{"id":14432,"date":"2024-07-08T07:05:18","date_gmt":"2024-07-08T07:05:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/?p=14432"},"modified":"2024-10-13T07:06:03","modified_gmt":"2024-10-13T07:06:03","slug":"incompleteness-and-digressions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2024\/07\/08\/incompleteness-and-digressions\/","title":{"rendered":"incompleteness and digressions"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

22jul2024 distractions<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve been kind of embarrassed, maybe even ashamed, to note that there have been many instances now where the following happens: I get my baby to fall asleep, I clean up around the house, take out the trash, shower, get in bed with my laptop, start writing something\u2026 and then switch tabs and check on Twitter. This has happened dozens of times now. It feels like the visitation of an old friend. I had some form of this problem when I was a student who hated school, and again when I was a working adult even with a job I liked. Since them, I have approximately achieved what many struggling creatives would consider The Dream, and yet I find myself repeatedly distracted from The Dream. When I\u2019m unkind to myself, I imagine them looking at me with disgust, \u201cLook at that guy, wasting the opportunity that he has.\u201d I know! I\u2019m sorry!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But if I manage to meditate a little, zoom out and see the bigger picture, I can see that I my understanding of The Dream is a little warped, and I think unfair. It becomes clearer when I separate myself into the maker-self and the manager-self. The artist who doesn\u2019t want to care about anything other than the glory of making art, and the manager who has to steer the artist such that he doesn\u2019t gloriously throw himself (and by extension his family) off a cliff. I\u2019m casually comfortable expressing confidence about my skills as a writer. I don\u2019t feel similarly about my skills as a manager\u2013 particularly as a manager of myself. I did manage some people when I had a job, and those colleagues have said some pretty nice things about me\u2013 I\u2019m good at offering support to other people, helping them manage their expectations, asking them useful questions and so on. Come to think of it, that\u2019s a big part of what keeps drawing me back to Twitter. It\u2019s the temptation of a quick hit of helping someone out with a problem they might be having. Or seeing an opportunity to respond to something or quote something in a way that people find entertaining. I\u2019m remembering now that in the earliest days of my job, I would be posting quite a lot in the company\u2019s general\/random\/casual chatrooms. My boss noticed, and asked me about it. I think I said something like, \u201coh, I thought it would be a nice thing to do, to entertain people, it\u2019s good for morale isn\u2019t it?\u201d And he responded with something like \u201cThat\u2019s true, but if you really care about morale, the actual best thing you can do is to achieve great results in your role, which would benefit the whole company.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I saw that he was right<\/a>. Banter is nice, but not nearly as nice as being on a winning team. And I\u2019ve been feeling lately that I\u2019m in the same situation now, even though I\u2019m no longer working for somebody else. For starters, I work for me now, and it would be great for morale everyone at Voltaic Publishing (me) if I actually published things. I know this from my past experience publishing things. It\u2019s more satisfying to publish things than almost anything else. Theoretically it might be possible to publish so much that I start feeling satiated, but I don\u2019t recall ever having reached that limit. Furthermore, I do have other people around me who associate with me, who would benefit more from witnessing me flourish, than they would from hearing more of my banter. (They\u2019ve already heard so much of it anyway, such that they could probably generate most of it themselves by simply asking \u201cWhat would Visa say about this?\u201d Though now that I think about this a little longer, I\u2019m reminded of past instances in which I\u2019ve asked people to write-as-me, and most responses are always a little tepid and underwhelming. EVEN SO. As I established in The Tavern and the Temple<\/em><\/a>, I don\u2019t think tweeting more will get me to where I want to be).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I \u2014 Beginnings: moving slowly<\/strong><\/h1>\n\n\n\n

START<\/strong> I\u2019m setting myself the intention of writing for about 60-90 minutes. I don\u2019t have any strong expectations or goals. I do have a vague idea I\u2019d like to explore, which is connected to many other ideas and questions and curiosities I have going on. But let\u2019s take it a little slow. I think part of why I\u2019ve felt so knotted in my writing lately is that I\u2019ve been approaching it wrongly, trying too hard to do too much too quickly, and it all gets constricted or overwhelmed. So let\u2019s take it slow for a change and see what happens.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

