Visakan Veerasamy
Appearances
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Why is being serious so important? Why is being serious so important? Well, you know, we have a limited life, right? We have limited resources and we get to live it however we want. I just think it is really tragic if we don't make the most of it, basically, right? And, you know, it's funny. It depends on who you talk to because there are people who kind of
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
You know what's coming up for me, strangely enough? I know you've done podcasts with the Renaissance periodization guy, Israel Tell. Yes. And so I used to have a problem with my lifting patterns where I would try to go as hard as I could. And it would go pretty well for like three months, four months. And then I wouldn't realize it, but I'm getting kind of burnt out in some way.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And then I would either experience a minor injury or thankfully nothing serious, but like a minor injury or... I'd start losing my appetite and then eventually I'd take a week or two weeks entirely off and then my habit would fall off the rails and then everything just went bad. And I had years and years of cycles of this until I watched Dr. Mike and he was talking about deloading.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And I think that's just such a... I can't believe I never encountered that concept until... I mean, I guess I may have encountered it in passing somewhere, but I didn't take it very seriously. But when I saw Mike speak about it, I was like, oh, this guy knows his stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
i gave it a shot and it totally works it's like so the idea is basically keep doing the reps or maybe maybe fewer reps maybe fewer weight but like you know still show up but like at a lesser intensity and that kind of keeps you in the game but not balls to the wall kind of uh pushing yourself too hard and i feel like there's a parallel here with like seriousness in general or just you know any kind of project management
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
athletes need their downtime. Rest is a part of the recovery process. And so if you're serious about doing anything for a long period of time, you should consider how that break from the main thing keeps you... allows you to return to the game with a healthy perspective. And I'm thinking also now of David Ogilvie, who was an excellent copywriter, excellent manager. He was just a great guy.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
But invariably, when I'm serious about what I'm doing, which involves, you know, playfulness and so on, and I'm surrounded by other people who are also serious. And that just produces something, you know, there's that je ne sais quoi, right? That excellence that is, once you've tasted it, it's such a, nothing else compares. And so I kind of, I talk about things like that in part to...
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
You should read his book. It's fantastic. And he would work really, really hard for, I think, months on end. And then he would switch off completely and go into... I don't know where he would go. Just go on vacation, I guess. And he would... just let his mind lay fallow. And I think the quote he gave was like, he would receive telegrams from his subconscious.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And the telegrams from his subconscious would inspire him and give him a new perspective and that kind of thing. Another person I'm thinking of now is Paula Sher, who is the designer of the Citibank logo. She runs this great design consultancy. And she's like, you know, I can't design anything if I'm not in a state of play. So what she does is she sketches while she's in taxi cabs.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And yeah, I think... there are very few things that are interesting that don't involve some amount of playfulness, some amount of, you need to step away from the thing so you can see the big picture and not get lost in the weeds of the thing. So yeah, like, you know, I'm kind of going in circles a little bit because I don't want to be too prescriptive. Like if you say, oh,
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
take seven days on and two days off. Like, no, that is not necessary. Maybe, maybe that's correct for your thing. But like, you have to be sensitive to your own rhythms. And now I'm thinking of Christopher Alexander, who's like a, he's a, he used, he was a famous like architecture thought leader, I guess you could say. And one of his quotes that I keep coming back to is like,
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
This idea of improving patterns by tinkering with things and then seeing how you feel about it. And it's really the feeling that dictates the action. And there's no... You can't outsource this. You can't outsource your judgment and you can't outsource your feeling. These are things that... It's just like all the way to the top, right?
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Even if you're like Beyonce or Taylor Swift and you have a whole team of people managing your operation, you still at the top have to judge, do I want to have this pyrotechnics? Do I want to have this part of the show or whatever? People offer you ideas, but you have to decide by your feeling what's right or wrong. There's no escaping that. And it's the same for rest and it's the same for...
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
If you've been doing things for some time and it's not working out, you have to sit back and feel it. And it's so funny to talk about it because I think people who hear it will be like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. But it's non-trivial. It's kind of tricky. I guess because you can get lost in the weeds so easily. So you kind of want to practice... having time away from the thing.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And like, I think Netflix has like, in their software department or something, they had this thing called Chaos Monkeys where they would basically program things to break randomly so that they would be like, oh no, if this breaks, we got to do that thing. And it challenged them to make things more robust. And yes, I mean, and life is like that, right?
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Like, whatever you're doing, things are going to surprise you and blindside you and so on. So, okay, if you're a person trying to be serious and overwhelmed...
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Yeah, that's very difficult. So this is why my first book is titled Friendly Ambitious Nerd because there are three variables. And also a lot of successful people tend to be ambitious nerds. And if they're not friendly, and when I say friendly, you know, it's like sensitive to other people.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
This is tough because the people who are really at the absolute cutting edge, most exceptional, they tend to be uncompromising. They tend to be, you know, just very intense characters who...
