I’m currently reading ‘The News, A User’s Manual’ by Alain de Botton, the guy who gave a TED talk about how snobs are people who judge other people according to some narrow criteria, and how maybe we should feel sorry for people in Ferraris because they feel that they have so much to prove. Venkat from Ribbonfarm described him as one of his ‘evil twins’, alongside Nassim Taleb. And so I’m reading him now. It’s pretty interesting. He has a poetic approach to things. I agree with his fundamental idea that the way we deal with the news is suboptimal. I’d say even silly and weird, grotesque.
There are some parts where I feel that Botton is almost naively optimistic. He writes that journalism emphasizes the negative perhaps because it doesn’t want people to be naive and uninformed. At first glance, this seems naive in itself– isn’t it quite understood that journalism emphasizes the negative because that’s what sells? But elsewhere Botton mentions that when you praise a child for positive behavior– being generous, kind and so on– you’re encouraging her to develop along a path. You’re pushing her to become somebody she isn’t yet. And I suppose that’s what he’s doing when describing the news. He’s almost sort of trolling newspeople, in a gentle, kindly way. I have to assume that, because I can’t imagine that a person would write about the news and yet not have spoken to journalists and learned about the business concerns of the press.
But that’s not why I’m writing this vomit. I opened up my laptop to think about aspirational writing, which is something that I haven’t done in a very long time. I used to do it from a very naive, innocent, angry point of view. [1] I started this word vomit project partially to submerge myself, to keep myself occupied so that I can’t come out. This is my exile. This is me wandering in the desert, getting to know myself, facing my demons, honing my skills and craft. Perhaps someday at the end of it all I will return in a blaze of glory. Perhaps not. I don’t want to get ahead of myself.
But I guess what I want to say in this vomit is that reading Botton makes me a little happy. It makes me smile to know that people like him exist, to care about writing aspirationally about how the news ought to be. That’s nice. All nations are imagined communities. We can’t experience a nation personally, we can’t have relationships with hundreds of thousands of people, with millions of people. So we have to imagine it. We have symbols and some sorts of shared realities– flags, songs… but ultimately a nation is still an imagined community. And that’s where the press comes in, that’s where artists comes in. And as I writer I have the opportunity to influence people’s concepts and imagination. This is a power I’ve always had to some degree. Right now I’m choosing deliberately to avoid using it. I’m in my cave, my grotto. I’m honing my craft. I will not attempt to persuade anybody of anything until I have climbed out of this pit that I have created for myself.
But I suppose this is a reminder to me that there is something I want to do at the end of it. I have been a little bit scared to acknowledge it but it’s true. I don’t want to jinx it but it’s true. I’m not just writing for my personal pleasure– or to be more precise, I intend to get more pleasure out of writing than just having written. I want to move people. I want to inspire people and give them hope. I want to galvanize their hearts and minds. Why? Because it can be done. Because it’ll be something to witness, to participate in. It will prove that I have understood, to some degree, this wondrous reality that I am embedded in, that I am a part of. It will be my way of dancing with the universe, of allowing the universe to dance through me. It is my expression of my freedom, an end in itself. A carnival of joy.
Alright, enough of that. What are the next steps? I should keep writing word vomits, obviously. But I should also be editing them. I should also be tidying up all the links I’ve collected and accumulated over the years, all the quotes. I should be narrowing down the list of things that I want to talk about at the end of these vomits. I mean, I can talk about them now too, obviously. But I just need to prepare myself for what’s coming next. That’s important. That will be useful. I think I’ll finish this book, write more thoughts about it, and then maybe start curating my Facebook links, or just read all my old vomits as quickly as possible. That might be worth doing.
I suppose on hindsight this will really be more about capturing intent. Intent doesn’t persist for very long, it appears in brief moments of inspiration and clarity. It has to be written down, and it has to be adhered to. We have to believe, when we are down, that what was true when we were up should still be true when we are down. It’s just harder or impossible to see. But it boils down to a simple question: do you trust yourself? Do you believe yourself? Well. That’s not thaaat simple a question. The meta question is– what can you reasonably trust yourself with, what can you reasonably believe from yourself? Assuming that things do change to some degree– what changes, what doesn’t? What is relatively harmless to trust, and what cannot be trusted because of the sheer cost of being wrong, if wrong? Think antifragile.
Back to the book.
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[1] And here now I’m thinking about something I read somewhere else– and suddenly I can’t quite figure out whether it’s from the internet or in a book, I’m thinking it’s from the internet– probably on Ribbonfarm– about how Einstein applied child-like questions to big problems and pursued them with adult tenacity. And how teenagers have a sense of frustration with authority because of hormones.