at almost every threshold there are a bunch of people who set up a basecamp where they discuss how to cross the threshold. some of those people do go on to cross the threshold, but those people tend to then become incomprehensible to most of those who are still in basecamp one might say “not all thresholds”, but in the model I’m presenting here I’d argue that thresholds that are easily crossed are not real thresholds. it is useful to demarcate the thresholds at precisely the boundaries people fail to cross

over the years I’ve found there’s a discernable “signature” to the way people are confidently wrong vs the way people are confidently right. it’s hard to pin down to any one element though. it’s discerned more ecologically. confidently wrong has a clunky bluntness to it the wrong tend to overuse words like “only” and “never” and often get kinda needlessly aggressive. it’s like they’re trying to bully you into accepting their position. the person who knows they’re right can be more chill and is often kinda laughing about it

A complication tho,

I have a lot of thoughts about this, as someone who both tweets a lot and likes reading books

I think for starters a lot of people do themselves a disservice by comparing their current/adult selves with their tutorial zone kid selves who read when there was little else to do

https://twitter.com/samswoora/status/1857829276822667694

second, I think as people accumulate socialization there’s a lot of “books I should want to read, books I’m supposed to read, books I ought to read” etc which muddy up the list of books you’ll actually read, which is the books you simply want to read

collection of 4chan posts that are extended criticisms or analyses of something, hit me up with whatever comes to mind

1. john oliver 2. harry potter

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

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!”

F

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

https://x.com/visakanv/status/1839700791659270355

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

https://twitter.com/m_ashcroft/status/1837440075782599120

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++

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?

https://twitter.com/mastertimblais/status/1835934391085809818

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

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1110605022968999938

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

a lot of loneliness plays out like this: people accumulate past grievances that they feel have not been appropriately heard. they front-load interactions with this (eg complaining about ex on first date), which makes other people feel unheard. this perpetuates the wretched cycle a lot of solutions to the loneliness problem begin by finding some way to metabolize the grievances, whether it’s through therapy, or drugs, or art

partial solutions are possible and better than nothing; and most people do live in some state of leaky compartmentalization

nonpartisan tweets about framing: scrolling through @joebiden's timeline, which i assume is run by his team, i can't help but notice just how many of the tweets are about trump, with pictures of trump, videos of trump. look at trump, think about trump. imagine trump as president



@JoeBiden I remember @HillaryClinton doing the same thing. imagine trump as president. picture trump in the oval office

https://x.com/HillaryClinton/status/762739172054601728

a critical skill if you wanna walk through the walls of culture, and/or “see the matrix” of social reality, is to de-fixate on who the winners or losers of some social exchange are, who’s higher status or lower status, whose group is better or worse, who’s allied with who, etc the way to de-fixate is to be curious

curious about the truth, curious about how things look from the other side, about how you might be wrong, about what is or is not technically possible, about what the material constraints are, about what the alternate narratives might be,

met a couple of different friends yesterday and today for lots of good conversation and I wanna try and remember stuff that came up, so- a thread of kinda disjointed thoughts one of the most powerful magical forces we’re all in thrall of is how mundane and inert everything appears to be. this is an illusion our minds generate to make things easier to navigate, but it also blocks us from seeing possibilities in plain sight

chaos-surfing well requires understanding a buncha things

1. how things appear to me are not necessarily how they are

2. what people say is not necessarily what they mean

3. what is said/shown is not necessarily all there is

4. what is true for me may not be true for you 5. the same words mean different things to different people

6. people often don't even read what is there, they often see a few words and assume what they thought they saw. you can ask them to repeat things back to you and they'll make up completely different phrases sometimes

I’ve gotten thousands of DMs over the years from people telling me about their problems. Here’s one interesting pattern/cluster I’ve noticed, which I’d loosely describe as

“anxious self-flagellating ambitious guy who desires greatness but refuses to learn from his mistakes” they tend to say something like, “I know perfect is the enemy of the good but I can’t bear to do merely good so I keep trying to do perfect and keep failing. how do you deal with not being perfect?” and- I’ll prob have to explain this but the vibe is very similar to-

https://twitter.com/primawesome/status/1178671690261286918

i used to agonize about this for years. i came to see that the agonizing is itself unproductive, lol. like an athlete who refuses to rest because he's not performing at 100%, when rest is required to perform. the ideal end-state is to transcend simplistic notions of productivity,

https://twitter.com/cxgonzalez/status/1776353308749205574

but ime that's much easier to do from a place of strength rather than weakness, so for a lot of people i actually do recommend getting productive before transcending productivity grindset.

i do believe it's possible to skip the middle, but the people who do don't ask for advice

might change my mind on this later but rn in this moment i feel like the biggest lie i've been told in my life has been abt the nature of distraction. or u could say the nature of attention. it seems to me that the misunderstanding of it is woven into the fabric of civilization i wont claim to have a perfect or even "very good" understanding of it, but I have a growing sense of the misunderstanding of it. a lot of it is downstream of exertion and control

i've circled around and alluded to this a lot over the years, eg:

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1149365496472432640

off the top of my head, a list of things i find myself always a little surprised to have to point out to people: you seldom have to care about "most people" if you're looking to connect with an exceptional person. this is true whether we're talking about dating, friendships, hiring, audience building, etc

visakanv.com/blog/most-peop…

and IME some are so hard to change that it can sometimes be better to work around them even if you additionally believe that the OG belief is wrong or bad or unhelpful

https://twitter.com/surenvynn/status/1770320109929644074

eg in my case I know I have some less-than-ideal beliefs about productivity and rest, yet for the most part it has been easier for me to just work and “earn my rest”, bad as that belief might be, than to dismantle that belief (been trying for like 20 years with minimal progress)

since i was a kid i kept seeing variations of this idea being expressed. the president is an idiot. the boss is a fool. the mogul is a clown. and people would be arguing about whether that assessment was correct or wrong. and that in turn struck me as the wrong frame entirely

https://twitter.com/RuxandraTeslo/status/1768802945187901671

to me, the correct frame, or the lesson to learn, is that you only need to get some things right. then you can be wrong about everything else and still be a rich/powerful bitch talking shit while the people who get everything else right stay broke and mad

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1382130322335096835