I used to be able to write thousands of words just like this, tapping fingers on glass, typically on the train on the way to work and back. Maybe it’s time to bring this back. It’s the simplicity of it.
I miss hearing my own voice. A part of me wonders if that’s arrogant, selfish, self-obsessed. But I’ve been through this loop before. I get good at practicing good reply game amongst other people but then I get tired of making that my main thing. It’s time for something new.
What is the audience that I want? When I was an adolescent, I wrote for my schoolmates, and I wrote for gamers on forums. I never particularly set out to write for Singaporeans, but Singapore was my primary frame of reference. I wrote about local news and politics and I built an audience for that, and then I got sick of it and walked away from that. I wrote for a more international audience at Quora 2012-2015 or so. Then I wrote for a marketing/ecommerce audience at work. And when I left my job in 2018 my twitter started blowing up internationally and I wrote for, well, my twitter audience. “People who follow me on Twitter” fall into a few major categories and buckets. A lot of it I think was downstream of the ribbonfarm cinematic universe. I started making some of the best friends I’ve ever known, people who share my values, who seem to understand where I’m coming from. And a lot of us seem to be hyper verbal ADHD types. And it’s been a blessing to be amongst such kinship, but I’ve been feeling a voice stirring inside me lately that says I gotta get out there, do something new, do something different
I’ve written two books, one called Friendly Ambitious Nerd (2020) and one called Introspect (2022). I’m proud of both of them, I think they’re fairly accessible to any curious person. I don’t know if I want to write a 3rd book anytime soon. I feel like I want to get back to my first love, which was writing essays and blogposts.
Alright Visa so what are these essays about? Who are they for? What is the brief? Well. I’m kind of tired and bored of everything around me. And I would like that to not be the case. I’d like to write things I find energizing, inspiring, compelling. I’d like to write for other people like myself that I haven’t gotten the chance to get to know yet. I know they’re out there, many of them not on Twitter.
My first essay was titled We Were Voyagers and I’m proud of it. I want to do a set of like… 20 essays? Maybe I should be thinking of how to package them? I know from experience writing 1000wordvomits that if you don’t have some sense of coherence then the incoherence will overwhelm you eventually.
I’m wary of coming across as pretentious, arrogant, overwrought. But maybe I shouldn’t worry about that for now, and just write what I fucking want to say. What do I fucking want to say? Well I think almost everyone is doing almost everything wrong, how about that? That’s a very incendiary statement. Although some people will nod and say, yeah, duh, everyone knows that. But the thing is if we did know that, why doesn’t it seem to be reflected in our actions? Well, people are scared and overwhelmed and busy, yadda yadda. Fine. How about I just say what’s the matter anyway? Well the issue I think is overly instrumental thinking. Look, western civilization and philosophy has done lots of great and wonderful things. And maybe someone else might want to do an elaborate, passionate, stirring, rousing defense of why it’s so great. I think I actually have more faith than that, I think it’ll be fine regardless of what I do or say. People talk shit about it all the time but they still live in accordance with its principles. Maybe in part because they don’t know any other way to think or be.
Here a more patient author might spend multiple chapters explaining all the problems. Ava wrote our a nice summary. I think I know what some part of the solution is, at least for small groups of competent and privileged people. And some people might say, that’s so small, that’s kinda elitist, it’s not enough. To which I’m like, yeah, sure, true on all counts. But it’s the best thing I personally know and believe I can apply myself to. Over the past few years I think I’ve done a moderately good job at finding people who are in a position to improve their own lives, and a moderately good job of encouraging them to find purpose and meaning in the small things.
I get into all of this in much more detail in my books, but also as a marketing guy I know that “just go read my books” isn’t a very compelling pitch to people who are tired and busy and have dozens of things on their todo lists. So I ought to summarize my books into shorter, actionable essays. And I’ve been stewing on that because it feels like a very difficult thing to do. If I could’ve condensed my books into essays I would have just written essays to start with. But I have to try.