MEMORY <\/strong>When I say slow, I don\u2019t necessarily mean \u201ctyping slowly\u201d. I\u2019m still typing at a fairly normal pace for me. I mean something more like, moving<\/em> slowly. Like in a walking meditation. Which reminds me of what it felt like when I had just finished my National Service (mandatory conscription in Singapore). For a moment, I no longer had any responsibilities, nobody to report to, no trouble to get into. I was free. I felt truly free. Simply bringing to mind the memory of that felt sense of freedom is relaxing my body, I find myself taking deeper, slower breaths, I feel some muscular tension melting from my face. Why don\u2019t I take a moment to do this every day? I\u2019m so often in such a worried, harried rush. And it doesn\u2019t even help all that much. Perhaps now would be an opportune time to reintroduce some sort of meditation practice. Which\u2026 writing is, for me. Or it was. It can be, when I let it be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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IDEA ON MY MIND (COMPLETION)<\/strong> The topic on my mind is \u201ccompletion\u201d. Closing the loop. Finishing something. What does it mean to finish something?<\/strong> I feel like I could go on for hours about how everything is unfinished. We are born unfinished. We die unfinished. Between the two, we live unfinished. Nothing is ever final except perhaps the heat death of the universe, and even then, who knows? Perhaps that is when everything begins all over again. Such vast scales can be enticing to contemplate, and they can dramatically recontextualize one\u2019s sense of self and being in relation to the world, but those are not the scales at which we live our lives. We live our lives in smaller, \u2018ordinary\u2019 scales. In witching hour writer patterns<\/em><\/a>I quoted Christopher Alexander, who said \u201cIf I consider my life honestly, I see that it is governed by a very small number of pattern of events which I take part in over and over again.\u201d I\u2019m thinking about it again. (Amusingly, it does seems like \u201cconsider Christopher Alexander\u2019s quote about the small number of patterns of events\u201d might be one of my pattern of events. Ah, recursion, how is it that you find me everywhere?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Patterns. Completion. Unfinishedness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Image\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

PATTERNS<\/strong> What is a pattern? It\u2019s something discernable, something that has some repetition to it. I\u2019m reminded of a newspaper columnist I used to read as a kid, Neil Humphreys\u2013 one of the clever things he would do in his writing was that he\u2019d often end his column with something that was a callback to something he had set up at the start of the column. There was something rewarding about it. I remember I\u2019d look forward to reading his columns in the paper, partially because he was so funny, and partially because I knew there was going to be a reward at the end of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CONTRAPOINTS<\/strong> (Which in turn reminds me of an interesting comment I saw on Contrapoints\u2019 latest ~3 hour video about Twilight<\/a> \u2013 someone said something like, \u201cI can\u2019t seem to find time to watch any episode of TV these days, but somehow I found time to watch this entire video.\u201d Which is a fascinating description of a phenomena that I believe is worth studying. My belief is that basically TV is seldom well-written anymore, probably more because of the paint-by-numbers structure of tv show production than because of lack of writer talent. Writers probably aren\u2019t given the time and space they need to really craft something good. Natalie, on the other hand, spent basically the last 18 months making this one video, and wouldn\u2019t have had to argue with anybody other than herself to do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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CREATIVE PROCESS<\/strong> ((And arguing with yourself as a creative can be an exhausting full-time job all on its own!! And is an important part of the creative process! Arguably it is THE<\/em> creative process! Which does then bring us to questions about productive vs unproductive arguments, because one way of explaining why a piece of work is bad is that it didn\u2019t argue with itself enough, and one way of explaining why it\u2019s bad is that it argued with itself too much. How do you tell the difference? I\u2019d say it\u2019s about whether you argued about the stuff that actually matters.<\/em> Here we might talk about the problem of designing-by-committee, trying to please everybody by making compromises that ruin the quality of the thing, pleasing no one. The parable of the Judgement of Solomon<\/a> feels relevant here.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BOREDOM<\/strong> Back to \u201cI found time to watch this 3hr video\u201d. I ended up writing my 2nd book Introspect in large part because I wanted to understand the phenomenon of boredom. From a zoomed-out perspective, it makes no sense to me that anybody is ever bored ever, considering that there\u2019s basically infinite interestingness in the universe. And yet, I myself remember experiencing boredom all the time as a teenager. I spent a bunch of time analyzing my experience, and I came to a hypothesis. The experience of boredom is a confluence<\/p>\n\n\n\n

