#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously

28:27So I don't want his relationship with gambling and I don't want the way that he cheats on his wife all the time. And I don't want the fact that this person never really seems to be able to speak their mind and so on and so forth. And their waymark is in the ground. You sort of place these different waymarkers of stuff that you don't want to be like. And I think that's reassuring to anybody that feels like they haven't yet found a role model or an encouraging word in your ear, because if you haven't had a single one of those, the likelihood is that you haven't just been sort of moving through some really boring gray middle zone, what you've been exposed to is the opposite end of the bell curve.

29:03Lots of people like the person you don't want to be like. And it was just a, I thought that was an interesting and nice way for me to rationalize, I'll comeize the situation that I've been in. And it's for the people who don't have that many role models around them, I'm sort of here for it. Yeah, I respect that so much. To decide to do that kind of alchemy is profound. Actually, I'm curious. Did you read anything? Would you point at anything that kind of set you off on that? Or do you feel like it was really just within? It was intuition, I think, mostly. that I just, I didn't fit in. I didn't resonate with the people around me in the way that they resonated with the people around them.

29:52And you know, you find little glimpses every so often of someone that you can sort of get on with. And much of this is your problem, right? Much of this is a you thing that you don't really fully know how to present yourself in the most legible way. Yeah, how is it that's best for me to be understood by people. It's not compromising, it's not changing yourself, it's not being a shape -shifting, like, sort of social climber, but it's putting your best, easy to understand foot forward. You know, you don't need to talk to people about your rampant flatulence or erect out this function on the first date.

30:24You don't have to save that for further down the line. And, yeah, the sort of social morays and graces and how you sort of slowly acclimatize people to you, it's a skill. It's a real skill and it's a skill specifically for people who are serious and who care about things and who want to have deep and interesting relationships with their terrified that if they bring that up to early on, people are going to think that they're some sort of a nerd or they're not fun, they're not playful, they're going to be a buzzkill. Don't bring Visa, he's just going to talk about feelings again. You know what I mean?

31:00You don't want to be that guy, especially when you're young. And I really think that the point you made before about how when you're first starting out, You have no legitimacy. Why on earth do you person at the same level as everybody else? I .e. zero novice beginner starter? Think that you have the right to be able to be this serious about anything. Why on a so fucking patronizing in a way that you build it's solipsistic, it's egotistical, it's narcissistic to think that you deserve this level of like rigor. But then when you look back, like you need to have some of that, that spark needs to be there.

31:43Also, you're never going to take it sufficiently seriously to actually be able to become good at it. Yeah, I actually thought about this a lot and I've encountered it myself back then and even now sometimes. And I find that what I find myself often saying is that, you know, So there are assumptions buried in culture that people just internalized from their upbringing from wider society or whatever. And the idea of deserving is very, is very tricky stuff. You know, it's very, it's a like, you know, I think there's this implicit sense that it's like status hierarchies and concepts of like royalty even like, you know, it goes back all the way to like our founding, like our earliest myths mythology and you know like if you go back and you know you can actually look at like Disney movies and even superhero movies or whatever and it's like oh you have to be a prince or a princess to be able to have agency right and like and that's like bestowed from its implied it's like you're the chosen one you're the divine whatever it's like everyone else is just you're meant to be a peasant basically And like this, these intuition still remain in modernity, right?

32:56And the way I put it is like, I'm not special that I get to be serious. Anyone can do it. It's there for the taking, right? And it's just, I guess maybe there might have been some validity to those old heuristics in ancient times. But, you know, and like one one analogy I would use is like it used to be that if you wanted to have your own TV show or a podcast or whatever, you basically had to go through the gatekeepers of traditional media. And back then producing video is very expensive thing to do. And so it was highly resource intensive. And like whoever had the cameras back then or like, you know, that whole operation, like they you would need to justify things to them.

33:40You would need to, oh, I'm going to do a show. It's going to make this much money. It's going to grow this much audience or whatever. And now with like YouTube and iPhones or whatever like even end like the cheapest phones Anyone can record anything and upload it for basically free anytime But that has been true for like a decade at least and yet people still think that we we always use our old intuitions Yes, and so like the present reality that we live in culturally is always like 30 to 50 years behind Or maybe even more. As you say, this medieval, serphthem environment where, well, you've got to work for the Baron and the Baron is not going to let you do this.

34:21Think you need to have agency bestowed on you. But you're right. So the gazetarianism is freed this up. There was a time where as a parent, if your son is trying to let's say wear fancy clothes, you would be protecting him by telling him, don't do that. the Baron has a temper, he doesn't like to see anyone other than Royals dress up, he's going to kill you. And so they are protecting you by saying those things. But that's no longer true. But it's like that story of the five monkeys beating each other because they used to get electrocuted. So yeah, culture evolves very slowly relative to... I had a great conversation with this guy that researched the history of humans discovering their own ability to destroy themselves.

35:07So a history of existential risk. And he's got this great term that is apparently in the literature called conceptual inertia. And it, let's say that we have a Copernican revolution, we go to learn that the universe is perhaps constructed in a different way to the one that we believe. And first off, people will deny that it's true. And you will continue to need to push with evidence and data and so on and so forth observation and then after a while maybe some of the elites will begin to accept that it's true that maybe some of the normal people will begin to accept that it's true, but they still don't behave as if it is and that's conceptual inertia.

