on sentimentality

oscillating into and out of the field of feels

MAMA, J-Hope, BTS (2016)

I’m in bed a little earlier than usual at 10:02pm and I got my laptop open and I’m reminiscing about past instances in which I used to write.

vignettes of past writing phases

i. One of the earlier memories I have is… in secondary school, I would have been about 13 or 14, when I would use one of the computers at the school library to write blogposts on my sadly-destroyed Diary-X blog. Sometimes I’d linger after school to write these posts, and I remember feeling a little bit smug, a little bit proud, rather chuffed to be tapping away at the keyboard, recollecting the mundane events of my day. It’s funny to think about in hindsight. Where was that feeling really coming from? I guess I felt like I was building up my self-image as a writer. And I’m grateful to that kid, because he laid the first few bricks of the structure that gives me a deep-rooted confidence and conviction that I kinda take for granted.

ii. A few years later I remember writing my blogposts on my family computer, alone in the home office in the dead of night.¹ I remember some of those moments felt very peaceful and pure, and I even got the sense that someday my life would be much more complicated, and that I ought to appreciate the calm while I had it. I was occasionally quite a wise kid, which I attribute largely to all the reading I did.

iii. Once I was in the military and had some disposable income (technically an ‘allowance’), I remember I would go to the local Starbucks a few stops down the road from my parents’ place, with the janky $100 secondhand laptop I’d bought from a friend, get a Java Chip Frappuccino (hm, I haven’t had one of those in years) and get to work writing about nerdy shit like swarm intelligence and how to ‘hack’ the 7 sins.²

iv. Then I got married, and got a job, and things started to change rapidly. I was previously writing a lot about local news and politics, which initially felt like important work, but eventually started to feel like sound and fury that wasn’t helping much. I struggled to keep up with local events and my obligations at work, so I ended up giving up on the local stuff entirely. I was now writing blogposts for work, which initially felt quite surreal. I had to do more research, and write more succinctly with specific outcomes in mind, which were great constraints. And perhaps the craziest and most consequential thing of all, was that I was adamant about writing for myself.

I got my first smartphone in February 2013 (a Valentine’s day gift from my wife), and I was determined to use it productively on my long-ass commutes, so I committed to writing as many stream-of-consciousness ‘wordvomits’ as I could. I started doing these on my main blog, then spun them off to a separate side-blog after 100,000 words or so. I wrote over 700,000 words (or 700+ wordvomits) when I had my job, and I’ve written less than 200,000 words since. A lot of this is because I switched to tweeting like a maniac instead (which I will write a separate post about), but even then it’s amusing to me how I made the erroneous assumption that, surely if I wrote so much when I had a job, I would write even more once freed from that commitment. It’s not clear whether that claim (“I will write more once unemployed”) was correct in the global sense, because my writing is so scattered, but my personal feeling is that I actually wrote less. There was something about the constraint of the job that made it feel really urgent and important that I keep writing.

on sentimentality

Anyway, all of this is setup for what I really wanted to talk about, which is sentimentality. I was thinking about it in the shower. A couple of days ago I encountered a tiktok that moved me to tears. I don’t know if it’ll have the same effect on you. It probably won’t. Maybe there’s a 10% chance. It depends on your priors. And that’s not important anyway…

Point is– I find myself asking myself, am I a sentimental person? I feel like I’ve oscillated on this over the years. (In fact, I just remembered that I wrote a Medium post in 2017 titled The Pendulum about precisely this. At the time I felt like I was oscillating from sentimental to not, and I’m pleased at how I correctly anticipated that I would likely continue to oscillate back and forth.) Am I sentimental? It depends on the frame of reference. Sentimental compared to who? I know people who are much more sentimental than me, who'd consider me comparatively clinical, even cold. I remember when I was younger I would sometimes be startled by people’s responses when I talked about things– they’d say things like “how could you be so unfeeling?” And it confused me because I felt very much like a person with a lot of feelings, I cared deeply about a lot of things, and it was often precisely that caring that led me to speak up in the first place. I don’t know if I can get into good specifics in this moment.

On the other hand, I know people who are even more clinical than I am, who are coldly methodical, people who would seem maybe outright sociopathic to the people in the first group. It’s a wide spectrum. And I don’t know if I would say that I’m squarely in the middle of it. I was born and raised in Singapore, which I think globally speaking is a less sentimental place than most. People here have long been described as sterile, boring, sometimes severe. I think there’s some truth to all of that, but it’s also complicated by the fact that emotional expressions vary culturally. My sense is that Singaporeans show respect for one another by respecting each other’s privacy, space and time. So our cashiers don’t make small talk. They keep you moving. I appreciate that. But I do also enjoy the opportunity to make small talk with Americans, for example. Though I’ve also heard some Americans complaining that American small talk is fake and forced. I see how it could be that way. There are so many layers to all of this everywhere we turn, and I have to keep moving.