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
My friend Kevin Kwok has this quote that's like, tapping a tuning fork, see what else resonates. So if in a sea of people, you have a distribution of different kinds of seriousness, you want to find the kind of people who vibe with you and I'll...
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
they see it as their point of view is correct because they they have put in so much work into it and so it's like they don't suffer fools right and yeah so it's like how much do you suffer fools is basically the question or like how do you do it in a way that is well each person has to decide for themselves based on their values how kind they want to be to people who can do nothing for them or you know are even in like
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
interrupting their process. And I'm kind of... I remember when I was a kid and I felt like an idiot and I felt like no one was looking out for me and I had no mentors or no whatever. And I really just needed someone to kind of show me around and help me out. So I'm kind of biased towards when I see someone struggling or I see someone lashing out or being whatever, I try to... Can I at least...
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
if i can i at least say something that they might consider later on and be like oh yeah you know actually that guy was unreasonably nice to me but you know i i don't know if i i've gone back and forth with regards to like how much should i like lecture people on that they should be nice to other people you know i i think this is one of those things where you may have some predisposition and it can vary a little bit slightly and like you know i'm reminded of uh
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
When the Google co-founders were looking for... funding. And I think one of the investors said something like, oh, these guys are so arrogant and they're so just not socially nice. They're not kissing the ring. They're just kind of saying, oh, yeah, we want to organize the world's information and it's going to be great. And I'm paraphrasing what they said.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
I don't think they said it's going to be great. It's like they just spoke in very clinical terms about precisely what they were going to do, which is like I would say it's a tell for the rocket scientists and the the people that are really serious about technical things and they want to make progress on things, they are thing-oriented people rather than people-oriented people.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
So they don't... Often they're like neurodivergent, autistic, something like that. And so... I think... Okay, here's what I think. Nobody needs to do everything by themselves. And it's a fool's errand to insist that your cutting-edge scientist should also be a very smooth political operator. It's not realistic to expect someone to be both.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Although really exceptional people are, but realistically, most people are going to specialize at the thing that they're good at. But, like, so the cool thing is life is a multiplayer game, right? Like, people are kind of indoctrinated by school to think that, oh, you've got to do standardized tests. You've got to get good grades at everything.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And, you know, like, that kind of, like, super generalist perspective. Whereas, you know, there's a lot of things where, actually, you just need a friend. You just need, like, one friend who can cover you for that. You know, you just need, like, a handler or a manager, right? My wife, I would say my wife is smarter than me in terms of reading people.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
There's a bunch of ways in which my wife is smarter than me, but she doesn't like talking to people that much. She married me, and so she gets to benefit from my social butterfly instincts or inclinations. I get to benefit from her being analytical about budgets and schedules. There's a quote from Rocky, which is like, we each have gaps, but together we have no gaps.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
So yeah, I think the good news is we can trade. So we can make friends. So you have to make at least one friend. And ideally, every antisocial... They're not trying to be antisocial, but the kind of person who isn't very good with people should have one person in their corner who's like their...
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
their representative or their advocate or someone who can look out for them and kind of translate their perspective to other people. And again, it's like the zero to one part of this is the hardest. Like when you don't have anyone, that's when it's really tough. But I think even just knowing that it's possible that if you can find someone who's like a nerd whisperer, right?
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And so I consider myself
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Basically, that's true, actually. I've described it as being the bridge between worlds. I am a fan of Heimdall from the Norse mythology. We need bridge people to bridge people.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Yeah. I respect that so much, you know, to, to decide to do that kind of alchemy is, is a profound, I think I'm curious, like, did you, did you read anything? Did you, would you point at anything that kind of set you off on that? Or do you feel like it was really just within?
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Yeah, I've thought about this a lot and I've encountered it myself back then and even now sometimes. And I find that what I find myself often saying is that there are assumptions buried in culture that people just internalize from their upbringing, from wider society or whatever. And the idea of deserving is very tricky stuff. I think there's this implicit sense that
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
So it's like status hierarchies and concepts of royalty even. And it goes back all the way to our founding, our earliest myths, mythology. And if you go back... And you can actually look at Disney movies and even superhero movies or whatever. And it's like, oh, you have to be a prince or a princess to be able to have agency. And... And that's like bestowed from... It's implied.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
It's like you're the chosen one. You're the divine, whatever. So everyone else is just... You're meant to be a peasant, basically. And these intuitions still remain in modernity. And the way I put it is like, I'm not special that I get to be serious. Anyone can do it. It's there for the taking. And it's just, I guess, maybe there might have been some...