35:44It's the archetypes, it's the stories that we tell ourselves, it's the way that we see the world and this just lags behind this lumbering behemoth that we need to fucking drag along. And the other thing just to kind of round out that the social element because I do get the sense that that's a really important seriousness derogating element that the social incentives will align for you to go back to the mean with anything whatever it is that you do even if it's aggression you will be socialized to be less aggressive if it's funniness like if you're too much of a comedian or it's like do come on we're trying to be it's a It's a fucking funeral.

36:26That's be serious here. But, and I always wanted, especially because I was very sort of lonely as a kid, I always wanted to work out how to make people like me. I wanted to be accepted. I wanted to have friends. I wanted to have a support system. And it took probably until about a year ago for me to realize that I always thought that people wanted to be around charismatic individuals, other people around them to be charismatic, to have some sort of, you know, gravitational sense, some sort of pole. And then I reflected on the friends that I like to spend my time around. And it wasn't the people who were the most interesting.

37:12It was the people who made me feel like I was the most interesting. So I came up with this idea of inverse charisma, which is what you want to be trying to cultivate is not necessarily a sense of everybody going, God, I'm so glad Vs is coming. He's gonna tell us all these amazing stories. He's gonna be like regalus with a dance. You know, he's gonna do the limbo thing again. We don't want that. What we want is Vs is gonna come. Fuck, like, I, I, I, I, he always brings the best out of me. I always feel good when I'm around him. And none of the feel good when you're around this person has got anything really to do with them, other than their love, their kindness, their curiosity smeared across time.

37:51And yeah, I think it's just for the fellow charisma uninfused out there, the people who maybe don't think, I'm not full of confidence and charm and wit and whimsy. It kind of doesn't matter. You can actually be one of the best -liked people in the room to whatever regard you care about, simply by being interested in other people, not necessarily by just being interesting. Yeah, I think there's a kind of a selection bias effect or a garrisonous effect. I call a version of this the Times Square problem where people like imagine thinking that the only thing in New York is Times Square which is like all the ads and all the garish lights and everything which is you know it's interesting to check out but like similarly like you know some people think oh the only people on YouTube are like Mr.

38:46Beast and whoever is like it's when there's like so much interest in this, just like two streets down, three streets down. I follow this like published, some just some guy running a really old printing press kind of thing, it's fascinating. And it's like that kind of, it's not exactly the same thing, but like his love for his craft really shines and everyone in his domain loves to be around that. It's just so nice to see someone lovingly tending to the thing that they care about and it doesn't need to be shoy or flashy or loud. That's just you know, if you filter that out, suddenly you look at the rest of the landscape and it's like, oh there's so much interestingness everywhere.

39:28Talk to me about the relationship between seriousness and earnestness. Hmm, well I feel like earnestness is at the heart of like you can't really be serious and not be earnest, right? I guess you can choose how much of it you want to show. I'm not entirely sure why I've used two different phrases in two different essays, but it just felt natural to me, I guess. So I think my earnestness essay says there's nothing easier than being earnest. So I got around to talking about earnestness by talking about ageiness. And I guess I like the that's probably how I ended up doing that. Because you could also say there's nothing easier than seriousness, but it's nice to have a little bit of a public service.

40:18But yeah, so basically the interesting thing about, so some people want to be, they don't want to go with the social hurt, they don't want to just say what everyone else is saying, they don't want to think what everyone else is thinking. And so they begin with that and then they think, well, I should contradict what is being said, which can be a little bit of a public service. And I think it was more of a public service in the past when we didn't have like Twitter and comments like you know like in your in your social friend group if Five if you're in a group of six guys and five guys always saying the same thing the sixth guy who says the other thing is Providing the group with like a useful service, right in a sense, but if it's something like you know you so you upload something online and and some like inevitably you know some guys gonna present the critical contrary perspective.

41:10So each additional contrary perspective doesn't add very much. And again, there's one of those things where like people are not yet good at acting in large groups. They still, no snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche, right? But the cool thing is, no, sorry, I didn't finish that thought. If you are gonna try to be edgy by reacting to what the consensus is, You're always gonna be lagging behind the consensus. So the consensus is there then you analyze it You compute your response and you're always gonna follow the consensus and in fact So like if you're like a rigid hetero doxies like you're being the opposite of what's the orthodoxy your Mathemat you can like map it out almost mathematically people you're still Following the hurt you're just well.

41:55Yeah black a black sheep is still a sheep right? Yeah, and And on the other hand, the interesting thing is if you go inwards, right, you follow your own heart, you follow your own Interestingness, you do what you deeply care about Because each individual is socialized like kind of on the outside the sole layers of socialization begin The way to talk about this is like a young children when they first start writing poetry they write excellent poetry because they haven't learned how ordinary people speak and so they have all these very fresh uses of phrasing that Seem surprising and almost like at the real like this.

42:37They'll just say very cool things until they get to like I don't know like starting for thin and they start caring about their peers and so yeah The kids like toddlers like three to seven. They are excellent freaks You know and I think several artists have quotes that's like the challenge is to remain childlike and not let the world whatever which is difficult but yeah so if you if you go inwards and express what's really true for you and what you feel you know like what you'd like daydream about what what you dream about literally so like that stuff and you express that you end up being more quote unquote contrarian you end up being away from the hurt.

