there’s a thing I often wish I could explain to people… but hilariously, it fits the same pattern I’m trying to explain:

a lot of the most interesting, valuable things you can do are things that have very small windows of opportunity so in the case of matchmaking, a beginner matchmaker might think it’s a matter of finding the best possible people (according to some set of metrics) for the best possible people.

but the expert matchmaker will tell you that actually timing and seasonality etc matter more

one of the oldest stories we have on record is from 1850BC Egypt called "The Eloquent Peasant". It's fairly short yet interestingly complex. i'll try and retell it as quickly and entertainingly as i can

we begin with our boi Khun-Anup, a poor peasant just tryna sell his wares... to get to the market he has to pass thru land that's owned by nobles. ultimately i believe the land is owned by the pharaoh, but it's administrated by the high steward Rensi, who in turn lets it be run by the local goon Nemtynakht... a ~4000yo matryoshka of bureaucracy

for starters I don’t think you’re selfish for not having children

and kids actually are a joy to have

but if you need a different reason, I really liked what some other couple once said, about wanting to have “a maximum human experience”. I’ll elaborate how I interpreted that

https://twitter.com/societyqueen999/status/1882024595789959223

but first again I’ll reiterate that you *don’t* have to have kids. i don’t think it’s something that should be done from a sense of weary obligation. I believe it’s possible to have a meaningful, beautiful life without kids and you should do what feels right for you in your heart

nobody is coming to do an honest audit of your time and energy for you

only you can face the truth of how you are living your life, and whether it’s the life you know in your heart you are actually capable of living you dont have to do it alone, but nobody else can do it for you

when I was young I figured out a bunch of solutions to a bunch of problems and I thought it would make people love me lol but it actually alienated me from them, and it’s turns out it’s roughly because people identify with their problems (I then went on to solve that alienation problem for myself by making a bunch of new friends, which involved dis-identifying as alienated)

Obama is still the only POTUS who was born after 1946. He was the only one born after the partition of India. Gandhi's assassination. the Berlin Blockade. the coinage of the term "Big Bang". Mao's proclamation founding the PRC. the signing of NATO. the Korean War. only POTUS born after the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1952, after Everest was summited for the first time in '53, after the Fellowship of the Ring was published in '54, after the first Disneyland opened in '55, after Elvis dropped Heartbreak Hotel in 56, Sputnik launched '57

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