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
validity to those old heuristics in ancient times. But, you know, and, like, one analogy I would use is, like, it used to be that if you wanted to have your own TV show or a podcast or whatever, you basically had to go through the gatekeepers of traditional media. And back then, producing video was a very expensive thing to do. And so it was highly resource-intensive.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And, like, whoever had the cameras back then or, like, you know, that whole operation... You would need to justify things to them. You would need to, oh, I'm going to do a show that's going to make this much money or it's going to grow this much audience or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And now with YouTube and iPhones or whatever, even the cheapest phones, anyone can record anything and upload it for basically free anytime. But that has been true for a decade at least. And yet people still think, We always use our old intuitions. So the present reality that we live in, culturally, is always like 30 to 50 years behind.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
There was a time where as a parent, if your son is trying to, let's say, wear fancy clothes, you would be protecting him by telling him, don't do that. The Baron has a temper. He doesn't like to see anyone other than royals dress up. He's going to kill you. And so they are protecting you by saying those things. But that's no longer true.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
But it's like that story of the five monkeys beating each other because they used to get electrocuted. So yeah, culture evolves very slowly relative to technology.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Yeah, I think there's a kind of a selection bias effect or a garishness effect. I call a version of this the Times Square problem, where, like, people... Like, imagine thinking that the only thing in New York is Times Square, which is, like, all the ads and all the garish lights and everything, which is, you know, it's interesting to check out. But, like...
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Similarly, some people think, oh, the only people on YouTube are MrBeast and whoever. When there's so much interestingness, just two streets down, three streets down. I follow this published... There's some guy running a really old printing press kind of thing. It's fascinating. And it's, yeah, it's like that kind of, it's not exactly the same thing, but like his love for his craft really shines.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And everyone in his domain loves to be around that. It's just so nice to see someone lovingly tending to the thing that they care about. And it doesn't need to be showy or flashy or loud. That's just, you know, if you filter that out, suddenly you look at the rest of the landscape and it's like, oh, there's so much interestingness everywhere.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Well, I feel like earnestness is at the heart of... You can't really be serious and not be earnest, right? I guess you can choose how much of it you want to show. I'm not entirely sure why I've used two different phrases in two different essays, but it just felt natural to me, I guess. So I think my earnestness essay says there's nothing edgier than being earnest.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
So I got around to talking about earnestness by talking about edginess. And I guess I like the alliteration. That's probably how I ended up doing that. Because you could also say there's nothing edgier than seriousness. But it's nice to have alliteration. But yeah, so basically, the interesting thing about... So some people want to be... they don't want to go with the social herd.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
They don't want to just say what everyone else is saying. They don't want to think what everyone else is thinking. And so... they begin with that and then they think, well, I should contradict what is being said, which can be, you know, a little bit of a public service.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And I think it was more of a public service in the past when we didn't have like Twitter and comments, like, you know, like in your, in your social friend group, if five, if you're in a group of six guys and five guys always saying the same thing, the sixth guy who says the other thing is providing the group with like a useful service, right? In a sense. But again,
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
if it's something like, you know, so you upload something online and some, like inevitably, you know, some guy is going to present the critical count, like contrary perspective. So each additional contrary perspective doesn't add very much. And again, this is one of those things where like people are not yet good at acting in large groups.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
They still know snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche. Right. Um, But the cool thing is... No, sorry, I didn't finish that thought. If you're going to try to be edgy by reacting to what the consensus is, you're always going to be lagging behind the consensus. So the consensus is there, then you analyze it, you compute your response, and you're always going to follow the consensus.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Very nice. It's so fascinating to me how easily people tend to triage themselves that way. Like there's no, you know, like top down way It's just naturally people gravitate towards people who are similar and away from people who are not. And, you know, I used to play in a band when I was a teenager. And it's so funny that like 10, 15 years later, we find out that, oh, this person has ADHD.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And in fact, if you're a rigid heterodoxist, you're being the opposite of what's orthodoxy, you're... You can map it out almost mathematically. You're still following the herd. You're just following the herd from the side. A black sheep is still a sheep, right? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And on the other hand, the interesting thing is if you go inwards, you follow your own heart, you follow your own interestingness, you do what you deeply care about. Because each individual is socialized kind of on the outside.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Layers of socialization begin... The way to talk about this is young children, when they first start writing poetry, they write excellent poetry because they haven't learned how ordinary people speak. And so they have all these very fresh uses of phrasing that seem surprising and almost ethereal. They'll just say very cool things until they get to...