43:18Like so, I think this is another thing where people who make predictions within a group, they tend to, it's like they're playing the price is right. Sort of, you know, they all kind of calibrate their guesses in relation to everybody else's guesses. And so there's like a bell curve of what all the people guess. And sometimes the answer is way out in the field, far away from the bell curve, right? It's like a thousand times more, 10 ,000 times more than, or whatever direction. And the person who figures that out is the person who wasn't listening to everybody else. And the way that, yeah, so the person who isn't listening, well, from time to time, be more radically edgy than the person who's trying to be edgy.

43:55Which is, it's kind of a trip. You think about it for a while and it's like, whoa, you know, yeah, just following your own rhythm gets you somewhere else. You have this great line in that essay where you say, as a general principle, if your position on things can be picked out very easily, predictably, it's probably worth being suspicious of it because you're basically running a simple script. And if nothing else, maybe consider that you might soon be easily replaced by a chat GPT bot coming to your Twitter timeline near you. I talked earlier about how earnestness gets suppressed. Sometimes a person who has lost the ability to focus on what they actually want can become superficially motivated by the social activity of attacking other people for the imperfection in their utterances.

44:36It's a fairly hollow form of nourishment, but hungry people without any good food will eat anything they get. Yeah, man, I sound better than right thing, but when I speak... It's a British accent. It's a British accent. Yeah, it's very... You should get you to speak my audiobooks. Yeah, that's true. You know, it's... What does that say about that? It's really... Well, when I hear that, you know, I find myself feeling some empathy for... You know, people who don't know how to be better than a hater. You know, it's like nobody, you know, like some people say they want to be haters, but you know, I kind of believe that if you could know how, if you could figure out how to be a door for your idiosyncratic personal flavor and style and essence, like you wouldn't want to go around disturbing, like annoying people for engagement, right?

45:30Like you just like again, we live one short life and like you want to look back and be like, oh yeah, I really, you know, I'm pretty good. Well, yeah, there's, there's some context in which that's true. But like, if you're doing it, like compulsively, you wake up in the morning, you scroll your feet and you look for someone to be mean to, like, you can do better, you can do better than that. That's my thing. Yeah. Yeah. What's your, you start that essay with this really lovely quote from Ted Hughes saying, that's how we measure out our real respect for people by the degree of feeling that they can register.

46:01What's that make At this think of this actually ties back to what we're talking about earlier about When I was bringing up Christopher Alexander and stuff like you have to feel like feeling is feeling is the highest bandwift thing That a person is capable of I think like this. There is you know, I love this This is book called the user illusion by Tor nori Trandus. He's a Danish physicist It's not a very popular book because it was written in Danish originally But he has all these brilliant bits about consciousness and And one of the things he says is that the bandwidth of feeling is more than the bandwidth of knowledge.

46:36I'm paraphrasing. I don't know what exactly he said now. And the bandwidth of knowledge is more than the bandwidth of communication. So we feel more than we know and we know more than we can say. Right. And we're like, and thinking is somewhere in the know to say aspect. So what that, if you sit with that and you really feel it, what do you realize is that you feel more than you can see. You feel more than you like what you think about something and what you feel about something the feeling is much more nuanced the feeling is much more and think about you know Intuition right like so one of the ways I think about intuition is that it's like you have a felt Understanding of all of the ecology of relationships of things around you one of my favorite stories is I think they want to melt up glad about books He talks about a fireman who goes to a fire and like a senior fireman And like all the firemen are trying to work on the fire and he's just standing there and he's like Something's not right.

47:31We got to get out like it's weird We got to get out and then he gets everyone out and like a second later the whole house collapses He he didn't think what's going on. He felt it and what he felt was it turns out He felt that hmm the fire is not going away the way it should the smoke there's not enough smoke for this level of heat There must be and turns out that the fire was in the basement So it's way hotter than what they were used to. But that's something he felt. He didn't think it. And I feel that similar to that kind of intuition, and that kind of intuition requires domain familiarity and expertise.

48:04So it's not the lack of a physical. I feel like the world should be more like this. So I feel like, having an ice cream, if you want to have an ice cream, go ahead. But it's like, I feel that that person is bad vibes. Like, okay, those things are kind of, it varies from context to context. but what I'm getting at is there is, so like going back to the tattoos quote, the amount of feeling that we are able to experience and like surf the waves of, because like our education systems and civilization as a whole, right? To minimize inconvenience to people because we are all smushed together in very cramped environments.

48:46Civilization is, I call it, you know, It's like this iterative potty training. Like it's at the most fundamental level. Please don't shit in the street. Don't shit in front of your friends. Like shit in the toilet. And shit on try to do it at appropriate times. So potty training is good. You want people, if maybe if you live in a barber and in the wild, you can shit wherever you want, whenever you want, doesn't bother anybody else. But it's a public health issue if people are shitting everywhere. So people need to be potty trained. And what that means is you need to be emotionally regulated. You need to regulate your feelings.

49:16You think you want to go now? No, you got to hold it in and go somewhere else. But okay, so that's that's party training and then you go on to I'm angry. No, you shouldn't be angry like you're saying you get socialized to be less aggressive, right? Like you need to we need to find ways to Express our feelings in healthy ways and in good containers that don't put other people on this like excessively or unnecessarily or whatever but so from civilizations point of view That's a little bit more complicated than complex than it can manage So what it does is it tells people to suppress themselves and it enforces this through culture and institutions and everything else And so you have all these people who are suppressed all the time and they feel like shit And they don't really know why and then they take drugs and then they all all those things but It is possible once you are awakened to this reality to realize that you have the capacity to Re -regulate yourself in a way that is optimal for you, right?

