(nov 18, 2021 thread) there are a bunch of things i wish some earnest person would ask me about, tho if i talk about it now it would distract me from my book lol. but maybe a quick distraction as a treat (been working on it today!!). i wish someone would ask me about what it’s like to live your dream
so visa what’s it like to live your dream? gee, thanks visa, i’m glad you asked. let’s see…
the first thing is that yes it’s absolutely beautiful. it feels like something in your heart unlocks, that you didn’t realize was locked, and initially there is a gushing, a great burst of color and light. you smile a lot, walk taller, you’re glad to be alive, eager to contribute
“wait, what was your dream again?” to write for a living, basically, as directed by my own taste. to be my own client. I crossed this threshold somewhere around 2018-2019 or so.
but! it doesn’t solve everything! the color and light do subside after a while. now that you’re actually in the arena, what used to be charming, intoxicating escapist fantasies of “what you would do if…” start to loom over you.
part of my dream that I would be able to help people like myself. I can do that now! that’s great! but what I hadn’t anticipated is, what that also means is, the # of people I can help, is constrained by own personal issues, my own personal life, my own demons, anxieties, shadow
I would NOT choose to go back. I feel more alive now than I ever have, even if in some ways it’s scarier. there was a deadness to the chronic background stress of salaryman life that was soul-destroying for me. now I wake up every day and get to do “whatever I want”…
I don’t have as much money as I used to, but I have more time. this is something I can calibrate. if I needed more $ I can take on more clients, or do more marketing for my books, or host more ii salons, I have lots of options, and I constructed this optionality brick by brick
but it’s been so weird for me to notice that there are some mirror patterns between the stress I used to have at work, and the stress I have working on my own book, when I’m my own boss and colleagues. it reveals something rather annoying and inconvenient that I cannot deny…
now I loved my last job– great colleagues, amazing boss, great work environment. I learned a lot. made good money. absolutely cannot complain, as far as jobs go. but I thought it was jobs themselves that I despised. the commute was a big part of it for sure. commutes suck
but also what I think I really disliked was being accountable to other people. even when the people are great! I notice this again when I work on consulting projects with people I love, and actively choose to. like gosh it’s just so annoying to have to “sync up” with people
but here’s the “aw fuck” thing – this applies TO MYSELF TOO. I HATE HAVING TO SYNC UP WITH MYSELF TOO. OH MY GOD. what I thought I hated about jobs, I really hated about… existence. lmfao. maybe that’s too dramatic. what I hate about BANDWIDTH LIMITATIONS OF THE HUMAN CONDITION
I know I’m smart. I know I have good ideas. I know that if you leave me unattended to walk around some domain, I will eventually figure out great suggestions and ideas that are legitimately valuable. this is part of why people hire me, and also why people follow me on twitter/yt
my ex-boss who I really admire/respect/love and still seek out for 1-1s with, once said something that captures all of this. he said sth like, “Visa, you’ll do fine wherever you go, whatever you do. But the constraints limiting you from reaching the next level are internal”
FLIP 100 TABLES
Mario, the root of the problem is INSIDE YOU
when you have the privilege of being a feral free agent wandering in the wilderness (@liminal_warmth had some great threads narrating her own experience of this), you rly see how you can’t blame anybody else for your own ennui. when your dreams come true you see that even clearer
none of this is to dismiss or write off all the cruelty and systemic injustice in the world. lots of people never get to the point where they live their dreams, and that’s really unfair, and those of us who can do something about that, should fix that. but also Jim Carrey is 100% right (“I hope everybody could get rich and famous and will have everything they ever dreamed of, so they will know that it’s not the answer.”)
so yea, what’s it like to live your dream? ngl it feels great, kid, but it’s not the end. it’s a beginning. you unlock Life+ Premium and shit gets harder from there. much of it is great, way better than regular life. way cooler quests. but don’t be expecting divine paradise now
also, the flavor of your procrastination almost entirely shifts from “eh, I don’t wanna do that icky task that’s boring & tedious” to “fuck i’m scared”. in a weird way, living your dreams means being scared all the time. bc everything is consequential now. failing at things you care about hurts a lot more than failing at things you don’t care about.
