You aren’t famous. Anything you do or create will probably receive little to no attention, so stop optimizing for a non-existent audience and instead focus on what makes you enjoy the activity.
Want to try a craft or artistic hobby? Focus on mastering the skill and enjoy the variety it can provide. You don’t need to build a personal style. No one will care. Want to do photography and think black and white photos are cool? Great! You don’t need to create an Instagram branded all around your moody black and white photos. Most likely you’ll get bored of it and want to try a different type of photography, and that’s great. You aren’t Ansel Adams, no one will care if your “style” is all over the place.
Do you want to build an app or website but don’t enjoy the process of designing? Then make it ugly. Who cares! Design is for an audience and you don’t have one. Functionality is more important right now. Maybe a designer will notice and want to improve it for you, but until then take pride in your crappy UI.
Blogging is fun and therapeutic. Grammar and editing aren’t. As long as your thoughts are coherent, don’t worry too much about writing mistakes or filtering yourself. Just use Grammarly to fix elementary-level errors and move on. It’s more about the writing process than the final product.
The most egregious thing you can do with any activity is daydream about how you can make money off of it. That’s the quickest way to optimize for the wrong things and suck the fun right out of it. Most likely you will stop doing the activity almost immediately, so save the money-making schemes for work.
In the end, find something you enjoy doing and just do it because you enjoy it. If you have to, make some goals for yourself, but never for your “audience”.
Clipping
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web > Stop acting like you're famous
[https://ajkprojects.com/stopactinglikeyourefamous]
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web > Introvert is actually emotionally stunted
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39979725]
You seem to have this idealized notion of what community was like outside of technology.
By “idealized notion” you mean “the vast, vast majority of human history”?
“Community” is not typically defined as “the people you talk bullshit with for fun” and that’s all. Your community is the people you live with and among. It’s the people you’re most likely to experience Big Things with, things like natural disasters, weird stuff like power outages, or your building catching fire if you live in an apartment or condo. If you regularly interact with them, you probably also see them during fun things: street cookouts or yard sales (we do both at the same time, you get a lot more customers by when they have 14 sales to peruse and brats for sale!) or just see them grilling out when you go to get your mail, and end up having a few beers with them and talking about goings on. Hell, depending on your locale or culture, maybe your community feeds itself too from bulk kitchens, or does laundry, etc. etc.
I say this as an introvert who opted out of every social thing I could in favor of forums and games when I was growing up: I was wrong. I was deeply, deeply wrong. People are pretty great. They’re not perfect, and they can be a lot of work, but ultimately I was not hiding from people because they were bad or annoying or stupid: I was hiding from them because I was emotionally stunted and didn’t want to deal with it. That was it. And once I did I found human connection that was so much more sustaining, in a way where I can’t believe I once thought ^this^, chatting online, was an adequate replacement.
It makes me sad to think how many people out there are just sitting in their little rooms or cubicles because for whatever reason or set of reasons, they don’t feel comfortable engaging their fellow man, nursing a hollowness that will follow them around until they do because fundamentally humans are just not meant to exist alone. We just aren’t, it’s in our DNA to make groups and be among friends.
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web > Artistic careers aren't helpful
[https://www.jefftk.com/p/trying-to-do-more-good]
Q: How do you think about art and music? Are you saying people who want to make the world better shouldn’t go into artistic careers?
Art and music clearly bring a lot of joy to a lot of people, and a world without them would be much worse. On the other hand, I think this is somewhere it’s helpful to look on the margin: what is the benefit of an additional person going into art or music? What is the benefit of that person going into reducing global poverty, harm to animals, or global catastrophic risk? So many people are eager to get into art and music that we’re far from a world in which we suffer from too few options here.
