084b – trying to funnel life a bit

Been very busy— socially— over the last couple days. Haven’t had enough time to myself. Haven’t been sleeping too well either but I finally caught up on that earlier today. The sun hasn’t been out for almost a whole week now which sucked quite a bit although music and people have been keeping me sane and happy. 

Finally bought an electric guitar after many months of mulling over models etc. Excited to practice and learn a few songs this month. 

I’d been thinking about temporarily deactivating Instagram for a while now and I finally took the plunge. Current plan is to keep it deactivated for 2-3 weeks and then see if I need it or no. Reasoning behind deactivation is primarily that I want to minimise unnecessary stimulus. I want to be more careful and mindful about the kind of content I consume and Instagram is coming in the way a bit, I guess. Further, the two main reasons I was still keeping it around were that

  1. it was one of my primary ends for creative expression (especially with photos as well as “thought dumps”) but I think I’m more determined to focus on journaling/writing/music as the primary forms of expression, at least this month, so maybe Instagram is just a bit of a distraction from those goals.

  2. i think I also had a lot of space for new people and connections in life and I thought Instagram can be a good way to keep that channel open. And while it’s true that you do sometimes find interesting opportunities and people through social media, I just feel like I have enough on my plate for the next few weeks so maybe for now I’m alright. 

So yeah, figured it’s worth testing. 

Kind of excited about getting to 100K words soon(ish) but also wondering what the next steps would be. This is good practice, I feel like I tend to keep jumping ahead with things. Or maybe, I just leave this question here and let the answers come to me. If the answers haven’t arrived, then I can potentially keep going as well. [open question]

Focused on drums class, vocals exam, learning Corduroy Dreams on guitar this week, and that’s probably sufficient work to be thinking about, so maybe I can allow myself to not have to think about January planning etc. 

Still have a couple of people I want to meet once or twice before they go back to their bases. 

Lots of travel lined up this year and pretty excited about all of it. 

I’d like to think about (and do some research on) whether long-form content consumption (like books, for example) is actually healthier compared to social media content consumption or not. Like obviously, intuition says it is, and I’ve heard a lot of such sentiments in passing, but I don’t think I’ve ever read about it properly. So yeah, that’d be good to learn more about. [open question]

Cheers xx 

065a – doubts, fears, inadequacies re: writing

“I thought I wanted to be a writer, turns out I just wanted to write.” 

I imagine I’ll be saying this a few months from now. Thinking about money or monetisation from my art makes me anxious. I definitely need to find a day-job. I’m not ready to give up all my time yet, so I plan to start looking in February. I imagine it might take up to 3-4 months for me to be able to find one, because I’ll also have to do some research on the kind of jobs I’m willing to take. 

But I want to make 10 complete songs before I start a job, and I’ve only made 2 so far. Will I push my “start looking for jobs” date if February arrives and I haven’t made 10 songs by then? I guess we’ll find out. I’m open to it, but we’ll see.  

Why do I want to make songs? I don’t know, I just feel like it’s a very fulfilling achievement. 

The college-student I teach on Sundays has been giving me a similar answer when I ask him why he doesn’t like Delhi. I’ve been teaching him English to help him with job interviews. He says “I don’t know but I just don’t like it”. 

Personal writing feels like a very selfish pursuit. Or the kind of art that I gravitate towards (ie MY feelings and MY thoughts) feels like a very selfish, self-obsessed activity. Which then re-opens the questions I haven’t taken the time out to think about, yet. Who will my audience be? I imagine I can figure that out on the way. 

I am definitely not someone who can quickly adjust to trends and what the world needs “right now” and drop comments on it. I do it sometimes but I can’t do it regularly. There was a time when people were more interested in the music I was putting out (although it was mostly covers) and they kept asking me to share stuff on streaming services but all of it doesn’t get as much engagement anymore. 

I do wonder lately if you need to be more “gifted” or “talented” or willing to make more compromises if you want to stand out with all of these things. 

But I haven’t really given anything a REAL shot yet. A real shot will have to be more planned, more patient, more sustainable. That’s fine, I can live with that for today. 

I am still interested in this problem-space. That is, I want to write, I enjoy the process, are there ways I can be better and find overlaps between the things I want to write about and the things people want to read? 

Maybe I need to go out and live more, also.