In an assessment of “so is Visa a sentimental person?” I would say… look at my life. I spent many years of my life playing in bands, and even more years writing publicly without getting directly compensated for it. I have always been someone who tries to participate constructively in the public commons, which many people consider a foolish task.³ This is a very unusual thing for a Singaporean to do, but I think it’s also quite unusual in the wider world, too. Though maybe it’s getting less uncommon. I think it’s true that more people are making books, movies, music, video games, etc than ever before. It’s still challenging to make a living from it– I would advise anybody starting out to expect it to take like a decade of slogging on the side before it starts becoming feasible, and even then it’s still a slog. And here I would say, genuinely, it takes a particularly sentimental kind of person to really go the distance. Nobody gets into posting for a living because it’s the most profitable line of work. I hesitate to say “I am an artist”, but… that is basically what I do. I experiment with words and phrases and framings and presentations to try and get people to see and feel things in new and different ways. Sometimes being an artist means refusing the label of ‘artist’. Which brings me to…

on the valence of terminologies

It’s interesting to me that sentimentality, like seriousness, is one of many words that has both a positive and a negative valence to it depending on how you use it. You have people saying “ugh, mere sentiment,” to dismiss something as unsubstantial, or they might say “my sentiments exactly” to convey emotional resonance and alignment. I wonder how large the set of terms like this is. Baudelaire wrote about how his favorite artists didn’t like to be called artists, because that term had come to mean something comparatively trite. (If I had a bit more time I’d love to dig much deeper into this, and maybe do a whole post about his 1863 essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life.) Ralph Lauren said he hates fashion and never thought of himself as a designer. Steve Jobs was careful to say that when he said design, he didn’t mean veneers or ‘mere interior decorating’.

Steve kinda threw interior designers under the bus there, but I think that’s mostly kind of an artifact of speech– I think Steve did actually appreciate serious interior designers who thought deeply about what they were doing, in the way that he described it: "Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service." Interior decorating can absolutely be that profound, too! Really, I don’t think there’s anything that can’t be profound, if somebody really cares about it deeply enough to spend an inordinate amount of time and effort to make it really resonate. And here I find myself feeling a bit self-conscious because I never seem to have enough time or energy to really devote myself to making my works resonate to the degree I wish I could. I find myself scrambling to satisfice for ‘kinda good enough’, and here I guess I’ll point out that, hey, the Apple I was unfinished, and I’m still in my Apple I era.

(source tweet)

the hunger-satiety cycle

It’s now 1:16 AM, and I would like to wrap this up and hit publish, because it’s been a while since I’ve published a Post on here (I’ve been posting a lot of Notes though!), and I’d like to get some momentum going again. I have to ship some unfinished Apple I’s before I can eventually make my Macintosh someday. I’ll get a bit meta and think out loud about what I’m doing here. I was in the shower when I thought about sentimentality. I remember thinking… man, I have all these drafts and notes and plots and plans… but it all feels so inert for me right now. It all feels like work, and not fun or exciting work. It feels like stuff someone (spoiler: my past self) asked me to do, and I don’t wanna.

And I do believe that there’s fun and excitement buried in there somewhere, that’s why I came up with it in the first place, but these goddamn drafts seem to have such narrow windows of opportunity. I typically have to write them right away, or otherwise wait a terminally long period of time until I’ve almost practically forgotten about them. And now that I think about it, I realize that something like this is the case even when I’m looking at other people’s works. If a work moves me to tears, it’s not going to have the same effect on me if I watch it again immediately afterwards. But it typically hits again maybe in a year. There’s some kind of hunger-satiety cycle that I’m not fully cognizant of. If it’s true for say, rewatching The Lord of the Rings (annually is the right cadence for me), then surely it could be true even for my humble little drafts? I typically lay these out in a moment of great excitement, but then I get weary of them, and then I feel bad for being weary of my own drafts. But I’m coming around to seeing that it’s not that the drafts are bad, but because I’m tired. And so the conclusion I”ve been arriving at, from several lines of inquiry, is that the best thing I could do for my work is sleep.

Good night!

1. Here I got sidetracked to look for an old blogpost that I’d written during that time. I just found one that I wrote at 2:25am in 2011, but in the process of looking for that post I ended up noticing some other posts I’d written– some posts about boredom that connected some dots for me, and some local music stuff sent me down a youtube rabbithole for a while, checking up on old bands.

2. Looking back I can see more clearly now that I was emulating the popular blogs of the time to some degree– it didn’t feel like a very deliberate choice on my part, it was mostly a kind of osmosis. Popular blogs wrote about productivity in a somewhat preachy way, and I found myself naturally inheriting some of that style, which took a few more years to shake off.

3. Search “greater fool” in The Tavern and The Temple