connected a few dots i’ve been simmering on for years now
oversimplified: one of the reasons there arent ~“simple solutions to everybody’s human problems” is that what sets off a cascade of insight for someone at one tier of wretchedness can worsen things for someone below
the recent prevalence of the phrase “skill issue” is a useful example to gesture at. it’s a scissor that can cleave a peviously nebulous group into camps of people who feel energized and people who feel demoralized by it
for private individuals, this is basically a good thing. ish. mostly. sorta. you want to be at least mildly polarizing enough that the social reality around you rearranges itself to suit you.
or rather, we cant escape or avoid this. it’s always happening! similar pattern as:
I’ve increasingly gotten the sense that each person has some kind of “wretchedness floor” in their cached worldview. eg re: that viral tiktok girl who moved to Texas. I saw a comment saying “where are her friends?” some people struggle to imagine that someone might not have any
similar general phrasing in other situations is like “where were the parents?” oftentimes the answer is “not there!” or “contributing to the problem!”
most people have a sort of maybe 3-step algorithm (honestly 3 is generous lol it’s probably mostly 1 sometimes 2) abt how to deal with most problems, you get some all time hits like “cheer up”, “man up”, “get over it”, “it’s not so bad”, some fun new phrases like “skill issue”,
this^ makes me want to approach this from another angle... there's something to all of this about Time, and varying forms of time-blindness, and the scales of time that we are socialized to consider and not-consider
i'll try and speedrun a form of it in a few tweets. my first big rugpull shock was probably when the women who raised me, left me. i seem to remember feeling the world going white, cold, screeching, the abandonment felt like a kind of death
for starters I think Rich is totally worth $1000/hr to the right client, even $10k/hr for some
second- I’ve seen versions of this crop up, people balking at how much others charge for their services, and imo it’s a mix of scarcity mindset + lack of project sense, market sense
maybe in Rich’s case the phrase “vibe mechanic” comes across as a little silly or wooey or something, probably on purpose. But what Rich does is help people interface better with each other, and there are corporate contexts where this is worth $100k++
in some situations, like in handling a dispute between two cofounders of a billion dollar company, a “vibe mechanic” can be literally worth millions. Think about this, seriously. Don’t waste your energy fighting and arguing over scraps
I actually wrote @introspectvv because of this. It all began with the question of, how does it ever make sense that I experience boredom when we live in perhaps most exciting, stimulating time in human history? when there’s so much possibility and opportunity everywhere?
I compared it to other experiences like “it’s so crowded, nobody goes there”, etc. in 2016 I didn’t have a succinct 1-word verb for “define your utility-values more precisely”, but I’ve since encoded that into my definition of the word Introspect
there’s at least two kinds of boredom. one is blissful pleasant idleness. nobody minds that. the other extreme is what I call corrosive or foreboding or ominous boredom. (I encountered a book where someone called it DEMONIC boredom lol). And I have a much clearer sense of it now
debating internally whether to discuss someone's earnestly cringe response to a friend's tweet... i'll paraphrase it: ~"you dont know me but we are uniquely suited for each other and we should get to know one another, pls DM me"
(i dont share this to dunk but to help)
i've sorta been on both sides of this, i vaguely recall maybe having sent some earnest emails and/or DMs when i was a kid that were sort of in this spirit, though I think even then I was at least careful to do what I think is the most important part: offer supporting evidence
basically, if you have a special connection with someone– and you might! I have had this with people I had never met or spoken with before! – the way to connect is not to say "i believe we have a special connection", but to *demonstrate* that special connection.