“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Howard Thurman
A very common question I get from my friends in all sorts of contexts is “What should I do? What should I write? What should I talk about? What do you want to hear?”
And an answer I find myself giving a lot of the time is, “whatever makes your heart sing, man!” Whatever makes you feel alive.
Some people might find this to be somewhat evasive and glib, but I think it’s the most important thing. Steve Jobs and Wozniak used to do pranks for fun, and it led to them making blue boxes to ‘phreak’ telephone infrastructure, and Jobs went on to say that, without blue boxes, there would be no Apple.
Richard Feynman was goofing off piddling with spinning plates, following his curiosity, and that’s how he ended up doing the “pointless” research that led to him winning the Nobel Prize.
People in general tend to worry too much about what “the market” wants, or what other people want. But most people aren’t very good at articulating what they want. So the magic happens when you articulate what you want. In a world where people are taught to falsify their preferences, deny their desires, “conceal, don’t feel”, expressing your heart’s deepest desires is a tremendous gift. Your roaring self-acceptance gives everyone else permission to do the same. It is tremendous, it is radical.
Do what makes your heart sing.
✱
(2024dec24) “Heartsong” feels like a proto-book, or a collection of posts beyond this one, so I made a category/list. Posts in this category include
- focus on what you want to see more of
- articulating a vision – these are 3 youtube videos, need transcribing
- you are already monarch — leads into (1)
- you can’t think your way out of a courage deficit
- do you know what you want?
- learn to laugh at yourself
- how to be more optimistic
- earn self-respect
- the library ethos
- the heat death of the universe means legacy is ultimately futile
there’s more, but I feel like I ought to switch to examining the “Knowable” category for now…
— 2. do not leave your longings unattended —
2023feb17
<folders pic>
the point of this post is to have some wistful energy, some liminality… i should be feeling it right now while i’m going through my notes… what does it feel like? like i’m being disassembled? bilbo said “spread like too little butter over too much bread”, and there’s some of that… but it’s more like… i’ve been prism’d
I wish I could tell you who made the above bit of art, I tried looking but I haven’t found anything definitive. It’s been on my mind for some time, and it represents the state of both my mind and my workspace very well. I have a lot on my mind. A lot of unanswered DMs, emails, open loops, unfinished drafts, scattered longings. As I start writing this I feel compelled to close some tabs. I have maybe 20-30 tabs open across 3 windows across 3 screens. I had saved this image in a tumblr I started a while ago, HREFgopuram.tumblr.com, with a title “Hyperthreading?”, as a breadcrumb for me to consider. I know that I want to use this image in a Substack essay, because it’s just so evocative and compelling for me, and I know that I want to write an essay about “hyperthreading”, which is an elaborate idea I have about elaborate interweavings of hypertext.
But I don’t feel like that’s something that’s wants to be written right now. It’s a rainy December afternoon, and I don’t feel like doing very much, but I do feel like I ought to write something. I have many different forms of writing. Last night as I lay in bed, I found myself thinking that I don’t really know how I write, I just do. In some sense, it’s actually my fingers that know how to write, and my job is to get out of their way. When I start thinking about it, it gets all messed up. Sometimes I write with my mouth – writing can be speech, speech can be writing, especially if you record yourself talking and then transcribe it. I’ve noticed that when I transcribe my speech, it follows different paths and patterns than when I write with my fingers. Who is doing this writing? It doesn’t feel like it’s me. I’m mostly just witnessing it happening.
I have had grand visions for this Substack – in my imagination I’ve tasted something sublime, transcendent, subversive, evocative, true. But visions are always vague, and reality can be stubbornly insistent in its precision. There’s so much in me that wants to come out, and I find myself in conflict with myself, because there are different parts of me that have different goals, different interests, different compulsions. And my task as the conscious adult in the room is to play some kind of referee, mediator, negotiator, and sometimes I wish that weren’t necessary, and that everything would just be effortless and beautiful.
I find myself chafing at my constraints. I’ve come this far and worked this hard – and in this moment a part of me wants to tell you all about my journey and my efforts, but another part of me resents the very idea of that. There’s a lot to be said, but not everything
A part of me wants to do everything. A part of me wants to tell beautiful stories about what we could be, what we could do together, wants to be inspiring and resplendent. Another part of me says Fuck That, life is grim and gritty and we ought to tell the hard, painful, unvarnished truths of things, we’re so tired of all the pomp and grandiosity. Part of me wants to write small, quiet, personal memoirs, simply revisiting and retelling the history of my own life in a plain way, and maybe if I’m being a little ambitious, contextualize it against the stories that I’m embedded in. Another part of me says, to hell with boring ol’ me, let’s do some exciting nerdposting, lets dive deep into the history of scenes, let’s write about the caravans of the Sahara, about the ancient forgotten kingdoms of maritime Southeast Asia. A part of me wants to do an advice column, because I remember thrashing about in uncertainty with no good guidance available, and I promised my childself that I would figure things out and then be a good big brother figure to the next kid. Another part of me says Fuck That, I don’t want to become an AdviceBro, even if I know I’ll be better at it than most of the options on the advice market, because I’m just tired of performing that role, I want to try on something different. (And in some ways that’s the “best advice”, to demonstrate what it looks like to live well.)
