i freeze up when i try to be proper and do keynotes, so maybe i oughta write more casually. it’s hard to relax when something is bothering you. how do you seek relief from what’s bothering you? you do something about it. in my case it’s my drafts, so maybe i should ‘discharge’ them somehow.

✱

I’ve been thinking that I ought to write more casually, since i tend to get stuck when I try to do something ‘proper’. (i have a writing style in mind for these essays that i’m not quite ready or able to inhabit, and i keep getting frustrated that i can’t seem to do a good job of it, and so i’ve been dumping draft after draft, which I realize is probably less than ideal. we’re now more than halfway through jan2025 and I will be quite displeased if I don’t publish anything this month, so i’m just going to freestyle. i don’t know if i’m going to write 100 substack posts in lowercase– i don’t think i will– but i think it’ll be helpful for me to write something in a maximally casual way. ) i’m reminded of how steve jobs once gave an internal presentation on branding while wearing shorts. i find myself thinking about the optics of that: how deliberate a choice was it on his part? was he simply being more casual because it was an internal meeting? or was that too part of his carefully crafted persona? either way, i keep freezing up trying to give my grand keynote, and so i think it makes a lot of sense for me to switch gears and do a bunch of informal sketches. (and now I’m remembering that I already had this thought in an earlier post– in when the vision isn’t manifesting, I wrote “if i can’t write 20 perfect essays (yet), i can at least write 200 good sketches”. [Also interesting here is that as of Aug2023 I hadn’t yet come up with the idea for Frame Studies– I was still referring to this substack by its previous name, Voltaic Verses.] ) I also wanna add real quick that I don’t regret having spent a lot of time thinking and experimenting with the big picture, because I think a lot of that will pay off later. So my frustration is really with the distribution of payoffs…

When I help people get unstuck, whether in my work as a marketing consultant, or in casual conversations with friends and followers, I often ask questions like “what do you really want?”– and I have a bunch of approaches for discerning that by proxy, since asking directly can trigger a stock response– a cover story that isn’t resonant with what the person actually wants, roughly the same way people reflexively respond with “i’m good, and you?” when asked “how are you doing?”. Even then, I recognize that sometimes it can be hard to discern what you want (to go towards), when you’re exhausted and overwhelmed. for a mundane example, if you really badly need to pee, it’s hard to have a conversation about what you’d like to have for lunch. you can’t really think until you’ve peed.

I have felt stuck for a couple of years now– and a lot of it boils down to the challenges of being a full-time parent of a now 15-month-old toddler, as well as undertaking a move to a new place, which will be the biggest financial decision of my life so far. These are quite understandable reasons for why someone might not be very productive. But even so, I believe that I could be doing more than I have done so far. The issue as I see it at the moment is that I have been fixated on trying to do the big thing with limited resources (time, attention, energy), when really I should be recalibrating and doing smaller things. I do still tweet. Tweets are effortlessly easy for me. But I want to do more than tweet. I just haven’t properly determined how to operate in that space between tweeting and writing polished essays. I have actually written some things that describe some of that space, such as resonance over coherence, but it’s not quite enough. It’s just a bit of a vibe. So… figuring out the solution to this project management puzzle is a project itself.

Going back to the pee analogy (sorry)– I think the question I need to ask myself is, what do I need to discharge before I can really experience relief? It’s my drafts. I have all these drafts I want to try and make something of. My ‘main folder’ of drafts has 80 bullets and 68,000+ words in it. At some level I think I should accept the fact that my draft folder will always be overflowing, because that’s just how I operate. But from another perspective, I also think that can be a rather defeatist attitude if I’m not careful. It’s theoretically possible that I blaze through a lot of them, maybe even all of them. I could also just delete a lot of them, which is an option I tend to hide from myself because I’m still grieving past losses of notes and drafts and blogposts. (Which is a long story that I have a draft about, but I don’t currently feel like getting into.)

