I’m feeling a little blocked at the moment, writing-wise. I’ve been tweeting a lot, but I’ve been getting a little tired of the sound and ‘taste’ of my tweets. I’ve been wanting to write word vomits. I’ve had several false starts, but I haven’t published a word vomit since April 13. That was before my trip to San Francisco. The trip was wonderful, and I feel like, at some level, I’m a completely different person now. And I think I fell into a bit of a silly trap – one where I have so much to say that I don’t know where to start, and end up not saying very much at all. It’s funny. I know from past experience that the way out is to just do a mind dump, which is what I’m doing now.
Anyway, so here I am. What’s on my mind? How am I feeling? My body is quite sore. I did a lot of walking in SF – I was doing over 20,000 steps on some days, when normally at home in SG I barely cross 5,000 steps on most days. And then I had to do my annual IPPT (individual physical proficiency test) for military purposes, so I had to do a bunch of running – and my ankles are even more sore. It’s a funny feeling. It’s hardly the most important thing in my life right now, but it’s on my mind.
What else?
I think the main thing is that I feel this strong urge to reconfigure my life. There are two things I want to think about.
One – the last time I really restrategized my life from first principles was when I was about 20. I was still in the military then – I didn’t have a job yet, I wasn’t married yet, I didn’t have a proper job, I didn’t have a mortgage, I didn’t have cats, I was basically… fresh out of school and preparing to face the world. There were a lot of unknowns, a lot of uncertainties, but I had time and space to really sit and think about what I wanted out of life.
What can I discern from the writing that survives? I was writing about things like “independent thinking will be the new literacy”, and “systems must adapt”. I was writing a lot about Singapore, which seems kind of cute on retrospect. I was writing about things like “enlightened hedonism” and “enlightened self-interest”, and “the hero hypothesis” – the idea that the world would be a better place with more people who strive to better themselves and others, beyond what was expected of them.
In 2007, I was still very passionate about the local music scene – I wanted to be a good songwriter, to be an artist who played in a great band. I also wrote that I wanted to be involved in education, I wanted to write “informative social commentary that will make a positive impact on society”.
It’s interesting to revisit. I know a lot more about the world now than I did then. I have a much clearer sense of what opportunities there are out there, what people are like. I have many, many more people who are interested in what I have to say. And yet I haven’t updated “what I want”. That’s really what I should revisit and update, before anything else. I’ve been feeling this feeling of, “I need to update my blog”, “I need to clean out my bookmarks”, “I need to declutter”, “I need to tidy everything up” – and from time to time I do sit down and go through my things, and experience something that feels like progress. I sorted out a lot of my photos a while ago. But what is all of it for? I think I’m feeling dissatisfied and edgy because it feels like I’m chipping away at something that’s growing faster than I can keep up with.
I know what to do. I need to step outside the day-to-day challenges and struggles. I need to see the bigger picture and be clear about what my priorities are. What do I want? What do I not need to care about? I’m thinking of a conversation or exchange I had with someone about why people struggle to cope with everyday life – and I think that conversation went to a place that was something like… people are trying to do more than they can, instead of focusing on what’s most important. It’s a sort of… hedging. You hedge your bets because you don’t know what’s important, and so you try to do a little bit of everything. Better to score a few points in every bucket, than to put all your points in the wrong bucket. But the best thing you can do is to put most or all of your points in the right bucket. And can you know what the right bucket is? In a sort of probablistic sense, yes! Imagine a sort of… landscape, a grid. A chessboard, let’s say. 64 squares. That’s your life, that’s the number of things you could theoretically possibly Every day you have maybe 3-5 points you can assign to squares on the chessboard. You could put all the points on one square, or you could distribute them across multiple squares. The thing I think I ought to figure out is, which are the most valuable squares? Do I know this? I think I know it subconsciously, and I think I need to articulate it. Okay? So I think I should spend my next word vomit articulating what the most valuable squares are.
Closing thoughts? Summarize – I used to know what I thought was valuable to me. Since then, I’ve learned a lot more about the world, and I think I was led to revisit and reconsider and re-examine all sorts of things. I think I learned that a lot of the things that I thought were “true” turned out to only be true within some specific context. I remember talking to my boss at some point about how I felt empty and lost, like I didn’t really know what I cared about anymore. I remember being outright depressed. And then… over time, I feel like I slowly, somehow rediscovered and rebuilt my interests, curiosities, and so on, almost from scratch. But funnily enough, I guess, I don’t precisely know what they are. It’s an embodied sort of knowledge, but I haven’t articulated it. I want to re-articulate it.