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web > Death is not the void
[https://www.naturalism.org/philosophy/death/death-nothingness-and-subjectivity]
The topic of our fate after death is a touchy subject, but nevertheless the error of anticipating nothingness needs rectifying. This misconception is so widespread and so psychologically debilitating for those facing death (all of us, sooner or later) it is worth a careful look at the faulty, rather subliminal logic which persuades us that dying leads us into ‘the void.’ Here, again, is the view at issue: When we die, what’s next is nothing; death is an abyss, a black hole, the end of experience; it is eternal nothingness, the permanent extinction of being. And here, in a nutshell, is the error contained in the view: It is to reify nothingness–make it a positive condition or quality (e.g., of ‘blackness’)–and then to place the individual in it after death, so that we somehow fall into nothingness, to remain there eternally.
As I tried to make clear above, subjectivities—centers of awareness—don’t have beginnings and endings for themselves, rather they simply find themselves in the world. From their perspective, it’s as if they have always been present, always here; as if the various worlds evoked by consciousness were always ‘in place.’ Of course we know that they are not always in place from an objective standpoint, but their own non-being is never an experienced actuality for them. This fact, along with the fact that other subjectivities succeed us after we die, suggests an alternative to the intuition of impending nothingness in the face of death.
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web > Physicists on consciousness
[https://www.reddit.com/r/nonduality/comments/xsiigf/quotes_from_quantum_and_theoretical_physicist/]
The notion of a separate organism is clearly an abstraction, as is also its boundary. Underlying all this is unbroken wholeness, even though our civilization has developed in such a way as to strongly emphasize the separation into parts.
-David Bohm
Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God). To Western ideology, the thought has remained a stranger… in spite of those true lovers who, as they look into each other’s eyes, become aware that their thought and their joy are numerically one, not merely similar or identical…
-Erwin Schrödinger
I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.
-Max Planck
inconceiveable as it seems to ordinary reason, you — and all other conscious beings as such — are all in all. Hence, this life of yours… is, in a certain sense, the whole… This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula… ‘Tat tvam asi’ — this is you. Or, again, in such words as ‘I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world.’ Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you … For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.
-Erwin Schrödinger
It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum theory in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.
-Eugene Wigner
As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clearheaded science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about the atoms this much: There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together… . We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.
-Max Planck
life may be the result of an accident, but I do not think that of consciousness. Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.
-Erwin Schrödinger
Relativity and quantum theory agree, in that they both imply the need to look on the world as an undivided whole, in which all parts of the universe, including the observer and his instruments, merge and unite in one totality. In this totality, the atomistic form of insight is a simplification and an abstraction, valid only in some limited context. Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one. This is a virtual certainty because even in the vacuum matter is one; and if we don’t see this, it’s because we are blinding ourselves to it.
-David Bohm
This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of this entire existence, but in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance.
-Erwin Schrödinger
The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment.
-Bernard d’Espagnat
Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one. This is a virtual certainty because even in the vacuum matter is one; and if we don’t see this, it’s because we are blinding ourselves to it. Consciousness is much more of the implicate order than is matter … Yet at a deeper level [matter and consciousness] are actually inseparable and interwoven , just as in the computer game the player and the screen are united by participation.
-David Bohm
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web > The six realms
When you realize that you are the one electron in the universe you often experience a complex superposition of emotions. Of course this is limited by your imagination and emotional state. But if you’re clear-headed, curious, and generally open to exploring possibilities, here is where you feel like you are at the middle point of all reality.
You can access all 6 Realms from this central point, and in a way escape the sense of identification with any one of them. Alas, this is not something that one always achieves. It is easy to get caught up in a random stream and end up in, say, the God Realm completely deluded thinking you’re God. Or in the Hell realm, thinking you’re damned forever somehow. Or the animal, seeking simple body pleasures and comfort. Or the human world, being really puzzled and craving cognitively coherent explanations. Or the Hungry Ghost dimension, where you are always looking to fill yourself up and perceive yourself as fundamentally empty and flawed. Or the Titan realm, which adds a perceptual filter where you feel that everything and everyone is in competition with you and you derive your main source of satisfaction from pride and winning.