50:07So the thing is Civilizations mechanisms are optimal for civilization and we all enjoy the benefits of civilization So, you know, I'm not like anti -civilization or anti -capitalism or any whatever. It's just we inherit the circumstances that we're in. It's on us to take it and double it and give it to the next person. No, it's not. I've got the idea in my mind of being over -civilized. Yeah, that's a degree of over being over -civilized and done to civilized. The Bureau can't imagine how to a barbarian civilized is an insult. Like you people need contracts to make, like do things together. like you don't trust each other, you put people in boxes, in jails, like this is, you know, it's a different value system, right?

50:48It's certainly something that I've had to get over, um, did therapy twice a week for around about the last year or so. And uh, in that, you're basically inviting somebody into a very intimate part of your home and they're pointing at all of the weird stuff that you've got. And they're like, why is that single spike on the floor over there? And what's that disused train set about? And what's this thing? And what's that thing? And I notice that you keep on walking over to the sink backward as opposed to forward or whatever whatever. And I'm one of the things that I realized was that I have a people pleasing tendency.

51:20I see other people's emotions as my responsibility that they're well being emotionally is on me and that it's partly my problem. And what the one of the issues that you come across with that is it's very difficult to advocate for your own needs or your own wants or to learn to forcibly say no because you know that invariably this is going it calls some sort of imposition or discomfort to somebody else. And if your concern is ever making anybody else ever feel uncomfortable, it's very unlikely that if you will subjugate your own desires in place of their well -being, even if you're in the right, even if you as a person that is you should advocate for you.

52:00So that's been a really interesting way of literally trying to uncivilize myself in some regards, I guess. And the curse of the people, these are is that people can tell, or like you're dislinning people can tell if you are like stiff in a way that's like, oh, you I need to put your needs first. And then subconsciously, or consciously, if they thought about these things, they know that they can't entirely trust you to take care of your needs. And so then they don't, they're not pleased, right? Like they, and then they don't trust you. And then it's like, oh, you want to make them feel better. And they're like, I don't trust you, you know, like, you said it.

52:33You say in the seriousness essay that it's like this sort of odd roundabout uncomfortable truth of life that the more you don't care about what other people think about you the more they seem to like you. Yeah, it's crazy. It's such a, you know, I'm writing about all this from a new angle now where I talk about like a blessedness spiral upwards and a wretchedness spiral downwards. And like it's so tragic because the more blessed you are, the more blessings you receive and the more wretched you are the more principle all the way up the way down. Exactly, exactly that. Yeah. And it's so harsh actually, you know, it's like every time you cross a threshold, suddenly everything's just better.

53:14And I think people know this instinctively, which is what part of what drives the desire for like wealth and like social climbing is that you know that at the next level, some things are less bad. And like, you know, I remember once my wife and I I think it was during COVID or something, there's a discount on the fan's gifts hotel in town. And so we decided to go. And so it was wonderful. And then we had breakfast the next morning with all these people who are very obviously wealthier than us, like a whole tax bracket or two tax brackets higher. And it was such a lovely environment. Everyone, like people are playing with the children, everyone is speaking politely.

53:52And I found myself getting kind of angry. Like, man, rich people have it good. And not just that they have consumer, you know surplus, consumer surplus, not that they have spending power, right? It's not that they have fancy things. It's that in the nice neighborhood, it's peaceful. It's You know, I'm sure there's problems that I'm not aware of like there's more pressure, you know, like there's more Like they seem to have a lot of like family squabbles about inheritance and stuff So like every context has its own Upside and downsides, but in that moment I was like whoa like I am underestimating how much I would actually appreciate like having access to those kinds of species, which is a...

54:33Well, think about how much less stress there would be on you. You know, there's this sort of poverty, this odd poverty trap, which is... Poverty is expensive, yeah. Yes, poverty is very expensive. If you're constantly having to get credit lines extended, if you're having to work two jobs, which means that you can't improve your education or your qualifications to get a better paying job, you're kind of stuck. and then you, some people get to escape velocity in one regard or another. And some people, you know, the Elon's of the world, the Bayes' Ossets of the world, have this sort of, I don't know, like infinite money glitch, or at least it seems like that, to everybody else.

55:08And then you think, what sort of quality of life comes along with that? And yeah, it's a weird thought to consider the advantages, is that wretchedness spiral and that sort of ascendancy spiral as well. Yeah, yeah, it's just such a... And it's almost too much to think about sometimes, I think. I think, again, everyone is living in the immediacy of their reality. It's like, you have... It was on your to -do list for next week. What's on your... You've got to ship this thing for work. You've got to deal with changing the oil on something. There's all these nitty -gritty things. And it's challenging to step back and really see the big picture and have like a long view of what I really want my life circumstances to be and you know, it's Yeah, it's a lot.

55:58It's it's What's your advice for people to sort of continue struggling cheerfully when things aren't going quite as they'd hoped? Huh, man, I have been in that state for the past couple of years, Aish. It's funny, because you know, when I was, it's like a, so I have struggled differently at different stages of my life and currently it's the best stage. You know, like I'm, when I was a teenager, I was struggling with, you know, my family didn't believe me when I said I want to be like an author and like my friends, you know, but didn't like that. I struggled to get people to take me seriously. And those struggles were in some ways harder, but in some ways also, I guess, more freeing.