;;;<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had to take an unscheduled break here because my son woke up, and I had a pleasant time playing with him, feeding him and talking with my wife about the essay that I\u2019m working on. In the middle of that conversation it struck me that \u201cthis might be my Artful Incompleteness essay\u201d. I don\u2019t want to jinx it. A lot of my essays drafts are mired because they have a kind of recursion to them. the Artful Incompleteness essay needs to be artfully incomplete. The Obliqueness essay needs to be oblique. The Frame Stories essay needs to be within a frame story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

;;;<\/p>\n\n\n\n

II \u2014 IN THE MIDDLE OF THINGS<\/strong><\/h1>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAre you done with work?\u201d<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

bitch i\u2019m never done working lmfao lolsob<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Something about me that is both a strength and a weakness depending on the context is that I seem to have trouble sticking to \u201cthe matter at hand\u201d. Given a task to perform, I often find myself questioning the source of the task, the context of the task, the intended outcome. As you can imagine this made me a very annoying student to have in class, bless the teachers who tolerated me. This wasn\u2019t just an act that I put on in school, this is an expression of what seems to be my fundamental nature. I\u2019m like this with everything. When I got my first job doing marketing for a software company, I felt that it was really important that I learn absolutely everything I could about all of the details around the business. I read up everything about startups and ecommerce and software-as-a-service. The thing I really want to get across is that I felt like I couldn\u2019t do my job without all of that context<\/em>. And, looking back, I get to ask myself: was it true? Well. It\u2019s a strange and tricksy thing. The excessive research I would do about everything didn\u2019t always necessarily serve me well in performing my day-to-day tasks, often it was a distraction from it. But from time to time, that excess knowledge would be tremendously helpful in ways I could not possibly have anticipated if I didn\u2019t have it. I would say that it was an impediment to me doing good-enough work, but it allowed me to do great<\/em> work. The single best thing that I did at work would dramatically outperform almost everything else combined, and it wasn\u2019t something I was specifically tasked to do\u2013 it was something that arose from me following my taste and curiosity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel wrote about how people\u2019s experiences shape their behavior\u2013 people who grew up witnessing their parents losing their savings in a big stock market crash tend to be much more conservative re: investing in stocks certain economic conditions have certain outlooks and assumptions, and people who grew up under different economic conditions have different outlooks and assumptions. One of the major lessons I learned from my body of work at work, and from my experience being online for about 25 years, is that power laws are real, their effects are dramatic, and it\u2019s seemingly always possible to create something that\u2019s better than everything else on the field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But here\u2019s the thing\u2026 living with this megahit-chasing process is tiresome and costly. That\u2019s kind of what Moby Dick warns us about, right? Don\u2019t go chasing white whales, it\u2019ll ruin you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

III \u2014 ENDINGS<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

what does it feel like, to be at the end of things?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

there can be a relief in doomsaying\u2026 we\u2019ll all go together when we go<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some people die too soon. To be polite, we can say that everyone dies too soon. But it\u2019s clear that some people died with more left to give, while others have a graceful exit, and others still overstay their welcome. It\u2019s kind of uncouth to talk about that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Da Vinci allegedly said \u201cArt is never finished, only abandoned\u201d. He was a terrible procrastinator with obvious ADHD<\/p>\n\n\n\n

orwell said every book is a failure<\/p>\n\n\n\n

fran lebowitz said words are easy, books are not<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

on digressions<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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here's a funny midwit meme type development i've had over the past decade

in 2016 i wrote a post titled "beware digression", and talked about how in 2013 I used to love digression, but i changed my mind

well in 2023 i change my mind again lol i love digression again pic.twitter.com\/gResm25som<\/a><\/p>— Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) May 8, 2023<\/a><\/blockquote>