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
I don't know, like 13, 14, and they start caring about their peers. And so, yeah, kids, like toddlers, like three to seven, they are excellent freaks. And I think several artists have quotes that's like, the challenge is to remain childlike and not let the world, whatever, which is difficult.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
But yeah, so if you go inwards and express what's really true for you and what you feel, you know, like what you'd like daydream about, what you dream about, literally. So like that stuff, and you express that, you end up being more quote-unquote contrarian. You end up being away from the herd. I think this is another thing where people who make predictions within a group
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
they tend to, it's like they're playing the price is right, sort of, you know, they all kind of calibrate their guesses in relation to everybody else's guesses. And so there's like a bell curve of what all the people guess. And sometimes the answer is way out in the field, far away from the bell curve, right? It's like a thousand times more, 10,000 times more than, in whatever direction.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And the person who figures that out is the person who wasn't listening to everybody else. And the way, yeah, so the person who isn't listening will from time to time be more radically edgy than the person who's trying to be edgy. It's kind of a trip. You think about it for a while and it's like, whoa. Just following your own rhythm gets you somewhere else.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Yeah, man, I sound better in writing than when I speak.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Yeah, I should get you to speak my audiobooks. Yeah, that's true. What is there to say about that? It's really... Well, when I hear that, I find myself feeling some empathy for... you know, people who don't know how to be better than a hater.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
This person is bipolar. This person, like it's all these people who were misfits and maladjusted in some way that were all just drawn to each other. And it's not like we signed up for who has ADHD. you know, this issue. We didn't even know. We just knew that we were all very passionate about what we did. And we just all found each other. It's so magical, actually, when you think about it.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
You know, it's like, nobody, you know, like some people say they want to be haters, but, you know, I kind of believe that if you could know how, if you could figure out how to be adored
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
for your idiosyncratic personal flavor and style and essence like you wouldn't want to go around disturbing like annoying people for engagement right like you just like again we live one short life and like you want to look back and be like oh yeah I really you know critiqued well Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
There's, there's, there's some contexts in which that's true, but like, if you're doing it like compulsively, you wake up in the morning, you scroll your feed and you look for someone to be mean to like, uh, you can do better. You can do better than that. That's my thing. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
This actually ties back to what we were talking about earlier about when I was bringing up Christopher Alexander and stuff. You have to feel. Feeling is the highest bandwidth thing that a person is capable of, I think. I love this. There's this book called The User Illusion by Thor Noritranders. He's a Danish physicist.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
It's not a very popular book because it was written in Danish originally, but he has all these brilliant bits about consciousness. And one of the things he says is that the bandwidth of feeling is more than the bandwidth of knowledge, right? I'm paraphrasing. I don't know what exactly he said now. And the bandwidth of knowledge is more than the bandwidth of communication.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
So we feel more than we know, and we know more than we can say. And thinking is somewhere in the know-to-say aspect. So what that... if you sit with that and you really feel it, what do you realize is that you feel more than you can say. You feel more than you, like what you think about something and what you feel about something. The feeling is much more nuanced.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
The feeling is much more, and think about, you know, um,
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
intuition right like so one of the ways I think about intuition is that it's like you have a felt understanding of all of the ecology of relationships of things around you one of my favorite stories is I think one of Malcolm Gladwell's books he talks about a fireman who goes to a fire like a senior fireman and like all the firemen are trying to work on the fire and he's just standing there and he's like
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
something's not right. We got to get out. It's weird. We got to get out. And then he gets everyone out. And like a second later, the whole house collapses. He didn't think what's going on. He felt it. And what he felt was, it turns out, he felt that the fire is not going away the way it should. There's not enough smoke for this level of heat.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
there must be, and it turns out that the fire was in the basement, so it's way hotter than what they were used to. But that's something he felt. He didn't think it, right? And I feel that similar to that kind of intuition, and that kind of intuition requires domain familiarity and expertise. So it's not the lackadaisical, hmm, I feel like, you know, the world should be more like this.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Or I feel like, you know, I mean, having an ice cream, if you want to have an ice cream, go ahead. But like, you know, it's like, I feel that that person is bad vibes. Like, you know, okay, those things are kind of, it varies from context to context, but what I'm getting at is there is, so like going back to the Ted Hughes quote,
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
get very hung up on the kind of thing I just said. And you can kind of go too far with it. And then you get really stiff and grimaced about, oh, I got to make as much money as possible. Oh, I got to acquire as much status as possible. And in my mind, that actually isn't. So when I describe seriousness, that is slightly unserious.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
the amount of feeling that we are able to experience and like surf the waves of because like our education systems and civilization as a whole right to minimize um inconvenience to people because we are all smooshed together in very cramped environments civilization is i call it you know it's like a iterative potty training right like it's at the most fundamental level
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
