oh, bother
mostly a note-to-self about what to work on next... -ish
(Funnily, like my previous substack Post, this Post started as a Note that kept going. Maybe this will become a pattern. Maybe not. We’ll see.)
What’s going on with me? Fatherhood has kept me busy and tired, but happily so. I’m feeling a little annoyed more locally that I had some thoughts a few hours ago that I got distracted from, they seemed like they were important to me… let’s see if I can recontextualize…
(incidentally, I was watching a bit of Rachel Bloom’s latest standup special earlier, and I was struck by her particular storytelling style. it seems very stream-of-consciousness, but rather than meander excessively, she re-anchors by restating the context, by setting the scene of what is happening. pretty cool to keep an eye out for it if you watch it.)
… oh, right. It all started with a random hater– no mutuals, no followers, and worst of all no tweets of their own other than critical replies to others– coming at me with the old “you’re not interesting, your stuff is entry-level, rudimentary”, etc. It’s predictably familiar stuff to me after all these years, so I no longer feel Attacked in a way that ruins my day— but it’s still always interesting to me, and I try to weave in each new haters’ position into my work if I can. (With this guy I invited him to share his personal interests and curiosities etc, which of course he didn’t respond to.)
Behind every criticism are some assumptions. For example, implicit in “your stuff is entry-level/rudimentary” is “and that’s bad”. But I don’t agree with that assumption. I don’t think writing needs to be complex or advanced to be useful. Furthermore I don’t think writing needs to be “Useful” at all! It’s fine to write something just for the pleasure of it. That can often end up leading to far more “useful” things than writing that tries to be useful. But even that shouldn’t really matter, y’know?
So I started writing a thread about that, to reaffirm to myself my own reasons for writing, which I really liked, actually:
Somewhere along the way, that + I think seeing some tweets about college being overrated, got me talking again about my own perspective on college not being necessary, as someone who didn’t go. I regularly encounter the idea that “it’s always Stanford grads who say that college isn’t necessary”, and I feel compelled to push back on that, because I too felt that way, at least in my own case. I also exist! And I would have loved so much to have heard from someone like myself when I was a kid; that’s one of my main motivations for anything I write. I talked about how when I was 17 I reasoned that I wouldn’t need to go to college to be successful on my own terms, and how everybody in my life told me I was being stupid, or arrogant, or excessively risk-taking. But the math worked out for me.
Then, I got a couple of responses to that that were like, well, they were right to say that, because Most People aren’t going to have what it takes to do what you did. Which, yknow, I have a bunch posts and takes about too. You gotta optimize for survival, study constraints, etc etc. I guess I’m writing this out now to remind myself that this should probably be an essay, because there are several different elements that come into play simultaneously, but the discourse tends to fixate on specific elements. It’s like we’re trying to bake cakes, but people keep arguing about whether flour or butter is more important. They’re both important!!
Oh, and now I’m reminded that someone posted a screenshot of a snippet of my Are You Serious essay, and many of the replies were basically filling in what was in the essay that wasn’t in the screenshot, lol. Which brings us back to some riffs from the tavern and the temple. I might be expecting too much from Twitter. But that’s also how I get so much out of Twitter. There’s a tension there with no simple static answer, it has to be navigated dynamically.
But okay yeah this whole note is me reminding myself to write something with a throughline from my experiences as a teenager (being anxious about really understanding what goes into making a living + being mindblown by the opportunity presented by the internet), through doing the math, and navigating most people’s “1-sigma heuristics” (for living in a world where nobody is 6’6 or has a billion dollars).
It feels like I have dozens of disparate notes and threads and blogposts etc around this throughline that would feel really good if I could consolidate all of them into one elegant reading experience. (I’m just writing that down as an intention for my future selves to rally around.)
Also related is how most people don’t really put in a lot of effort into posting, and so cannot really imagine how different outcomes could be for them if they behaved in different ways. If only people knew how different things could be!!
This note is now 6 paragraphs long. My last substack post was a note that ballooned in size. Maybe I might wanna do the same here. What would I have to do to feel good about shipping this to everyone’s email inboxes? I believe that the way forward is to navigate by feeling. How do I feel? Well… I’m a little self-conscious about having written so much about haters, because it troubles me a little bit to be perceived as someone who cares too much about haters. But my thing is that I care ‘too much’ about everything. I keep all these elaborate ongoing threads about all sorts of trivial things that fascinate me. Why wouldn’t I also do the same for my haters? If that makes me thin-skinned in some people’s eyes, I think I’m going to have to make my peace with that, because it’s more important to me to be earnest and to be honest about my experience.
Also, I relate to this moment in a David Bowie interview once where the interviewer asks, I paraphrase from memory, “Does it bother when people say these hurtful things about you?” and Bowie responded, “Yes, very much so, I am a very sensitive person and it hurts me very deeply.” I’d like to embody that. I want to be heartbroken all the way.
Simultaneously, though, I also relate to a Fran Lebowitz interview where someone asks “does it bother you when people…” and she interrupts with “Yes.”
There’s a lot that’s bothersome about the world. Nevertheless we find a way to ayy lmao through it all…1
Post-script: Is that where I want to end this, or do I have more to say? Let’s circle back to the start. This post started as a note where I wanted to remind myself to piece something together. I expect it to be a really satisfying thing when I’m done, like how I’ve felt great relief at writing my first two books, as well as the Are You Serious essay. It just feels great to have something to point to confidently with “this is it, this has everything you’ll need”, as opposed to rummaging around again for the fifth time to piece together all the relevant elements. But… how do I know it’s going to happen? After all, practically everything on my todo list is some form of “consolidate all the things into a beautiful whole”, which is a nice ideal to fantasize about, but a really challenging thing to actually put into motion. I think the thing I’ve been missing– I knew this before, but it’s so easy to lose one’s grasp on it– is that the core essence of the thing has to be “people-shaped”. Meaning, if I plot out a human story that runs through it from start to finish, it becomes much easier to consolidate everything around it.
*HEARTBROKEN ALL THE WAY SQUAD RISE UP*
This is one of my favourite substacks by you so far. Made me realise that what usually bothers me about criticism isn't the actual criticism as much as it's the assumptions behind it -that I may deeply disagree with. And the point about being useful rather than complex or advanced. I think this is why your writing is particularly good. It's simply and straightforward, not trying to be fancy or important. In a way, anti-BS.
Glad you don't have a manager man. Keep it up, saying what you wanna say, how you wanna say it, when you wanna say it. It does help, and it's useful to me on this day, to feel a little bit more understood