Friendly Ambitious Nerd is a book about increasing people’s agency, giving them courage and confidence, making them wealthier and more powerful. The three core variables are, seek excellent peers, be prolific- “do 100 things”, be curious, inhabit a nexus of questions. Ethos, logos, pathos. These aren’t new ideas but it’s such a small % of people who really embody them well. I want to continue to embody them better, find and encourage people who do, and get better at every facet of it. It’s very recursive. And it’s very simple. People keep overcomplicating things.
Some of my friends are very “trauma-pilled”, ie very much into some form of idea that if you identify and resolve your traumas you will become more powerful and capable to do good in the world. This idea is a good one, and it feels a little repetitive and stale within our circles, but it’s still in the early days of going mainstream. One of the ways I keep a finger on the pulse is I observe how things are where I live, in Singapore. We only just decriminalized gay sex, and drugs are still prohibitively illegal. There’s a lot of work to do. My theory of social change is very simple: the most critical thing is that you need to get a substantial proportion of a given population to care about a thing before you have enough “energy” – brainsweat, boots on the ground, people calling friends and knocking on doors etc – in order to go out and make a difference, whether that means changing laws or social norms- from some angles they’re the same thing. The 4 day work week. The idea of consent in sexual relations. A person could spend a lifetime championing for ideas that are kind of obviously good but have not yet come to fruition. Nuclear power. Education for girls. Access to water. All of these are obviously good things. Why do we as a species struggle with them? And should individuals necessarily concern themselves with trying to solve the biggest problems on the planet?
I’m not actually sure that the answer is a resounding Yes, unless you feel that way personally yourself. There are a lot of things I would like to see happen in the world, but I don’t necessarily feel a personal compulsion to devote my limited time and resources towards. And I don’t think it’s healthy or desirable to try to hyperoptimize myself into becoming some sort of capital allocator. I think what the world needs are people whose eyes are shining, heart-eyes, heart on fire. Jobs and Wozniak were pranksters who were goofing off. When it comes to futurism, I think it’s important that our descendants know that we made time to enjoy our own lives, too, because they will learn from our example. I think it’s weird when people get all swept up in 100 year or 1000 year hypotheticals and then work themselves up into a frenzy. I don’t think less of people for it, but it just doesn’t work for me. What I want is to make my own life more delightful, and my friends, and my peers, and everyone that I come in contact with. Some people think that any effort we spend on anything that isn’t maximally effective at saving lives is a kind of failure… I can see how that’s a valid perspective. I won’t try to invalidate it. I just have a different perspective. I don’t quite accept the idea that people are obliged to twist themselves into knots to try and remake themselves into agents. If you plot people on a graph (already always a slightly iffy endeavour) re: how much they are doing to “make the world a better place” (another iffy endeavour), I think it’s fair to say that, well, most people are struggling just to get by, and lots of people who are above that aren’t really going out of their way to modify their behavior or anything. I’m in the somewhat moderate camp of “we should try to improve society somewhat”, and I believe that the healthiest, most sustainable approach is one that we can contribute to consistently over a lifetime- and to do that we typically need to find something like a “soul-vocation fit”. There are people who think about impressively long term scenarios, things 10,000 years out and so on, and then… after a few years of tinkering, they get frustrated and give up. Not everyone gives up, but every attempt at any sort of social movement sees a lot of churn – people giving up, quitting. So it seems fairly self-evident to me that the way to go is to work backwards from reducing churn.
I find myself thinking about the stuff people DM me about that they struggle with. How do I do something meaningful with my life? How do I deal with conflict in my relationships? How do I find a date? Should I have kids? It’s conventionally tacky to describe oneself as wise, but I also made a pact with my child self to become as wise as I could and also to be honest about my journey and process. So that’s a tricky thing I choose to navigate. I will say, a lot of the wisdom people seek is already out there. You can find it in so many places, if you just look for it and stick with it. The issue is that lots of people have a difficult time looking. And when I think back on my own life I think I constantly underplay my past struggles, which is a kind of unintentional, innocuous deceit. Something about the way I process information and store memories maybe. I don’t know.