please don't shit in the street. Don't shit in front of your friends. Like, shit in the toilet, right? And shit on, like, try to do it at appropriate times, you know? So, like, potty training is good. Like, you want people, maybe if you're a barbarian in the wild, you can shit wherever you want, whenever you want. It doesn't bother anybody else.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
But, like, it's a public health issue if people are shitting everywhere. So, people need to be potty trained, right? And what that means is you need to be, like, emotionally, like, you need to regulate your feelings. You think you want to go now? No, you got to hold it in and go somewhere else. But okay, so that's potty training. And then you go on to, I'm angry. No, you shouldn't be angry.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Like you're saying, you get socialized to be less aggressive, right? We need to find ways to express our feelings in healthy ways and in good containers that don't hurt other people excessively or unnecessarily or whatever. But so from civilization's point of view, that's a little bit more complicated and complex than it can manage.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
So what it does is it tells people to suppress themselves and it enforces this through culture and institutions and everything else. And so you have all these people who are suppressed all the time and they feel like shit and they don't really know why. And then they take drugs and then they all, all of those things. But, um,
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
it is possible once you are awakened to this reality to realize that you have the capacity to re-regulate yourself in a way that is optimal for you, right? So the thing is, civilization's mechanisms are optimal for civilization and we all enjoy the benefits of civilization. So, you know, I'm not like anti-civilization or anti-capitalist or anti-whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
It's just we inherit the circumstances that we're in. It's on us to take it and... If I pinch a doublet and give it to the next person.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Yeah, that's a problem.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Imagine how, to a barbarian, civilized is an insult. You people need contracts to do things together. You don't trust each other. You put people in boxes in jails. It's a different...
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And the curse of the people pleaser is that
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
people can tell or like you know discerning people can tell if you are like stiff in a way that's like oh you i need to put your needs first and then subconsciously or consciously if they've thought about these things they know that they can't entirely trust you to take care of your needs and so then they don't they're not pleased right like they and then they don't trust you and then it's like oh you want to make them feel better and they're like i don't trust you you know like you
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Yeah, it's crazy. It's such a, you know, I'm writing about all of this from a new angle now where I talk about like,
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
a blessedness spiral upwards and a wretchedness spiral downwards and like it's so tragic because the more blessed you are the more blessings you receive and the more wretched you are the more Matthew principle all the way up and all the way down exactly that yeah and it's so harsh actually you know it's like every time you cross a threshold suddenly everything is just better and I think people know this instinctively which is what
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
part of what drives the desire for like wealth and like social climbing is that you know that at the next level, some things are less bad. And like, you know, I remember once my wife and I, I think it was during COVID or something. There's a discount on like the fanciest hotel in town. And so we decided to go. And so it was wonderful.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And then we had breakfast the next morning with all these people who are very obviously wealthier than us, like a whole tax bracket or two tax brackets higher. And it was such a lovely environment. People were playing with the children. Everyone was speaking politely. And I found myself getting kind of angry. Like, man, rich people have it good. And not just that they have consumer...
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
you know, surplus, consumer surplus, not that they have spending power, right? It's not that they have fancy things. It's that in the nice neighborhood, it's peaceful. It's,
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
i'm sure there's problems that i'm not aware of like there's more pressure you know like there's more like they seem to have a lot of like family squabbles about inheritance and stuff so like every context has its own upside and downsides but in that moment i was like whoa like i am underestimating how much i would actually appreciate like having the access to those kinds of spaces which is uh
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Yeah, yeah, it's just such a, and you know, it's almost too much to think about sometimes, I think. I think, again, like everyone is living in the immediacy of their reality, right? So it's like you have, what's on your to-do list for next week?
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
You know, what's on your, you got to ship this thing for work, you got to deal with changing the oil on the something, you know, there's all these nitty gritty things. And it's challenging to step back and really see the big picture and have like a long view of what do I really want my life circumstances to be? And, you know, it's, yeah, it's a lot.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Man, I have been in that. state for the past couple of years-ish. It's funny because when I was... I have struggled differently at different stages of my life and currently it's the best stage. When I was a teenager, I was struggling with My family didn't believe me when I said I want to be an author. And my friends didn't like that. I struggled to get people to take me seriously.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Those struggles were in some ways harder, but in some ways also, I guess, more freeing. So this goes back to every stage is different and has its pros and cons. But so in my current stage, I've written two books that I'm happy with and my readers love them.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
But instead of directing my energy towards doing marketing for them and selling more books and whatever, I feel like I got to move on to the next project and do the third thing. And that has been a struggle for me because, I mean, I guess any interesting work creatively is going to be a struggle because you're trying to birth something that doesn't already exist.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And so you have to find new perspectives and you have to, you want to say something and it hasn't quite been said before and you don't know how people are going to receive it. And, you know, it's just a lot. And I have woken up very often and been like, oh my God, what am I doing with my life? What am I... How am I going to do this thing? Why is progress so slow?
