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

Alison reshared this as a response to “what is your contribution to society”. It’s an entertaining watch and rewatch

what i find myself thinking about is how contribution is downstream of distribution. say you do 10 good works, and 1 gets distributed 1000x more than the others

https://twitter.com/tiredactor/status/1759767160346272074

studying how this played out in all sorts of domains is roughly how/why I ended up specializing in marketing, networking, understanding how things spread.

At any given point in time there’s always good stuff going unnoticed and underappreciated

i'm so curious to understand the economics behind this business. have they actually built the thing? how much did it cost to make? what do they do if nobody buys it? how did they finance it? do they sell smaller subs? let's investigate

https://twitter.com/NavalInstitute/status/1754249074226725346

ok so first of all important detail is it doesn't exist, it seems more like a "if you want it we'll build it" type of deal. a lot of press attention for a thing that doesn't exist! (and the attention economics makes sense there; billionaire bashing is always great for clicks)

fascinating. i went to look up the original post because this is so interesting to me. particularly the second paragraph where they list out everything they've "tried", which seems like successful processes (audience, paying customers), before listing out the failed outcomes...

https://twitter.com/volodarik/status/1750271064737731046

the entire second last paragraph is also fascinating to me, i'm not sure if I can fully articulate why. there's a kind of double consciousness going on, and my instinct is that this is what is keeping them from achieving success. to put it bluntly, i think they're playing house

i was rewatching the arnold netflix documentary,
and they kinda casually skim past how, after he decided to stop doing mr olympia contests and get into movies, for 5 years, nothing came out of it. 5 years!! most people would give up imo elsewhere- maybe about the same thing, my memory is a lil hazy– they asked him, "how come you didn't give up?" and he said "oh, giving up wasn't a part of my vision"

actually lemme walk yall thru how i've worked through my own versions of these feelings, ie a realtime rerun of past introspection.

A: "I am a failure"
B: "what makes me say that?"
A: "i am not achieving the results I am supposed to be achieving"
B: "ok, two paths here. (1) where do these expectations come from, and are they reasonable? (2), can we get better results? do we know how? what are the next steps?"
A: 1. "family, friends, society... i don't know if they're reasonable, but it's not like i can realistically get away from them anytime soon..." 2. "probably, i'm not very sure, idk, work smarter I guess..."
B: 1. "when did you last have a conversation with specific individuals about the expectations you're dealing with?" 2. "what does working smarter look like? how are you currently allocating your time and energy? what specific outcomes do you want to make progress towards?" you see how this fairly quickly leads to actions that provide relief. recalibrate expectations via conversations with relevant parties, and get better at project management to achieve better outcomes.

embodying this process eventually eliminated the feeling of "i am a failure"

time and time again i keep finding that pooping is one of the best analogies for talking about emotion. i hesitate to use it because it's a bit gross, but ime it almost always gets the point across simply and clearly if you're shitting uncontrollably all the time, that's probably not good

if you can't shit at all, that's probably not good either

one of the funny things about life– hilarious when it happens to others, humbling when it happens to you– is meeting someone who’s casually, indifferently better at a thing than the median person who makes an identity out of it for example, when a farmer demolishes a bodybuilder bro at arm wrestling without even trying

when a fanfic author happens to have a better info management system than the median “tools for thought” nerd

when a dentist writes a more moving eulogy than someone w/ a fine arts deg

the more experience i accumulate in helping (coregulating) my son eat, sleep and breathe, the clearer it becomes to me that i didnt have much of that myself as a kid growing up, which makes so much of my unhinged childhood make so much more sense i spent my teens and early 20s writing extensive journals ruminating on “why am i so fucked up” and the tldr was nobody taught me how to regulate myself healthily, which meant i was a whole nexus of messy entangled coping mechanisms