Thread by @visakanv

been torturing myself lately for no good reason and had to remind myself I’m living my dream. very tricky and funny business, managing a psyche

the self-torture is in relation to the book which I have inflated out of all proportion into some sort of cosmic struggle of good vs evil when it’s really just a bunch of gibberish in a google docs

was gonna write a blogpost but maybe I’ll just tweet it since I’m here. around 2015 or so when I was working in software marketing I got obsessed with the idea of writing a comprehensive guide to X that would be the best guide to X ever written. This was something I really wanted

I tortured myself over this, like I really suffered. Like I’d agonize over it day and night, with standards higher than any of my colleagues could even really make sense of. It affected my sleep and it affected my marriage. It was my Moby Dick of sorts I guess. At the time

In retrospect it didn’t really fucking matter. No one cares. Even I don’t care any more. I painfully shipped some version of it that I was dissatisfied with, it achieved mediocre results relative to other things I’d done for far less effort with much more fun

when I look back on my accomplishments at work, it’s not even in the top 5-10 things. I helped to hire some great talent. A couple of blogposts I wrote from a place of curiosity brought in tremendous # of leads. But this Grand Work that I obsessed about and bled for? Eh. crickets

so... the book that I’m agonising over... is clearly another one of this

I have once again spent years contorting myself, wrenching my guts, twisting my shoulders and neck in pursuit of some sort of phantom ideal that has very little relationship with reality

I suppose if there’s something interesting to salvage from the wreck here, it’s my relationship with grandiosity. I like to think that I am indifferent to prestige, and I do think that’s broadly true, but I do get swept up in this Magnum Opus, “build a Wonder” type thinking

And the reality is I think that I’m not ready, and I have to face the truth of this. Magnum Opus type works take decades and you can’t force them to happen. You can only pursue what you think is genuinely fascinating. It is hilarious and sad that I let myself be led astray...

... by my own ass

I will still be finishing the book soon-ish but I am making more of an effort to consciously frame it as “this is not a grand work this is just a bunch of notes stapled together, fuck it”