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
There's all these unpleasant thoughts. And I have to... It takes... effort to contextualize things for myself. I have to actively remind myself when I go for a walk or something and be like, Visa, do you know you're living your dream, your teenage self's dream? If I could talk to my 17-year-old self and be like, oh yeah, I don't have a job. I just write and I talk to people.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
I just do whatever I like. He'll be like, what? How is that possible? You succeeded. You've made it, man. I'm like, yeah, I just feel like a... There's this quote from Steve Jobs again where he says, when you haven't succeeded yet, when you're like a nobody, it's fun to fantasize about all the riches and all the things about dreams, like grand dreams.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
But once you have some means, once you have some money, you have some authority, some influence or whatever, Now, the chance of your dreams coming true is not zero. It's not one either. It's like in between. And you have responsibility to make that happen. And it's a burdensome responsibility, I feel. And I always feel survivor's guilt as a creative. Why me? Why not?
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
I know that there are people who are surely more talented than me, more intelligent, more articulate, whatever. but you know, maybe their mom is sick. And so they've never had a, like they've had to work extra hours. And so they haven't had time to write. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And I always feel like I got to make it for that guy, you know, because he, that's maybe my, I feel like it's a little bit similar to your people pleasing stuff. Maybe I'm not sure, but like, anyway, you were asking about how do I help people who want to struggle creatively or struggle cheerfully, right? There's layers to this, but,
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
I think Mark Manson has a quote about like, whatever you do, you're going to have to eat shit. I don't know why I'm saying shit so much in this call. Whatever you're going to do, you're going to have to eat shit. So find the flavor of shit sandwich that you like, right? Like find the thing.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Yeah, like what pain can you endure? And like what, so imagine you struggle at a thing for the rest of your life. And on your deathbed, you know, maybe you had like some minor success, but it never really fully paid off.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
But you imagine yourself, so imagine you could, like this is a great exercise, by the way, a thought experiment of visualize your old self and visualize your young self and like just have a conversation with them. So I imagine like a 90 or 100-year-old visa person And I imagine a few different versions of them.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
But one of them is like, Visa, I've been working my butt off for 50, 60 years, writing every day, and I have not achieved any great success. But I'm like, but did you love it? And he's like, yeah, I loved it. I love writing. I love playing with words. I made friends with other authors. We discussed things that were interesting. And it was a good life. I can visualize that.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
If you told me something like, Well, imagine Visa being a software engineer and never really... I know I could do it if I wanted to. I don't want to, though. So find the struggle that you enjoy for its own sake and you don't mind not succeeding at. And then you have the energy to keep going.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And I guess define for yourself small victories that are victories to you, even if it's not victories to other people. And I found, you know, so I've been writing for a long time. There were things that I wrote like 10 years ago or like many years ago where nobody in my life then cared about my writing, but I thought it was good.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And then now, 10 plus years later, when I do have an audience, I can share that old stuff with my audience and they're like, whoa, this is really good. And I'm like, yeah, I know, right? You know?
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Yeah, what you're describing reminds me of an anecdote from one of Michael B. Jordan's classmates. And she was saying he was such a weird kid. You know, he would come to school with his headshots and stuff like that. And it's just so striking to me that being serious when you're starting out is really difficult socially.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
you know so it's like if you are a success to yourself and no one else sees it but you have to see it right if and there's a quote for i think from les brown like if no one else will see it for you you have to see it for yourself like you have to be honest about what you think is good work what you think is this was worth doing i think this is worth doing i think this is worth struggling at and if no one else sees it i'm just i will see it for myself and then you try and find one other person who can see it and then another person and then another person right and then um
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
in that kind of mindset, I think, um, you can try to be cheerful about it. There's all these other, like, project management nitty-gritty stuff. So, like, don't attempt extremely large projects that might, like, sink your ship if you fail. You know, like, I think, uh, Nietzsche said something like, write a hundred, like, um,
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
outlines of essays or drafts or something like so you can if you can like the saddest thing I see from time to time is like an author who spent or like a startup founder or an author who spends several years of their life and a lot of their money and their resources and whatever working on a project that they had like this kind of white whale idea like oh when my novel is done everyone's going to love it it's going to be amazing
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
yeah and then you do this really big thing and then you talk to people about it for the first time and they're not interested and then that's just so depressing and so disheartening whereas what you want to do and this is part of like being cheerful and whatever you want to do little sketches little outlines little drafts and then share them with people and then like see how they respond and if you just talk to people every couple of days even just a regular conversation
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
you may notice at some point you make someone laugh or at some point their eyes light up. And those are the moments that you want to collect and pay attention to. And you do more of that.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Because, again, it's like, I think the general sentiment in most of the world is like, who do you think you are, you know, to take this thing so seriously? Like, why are you so... And, you know, like, another joke I liked was, imagine being Shakespeare's English teacher, right? Like, this annoying kid coming up with his own phrases and words and stuff like that.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
You know, it's a... When I write, you know, when I hear this, right, it doesn't feel like me. You know, I can recognize that it's me, but it's my... It's kind of a peak state me or like when I'm in the middle of a thing, right? It's a... Day to day, I don't feel like my best self or I don't feel like my best writer self, but like I got to keep...