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web > Kierkegaard on Marriage
[https://www.honest-broker.com/p/i-had-to-say-something-at-my-sons]
“Over the centuries have not knights and adventurers experienced incredible toil and trouble in order to find quiet peace in a happy marriage. Over the centuries have not writers and readers of novels labored through one volume after another in order to end with a happy marriage. And has not one generation after the other again and again faithfully endured four acts of troubles and entanglements if only there was any probability of a happy marriage in the fifth act?
“But through these enormous efforts very little is accomplished for the glorification of marriage. For the unhealthiness of these books is that they end where they should begin. So let Don Juan keep his romantic bower and the knight his nocturnal sky and stars—if he sees nothing beyond them. Marriage has its heaven even higher. And it is not the earthly heaven that arches over marriage but the heaven of the spirit. So beautiful is marriage. And the sensuous is by no means repudiated, but is ennobled.
“Indeed I confess it—perhaps it is wrong of me—frequently when I think of my own marriage, the notion that it will cease to be awakens in me an inexplicable sadness, as does the thought—sure as I am that in another life I will live with her to whom my marriage joined me—that this will give her to me in another way, and the contrast that was a condition of our marriage will be annulled. Nevertheless it comforts me that I know—and I shall recollect—that I have lived with her in the most intimate, the most beautiful association that life on earth provides.”
Adapted from Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) “The Esthetic Validity of Marriage” (Either/Or, volume II)
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web > The world is full of subtle invitations to feel good
[https://www.ranprieur.com/archives/089.html]
Depressed individuals tend to avoid experiencing positive emotions. Nobody would ever consciously choose to avoid feeling good, so they must be doing it subconciously, and it must be hard not to. So I’m thinking, what instruction would you give to depressed people, to change their habits? Something like, “Imagine the world is full of very subtle invitations to feel good, like tiny packages that you can look for, and open.”
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web > Taste games
[https://dynomight.net/taste-games/]
Tastes are just a matter of:
- Understanding the consequences of liking stuff in your social context, and
- Having the cultural knowledge of how to like things “correctly.”
Basically, your brain does game theory: Do the cool people around you like potatoes? Would you benefit from liking potatoes? Do you understand potato consumption rituals well enough to blend in at the hot potato salons? Then: Start liking potatoes. Unsettlingly, this is mostly supposed to be unconscious. We’re social creatures, we sense what we should become to get ahead, and then we become it, all without involving fickle rationality. Can that be right?
People with mostly economic capital play the Expensive Cars game. People with mostly cultural capital play the Glass Bead Game. We all play the game we think we can do better at. But I think it goes beyond that? I reckon I could beat Donald Trump in a debate about the hard problem of consciousness. But Trump would obliterate me in a “travel between your mansions in your private plane while being fed caviar by models” contest. Conceivably, Trump and I could decide that there’s no conflict between our different status-seeking strategies and leave each other alone. But we don’t seem to do that. In practice, people like me sneer at gold-plated toilet seats and insist we really really really have no interest in anything like that…
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web > The travel game
[https://dynomight.net/taste-games/]
What do you see people bragging about? For me, it’s travel.
Something about how people talk about travel has long made me uneasy. After all, travel is expensive. No one in my circles would dream of going to a party and showing off their new Rolex. But somehow, travel is this unusual form of conspicuous consumption that isn’t subject to conspicuous consumption taboos. Why?
My conspiracy theory is that it’s because travel combines Fancy Cars and Glass Beads. Nobody I know brags about flying first class to stay at the Four Seasons in Miami because, that’s pure Fancy Cars—you just pay your money and go. To play Travel, you need to go to some unusual corner of the world with an unfamiliar culture and speak the local language and befriend locals and find secret underground parties and sneak into castles at night to sample vinegar made by 18th century monks.
But even when you focus on displaying your immense cultural capital, travel still costs money. A deeper conspiracy theory is that Travel is popular because it allows people who aren’t socially permitted to play Fancy Cars a way to do that while pretending that they’re only playing a normal, respectable game of Glass Beads.