you ~could~ also sorta coast off your success & take it easy, but that strikes me as a kinda creative death, too. a young person shld not be retired. take a nice long vacation maybe, whether literal or psychological, but then IMO we kinda owe it to ourselves to keep taking risks
not like in a tedious obligation sort of way though, if it feels like a burden on your back you should probably fuck off for a bit and not take yourself so seriously. one must ayy lmao through life.
a tricky thing – when a person has received the jewel of life, and then they feel this anxious burdensome obligation to pass it on, and they get all needy about it. I think I’ve been this person sometimes. they need a friend to lovingly smack them with a laugh like bro wyd
big “I must explain the tao!!!” energy. bro, you cannot explain the tao. the best you can do is allow the tao to explain itself through you. and to do that you have to get out of your own way and not take yourself so seriously. ppl will pick up on your solemn anxious energy
and with this gentle chill energy I will now return to working on my book. may fair winds bless your sails, dearest friends
(edit notes throughout the book now “bro wyd”)
also wait here’s a sort of unexpected gem of a question for myself: “visa what if you figured out a way to *enjoy* syncing up, with yourself, and with others?” see this is the kind of asshole question that sends you on a journey of self-discovery and I am so tired of these lmfao
^ and this is also an eg of what I mean by stream-of-consciousness journalling. i basically write as fast as I can about whatever feels true, and along the way I accidentally expose my own weak points to myself, which are then opportunities for growth!! (puke emoji, laugh emoji) sigh exhausting
“but visa what if you figured out a way to make your personal growth more sustainable and less exhausting? what if you could enjoy going through these transformations?” fuck you visa bro i am LOGGING OFF (laugh, skull emoji)
✱
Accumulating social capital (2020jun10 thread)
(1) the creative life is lonely but freeing when nobody cares about your work
(2) it gets good when discerning folks like your work bc of their independent assessment of it
(3) it gets frustrating when less-discerning people start showing up because of social proof via (2)
creatives who are not sensitive to this phenomena sometimes kill their own creative spirit because they start to pander to people from (3), because those are the people who in aggregate have the most money to spend, prestige to give, etc.
Navigating (3) without losing your mind requires developing skills of disengagement. Seems to me you have to learn to tactfully/politely ignore people, etc. This is VERY hard for lots of creatives, because it’s directly the opposite of what got them there in the first place.
Sometimes you’ll see a celebrity comment on something, and you’ll think “LOL why did they say that? they could’ve just kept their mouth shut” – yes but, often they *became* celebrities precisely because they were the sort of people who can’t keep their mouths shut.
Not saying it *excuses* the behavior, but it certainly *explains* it. quote-tweeting a celeb with “omg shut up” not only doesn’t work, you drawing attention to them just reinforces their self-image as someone that people want to hear from and talk about. Haters are fans too.
“you should respond to everything” is a position that I started out with, and I still believe in the overall spirit of – but once you cross a few thresholds, it then basically becomes a “hijack me and waste my time whenever!” sign on your back. people start prodding you for fun.
And you have limited hours in a day. it looks like I got ~80 mentions on twitter yesterday. that’s a normal day, nothing went viral or anything. these are mostly real people with real thoughts. sometimes I miss a mention or 5. even with my friends, I can’t reply to everyone.
So it gets to the point where, if I care about my friends, and I do, I *have* to ignore some strangers. I just don’t have the time or headspace anymore. I spent 15+ years having more conversations with strangers and randos than I think 99% of humans ever will.
Oh, I didn’t even talk about my DMs. I get somewhere between 3 to 10 DMs a day. Yesterday some guy I don’t know started asking me for advice about some terrible thing that I can’t possibly help him with. Like… I have household chores to do, man. I wish I could do more but I’m only human.
I suppose this thread is a sort of roundabout reflection/meditation on the nature of accumulating social capital. I always wondered what it’s like to be someone who had it. I have some of it now. Somehow it seems simultaneously wilder and more mundane than it’s made out to be.
It’s very satisfying to have dozens of kids tell you that reading something you wrote helped them through something, made them decide to try and be kinder and more nourishing, etc. The cost of that is every so often someone will seriously accuse you of being a literal psychopath. And if you are a sensitive, thoughtful person, you can take those accusations very seriously. which is ironic! if I were the narcissist that people say I am, I would either agree (“duh I am!”) or disagree (“fuck you”) or go on with my life. but I am conflicted about everything.