I just sent out my 4th tinyletter. I’m pretty happy about that. Just as I want to reach 1,000 word vomits, I’d like to send out 100+ tinyletters.
At the time of writing, I have…
- 608 friends + 718 followers on Facebook
- 5,497 followers on Twitter
- 39 people subscribed to my Telegram channel
- 66 people following my Tinyletter
Obviously, this stuff is not a contest. Having more followers doesn’t make you a better person. Getting lots of followers isn’t necessarily an ideal outcome, too – there are all sorts of issues that celebrities have to deal with. Bad followers are generally worse than not having followers.
That said – going viral on Twitter a few weeks ago and picking up 3,000+ followers has been a generally positive and exciting experience for me. There are some disagreeable, unpleasant people, but most of the new folks are quite engaging and stimulating. When I post questions, I get answers. People give me interesting and useful feedback. So if I could step on the accelerator and gain more followers the way I did before, I would absolutely continue to do it. Would that be up to some point? I’ll probably like the opportunity to stop periodically to acclimitize. Anyway, it’s a fantasy question, like “would you like more money”. Of course you’d like more money. But up to a point, maybe, because you don’t know what it’s like when you have so much money that you become a target. (At this point I found myself thinking that I should really write a post about celebrity/fame – and I now have a todo list item for that. Hopefully this works out.)
What should this vomit be about, other than followers – which seems quite narcissistic? It’s funny that I even care about narcissism in something like a word vomit project. Writing is intrinsically kind of a narcissistic, optimistic activity – even when you’re writing pessimistic shit. But there’s something about writing in public that makes me self-conscious about this. Like, you can’t be too direct about your narcissism. At this point in this essay, it’s probably okay, since I’ve already circled around this so much: Yes, I am somebody who is very interested in himself. Why is this a bad thing?
I guess it’s not so much about whether you’re interested in yourself, but whether your self-interest is more important to you than the well-being of other people. Let’s look up the definition(s) of narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder.
“Is it important to you that you are admired? Do you lack empathy? Do you obsess about your appearance, power, success?” – it seems to me that a person can have a very active interest in themselves without being a narcissist in the social illness sense. You just need to have a similarly active interest in other people.
I think I’m quite narcissistic. I’ve written about this several times, and the fact that I write at all is a part of it. I think I am an interesting person and I’d like to get to know me better, I’d like to dive into my brain and see what’s in there. I’d like to apply myself to things so I can see what I come up with. I’m curious to see all sorts of things that don’t exist in the world as far as I can tell, and I’m the person primarily responsible for enacting my own taste.
Does it affect my social life? That’s the important question. Has my self-obsession harmed others? What do I damage out of neglect? I think I’m pretty decent with relationships – I have friends and peers I care about, and I think they care about me too, and I think I make more of an effort than lots of people do. Maybe most. I wouldn’t say I’m in the top 10% of “good friends” – but not in the bottom 50% either. I’m something like a top 30% friend, maybe. I’m great to talk with about certain things, but not all things. I don’t know, man. This stuff is messy. Peopling is messy. Lots of people are terrible at it. I used to be pretty bad, and I got better. And I’d like to keep getting better. I want to move through the world in an artful way, that people can point at and go “well damn, that was a pretty good life, that was an example worth following – in my own way, of course”.
So… how does all this tie together? Getting more followers, helping other people, trying to be interested in myself without being self-obsessed. I guess what I’m circling around saying is – I want more followers still. I want to earn it, and I want to make things that are deserving of a discerning audience. I don’t want to cheat my way to one. I don’t want one if I don’t deserve it. But I think my work does deserve to be more widely read and more widely shared. And so if it isn’t already happening, maybe my assessment is misplaced. I don’t think it’s completely wrong, it just needs some tweaks that I am not fully aware of yet.
I need to keep producing output. Sometimes my output engine stops, and that’s a damn shame because you can’t get people to listen to a song that you haven’t written yet. Why does my output engine stop? That’s the real question that I need to answer. I think it’s because at some point I started to feel like, this is something I can defer. I can put it off, I can write my 300 vomits next month. Which, of course, isn’t how it works. I have to be honest with myself about this.
If I really knew with absolute certainty that I was going to write 10 word vomits a day and finish them in a month in 30 days time, I could rest easy. But I haven’t truly rested easy since I was a child. Because there’s always homework that hasn’t been done. There’s always some bullshit lie that I’ve made up to just push the problem out of sight, out of mind, so I can continue playing stressfully.