56:45So this goes back to every stage is different and has its pros and cons. But so in my current stage, like I've written two books that I'm happy with and my readers love them. But like instead of directing my energy towards like doing marketing for them and selling more books and whatever, I feel like I gotta move on to the next project and like do the third thing. And that has been a struggle for me because I mean, I guess any interesting work creatively is gonna be a struggle because you're trying to buff something that doesn't already exist. And so you have to find new perspectives and you have to, you wanna say something and it hasn't quite been said before and you don't know how people are gonna receive it.

57:25And you know, it's just, it's just a lot. And I have woken up very often, I'm gonna, oh my god, what am I doing with my life? I wonder why am I going to do this thing? Why is progress so slow? There's all these unpleasant thoughts. And it takes effort to contextualize things for myself. I have to actively remind myself when I go for a walk or something. And be like, Visa, do you know you're living your dream, your teenage self's dream? Like if I could talk to my 17 year old self and be like, oh yeah, I don't have a job. I just write and I talk to people. I just do whatever I like. I just, you know, he'll be like, what?

58:04How is that possible? Like how do you like you succeeded? Like you've made it, man. I'm like, yeah, I just feel like a, you know, I, it's, this is called from Steve Jobs again, where he says, when you haven't succeeded yet, when you're like, it's a nobody, right? It's fun to fantasize about all the riches and all the things that about dreams, like grand dreams. But once you have some means, once you have some money, you have some authority, some influence, whatever. Now the chance of your dreams coming true is not zero. It's not one either. It's like in between. And you have responsibility for make to make that happen.

58:38And it's a burdensome responsibility I feel. And like, you know, I always feel survivors guilt as a creative. You know, why me? Why not? I know that there are people who are surely more talented than me, more intelligent, more articulate, whatever. But, you know, maybe their mom is sick. And so they've never had a, like they've had to work extra hours and so they haven't had time to write, right? And I always feel like I got to make it for that guy, you know, because he might care. That's maybe my, I feel like it's a little bit similar to the, your people pleasing stuff. Maybe I'm not sure. But like, anyway, you were asking about, how do I help people who want to struggle creatively or struggle cheerfully?

59:15Right? There's layers to this. But I think Mark Manson has a quote about like, whatever you do, you're going to have to eat shit. I don't know, I've I think shit so much in this call. Whatever you're gonna do, you're gonna have to eat shit. So find the flavor of shit sandwich that you like. Find the thing. Orient yourself toward the pains rather than the pleasures. Yeah, like what pain can you endure? And like what? So imagine you struggle at a thing for the rest of your life. And on your deathbed, you know, maybe you had like some minor success, but it never really fully paid off. But you imagine yourself, so imagine you could, like it's, this is a great exercise by the way.

59:52thought experiment of visualise your old self and visualise your young self and like just have a conversation with them. So I imagine like a 90 or 100 year old visa and I imagine a few different versions of them. But like one of them is like visa. I've been working my butt off for 50, 60 years writing every day and I have not achieved any great success. And then but like I'm like, but did you let you love it? And he was like, yeah, I loved it. I love writing. I love playing with words. but I made friends with other authors, we discussed things that were interesting and it was a good life. I can visualize that.

1:00:28If you told me something like, well, imagine these are being a software engineer and never really, I know I could do it if I wanted to. I don't want to though, it's not. So find the struggle that you enjoy for its own sake and you don't mind not succeeding at. And then you have the energy to keep going. And I guess defined for yourself small victories that are victories to you even if it's not victories to other people And I found you know, so I've been writing for a long time There were things that I wrote like 10 years ago or like you know Many years ago where nobody in my life then cared about my writing But I thought it was good and then now 10 plus years later when I do have an audience I can share that all stuff with my audience and they're like whoa, this is really good I'm like, yeah, I know right.

1:01:15You know, so it's like if you are a success to yourself and no one else sees it, but you have to see it, right? And there's a quote from, I think from less brown, like if no one else will see it for you, you have to see it for yourself. Like you have to be honest about what you think is good work. What you think is this was worth doing. I think this is worth doing. I think this is worth struggling at. And if no one else sees it, I'm just, I will see it for myself. And then you try and find one other person who can see it and then another person and then another person, right? And then in that kind of mindset, I think you can try to be cheerful about it.

1:01:49There's all these other project management, nitty gritty stuff. So don't attempt extremely large projects that might sink your ship if you fail. I think Niji said something like write 100 outlines of essays or drafts or something. Like so you can, if you can, like, the saddest thing I see from time to time is like an author who spends, or like a startup founder or an author who spends several years of their life and a lot of their money and their resources and whatever, working on a project that turned that they had like this kind of white whale idea like, oh, when my novel is done, everyone's gonna like them.

1:02:26They're amazing. Yeah, and then you do this really big thing and then you talk to people about it for the first time and they're not interested and then there's just so depressing and so dis -hapening, whereas what you want to do, and this is part of being cheerful and whatever, you want to do a little sketches, little outlines, little drafts, and then share them with people, and then see how they respond. And if you just talk to people every couple of days, even just a regular conversation, you may notice at some point you make someone laugh, or at some point their eyes light up. And those are the moments that you want to collect and pay attention to, and you do more of that.

