@visakanv

0804 – introspect: overview

The above image is a screenshot of my latest (and final, I think) conceptualisation or overview of INTROSPECT. It’s been through many, many iterations, which I may someday get around to piecing together. But for the time being, my focus is on finishing the book, and to do that I think it would help to also use my auxiliary efforts (wordvomits, YouTube videos, etc) to talk about the book. So…

0801 – introspect: deliver on the promises

I’ve been feeling a strange tension lately – I’m working on my book, INTROSPECT, and I’ve been feeling stuck – it feels too big. I’ve been tweeting as “usual”, but it doesn’t feel right, tweeting feels too small. So I think the smart move to do is to write wordvomits again. My next few wordvomits will be freestyle essays that are attempts to capture the spirit of what I think should go in the…

0800 – cultivate courage

This is my 800th wordvomit! I am now 80% done with this project that I started way back in 2012. For starters I’m curious to see how I’ve marked my previous “100 done” milestones. In chronological order, we have… 0100 – quitting an addiction is like leaving an abusive relationship – well this hints at the darker origins of my earlier writing – I was struggling to become a better version of…

0799 – be honest

I used to lie a lot as a kid. I’m not proud of it and I don’t want to defend or justify it. It just seemed so easy to do. You could lie to get out of trouble. You could lie to impress people. Lying seemed to be a harmless thing that led to better outcomes. I didn’t feel bad about lying to my friends and loved ones. I think I probably had some boundaries – which now seem embarrassing and shameful…

0798 – be kind

What is kindness? It seems like a simple enough question but the answer doesn’t jump out at me. The word’s origin is related with words like kin, mankind, and it’s why phrases like “kind of, kinda” are about things having a “family resemblance”. So it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that the origins of kindness was about treating people as your kin. And the contemporary assumption there (for me,…

0797 – be playful

When I look through the draft of my book INTROSPECT (it’s not out yet), I find that there are several recurring motifs in my suggestions on how to deal with life’s challenges. And one of the most powerful and important ones is “be playful”. What does it even mean, to be playful? What is play? It can feel a bit silly to talk about it (but silliness is a very good sign!) – I think because of the…

0796 – writing is what I do

I’ve missed typing. Specifically, I’ve missed typing on a blank page. I type a lot on Twitter every day – something like 100 tweets a day – but I miss the feeling of opening up a blog and just throwing word after word with reckless abandon. As I write this I’m thinking, wow, there’s so much space. Tweeting has been a delightful adventure for me these past few years, but it’s also quite…

0795 – my relationship with twitter

When I signed up for Twitter in October 2008 (I was 18 then) I had no idea that it was going to be such an important part of my life in my late 20s and early 30s. I started by following my favorite celebrities (I remember Pink, 50 Cent, Dita von Teese, John Mayer etc were a bunch of people who were active on it pretty early on), my IRL friends from Singapore, and just a bunch of interesting…

0794 – “my book is killing me”

I’ve been spending most of my time on Twitter lately. And it’s probably not great for me. It’s time for me to reorient. I’ve also been making YouTube videos fairly regularly, which is great, and I just started posting on my TikTok as well, which is fun and exciting. In other news I also finally got myself a pair of drumsticks and a practice pad, which has been fun to fool around with. But the…

0793 – checking in with the inner newsfeed

I went to bed at about 5am last night – a fairly common thing for me at this point – but what was slightly less common was that I woke up at 1120am. What’s even less common is that I’m now sitting here writing this wordvomit, before showering, before checking my twitter. This is a substantial deviation from my usual behavior. I usually sleep longer than 6 hours – sometimes I’m in bed until 1, or…

0792 – starting pomodoros again

At some point during this project I printed out a few calendars for each year to try and get a sense of how often I was writing. I believe I posted it on Instagram, let me look it up… yeah, here are a couple of the years. I’m missing 2014 for some reason. Maybe I archived that one? Point is, I would sometimes go a month without writing, and I would sometimes try my best to write every single day…

0791 – renegotiating my relationship with rest

I had a re-realization a couple of nights ago at almost 6am when I was lying in bed struggling to sleep. I was thinking about what was keeping me from sleeping, and I settled on the explanation “it’s my book”. What’s up with my book? Well, some part of me felt like I hadn’t done enough work on it, and was holding me hostage as a result. And I realize that me writing my book is in part a…

0790 – enjoy your life without bullshitting yourself

It’s 2021jun02-1716, and I’m working on my second ebook, INTROSPECT. I’ve been working on this for a long time. An interesting and important challenge when writing a book like this, in my opinion, is that you have to figure out what the core directive is. The great thing about a book – and the whole point of writing a book, really – is that you have a lot of space to talk about what you want to…

0596 – cherish your friends

As at 26 year old, it’s interesting to look back on my relationships with other people when I was younger, and to think about what friendship meant then, and what it means now, and how my concept of it has changed over the years. It’s also interesting to juxtapose that against what I see and witness around me. I was reading something on Meaningness about a phenomenon where young people get into…

0595 – tentative thoughts about gender

I’ve been thinking a lot about manhood and masculinity over the past year or so. I haven’t been obsessive about it; it’s not like I borrowed or bought a bunch of books and tore through them. There’s still some stuff that I’d like to read that I haven’t really gotten around to. But it’s been one of my dominant interests. Why is that? I think a part of it has to do with growing up, and thinking…

0594 – seek out the difficult conversations

I have an old friend that I’ve been talking to for almost a decade now, and I enjoy reflecting on the history of our conversations. When we were younger we talked mostly about video games, about lore, music, technology, futurism. One of our favorite things to do when we were teenagers or NSFs was to sit together over iced drinks and cigarettes and geek out together over the future. It would be a…