who wrote an epic multi-part essay over seversl years called the Gervais principle. I’m mentioning him because I realize that both paulg and vgr have seeped into my thinking (seth godin already did some fime ago, but now the three are coalescing in my head in some ways that I’m pretty excited about- but as I’ve been saying for v the past 5 or 6 posts and will continue repeating- it’s all a mess for now and I will figure it out as I go. I’m willing to invest a good 50,000 words or more worthbof thought to figure this stuff out. I don’t care, I do it because it’s fun. Defining social media was hard and fun. Trying to make sense of gamification and subjectivization is fun, too. Maybe my obsession with complex systems was just laying the groundwork for thinking about identity creation.
Once you realize that most if not all the things we do are to make ourselved feel better or to construct our identities in a way that makes us feel good somehow, it’s really, really hard to unsee it. I’m fucking lucky that my boss gets this, because it must be excruciating to work for someone who doesn’t. (Well- you could exploit them, but would you rathee work for a sucker you’re exploiting, or someone you acknowledge as superior and learn from? Depends on your priorities. Where possible one should seek out superior mentors. For selfish reasons. It leads to a more rich, interesting and compelling life. And ultimately I think more free-wealth too, where not-free-wealth is money you earn with the subtle unwritten clause that you have to spend it on a shitty aspirational lifestyle you didn’t in full-consciousness sign up for. That’s a pretty shitty life. Maybe. Maybe it’s great. I could be making this up to feel good about my own chosen path. But many people richer and smarter than I have revealed that the grand hedonistic treadmill has very diminishing returns. So get the hell off and do whetever brings you real, sustainable desert-island-joy. For me it’s writing. Everything else exists to some degree to serve this process. Maybe.
Venkat Rao does this thing where he comes up with terms (Gollumization, for instance, is when a person is turned into a Gollum-like character from Lord of the Rings, single-mindedly obsessed with some pursuit. They typically possess some degree of cunning- like how drug addicts might be really persusasive and charming [David Foster Wallace explores this in Infinite Jest], but only just enough to serve the real master. Smeagol is but a shadow, a smidgen kept alive simply to serve the rot, decay, obsession. Smart zombies, basically.). Having coined these terms he is then free to use them in future writing to quickly and succinctly bring up a wealth of information/idea in a very compressed amount of space. It’s like linking to a wikipedia page instead of explaining a phenomenon.
I don’t have to invent these things myself- I can use the motifs of others. Nathan Jurgenson’s work on the dialectic data self is a great one. The concept: the Profile. Your web identity which you create and present to the world; a persona which serves you… but you also live to serve it. Ig begins to create you just as much as you create it. Documentation influences experience, experience influences documentation. (Just occurred to me that Nassim Taleb does the motif creation thing too. And I suppose to some degree, so does Gladwell. The ides is to create or curate and use sticky terms that resonate with people. It’s good jargon, evocative and memorable.)
Breaking the post in half here.