So, okay. I expect that discharging my drafts will bring me relief. But even that is a project, because there’s so much of it. I could delete some of them. I could summarize some of them. Maybe for the remainder of this post, I’ll do just that– go through my drafts document and see what I feel comfortable transcribing here.

• there are a couple of things i’ve been relearning. one is that i’m very suggestible and very influenced by my environment, the things i’ve read, the people i’m following and talking to, and so on. A part of me sees this as a weakness, or rather, thinks that other people might see this as a weakness. But when I lay it out, it becomes clearer to me that it’s just my nature, and that a clear understanding of my own nature is a strength, because I can be proactive about choosing the influences I want in my life. I am capable of resisting influences if necessary– I got very good at disassociating as a child. But that’s something best saved for emergencies. It’s not a wise way to live one’s life in general. There are costs to that sort of thing. Another way of talking about this whole thing is that we are not immune to propaganda, so we might as well choose the propaganda we want.
• I’m now getting thoughts and feelings about the process of going through one’s notes and touching them. Some things feel more or less resonant in the moment as I go through them.

I was reading a bit of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil a few days ago, and I feel somewhat inspired by the format. It has 296 numbered sections. I find myself compelled to write a bunch of numbered sections myself, as a way of airing out my drafts.

1. inception

“I think it’s about seeing the world anew, in a different frame.” – Dileep Rao (Yusuf), when asked what Inception is about (source)

Inception is my favorite Christopher Nolan film. There are many things about it that interest me, but one thing I’ve noticed is that people tend to either love it or hate it. Of course, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but I do feel like a lot of the people who hate it probably are viewing it through a frame that doesn’t help them enjoy it. And I believe that a good appreciator of Inception might be able to help some people who initially hated it, come around to enjoying it too. This happened for me with the game Red Dead Redemption 2. It’s widely acclaimed as one of the best video games of all time, but I found it plodding and tedious. It was only after watching a youtube video of someone demonstrating what they love about it that I came around to giving it another shot, and ended up deeply loving it myself.

If I had to write just one thing about why I love Inception– I’d have to skip past some of the things like the cleverly intricate structure, and Zimmer’s excellent soundtrack, and say… fundamentally, Inception to me is about the creative process. And I don’t mean that in a superficial sense. In fact– I don’t mean to glaze Inception fans too much, but– I think the difference between people who enjoy Inception and the people who don’t, is the degree to which the individual is able to enjoy participating in the co-creation of the movie experience. Just as the dreamer populates the dream with their subconscious, the viewer of the movie creates the meaning that they want to get out of the movie they’re viewing. This is true of all movies and all media, but it’s not always true to the same degree.

To me, Inception is a movie that belongs in a pantheon alongside Alice in Wonderland and The Matrix. The very concept of nested dreams is something that I think challenges viewers to ‘expand their minds’… (better way of saying this?)

2. structure

Broad question: How do you build useful structure? How do you identify and eliminate unhelpful structure?

A related question I’ve had is “how do you deal with messes”, and the clarifying insight that emerged for me is “a mess is not just a clutter of objects, but of intentions, and that’s what makes it really hard to tidy.” If you had clarity of intention, it becomes obvious what belongs and what doesn’t, what should be prioritized and what shouldn’t. But a muddle of intentions leads to a muddled reality.

It dawned on me recently that I’ve settled on Frame Studies as the overarching theme for my current writing era, because I believe that the solution to my problem of mess lies in better understanding how to frame things. I have a decent understanding, which is how I got this far, but I need to get even more skilled if I want to transcend my current circumstances. The meta here is that I enjoy this framing– I’d much rather write about something that I’m figuring out, than write introductory educational material that people can just look up themselves.

An interesting idea I had about messes was “I should make a home movie about it”. There’s something about that act that reminds me of rubber-duck debugging, or simply just explaining an idea to someone. I could try to do something with my phone… I’m trying to project-manage this appropriately here. What baby steps can I take here that feel energizing, rather than overwhelming? I could take photos and put them in an album on my phone.