1:02:58I love the idea of sort of the challenges that the person who's not yet successful, but not a total noob is encountering. And the fact that sympathy for successful people is very unpopular, but there is certainly a new skill set that everybody needs to learn. Just imagine that you get to ward where you want to be. Not even where you want to be. Just imagine you get to ward where you want to be. What fears are going to come into your life that you don't have right now? Well, what about the fear of losing something? Right, you've got something to fucking lose now. The climbing higher simply gives you further to fall.

1:03:38You've got the onus on you to continue doing the thing because if you don't, you've actually risked something. Now, as opposed to before, you know, if you haven't made any, if no one reads your blog, if nobody cares about your t -shirt designs, If no one's supporting your sports team or you're buying your products or whatever, what does it matter if you quit? It doesn't care. It's all on you. It's just a passion project, but that's not the case anymore. You've got this beautiful idea of the scarcity sprite, and it really sort of spoke to me. You say, this particular ghoul looks to me like a scarcity sprite, a grabby, anxious being terrified of coming across as ungrateful out of touch and selfish, terrified of losing or squandering the opportunity that fortune has granted us.

1:04:22It's a sort of emotional flashback of some sort, and that's something I expect I'll have to sit with and meditate on. As I revisit this, a small part of me shiely raises his hand like a kid in a classroom and says, it's okay if you lose everything, I'll still be your friend. Yeah, man. Dude, fucking unbelievable, that sense of support from yourself from the past. I'm praying with you for doing what you did. Yeah, that's... I have my moment, huh? When I hear this, it doesn't feel like me. I can recognize that it's me. It's kind of a peak -stake me. I know you mean. It's a day to day I don't feel like my best self.

1:05:06I don't feel like my best writer. But I got to keep doing stuff and then it just comes by and flow. Elizabeth Gilbert has a great chat talk about this, where she talks about the myth of the genius, of the creative genius, like in the sense, where it's like, she goes back to, because she was a successful author of Eat Pray Love, and she described how, when she was a struggling author, people were like, how are you gonna feel, never making anything worthwhile? Like, what if you're never gonna make it? And then immediately after she made it, immediately people are like, oh, I'm too afraid you're never gonna match up to that success.

1:05:40And she's like, what the fuck, man? Like, you know, it's really, so yeah. And so she looked up like the history of how people thought about these things. And like I think in the Roman times or like antiquity people like, people get possessed by genius from time to time. So if you do good work, it's not you don't get the you don't get full credit. And if you do bad work, you don't get full blame. You know, it's like the creative sometimes just creativity happens and we are we are vessels for that. Right. And but yeah, with regards to Disgusty Sprite, it's really I don't know, I think maybe maybe Maybe I indoctrinated myself a little bit with video games, motivational stuff.

1:06:18But I feel it to be true. I really just want to have my own back. I think there's a quote from Montene, where he says, you can try to be clever and fancy with all your words and stuff. But on your deathbed, you're going to really confront the barest troops about yourself. Did you live up to what you wanted? Do you forgive yourself for whatever? do you and like those very basal things. Yeah, I think about that a lot. I'm like, how can I be a better friend to myself so that I can be a better friend to other people? And I say it's funny, it's funny that I'm so quick to go from that first sentence with the next.

1:06:55It's like a, you know, like self love or self care. Therefore that I can help other people, right? It's a yeah, the subjugating of desires. I must put other people first, who am I to ask for the attention even from myself, my attention should be paid onto other people. No, dude, I'm, I'm, I'm bulls deep in, in that challenge at the moment. Speaking of the tactical stuff, you know, we can, we can talk Mark Manson quotes all day. You spent a good bit of time looking at procrastination. Oh yeah. What, what is the TLDR 30 ,000 foot view as somebody that needs to write lots of words and do things self -powered every year?

1:07:33What's the TLDR of procrastination? Yeah, so you know what's funny? I spent like years reading everything I could about it analyzing it psychoanalyzing myself and everything and these days I don't even use the term anymore. I don't I don't you know it's I think one of the most major things I've learned is that you really have to focus on the outcomes that you want and not the outcomes that you don't want and even describing things in terms of procrastination somehow I feel it tends to like like reinforce the procrastination. You know, I don't know, this is like a slightly radical view. I can try and answer the question directly, but like my meta view is that you don't even need to use that term, you know, like think about what you want.

1:08:14Ask yourself what's in the way of getting to what you want. And the problem is, you know, very often procrastination is like trying to protect you. You know, it's trying to protect you from doing something that you don't actually want. You know, like my wife and I have been procrastinating on renovating our house for years and years. And I eventually realized, oh, I don't want to live in this neighborhood. And I have not been honest with myself about that. And like, but my subconscious protects me from making a costly financial decision, like a very costly financial decision by just putting it off.

1:08:46Like, no, no, no, let's just keep looking, let's whatever. And the moment I realized that, oh, I actually want to be in a better neighborhood, then like, it's so easy to fall into, I'm going to go see an agent, I'm going to go look at houses. and everything is just flows from there. So yeah, I think a lot of times procrastination is, you know, maybe you don't actually want to do the thing. And I think people struggle with like, well, but I need to pay the bill. So I have to have a job. So I have to, which is fair, right? Everyone, most people go through that. But I think a lot of things falls down to like the story you're telling yourself about why you need to do what you're doing.

