Tag: purpose

082b – seriousness

Thinking about meaning and usefulness lately.  

re: meaning 

Lately I’m realising I do like assigning meaning to things. (I mean, I’ve always known this but it’s only lately I’m realising how automatic, strong and frequent this process is for me.) Obviously, this contradicts a little bit with mindfulness, and I’m still not sure how much I must allow myself to extract meaning out of events. Sometimes I think that we do have roles to play in this world, because otherwise there isn’t a point. 

Or if life or sentience is even, simply put, a random occurrence, even then, if assigning meaning to it makes it easier for me— then why not? 

I suppose it is only the “attachment” to the meaning (whatever that is for you) that might make it a problem. I guess, if we can practice connected detachment, then meaning can probably serve as a good guiding star. 

What is the problem, then? I suppose the problem is it’s hard to keep a check on how far you can constantly get lost in the narrative. If you don’t keep your meaning-assigning-parts in check, or if you don’t regularly question them, or put them through scrutiny filters, you might end up away from awareness. 

Okay, where is all this coming from? 

I was having a discussion with some people and someone claimed that “life shouldn’t be too serious” and I think I got somewhat triggered by that statement. I went on a bit of speech on how “life is serious, actually” and how there’s wars happening and how people aren’t being nice and kind to each other and all of that is serious. But now that I recognise that maybe that’s not what that person was claiming at all, I suppose, I need to apologise to them. (Oops) 

But I do feel strongly about how humanity needs to be better. I don’t know what this is exactly but I clearly need to explore this more, otherwise I might get keep getting triggered every time someone says anything along the lines of “life isn’t that serious”. 

Of course, I recently came across this which I’m planning to read soon because it might be helpful for me. And something I read probably from the same essay was that the trick is to “not take your self too seriously but it’s okay to take your work seriously” and that does resonate with me a lot. I’ve now accepted that my work isn’t about me necessarily but I am the vessel that’s doing the work and for me to do it well it makes sense that I would take it seriously. Even if I’m having fun, I tend to be serious about having fun, if that makes any sense at all. And maybe another thing to remember is that people just function differently, maybe “taking things lightly” allows some people to live an easier life— and that’s okay— but for them to generalise this for everyone is what I don’t necessarily like. 

So, I suppose part of the problem is just accepting that I am a serious person and I do take “life” and the world and many things that we have in front of us seriously. Whatever that means, really. 

I’ll talk about usefulness another time, I don’t feel like getting into it at the moment. 

Happy last day of 2023, I hope you don’t resist whatever comes your way 🙂 

071 – find ways to get over yourself

I realised why I haven’t been feeling the same amount of satisfaction on my music account lately (as I used to earlier). It’s not about the validation or the lack thereof. It’s about the fact that I’ve been holding off, a bit. I enjoy the freedom I have on this blog, I really do. 

But I think because more “known” people follow my music account, sometimes I tend to hold back. I should accept that my style is verbose. I’ve been trying to “play” a part. I wanted to appear a certain way. But I think I’m happiest when I’m posting as much as I want and in the ways that I want. That’s always going to be the primary purpose. Even when I have secondary and tertiary purposes (ie connection, more engagement, good “quality” work etc) the primary purpose is still sharing your art AND YOURSELF in the ways that YOU WANT. This is my account and it’s only tracking my journey. 

Being verbose actually helps me a lot. It helps me free my mind of the clutter. I also have really fresh learnings from yesterday about how new ideas sometimes only come to me when I make space in my brain from them. This actually literally means thought-dumping in all the various ways I need. Yesterday, it looked like finishing a song (even though I didn’t end up happy with the “final” result— more on this another time), making a couple of covers, journaling a few times, going over some of my older stuff and taking it a bit forward (even when I couldn’t reach too far), and then going out and sharing some of my thoughts on all this with a couple friends too. (Luckily there were people around me who like talking about stuff like this.) 

