The following is an unedited messy transcript of bits of my parts of a conversation I had with a friend, Ms. G.
I spent a long time working on Introspect before it became clear to me that one of the core themes that needs to be in it is about “The Heart”. And it’s slightly prickly…
the main thing throughout has always been, what the fuck is the core theme of the book? the real central idea? i started out thinking maybe it was about “figuring out what you want”
and along the way I picked up other phrasings like, “troubleshooting your internal narrative”, “seeking narrative resonance”, “project management of the soul”, all of which felt warmer and warmer
warmer and warmer still: managing your psychology, illuminating the fog,
dismantling the inner authoritarian, putting the gun down, unlearning coercion
and like what I’ve finally finally come to is that this is a book about HEART
and i’m like oh my god this is so cheesy lmfao but it’s correct
literally, listen to your heartthe heart wants what it wants
i basically wrote a whole book about “figuring out what you want” to realize that that’s the wrong frame, that’s all up in your head
children don’t have to “figure out” what they want. they know. they lead with their hearts
and it’s like, ok, so that’s the hero’s journey, you lead with your heart, you get into trouble, you get hurt, you worry, you second-guess yourself, you analyze
so much of the stress of life is something like, “you don’t really trust your heart”
and the root of the problem people keep describing, is in a different castle
people keep saying, how do I be less stressed, how do I be smarter, how do I waste less time, 100 questions like this. how do I stop procrastinating.
and, trying to solve those problems, might give you some progress and relief, not knocking on that – a significant part of my book is about project management, bc you do need to recruit your mind to protect and encourage and support your heart
but you can’t ignore/avoid/disregard the heartand i’m like oh no this is kinda wooey language LOL
but!! i did some reading and I found such interesting clueseg, martin luther, who did the protestant reformation, when he was in the monastery, he felt like an irredeemable sinner, described christ as the jailer of his souland his mentor johan said “bro walkin the path of christ is not about beating yourself up. focus your attention on the merits and mercy and love of christ. you must have a change of heart”
centuries later, JS Mill – this poor fucker was raised by his father to be a genius, father was a friend/follower of Mr. Panopticon, Bentham, and they raised this kid in isolation to become Mr Utilitarianismand in his own autobiography, he asked himself, “yo, will i even be happy if I achieve my goal of making society Just”and he wrote!!! “MY HEART SAYS NO”
and it was the POETRY of william wordsworth than OPENED HIS HEART to JOY
my god, people have known this for hundreds of years
and still I get ppl in my DMs, hundreds of years later, “i am trying to maximize utility but i’m still kinda miserable”
yea! so even illuminating the fog is like, how do you illuminate it? the the beacon is your heart
my heart will go on, wtf does that meanif you squint you see that it’s like the only question that mattersmiles davis had a quote that’s like, “man it takes a long time to sound like yourself”
and rn my frame is like, it takes a long time to hear your heart, to unfurl your heart, to live in an open-hearted way
do you see how like…. while i have been taking so long with this, it’s actually the right thing to do. it’s so meta. my heart wasn’t in it until now
and the difference between a thing when someone’s heart is in it, vs not quite, is night and day
my main tension was like, i’m so good at helping people in my DMs, how come this book doesn’t feel like it’s the same? I mean some people are down bad so hard that even just reading about me rambling about project management will be helpful
but my artist’s heart wasn’t satisfied bc it knew that i wasn’t yet quite getting to the heart of thingsin DMs you can feel it moment to moment in the exchangesbut i was writing the book with my mind, intellectualizing itwhich, is not BAD, but the heart wasn’t in itand you know what’s funny, I TRIED TO TELL ME AND I DIDNT LISTEN LOL
I didn’t even really know what he was saying but he rightbut yea i can feel the fears shift too lolpreviously the fear was like “what if this book is not good enough, doesn’t quite do the job I want it to do, what if it wastes people time, discourages them,” blah blahnow it’s like, oh, obviously I just gotta talk about heart, lol. now the mind is worried that people will call me a kook. but the heart is like fuck yeaaaa this is it boys
i’m reminded that ultimately this is a book from me to my younger self
that kid’s judgement is what I care about
being a kook is like a given anyway
mind just grasping at straws to try and do its job LOL
cute little tryhard
it’s not like I’m “listen to your heart, open all your chakras and just vibe bro”
it’s more like, “yo! we are going to do a thing that is going to seem silly, frivolous, scary…” and then it goes into all the specifics
all the project management nitty gritty stuff is already in the book
it’s just that it needs to be clear that it’s all in service of the heart
which isn’t necessarily to pedestalize it, which I think our overthinker twitter friends etc aren’t in any trouble of, but we know there are people out there who have the opposite problem
it’s interesting how the language of work doesn’t quite work with the heart. like we say “changed my mind” but it’s weird to say “changed my heart”, it’s more, “I had a change of heart”. the heart is quite independent
> “i’ve been trying to figure out how my heart feels about this, u know, and i’m kinda struggling to articulate, can i use u as a soundboard for a second”
> “i think my heart needs a little rewiring bc of all these trauma patterns ykwim??”