I just had lunch with someone (RH) – she was an acquaintance I knew through work, and we’ve exchanged emails before in the past – and I think through this conversation we’ve become friends. This process itself, of how relationships change over time and experience, was one of the topics we were discussing. The conversation was lively and intimate and nourishing, and I found myself thinking that I wanted to write when I got back. Not necessarily write about *it*, the conversation, but just write in general. Why? I think the simple act of spending time with someone Icare about is a reminder that “this” is not all about me. What is “this”? Everything, all of it, my life, the world. (Isn’t it interesting how much of our language is vague, and allows for multiple interpretations?)
A couple of things I want to remember. We talked about cover stories, and how we use them, and partially buy into them ourselves. And we talked about corroborating our thoughts and experiences with others – conversation as a way of figuring out what we think. We also talked about the utility of being clear about what you want.
I said this on Twitter a while ago, in a thread about unpaid internships – my entire goal in life is to produce some art that inspires some kid like myself to also get involved and do the same. To give back to the “library of human goodness and flourishing” that nourished me when I was a child. She pointed out that I was lucky to be clear about that, and I realized I could do more to get even clearer about it.
Another thing that I wanted to remember was… about emotional moments. Feelings. A catalog of feelings. Another conversation with a couple of other friends on Twitter had us talking about “crash-induced” changes – how most worldviews don’t change iteratively over time, but rather are modified upon the trauma of some sort of crash event.
I was watching Billions yesterday and thinking about a scene where two managers were talking about how they wish getting better performance was as simple as a matter of giving a good pep talk – but if someone wasn’t carrying their weight, in a high-performance environment, they needed to be fired. Somebody had a quote about Oprah, too – Oprah was fired when she was young. “Imagine firing Oprah!” “They didn’t fire Oprah. They fired a punk-ass kid who had to be fired in order to become Oprah.”
I’m hoping that my past experiences of failure and trauma etc etc have accumulated past some point that now allows me to face up to all of it, rather than keep looking away. I know that I should be writing. I’ve said before multiple times that I’m tired of being tired of being tired, recursively. How many times do I have to say it before I do something about it? When am I going to do something about it? What needs to change in order for me to change? I feel slightly like I’m going through the motions, but also like time is running out. I’ve said that before, time is running out. I definitely have blogposts from when I was 17, 18, 20, 21, 24, all alluding to the idea that time is running out. And time is always running out, until it’s finally actually out.
Maybe I’m going about it the wrong way. Maybe the statement “time is running out” is actually a sort of false flag, a distraction from the actual reality that time is running out. The point is to act. The point is almost always to act. The point, when it matters, is to act. Something like that.
I sat down to write this because I wanted to remember. I wanted to remember what it felt like to be in conversation with a friend. My long term goal in life is to die surrounded by interesting, thoughtful, kind people. If I have children, that’s all I want for them – that they be kind, thoughtful people, and it would be cool if they liked me enough to want to hang out with me. But if I don’t have kids, I want that outcome anyway. I want to meet more new people who I feel like I can be honest with, psychologically intimate with. In some ways I feel closer to this new friend than I’ve felt with some really old friends that I’ve known for over a decade. I expected this. I want this. I want to be more intimate and vulnerable and sensitive and tender than I’ve ever been.
So what’s next? What’s next is more writing, and more conversations. What’s next is taking action. The point is always to act. I take too long between actions. I second-guess myself too much. I wait too long. I languish too long. I sleep too late. I need to sleep earlier, sleep more. To fix my sleep I need to correct my scarcity mindset regarding sleep. How is scarcity mindset fixed? According to a blogpost about it – change your environment (how?) change your language (how?), learn new skills (how?), change your traditions and habits (how?). In all cases each project is made up of small actions. The smallest actions are the ones that can be done outright. So suppose I made it a priority to sleep early tonight. What does that look like? After I have dinner, I typically linger and bum for several hours, sometimes reading, sometimes just sitting on twitter, sometimes playing video games. This has been relaxing in the short term these past few weeks that I’ve been unemployed, but I have hit the point of diminishing returns. What I need now is a simple notepad of some sort, a simple file, maybe a new personal chat with myself on telegram where I keep track of the small actions I’m taking in order to bootstrap my new language, my new environment, my new way of being, my new, fuller self. I’ll do that.
> “I definitely have blogposts from when I was 17, 18, 20, 21, 24, all alluding to the idea that time is running out. And time is always running out, until it’s finally actually out.”
I empathize with this very much. I have snippets of notes from 1, 2, 5 years ago all saying “time is running out” & “you’re wasting time” — I remember sometime in my mid-teens crying to parents because I had this feeling that the deadline was looming closer. What deadline? I’m not sure, just that time was running out.
> “What I need now is a simple notepad of some sort, a simple file, maybe a new personal chat with myself on telegram where I keep track of the small actions I’m taking in order to bootstrap my new language, my new environment, my new way of being, my new, fuller self. I’ll do that.”
Would something like a text file stored on Dropbox, or a Google doc, or Evernote note, etc, be more versatile for you? That way you can also access it on the computer (not sure if Telegram has desktop).
Hey Huan! It’s interesting to read this comment now a couple of days later – because it’s obvious on hindsight that what I need isn’t any particular device or app, but a different way of thinking. And yes Telegram is on desktop; it’s what I love about it!
Seems like you’ve been exploring new ways of thinking, and some of it shows on Twitter. Looking forward to reading more!