1:09:22I have been helping some friends with these issues recently and one pattern I keep noticing is people have like this task master inside their head that's like beating them up over and over again like you should be doing this thing Why are you not doing it like you're so lazy? you're so whatever and it's it doesn't get to the truth of Why you should or should not be doing it what you are what you care about what you're afraid of And yeah, so now talking to my friend he he was trying to spend less time on Twitter And I'm like why why why and he's like oh because I spend so much time on Twitter and Instagram and whatever and I don't get any work done.

1:09:56And so I should spend less time on those things. And I'm like, I don't think that's actually true. Like somewhere out there, there's someone else who spends twice as much time on the socials as you. But they're happy because they're achieving their goals. So like, why is it that you're focusing on lowering the thing that you think you don't want, instead of increasing the thing that you actually do want? And then we talked about that for almost an hour. And we got around to, well, he wants to be doing some research stuff, but he hasn't, you know, made a study plan. He hasn't. And his initial plan was, oh, I'm going to read this whole textbook in a week.

1:10:31And that's not possible. It's a thick dense textbook. So you got to partition the thing. So, you know, he, it's so interesting when you lay it all out. It turns out that this guy has the thing he wants to do. Has like, and you know, if you split him into two people, imagine that there's like the the client and the worker, right? Like The plan, no, this client is not the right word. We're like split him into two people, one person asking the other person to do a job, right? Like the manager and the worker. The manager is giving these really big, requests, like unreasonable timelines, not unclear what needs to be done, what needs to be shipped or whatever, just get work done.

1:11:09And the worker is like, fuck this shit, like I'm just gonna goof off and watch play video games or whatever. because the gradient of work to be done is just so out of whack that they're not going to do it. So you have to respect that there's some part of you within you that will not accept shitty management. So people have shitty bosses of themselves. And you know, that gets some funny theory tree here where people might be like, oh yeah, you know, like bad workplace environments are horrible. My boss sucks. My this, whatever. And like, how are you managing your own home, your own head, and your own whatever?

1:11:46And people inherit the top from their parents, from their teachers, from their whatever. And it's like, you got to work harder, you got to do more, you got to, like, it's very, it's nebulous, vague. And so I always ask people and ask my friends, what are you really trying to accomplish? Why? What is the most like sensible, reasonable, interesting, exciting way to do it? And like if you really want the thing and the path to getting there makes sense and you can see your progress towards the thing. And video games do this really well. Which is why video games are so fun to play. You have some mission, you have some objective and like you know how much XP you're going to get from each monster you kill, you get the goal, you get the skill points.

1:12:28It's very clear. If the game has done the hard work of project managing your tasks for you. So you go in there and you have a good manager in the game and it's shiny and colorful and whatever. But like you can do the same in your own life with your own projects. You know, it's like you're practicing guitar or whatever. Like how much are you practicing? What specific thing are you trying to do? What progress? What's the reward? Like what song do you want to be able to play? And when you make that progress, progress feels good. And what's interesting is that I think people don't even feel that they deserve the right to feel good making progress on their work.

1:13:01That's the real painful thing. They feel that work should be miserable and difficult. Pure return work ethic. Yes, and that's what really. And they have that, which is like, imagine a boss saying, oh, you're all going to have to grind, grind every weekend, every night. And the employees like, yeah, sure. And then they just, they're hearts not in it. And then, so then you get this conflict, this, this, just this, this, the person becomes unintegrated. They get split selves. And you have this phrases like revenge, bedtime procrastination, where basically, you're prefrontal cortex that's making all the plans.

1:13:36It's like the manager. It's a shitty guy. It's like, you know, in a lot of the rings, there's King Fiernan, and then there's the worm tongue whispering poison in his ear. It's like a lot of people's prefrontal cortex is worm tongue. And it's like, you know, you got to do more days. You got to do this not okay. I think that kind of thing. And when you see it as that, and then you're like, and I have this whole analogy with Gandoff, as a friend who sees what's best in you and encourages you to grasp your sort of agency and do what you actually want to do. And yeah, so when people, like, and when you get tired, like, your prefrontal contact shuts down, it's like the boss leaves the office.

1:14:15And then what people do, they're going to goof off. They're like, we've been grinding on this thing that doesn't make any sense. Like, let's just, you know, like, we need to have fun too. So we're going to, and at that point, you feel like you're burnt out, you're tired, and you feel you have no choice but to like go along with the thing and next thing you know you're an Abender it's 3 a .m. you can be a good guy. And then you feel bad about that and then you feel bad about that and then and you justify I should be harsh on myself and then it's a it's a only solution. The only solution is to grip things more tightly.

1:14:44Yeah I um I wrote this essay yesterday and I actually spoke it at a live show last night so this this might be interesting to you. I wrote But I think type A people have a type B problem and type B people have a type A problem. Insecure overachievers need to learn how to chill out and relax and lazy people need to learn how to work harder and be disciplined. Given that you subscribe to me, I'm going to guess that you're probably type A. Some version of a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity as Andrew Wilkinson says. I have a tweet like that and it's a ghoul for my prickly friends and prickles for my Yeah, everybody overextends the more that they are good at.