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
doing stuff and then it just comes by in flow um elizabeth gilbert has a great tech talk about this where she talks about the the myth of the genius of the creative genius like in a sense where it's like she goes back to because she was a successful author of eat pray love and she described how when she was a struggling author people were like how are you gonna feel never making anything worthwhile like what if you're never gonna make it and then immediately after she made it
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
immediately people are like, oh, aren't you afraid you're never going to match up to that success? And she's like, what the fuck, man? So, yeah. And so she looked up the history of how people thought about these things. And I think in the Roman times or antiquity, people were like, okay, people get possessed by genius from time to time. So if you do good work, you don't get full credit.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And if you do bad work, you don't get full blame. It's like the creative... Sometimes just creativity happens and we are vessels for that. But yeah, with regards to the scarcity sprite, it's really... I don't know. I think maybe I indoctrinated myself a little bit with video games, motivational stuff. But I feel it to be true. I really just want to have my own back.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
I think there's a quote from Montaigne where he says, you can try to be clever and fancy with all your words and stuff, but on your deathbed, you're going to really confront the barest... like, barest truths about yourself. Like, did you live up to what you wanted? Do you forgive yourself for whatever? Do you... And, like, those very basal things. And I think about that a lot.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
I'm like, how can I be a better friend to myself so that I can be a better friend to other people? And actually, it's funny. It's funny that I'm so quick to go from that first sentence to the next. It's like, you know, like, self-love or self-care...
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Yeah, so you know what's funny? I spent like years reading everything I could about it, analyzing it, psychoanalyzing myself and everything. And these days, I don't even use the term anymore. I don't, you know, it's... I think one of the most major things I've learned is that you really have to focus on the outcomes that you want and not the outcomes that you don't want.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And I also have sympathy for people who... like the teacher, for example, who is just trying to teach a class, but there's a student who's like, nah, I'm going to do my own thing. God damn it, William, not again. Exactly. And at the same time, I think about all the kids everywhere who had that spark of something, but it was snuffed out because their social environment just didn't allow it.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And even describing things in terms of procrastination, somehow I feel it tends to like... reinforce the procrastination. I don't know if this is a slightly radical view. I can try and answer the question directly, but my meta view is that you don't even need to use that term. Think about what you want. Ask yourself what's in the way of getting to what you want.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And the problem is, very often, procrastination is trying to protect you. It's trying to protect you from doing something that you don't actually want. You know, like my wife and I have been procrastinating on renovating our house for years and years. And I eventually realized, oh, I don't want to live in this neighborhood. And I have not been honest with myself about that.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And like, but my subconscious protects me from making a costly financial decision like a very costly financial decision, by just putting it off. Like, no, no, let's just keep looking, let's whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And the moment I realized that, oh, I actually want to be in a better neighborhood, then it's so easy to fall into, I'm going to go see an agent, I'm going to go look at houses, and everything just flows from there. So yeah, I think a lot of times procrastination is... maybe you don't actually want to do the thing.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And I think people struggle with like, well, but I need to pay the bill, so I have to have a job. So I have to, which is fair, right? Everyone, most people go through that. But I think a lot of things boils down to like the story you're telling yourself about why you need to do what you're doing.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
I have been helping some friends with these issues recently, and one pattern I keep noticing is people have this taskmaster inside their head that's beating them up over and over again. Like, you should be doing this thing. Why are you not doing it? You're so lazy. You're so whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And it doesn't get to the truth of why you should or should not be doing it, what you are, what you care about, what you're afraid of. And yeah, so when I was talking to my friend, he was trying to spend less time on Twitter. And I'm like, why? And he's like, oh, because I spend so much time on Twitter and Instagram and whatever, and I don't get any work done.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And so I should spend less time on those things. And I'm like, I don't think that's actually true. You know, like somewhere out there, there's someone else who spends twice as much time on the socials as you, but they're happy because they're achieving their goals, right? So like, why is it that you're focusing on lowering the...
