[written 2021/03/23]
I’ve been reading David Lipsky’s “Although of course you end up becoming yourself: A road trip with David Foster Wallace”. It’s not something I would ordinarily pick up, but I’ve been primed because a number of people in my social circles have been talking about David Foster Wallace lately (n=2…but they don’t know each other!)
I came to learn of this book’s existence from a twitter thread that I can no longer find. It quoted this bit by DFW: “…I think that the ultimate way you and I get lucky is if you have some success early in life, you get to find out early it doesn’t mean anything. Which means you get to start early the work of figuring out what does mean something.”
I’m very much not a paragon of success, but my mind still goes ‘I know what he’s talking about’. And the interpretation is something like, ‘it doesn’t mean much if others are impressed if you aren’t; it doesn’t matter if others think it means something if you don’t’.
I think it’s related to undeserved success: I found that it’s one thing to know about it, and it’s another thing to experience it close up. If you’re reminded of imposter syndrome, I agree—it’s like an inverse of imposter syndrome: Though it’s not me whose level of competence is in question (conveniently, I’m too inept to fake anything), but society’s—specifically, their ability to evaluate. It’s led to generalized apathy towards external success markers—they’re proxy measures that I now regard with more suspicion/wariness. It’s a rather unnerving development because it comes with a sense of alienation and detachment from mainstream social narrative-reality of what matters—it seems like a step towards delusion (maybe let me expound on the relatability of a cancer cell in a later post).
And that’s an unspoken peril of figuring out what does mean something.
Paul Graham wrote a nice essay about independent thinking, but it was about successful independent thought, and I’ve been worrying about unsuccessful independent thought. I’m afraid of becoming a conspiracy theorist. Or delusional — I’ve more recently finished “Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth”, and they don’t shy away from the association of schizophrenia/delusional thinking and people who are striving to figure things out. I’m definitely not as passionate and meticulous as these logicians, but it is relatable enough to unsettle me. I don’t think you don’t need to be a genius to find ‘A Beautiful Mind’ horrifying. And on my backlog of books to read is “Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray”, because I’ve been saliently using aesthetic/intuition/beauty as a means to choose my mental structures (see: future post on mental interior design).
So, what to do about this?
I think a preventative practice to this is getting regular feedback. I’ve been extremely fortunate to have friends that help me build and refine mental frameworks. But I’m aware that we’re a specific type of people and few—I’m missing a broader perspective. And so, an obvious solution seems to be to write.
There are a myriad of reasons of why I’m not much of a writer, one reason being that I’m shy.
Though, not DFW-shy: “I think being shy basically means being self-absorbed to the extent that it makes it difficult to be around other people. For instance, if I’m hanging out with you, I can’t even tell whether I like you or not, because I’m too worried about whether you like me. It’s stressful and unpleasant or whatever.”
I wondered if I was misunderstanding him, but he followed up with, “Part of the shyness for me is, it’s very easy for me to play this game of, What do you want? What will the effect of this be on you? You know? It’s this kind of mental chess. Which in personal intercourse? Makes things very difficult. But in writing, when I think a lot of what you’re doing—there are very few innocent sentences in writing. You’ve gotta know not just how it looks and sounds to you. But you’ve gotta be able plausibly to project what an alien consciousness will make of it” (24). I definitely don’t do that on a regular basis, so I’m not DFW-shy. In fact my shyness is due to my inability to model others – it’s less worrying about whether they like me, and moreso having minimal perceived feedback, so it’s like writing into a void and not being sure if I’m even understandable.
Another excuse is that writing is hard.
Even texting is hard—I’m baffled and in awe of people who can text throughout the day on a daily basis. Not that long ago, I learned that some people primarily think in language, so to communicate, it’s pretty straightforward to transcribe their thoughts into speech. I seem to think more in ‘pre-language’; communication is more like trying to describe a scenery or cloud of concepts. I often get tripped up in knowing where to start, and in linearizing ideas that don’t have a linear structure. I’m not sure if it’s a legitimate excuse, but I wonder if this contributes to ease-of-communication baselines. The hope is that I’ll develop better transcription heuristics as I write more.
I suppose I’m starting to write now because while these frictions haven’t decreased, the incentives have increased.
As DFW also astutely notes, “somebody who’s writing, has part of their motivation to sort of I think impress themselves and their consciousness on others. There’s an unbelievable arrogance about even trying to write something…” And, well, I am trying to asserting/indulging my sense of aesthetic here. Arrogantly, maybe tautologically, I do like my aesthetic. But part of my taste is in the integrity of the ideas, and I’ve been feeling the limitations of my current approach for a while now. The ideas in my head don’t feel sufficiently processed and compressed, and all advice seems to point to writing.
While I anticipate these writing exercises to mainly benefit myself, there’s some small hope that it could be a source of solidarity. I’ve recently finished a book called “Discovering: Inventing and Solving Problems at the Frontiers of Scientific Knowledge” (Root-Bernstein), and on the last page, it said, “If what we’ve said and done here gives such a person the courage to do science on his own and in his own way–you know I mean her, too–then we have succeeded in producing something important” (428). Unlike other independently-thinking people I know, I’m often much more uncertain and unconfident.
Another reason I picked up the book “Although of course you end up becoming yourself” was because I like the title. It reads like a reassurance—you’ll find your way, eventually.