1:15:28And again, it's like coping mechanisms, right? And it's like in like D &D and video games, it's this concept of a glass cannon, which is like a character who can do a lot of damage but like dies very easily. And you think, oh, why is he like that? And it's like, oh, he's because he dies very easily, he has learned to do a lot of damage. And so he takes pride in that. And that his identity becomes tied up in that. And it's just, you know, let's that. Yeah, yeah, it's a lot. And you know, if so you asked for the TLDR and I went on this long, Rambley circular rent, but I would say at the heart of everything, you have to really step back and observe the patterns non -judgmentally.

1:16:11Right? Like because and you know, you have to ask, like, I recommend really abstract questions like like a, how might this look if it's easy or how might it look if it's done skillfully and beautifully without anger without, you know, like, one of my favorite things in the book, Easy Way to Quit Smoking by Alan Carr, they insist that you keep smoking as you read the book. And it's like, why would they do that? Right? It's because part of the cycle of addiction. And this is true for all addiction. So in procrastination can be a kind of addiction. Part of what happens with the smoker who wants to kind of wants to quit but is struggling to and then he tries to quit but he's like half -heartedly about it and then eventually he lights up again and then he feels guilty and shamed that he did that and that is a higher -ausal emotion he gets stressed and he wants to smoke more.

1:17:03So there's that loop and then there's like the metal loop that keeps the loop going harder and when the book says I want you to keep smoking. You're like, am I being pumped right? Because you assume that you're supposed to not. And that just creates this tension that makes it difficult to mess with the process. So same with like budgeting software or even diets and this, the good ones say, don't change your spending, just track it. Don't change your like food habits this the first month. Just track it. Just see what you're doing and like don't judge, just observe. And like when people are able to comfortably just observe what is happening, there are all, there's like breathing room that opens up And you're like, oh, maybe I don't have to play video games until 3 am in the morning.

1:17:45And so yeah, and I had an issue with schedules as a child, like with school time tables and stuff. Like I found it very stressful and traumatic. And the idea of even using opening up Google Calendar and putting, I'm going to do this work today, this work at this point, and whatever. I hated that. And because I felt like I was always dishonest. And when I put whatever, I would get excited and fill in with lots of stuff. And then I would miss it. And then I feel bad. And then the cycle continues. and what someone suggested that really worked for me was only schedule the fun stuff. Which again, it sounds immoral.

1:18:17It sounds like, oh, gasp, you know, like it's a, it violates the puritanical thing, right? What do you mean schedule the fun stuff? But if you say I'm gonna play one hour of video games every evening, you no longer feel this anxious, grabby, I might not get to play tomorrow, so I better play three hours tonight and then you don't sleep and then you're sleep gets fucked and then everything's virus wasn't worse. So if you beginner of the premise that to do your best work, you have to be emotionally well, morale has to be good. Again, people don't want to admit until they get so bad that it's horrific and then they don't even get to enjoy.

1:18:49Then the only rest they get is that they fall sick and then it's like, what kind of religion or recreation is that? You're just lying in bed. You don't get to go and see things. You don't get to hang out with your friends. So you schedule the good stuff and then you will get, nobody wants to be on a beach vacation for years. People feel that I would like to sit at the beach for a year. No, you wouldn't. Three weeks, maybe two or three months is about as long as anyone would really enjoy a beach vacation. Most people, I guess. Before you start to go, ah, what am I doing? Same for like, if you were tasked with eating as much chocolate cake as you could, you would probably eat somewhere between half a cake to one cake or something.

1:19:32Whatever your number is. But you would eat So the people who went tasked to have pleasure, they tend to contain it reasonably. But when they've been suppressed away from pleasure, that's when they eat three cakes. And then they feel like horrible and they want to throw up. And then next morning, they're like, I'm never going to eat cakes again. Like, you know, it's, it's a yo -yo extremes. And it's just chaos. It's just bad. So you want to dampen that extreme yo -yo stuff. you want to schedule the fun and the pleasure. And I remember so clearly when I was working and I was like 25 and I felt, I don't have the right to have fun.

1:20:12I have overdue work. I don't have the right to, one of the saddest days of my life was, I think 2015 or 2016, the New Year's Day, my wife was like in both me and my wife were at home and I was anxiously trying to get work done because I had gotten myself into such a spiral of self -loving and whatever that I'm not doing enough work that my poor wife was sitting in the living room by herself while I was working and I can't even tell you what I was working on. I don't remember. So I was like never again, you know, like prioritized what's important to you. You are a human being who deserves love and space and even if you don't think you deserve it, like that's what good performance requires.

1:20:52I hope you get to the point where you feel that you But you know, even, you know, and sometimes I say like LeBron James slept like 12 hours a night and like freaking God almighty took a day off on Sunday. So, you know, schedule your breaks and like, yeah, then cultures, like, historic cultures have like the Sabbath and it's supposed to respect the Sabbath because that's how you decompress. Yeah, well it's wild. I think about sometimes me and my friends reinvent shit that was Literally with us from the beginning of time. Like you know, you know what? I've really enjoyed doing really enjoyed taking like one Two days a week and just not you know not working quite so hard.

1:21:30You go hey guy. That's called a weekend Fucking baked into your calendar look these are dude. I appreciate the hell out of you I love your work. I love your writing Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you're doing The most interesting stuff that's happening for me right now is on my substack. So if you go to vsaddenv .substack .com or like, okay, most people like my Twitter, but like, I feel like my action is moving to substack. Follow both, I guess. I could just Google me, VISAK and V, you get my personal website that has links to my YouTube channel and everything else.

1:22:03Dude, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. This was great.