I’ve been tweeting a bunch lately about status and misunderstandings and thresholds. This seems to be something that I care about in cycles. Sometimes I think about it a lot. Sometimes I don’t think about it at all. I tend to get self-conscious about it, and then get annoyed for being self-conscious about it. Why? Because… a part of me would like to live in a world where you can just be a nerd and ask questions about things and not have it mean anything about who you are, or what you’re trying to do, and so on. We don’t live in that world, not quite. We can carve out spaces that are more receptive to such thinking, and I think I don’t give myself enough credit for having already done so with my friends. I have a bunch of relationships with a bunch of people who trust me, who are eager and curious to hear what I have to say, and ask me interesting questions and make interesting observations. In this regard I have already succeeded at something that I thought would take me a much longer time to do. And I think I ought to celebrate that more, be grateful for that more. Let’s take a moment. Thank you readers. Thank you friends. Thank you people who try to understand. I am very blessed, very honored, for real.
But. I’m not done. I’m just getting started. There’s more I want to do. Now that I know that I have figured out some stuff that works, I want to share it with more people. But I don’t want to do it in a boring and tedious way, like it’s some sort of job. I want to have fun doing it. And I’ve been a student of fame and celebrity long enough to know about the problems that come with increasing your visibility, increasing your public profile. So far I think I’ve done a pretty good job at each threshold that I’ve crossed. I go through some growing pains… a sufficiently large audience will poke at all of your insecurities and anxieties and induce all manner of frustrations. And that’s… kind of good, actually. It’s neither good nor bad, it is what it is. There are no haters or enemies, only training partners, sparring partners. Some of them might be more vicious than others, in which case the onus is on you (me) to block them, or otherwise figure out some sort of arrangement that minimizes the damage that they do, while maximizing opportunities for healthy, nourishing interactions.
I don’t always get everything right. I make mistakes. I blunder. I really liked something I saw in a video recently – it was about The Witcher 3, and the video essayist was talking about his understanding of how graphics cards work, and why in particular the performance on an old game wasn’t nearly as good as the performance on some newer games. There’s a broken telephone thing going on here where I am half-remembering what it was about, and surely relaying only about half of what I remember, and surely half of that is wrong.
(I took a break to tweet a bunch, and then twitter started failing on me. What a strange thing, in 2023, that Twitter would fail so much more than it did back in the days of the fail whale. Shouldn’t make assumptions about progress being linear and constant.)
The thing I took a moment to tweet was the broken telephone bit above. I thought it was a nice bit of writing. Kinda poetic, and gesturing at a real phenomenon… the kind of beautiful thing that I want in my writing. When I started this wordvomit I had no idea that that’s something that would come up. And so this confirms what I’ve been trying to convince myself of: that I shouldn’t try to write good essays, I should just write as much as I possibly can, in a self-directed, random-exploratory way, and see what happens. And then maybe I might want to use bits and pieces of it for essays. But lets not even think that far ahead. I spent a lot of time thinking very far ahead and it wasn’t very helpful to me past a certain point. All things in cycles. I was in the essay longcycle, now it’s time to get into the essay shortcycle. The interesting thing is that the essay shortcycle is longer than say, writing a twitter thread.
Writing twitter threads is such a specific style of writing. I’m really grateful that I spent several years getting good at it, but when I tried to write essays afterwards I definitely found that I was struggling. It’s like I had contorted myself into a very specific style of containerizing my thoughts, and it made it difficult for me to properly take up space in an expansive way. So… a lot of the time I’ve spent since then has been just… decontainerizing my thinking. It’s another subtle mental posture thing. But it’s at least partially visual, I can see it on the screen, I can feel the rhythms and melodies as I’m going.
I’m not sure if I’ve written yet about how… my twitter threading style actually informed my thinking style, like how I think about information. It always seems a bit silly to talk about things in terms of twitter, i think because twitter is often coded as some kind of timesink, or like unproductive public square, for layabouts to loiter… but if you can get past that nonsense I think there’s something more powerful and profound underneath it. Something about organizing ideas in a people-shaped way. I’ll write more about it in the next wordvomit, separately. Why do I think I should separate it rather than do one of my double-posts? It’s mainly a feeling. I feel like I’m talking about separate things. While I said “decontainerization”, regarding tweets, even essays are a kind of container. And there’s a bit of an art in figuring out what goes in what container, how many containers to use, and so on.
A final thought, I don’t think I actually completed what I meant to say with the Witcher 3 Broken Telephone anecdote. I meant to say… I think the ideal posture is not to pretend that you’re right about everything, but to concede in advance that you’re probably wrong about quite a lot, and yet make a valiant attempt anyway. And a thoughtful audience should understand that.