met another old/longtime friend today, we discussed singapore, southeast asia, narratives. gives me some encouragement and confidence to think about some of my next steps. Memeing Garuda into a wider-spreading idea. Point out that Singapore’s CMIO framework cannot be an enduring concept 50 years from now. What else is there? Thinking about southeast asian folklore… cultural showases… it’s not quite right when you go to somewhere and you pay them and they put a performance on for you… feels sterile and fake.
Still thinking about what the job of each of my domains are going to be, what my substack essays and blogposts are going to be, what my twitter is, and even how these 1000wordvomits are going to end. I don’t really know, there aren’t fixed answers. I gotta think about the questions I want answered. Missing middles… I was reminded that part of what I wanted before I started cultivating an international audience was to… inspire a better standard of discourse in my own country. Challenge more people to write interesting commentary. I don’t quite feel like the time is ripe for me to do that yet, but I’m writing about it right now just to… stir the pot on the backburner, and keep it in mind.
what do I want to do right now now? I still want to write all my essays, starting with the ones weighing most on my mind, so I can get them out. One of the big ones will be something like, chaos surfing, how to be extremely online and not lose your mind. What if I just wrote it now? I feel like I ought to intertwine some of my memoirs with it, be somewhat autobiographical – I talk about the helm of the arse gods, but there’s more… something about growing up at the crossroads… there’s some hesitation here. But that’s a good sign that there’s something there. How DO you be so online and not lose your mind? Not lose all sense of proportion? I want to point at Gopnik’s essay, which is my favorite of all time. I could just do an essay about that essay. I could do an essay about speedrunning. About all the channels at once, what I used to watch on TV. Anime, Bollywood, Hollywood, Singaporean TV, each of these things embodies a different culture, different set of values… what is syncretism? The ability to consider many points of view… again even in Encanto, Mirabel was blaming her grandmother for everything but she never quite considered her point of view, saw the pain that informed her perspective.
Everyone is struggling in some way, nobody is born with all the answers, with everything figured out. Everyone has imperfect information, imperfect knowledge, and a particular experience that they overgeneralize from because it’s so salient to them. Morgan Housel talks about this a bunch in Psychology of Money – how people born in different years experienced different social realities, different economies, different economic realities, and so they learn different lessons. And I’m thinking about a video about video games, and how new gamers can learn the wrong lessons from their limited experience, because two things might happen simultaneously and you might confuse the cause-and-effect. And reality is full of extremely complex events with many different things happening at the same time, and it can be hard to suss out what’s important and what’s not, what made the difference, and so on. We seem to have narrativizing brains that come up with compelling explanations. People who lose elections are often kind of surprised when it happens, because from their point of view they were surrounded by supporters who were encouraging them… and everything is like this. We’re wrong about all sorts of things all the time and we don’t realize it. And even after we think we learn this lesson, we find it waiting for us again around every corner.
So what are we to do? Taleb gets into this stuff, but really it’s not something you can read once and be done with. It has to be an ongoing practice, with ongoing reminders. We have to actively, conscientiously be working against misunderstanding, against ignorance, against the pretense of knowledge. And our emotions come into the picture. We avoid things that make us uncomfortable, conclusions that we don’t like. Thinking about a gary vee video i watched recently– “you want to change the world with one post a week?” which isn’t to say that that’s not possible, but in this media landscape… when you’re starting out, you’re probably better off with more shots on goal, even if they’re cheap, flimsy, imperfect… you want to optimize for resonance, for connection, and mindshare is scarce. Attention is precious. We have to earn attention, carefully, effortfully, over time. Sometimes it takes years and years before something pays off. And why do we expect otherwise? Because of false assumptions. Fairy tales. Fairy tales ought to come with warning labels for the expectations they encourage.
Lately I feel like my writing has been a little slovenly, imprecise, convoluted. I’d like to be more precise in my claims. That takes work. I have to come up with the wrong ideas before I can articulate what the right ideas are. I will likely frame them wrong before I figure out the right way to frame them. I have been paralyzed because of my insistence that I get everything beautifully, perfectly right the first time. It’s been a painful constriction. I’d like to let go of that, to relax and allow my words to flow. And maybe that’s what these word vomits can be about again. I used to worry about repeating myself too much in these wordvomits, but now it annoys me a little bit more that I repeat myself in my twitter threads- talking about strategy and so on. I’d like to piece together something powerful that I can just point people to instead of writing the same things over and over. Luck is a part of it but I don’t really want an entire essay on luck. I do have a blogpost about that. The point of an essay is to paint the wider picture. The blogposts can go into specifics. The essays are for broader pictures that convey the gestalt. Essays are for gestalt.
(PS: Even in this wordvomit – I can link out to a bunch of stuff from it. Maybe part of what I want to do with old wordvomits is to look for things to link to. And the other thing on my recent todo list is to catalog the conversations that I have people in my “wanton fuckery” thread. Much to do.)
I like the metaphor of “stirring the pot on the backburner”! It reminds me of one of mine, of little plants that for now just need watering occasionally.