With each passing year I get slightly more comfortable accepting the fact that most complainers don’t really want to do stuff. but still it makes me sad because it means I have to revise my assessment of people in general. I can still love them, but I can’t respect them as much
I spent a lot of my teens and early 20s trying to encourage complainers to do stuff. It was very unproductive and frustrating. I’ve since found that life is 100x better by seeking out people who do stuff. I kinda still have a soft spot for complainers bc in my heart I’m one too
this actually intersects with this previous thread. In a sense it’s disrespectful to “manage” or “deal with” someone in a way that’s presumes they’re diff than who they are. But how do you “really know” who someone “really is”? We barely know ourselves. Yet the 🌍 spins madly on
so okay, you try to escape this conundrum by emptying your cup of assumptions and presuppositions - as far as possible, anyway - and engage with each lovely new person as a fresh set of infinite possibilities...
where do you go from there? IME, I find pretty quickly that different people have different interests, priorities, capabilities and so on, and it would be dishonest to pretend that this isn’t the case. I don’t wanna be harsh or hurtful to anyone but this is just how it is afaict
Sometimes it feels like all one can do is to try to minimise harshness. And there are so many ways to be harsh, unwittingly, unintentionally. It can be a kind of harshness to misread or misinterpret somebody. And yet the nature of communication means this is near *inevitable*
the wrong takeaway here would be to renounce reality - that itself is a kind of harshness to oneself, and you are a person of this universe just like everybody else. I think musicians have this figured out: it’s ok to make mistakes but you try your best to fix and flow as you go
you try to be clear about who you are, what you’re about, what games you want to play - as far as you can, anyway - and be open and inviting to others who want to play similar or complementary games. there is no universal game that’s for everyone and that’s okay
you could reframe this entire train of thought to be one about healthy and good boundaries. I suppose then I am grieving about the inevitability of exclusion. It is not possible to be perfectly inclusive. You can try. You will fail. You can try again, better, wiser. Fail better
I want to be for everyone, but that is a material impossibility. So I have to choose. “I refuse to choose” is also a choice, and one that relinquishes responsibility to the winds of randomness. Can a person do better than chance? Yes: many such cases. Although not nearly enough
A combat medic has to make some grotesquely difficult triaging decisions. He’d love to save everyone if he could, but the best he can do is the best he can do. It’s nobody’s responsibility to save the world. But some of us do have more power than others.
I suppose I’m wondering about what it might be like to renegotiate my relationship with futility, and whether that might do me or anybody else any good. I feel like there’s something very powerful here that I’m not properly facing
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Can’t sleep, time to do a fresh reboot of VV’s talking points
1. Do it 100 times.
Write 100 songs, cook 100 omelettes, talk to 100 people. It never seems like a huge deal until you try it yourself. It’s manageable, and yet it stretches you, and you’ll be observably different at the end of it. Effective way to get a foothold on a new thing
2. Play long games.
This is kind of a remix of 1. Thousands of people will want to start a substack or podcast. Something like 1% of them or less will stick with it consistently for 2 years. If you commit to things for 10+ years, you develop what appear to be superpowers
I’m enjoying it so far - a few episodes in - and it does make me feel good to watch a smol nerd achieve success even as she suffers hardship and loss. When you first buy your first set of X supplies from your winnings at playing X, that is a delicious feeling that not many taste
I remember the first time I was “paid” for playing live music in a bar, with beer and spaghetti. It‘s a contender for the most delicious meal I’ve *ever* had in my life, and I’ve had been privileged enough to have had a couple of ridiculously expensive meals over the years since
I do think it genuinely feels good to see someone receive the opportunity to exercise their talents at the highest level, triumph over their doubters, be supported by some friends and loved ones, and achieve greatness - even if they incur painful costs along the way
interesting thing to try and suss out: is a friend framing a POV in a deliberately contentious way for engagement, or is that just how they see and think about things? And what is their actual preference for the kind of engagement? I bet there’s an old Russian novel about this
I suppose it’s more intuitive if you talk about this in terms of “drama”
the “if it quacks like a duck” Occam’s razor interpretation is, if a person is always surrounded by drama, well they must at some level enjoy drama, or its pursuit.
But also I think it’s true that some people genuinely disdain drama yet have an intrinsically contentious POV
Went to bed but this has been on my mind so here’s a thread on the virtue of vanity.
The word has a pretty clear history of negative connotations and this is a perhaps a vain effort to reclaim it, nevertheless I am adamantly earnest about this
I’ll start by conceding the obvious: of course there are ways in which vanity can be bad, a cope, a distraction, an unhealthy fixation on appearances at the expense of substance.
I‘m saying that there’s also the opposite error: fixation on substance that disregards appearance
Jimi Hendrix always dressed like Jimi Hendrix. I believe that this is an example of AESTHETIC RESONANCE: he didn’t make a distinction between substance and appearance, the two informed each other in a yin/yang loop. Harmony across the spheres!