I had a list of old prompts lying around in my Evernote since forever. Finally, on a day where I felt full of writerly energy, I wrote out medium-length answers and elaborations to most of therm. This happened a few weeks ago. I’m tidying them up and assembling them here.
What I’ve learnt from being in a long term relationship
I’ve only seriously dated one woman my whole life, since we were young and stupid. We’re still young and stupid, but now we have a house and two cats, and we’re building our lives together. We met when we were 10, got together when we were about 13, separated for a couple of years when we were 17, got back together and got married when we were 22. We’re 24 at the time of this writing.
What have I learnt?
- I’m really bad at relationships. I like to think that I’ve gotten better, but I haven’t gotten better nearly as much as I ought to, in a way that matters.
- The main reason me and my wife have been together for as long as we have is that we’re both really stubborn and we refuse to let our relationship fail- there are some people who would be very happy to go “I told you so” if our relationship fails, and we’re not having any of that.
- Hate the same things. It’s okay to not like the same things. What actually matters is that you hate the same things. There is a certain lasting comfort and solace in the arms of a person who hates the same things that you do.
- It’s about cooperation more than anything else. Can’t remember who said that- it might have been some actress in a movie- but it rings true for me. A marriage is a partnership. The whole ‘love’ thing is nice to have, and something that you can re-create over and over again. Couples that last know how to do this. I highly recommend Esther Perel’s “Desire in long-term relationships” talk. That’s some real shit.
What I’ve learnt from playing in a band
Playing in bands is actually really fun, really pleasurable. It can be a bit messy and challenging, but when you get it right it’s really lovely. I haven’t done it in too long. I should do it again soon. Maybe I should really bring my guitars to work. I should probably do that. Yes.
Sleep experiments
Sometimes I like it when I’m awake really, really late at night. I remember enjoying those late night cigarettes. The world would seem quiet and wistful and silent, and it was all mine. Those are things I will remember on my deathbed. I will also remember what it was like to be in an office playing music, I will remember what it was like to be in a security room for the Singapore Air Show, I will remember my route march in NS, I will remember my first kiss when I was in a library in Tampines, how excited and edgy I felt- I remember thinking wow, this is what adults know that kids don’t, this is what growing up is about.
I love waking up really early in the morning. It feels like you start before the world does. I managed to pull this off for a couple of days, and it felt really good. Wake early, sleep early. I think a part of my brain almost feels like I don’t deserve to do that.
Learning to draw
I’m so jealous and impressed by people who are amazing at drawing. And I suppose by people who are amazing at music, too. But I used to think about it in this really… (I want to say “American”, or “Asian”) competitive, possessive way. I want to have those skills. I want to impress people. I want to be powerful and amazing and rich and all of that.
It makes a lot more sense to focus on expressing yourself. Mastering yourself. Drawing and playing music aren’t ways to impress people (though they can be impressive), they’re ways of exploring reality. Ways of making sense of reality. Ways of mapping and modelling reality. And you get good at it to paint a richer picture of reality so that you can understand and appreciate it better.
Maybe not everybody else feels the same way. There are some more straightforward utilities to art- like playing music to club to, to lose yourself to. But even that I’d say is a kind of mapping of the reality of our own primal, tribal desires.
I used to want to draw to impress people. Now I want to draw because I think sometimes it might be the most succinct way of communicating a concept, and I want to communicate useful, effective concepts in the most effective way possible. Because we need to do that if we’re going to expand the consciousness of the species, and if we’re going to go to space, become multi planetary, etc.
Facebook shenenigans
Facebook is an amazing utility that adds a lot of value to my life, and to everybody else’s too. We tend to take the good stuff for granted and focus on the bad. I think it’s okay to focus on the bad so we can mitigate it, but it’s healthy to also think about the benefits. The optimal outcome is to get as much good and as little bad as possible.
The scariest thing about Facebook is that your profile co-creates you just as much as you create your profile. You start taking photos and going to places etc just so you can have specific profile pictures and cover photos. It’s all one big game of identity performance and it can be rather exhausting.
I think it’s pretty sad that people spend so much time arguing on Facebook. I think worrying about what happens on Facebook is a horrible way to live. I think we should all sit our friends down and agree once and for all that anything that happens on Facebook isn’t particularly serious, that we’re all prone to missteps and misunderstanding, and that nobody really changes their mind about anything on Facebook. We should instead use Facebook as a utility for private conversations via PM. The best things that have happened to me on Facebook all happened via PM.
Being in debt
I was in debt for a while. It was one of the worst experiences of my life. This was despite the fact that the person I owed money to was an understanding friend who could afford to lose the money.
Starting a business
I already wrote an entrepreneurship rant that covers most of what I’d like to say about it. In a nutshell, don’t take stupid risks. Take the tiniest little risks you can, things with little to no downside but some unknown upside. Spend as little money as possible, as little time as possible, and expose your work to as many people as possible. Iterate as much as possible. Have a common understanding about what you want out of it, and discuss it together.