I think about my first really great software engineering internship experience. I had a superb mentor. He was great at most of the things I needed help with— code reviews, technical advice, prioritisation stuff, debugging— all the jazz. But do you know what he was excellent at? Teaching me how to get the fuck over myself. He didn’t phrase at this way. He was gentler about it, and I’m glad. One of the questions that I would ask him on a recurring basis was, “Oh should I just ask other people for help directly or should I spend time by myself on the thing before that?” As an intern or a new grad, some of us tend to be very afraid of bothering people. We tend to be afraid of looking stupid. And yes, there’s a balance to be struck with all this, I’m not saying you want to be the person who’s walking up to one person 20 times in a day. But here’s the thing: You want to get over yourself because the work that you’re doing is more important than you. If you zoom out, everyone you’re sharing the space with has a common purpose, and you have to trust that everyone around you will remember that as well. (I’m going to write more about this in a more structured way).

But the point is, my social media accounts are currently PRIMARILY there to serve me. If they can serve me, I can get better. If I can get better, I can perhaps come up with and share more ideas with the world. Maybe there are people who are naturally able to directly serve others. But for me, serving myself is the only way I’m able to serve others. 

So, I’m going to do this. I’m going to post more on my music account in the ways that I want to. Not hold back, because I don’t want to follow a template. I want to be my verbose, journey-loving, process-loving self on there. Whatever people think about that, I’ll leave that up to them. 

Because if I really had to be succinct about my goals on my music journey (and really all creative journeys) at the moment, they’re just: 

  • Making a lot of things 
  • Understanding myself better 

— 

Anyway, that’s that. I’m a little hungover from going out (and drinking a lot) last night so that’s going to be it on all that. I’ve been feeling a few unpleasant feelings since I woke up today so maybe I’ll just share those and get rid of them. 

  • I don’t like this feeling that comes when you’re hungover. I don’t want it. So I’m going to make it a point to stop at 2-3 drinks OR if I really do cross my limits, I really need to make sure to hydrate before I go to sleep. Definitely don’t want to be doing the early 20s kind of drinking anymore. 

  • I also get triggered when I see too many couples doing couple things and I want to find a better cope for this. 

  • I got a rejection from a portal for online tutoring that I’d applied to. It’s only a small bummer by itself but it opens up a bigger question. Obviously, part of me wanted this perhaps a bit “easily”. If I want to apply to a few places (or a few times) then I really need to decide whether this is the thing that makes the most sense for me to “try properly”. [for part-time paid work]

  • There’s a friendship I’m lowkey struggling with. We’ve been sufficiently close friends since college and this is perhaps one of those friendships where I feel close and intimate enough with the person to share a variety of stuff and we have a good amount of fun together and yet there’s something missing. Maybe I just want more quality time. Or more attention. I don’t know what it is exactly, and this is quite interesting. I gotta come back to this.

011 – consumption, creation and the desire to feel special

Been wanting to think about this for a while. This post of mine from almost a year ago came back to me recently and I was thinking about how much things have changed. I was gravitating towards (media, art) consumption because the desire to feel something was trumping the desire to create something?

How out of touch from my feelings must I have been? Or was the tank really just empty? Guess I won’t know but if I had to hazard a guess it was likely the former.

I think when my “feelings tank” is full, consumption rarely helps. It can sometimes help in the moment by providing a distraction of sorts, but more often than not it just acts as a temporary numbing agent. But when the feelings tank is empty, it looks like consumption can help me feel something? I feel like whenever I’m at this point – if I change my consumption of (media, art) to that of (experiences, people) instead, could I possibly feel more valuable things? 

Gosh, I don’t know, this is getting a little dense for me right now. I watched Call Me By Your Name for the second time and enjoyed it so much more than I had the first time around. I realized I’d missed so much of the brilliance when I’d seen it earlier. I ordered the book as well, looking forward to reading it. But my motivation today to start watching it wasn’t to “feel” something, my feelings tank was definitely quite full, but it was more to resolve one or more of these feelings — the feeling of loneliness, the feeling of not being fully understood by the people around me? and other related feelings.

