(2025apr15) a thing I haven’t yet felt like I’ve done a good enough job of conveying is how desperately I sought to escape wagie cubicle life, how I plotted and schemed my jailbreak for years, and how I eventually succeeded. I’ve written-as-I-went it across hundreds of posts on vv/1000/ but– I feel like One Good Essay would let me shake off a ton of tension I’ve been carrying about it all…
actually it would be worthwhile to articulate what the tension is? what tension am I carrying? um… I guess I feel overdue for a ‘narrative refactoring’. a reconsolidation of my story, a recontextualization. my story feels fragmented and incoherent in my head. if i can retell it fluently, there will be all sorts of cool effects.
oh, i’m reminded now that when I tweeted about crossing $100k in self-published book sales, a couple of people asked me how I did it. and the somewhat glib (but actually earnest) short answer is, “1. write in google docs, 2. export as pdf, 3. upload to gumroad, 4. tweet about it”.
https://x.com/visakanv/status/1914733294924783930
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when I tweeted this, someone responded with “you probably gotta explain Singapore first”, which itself feels like something that someone could spend a lifetime working on. which brings me back to a big part of why I’m doing frame studies at all…
but actually let’s set that aside and just lay out 7-12 thoughts
- I hated school to begin with, so i knew that i would hate a regular job where you have to wear a shirt and tie. this caused me immense stress when i was in secondary school and in junior college because i felt like everyone else around me was marching to a different beat. i was out of lockstep with them and i felt immense social pressure to conform, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. you could say this is a story of contrarianism or something and typically people here use this opportunity to show off. but the truth is mostly it was sad. i’m reminded that someone once asked me “how do I be more adhd like you” and I was just gobsmacked by the question. why would you want to be more adhd like me? and thinking about it now i realize, ah, you’ve seen the highlight reels, you’ve seen how cool it looks when things are good. but that’s not the default state. the default state for me has always been rather unpleasant.
- i did figure out very early on that the internet would be my ticket out of the life that everyone said i was supposed to live. (I could write a whole post about this, but what if i only had space for a paragraph?) from first principles– being able to write to anybody anywhere at any time for basically no cost… means that you could, for example, sell books to strangers directly all over the world. or CDs, or whatever you like. you could become someone notable, by being noteworthy, and talking to people. and I pretty much set out to do that. i remember looking at the top posts on reddit and thinking, hey, I’m pretty sure I could do that too. I wrote a blog and I would post about it on forums and on Facebook and so on. I would get comments from people on Livejournal, and replies on various forums, that people enjoyed my writing. All of this confirmed for me that this was a path I ought to pursue. this was validated for me by Quora in 2013-2015 when they honored me with their ‘top writer’ award. Today nobody really seems to care about Quora anymore, but at the time for me personally it felt like a huge honor. I wrote to the internet, and the Internet rewarded me for it. A few years later in 2019, my twitter friends would pay for me to fly out to San Francisco, and by that point I was pretty much certain that I was going to be an internet writer for life. I setup a patreon, wrote an ebook, then another, and here we are.
- I just described everything in a very light-and-breezy way, which is kind of dishonest. I stated no falsehoods, everything I stated was true. But it’s a kind of highlight reel. I gotta talk more about the struggle. And the difficult thing is that I’ve forgotten a bunch of it. I’ve forgotten all the times I had some idea for some novelty account or project that I poured a bunch of time and effort into, and it just fizzled out with nothing much to show for it. I suppose I should talk about my first (and only) job. My ex-boss dinesh found me through my blog– I had been writing about local news and politics as thoughtfully as I could, and he noticed, and he wanted to hire me to manage the blog and content strategy of his ecommerce saas company. it was a great time, I learned a lot and became a better person for it. he was basically a great therapist-coach who cared about my actual performance. I was paid more than I initially dared to believe I was worth, and grew into appreciating how much value I can actually help create.
- but ok so what were the struggles? i think… even just choosing not to focus on the conventional career ladder is something that’s hard to do, socially-psychologically speaking. and uh… it’s been very important to me that i stay true to myself and not compromise on my values, ie not post clickbait, not stir up outrage and controversy… that’s part of it… choosing what to focus on is also tricky… there are all sorts of tradeoffs to be made, and that can lead to decision fatigue.
- tbc