I want to do all of these things and more. I want to write fiction, and I know the smart thing is to start with short stories and sketches. I want to finish 1000wordvomits, which was a writing project I started just about a decade ago, to write a million words. I’m 81.6% complete, so theoretically it should take me another 2.5 years to finish. A part of me believes I could finish it in a month if I really set my heart and mind to it. But I have so many other scattered longings, and who I am to decide what to focus on? Oh, right. I am the monarch of my life…
Well, that’s a lot of responsibility. It involves feeling personally accountable for everything that doesn’t work out, everything that doesn’t go wrong. That’s painful, and it’s probably a part of why lots of people abdicate responsibility for themselves, and for the outcomes that are intertwined with them. (The first line of King Warrior Magician Lover is, “We hear it said of some man that ‘he just can’t get himself together’.” There are great riffs on psychological integration…..)
But do I want to go there right now? Because I think it’s also true that sometimes it’s better to wait it out, for the thing to reveal itself, for coherence to emerge, rather than be forced. That’s the nature of desire paths. You can’t demand desire paths into being overnight, just as you can’t have a baby in 1 month. Some things take time and can’t be rushed, and rushing can even make it worse. Hence…
✱
you are already monarch of your life
your task, if you choose to accept it, is to step resolutely into your responsibility, to walk the path between tyrant and weakling, to use your strength to bring order and prosperity to the realm. start where you are.
“You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself… the height of a man’s success is gauged by his self-mastery; the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment. … And this law is the expression of eternal justice. He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others.” – Leonardo Da Vinci
— 3. writing from the heart —
2023apr13
(abandoned substack draft)
It’s funny how the bog of life’s troubles can creep up on you. Even when you’ve done the reading and the reflection and you think you know what to expect. A day passes, then a week, and next thing you know you’re neck-deep in psychic muck, and it’s hard to breathe, hard to move, and the only way out is some kind of intervention. A part of me is ashamed to be here. A slightly more enlightened part of me knows that being ashamed about being stuck only prolongs the stuckness. And so I have to surrender to the reality of my situation, acknowledge that I need help, and let myself be helped. In this case, by myself! By a “higher consciousness” form of myself, it seems like. It’s so bizarre how that somehow works, but it seems to be working. Hey, I’m not going to question it, if the spirit is finally going to move me then who am I to argue?
As I sit here, in my home study, in front of my ridiculously overpowered Macbook and 3 external monitors, I find myself reminiscing on the writing I used to do when I was a kid. I used to write on my family’s home computer at 3am in the morning. When I was in school, I remember sometimes going to the library during recess time to use the computer… to post on forums and to update my blog. I remember buying a secondhand laptop from one of my friends for S$100, and going to Starbucks to write blogposts, where I would nerd out about the nature of complex systems, and cheerfully pontificate about things like “the problem of ignorance” and “how to hack the 7 deadly sins” and rant about local news and politics. I used to write blogposts in the office computer while I was in the military. I remember feeling pride at shipping those old blogposts, some of which I’ve archived, but many of which have been lost to time. I’ve written so much – over a million words easily – that it’s almost inconceivable to me. (And then I reflect with awe about the authors who’ve written even more. The New York Times pegs Isaac Asimov’s total published wordcount at 7.6 million — and the unpublished wordcount is surely at least double that!) I remember once sitting with my laptop and a notebook on a Saturday morning, crying to myself because I had
But here I am, sitting at my computer, looking at a hundred drafts and a thousand notes and wondering to myself, why am I so knotted? Why am I so stuck? What is it that I want to be writing? I’ve gotten so swept up in all my grand plans and schemes about what I should write, that I’ve lost touch with the heart. I remember giving myself advice from one of my alts: “The most important part of a book is its heart.” I todl myself that in May 2021, after I had spent more than a year agonizing over Introspect, and I would still continue to spend 9 more months agonizing further. When I shipped the book, with all its flaws and imperfections, a part of me felt like I was surrendering, giving up. And yeah, I know all the quotes about how “art is never finished, only abandoned”. I feel a sadness in that. I’m reminded of my mortality. There’s a whole essay I’ve been drafting around the idea of “artful incompleteness”, and I continue to stew on it because it doesn’t quite seem artful in its incompleteness.
I don’t know. I don’t want to bore readers. Most critically of all, I don’t wanna bore myself. But if I’m honest, I have to acknowledge that I have been tormenting myself with these directives, intellectually dismissing everything as boring before I can even give myself the time and space to really feel what I’m getting at.
The most important part of a piece of writing is its heart. Maybe not all authors would agree with that. Some might say, the most important thing is that you have a good idea, or a compelling thesis. The most important thing might be a sense of plot, a line of action running through the thing. Or that something you write is well-researched and supported with evidence. I can nod along to all of those things. But for me, if I’m honest with myself, the most important part of a piece of writing is its heart. And my writing has felt heartless as of late. I’ve written enough now that words can spill out of my fingers without my conscious intervention, like a musician improvising along familiar scales. But casual improvisation, while a pleasant way to pass the time, is not performance. And here I want to be careful to remind myself that passing the time pleasantly with one’s craft can be a critical part of continuing to love the work. If you’re not having fun, what’s the point?
/// (on creation myths, ethan hawke) like a lot of these things, i think it’s right there in plain sight and people will nod their heads when you point it out “oh yea of course” but few people typically really dig into it and FEEL the intensity within it- usually this happens after major heartbreak, failure, grief,
// abandoned
Amen, brother. Been following that ethos for most of my life and it’s an enriching and enjoyable journey so far. : )