And this is pretty much the same reason I’ve been posting as well, to resolve the feeling of not being fully understood. 

This might be one of the rare phases that consumption and creation were driven by the same motivation. Or maybe they always can be, and us choosing one is perhaps based on other factors? 

Last week I kept feeling like consuming isn’t as exciting as creating. But watching this movie was a thoroughly exciting experience. 

I think it’s safe to say that both consuming and creating can help resolve certain feelings, and give rise to new ones as well. Should we always pick creation though, since it adds more value to the world? Or is that even true? I’m sure when we consume certain things, we are in some (many) ways adding value to the ones who created them. So it’s also safe to say that both are equally valuable to the world.

So it looks like both activities can 

  1. help resolve certain feelings 
  2. help create new feelings 
  3. add some value to the world

So how do we even pick between them? Is it even a competition? Maybe they can work together for us.

Or maybe we can think about what are the requirements for each of these. 

consuming 

I feel like when we want to consume to resolve certain feelings, we might need to have an idea of what we want to consume for that to happen. If that’s not the case it’ll probably just end up working as a numbing agent.

And when we’re doing it to create new feelings, the main things we need are probably time and an open-mind. 

creating 

In this case, when the driving factor is feelings resolution, I think it’s simpler – if we follow them, they pretty much do the work we need. It might be safe to say that we need at least one of (ideas, feelings) to create something. I suppose the best things come around when the two work together?

Eh, I don’t know where I’m going with this. There’s not much more to say on this right now so I’ll give it a rest and stop forcing myself to come up with something.

—

*12 hours later*

Went back to Visa’s post about “reflecting on why” since I remember reading some stuff about this topic on it. He talks about how being really, deeply useful to a lot of people is something that could fulfill him. I think that’s a good, different framing for “adding value to the world”, and I think that’s one of my unfulfilled needs at this time as well. This often comes to us in different words, right? Impact, purpose, calling. Feeling needed, feeling like you exist, for something or someone else. It doesn’t have to be a single thing or person, as long as the sum of the value you’re adding to the world is enough for your own satisfaction.

I suppose my dissatisfaction is coming from the fact (or the feeling) that for the last few months I’ve only been “taking” support from people. Taking, taking and taking. At work as well as personal relationships. So bear in mind that when I say “creating”, I don’t only mean art or media, it can really be anything. I guess at its core I probably just mean “creating value”. 

Not to say there’s anything wrong with seeking support and maybe needing that for extended periods of time as well. I do believe in the idea of “secure your own mask first before assisting others”. Or with things that cannot be fully resolved, it’s okay to do it somewhat parallely as well. But yes, it does create an unfulfilled need. Finding small ways of adding value could probably help with that. Creating small units of “content” has been quite nice for the same reason, so far. Offering support to junior team members at work is another – I plan to do this the coming week. Of course, one would say, if you really wanna add so much “value” to the world, why don’t you go out and do some social work? Honestly, it’s a valid counter. I wonder why the thought of it is not as exciting. Is there something about me wanting to provide value in “my own, unique”ways? Wanting to feel special, even?

It makes sense then why creating could generally be more exciting than consuming. Consuming in “my own special way” can only work if I can communicate that to someone (examples: give an artist feedback about how their work impacted me, or tell someone a story about how a particular experience shaped me). Creating on the other hand probably has that “uniqueness” built in itself. 

Do I want to summarize this? Not really sure. I’ll just end with maybe the factors I might want to look out for the next time I have a chunk of time and I can’t decide what to do with it. When picking between two activities, I probably want to optimize for these and ask myself if the activity will:

  • help resolve certain feelings 
    • do i know which feelings i want to resolve and what kind of content or activities can help me do that? 
  • help create new feelings 
    • am i open-minded at this point of time? emotionally, intellectually 
  • add value to the world 
    • do i have ideas and skills
  • add value that only i can provide / honor my uniqueness
    • do i have ideas and skills