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
that you think you don't want instead of increasing the thing that you actually do want. And then we talked about that for almost an hour. And we got around to, well, he wants to be doing some research stuff, but he hasn't made a study plan. And his initial plan was, oh, I'm going to read this whole textbook in a week. And that's not possible. It's a thick, dense textbook.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
So you've got to partition the thing. So it's so interesting when you lay it all out. It turns out that this guy... has the thing he wants to do, has like, and you know, if you split him into two people, imagine that there's like the, the client and the worker, right?
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Like, the client, no, client is not the right word, but like, split him into two people, one person asking the other person to do a job, right? Like the manager and the worker. The manager is giving these really vague, requests, unreasonable timelines, unclear what needs to be done, what needs to be shipped or whatever, just get work done. And the worker is like, fuck this shit.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
I'm just going to goof off and play video games or whatever. Because the gradient of work to be done is just so out of whack that they're not going to do it. So you have to respect that there's some part of you within you that will not except shitty management, right?
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
So people are shitty bosses of themselves and, you know, I guess there's some funny territory here where people might be like, oh yeah, you know, like bad workplace environments are horrible, my boss sucks, my this, whatever. Like, how are you managing your own home, your own head, your own whatever? And people inherit the talk from their parents, from their teachers, from their whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
It's tempting to think that, oh, You know, I have it and I've made it so far. Therefore, I'm special. Which, yeah, in some sense, yes. But we always, I think, underestimate the degree to which a kind word here, a supportive context there, just really, you know, you watch the right movie at the right time of your life and it just hits something for you.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And it's like, you got to work harder. You got to do more. You got to like, and it's very, it's nebulous, vague. And so I always ask people and ask my friends, uh, what are you really trying to accomplish? Why, what is the most like sensible, reasonable, interesting, exciting way to do it? Um,
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And like, if you really want the thing, and the path to getting there makes sense, and you can see your progress towards the thing. And video games do this really well, which is why video games are so fun to play. You have some mission, you have some objective, and you know how much XP you're going to get from each monster you kill. You get the gold, you get the skill points. It's very clear.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
They've The game has done the hard work of project managing your tasks for you. So you go in there and you have a good manager in the game and it's shiny and colorful and whatever. But you can do the same in your own life with your own projects. So it's like if you're practicing guitar or whatever, how much are you practicing? What specific thing are you trying to do?
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
what progress what's the reward like what song do you want to be able to play and when you make that progress progress feels good and what's interesting is that i think people don't even feel that they deserve the right to feel good making progress on their work that's the real painful thing they feel that work should be miserable and difficult puritan work ethic
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Yes, and that's what really... And they have that, which is like, imagine a boss saying, oh, you're all going to have to grind, grind every weekend, every night. And the employee's like, yeah, sure. And then they just... Their heart's not in it. And then... So then you get this conflict, this... the person becomes unintegrated. They get split selves.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And you have these phrases like revenge, bedtime, procrastination, where basically, like your, you know, and so it's your prefrontal cortex that's making all the plans. It's like the manager is a shitty guy. It's like, you know, in Lord of the Rings, there's King Theoden and then there's the worm tongue whispering poison in his ear. It's like a lot of people's prefrontal cortex is worm tongue.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
it's when you see it as that and then you're like and I have this whole analogy with well Gandalf is a friend who sees what's best in you and encourages you to grasp your sword of agency and do what you actually want to do and um Yeah. And when you get tired, your prefrontal cortex shuts down. It's like the boss leaves the office. And then what people do, they're going to goof off.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
They're like, we've been grinding on this thing that doesn't make any sense. We need to have fun too. And at that point, you feel like you're burnt out, you're tired, and you feel you have no choice but to go along with the thing. Next thing you know, you're on a bender. It's 3 a.m. And then you feel bad about that. And then you feel bad about that. And you justify, I should be harsher on myself.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And someone else just random walking didn't get that. And it's like virtuous cycles of do things get better or not. And yeah, there's a lot to get into about how society is structured in a way that kind of, you know, it's like, I can always see both sides of this. Like, it's both good and bad. It's a kind of sorting algorithm in a way.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Yeah. I have a tweet like that and it's, um, goo for my prickly friends and prickles for my gooey friends. And there's a whole, there's a whole bunch of things like that, which is like, yeah, everybody over extends the mode that they are good at. And again, it's like coping mechanisms, right? And it's like, um,
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
in like D&D and video games is this concept of a glass cannon which is like a character who can do a lot of damage but like dies very easily and you think oh why is he like that and it's like oh he's because he dies very easily he has learned to do a lot of damage and so he takes pride in that and that his identity becomes tied up in that and it's just you know it's that yeah Yeah, it's a lot.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
So you asked for the TLDR and I went on this long, rambly circular rant, but I would say at the heart of everything, you have to really step back and observe the patterns non-judgmentally. I recommend really abstract questions like how might this
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
look if it's easy or how might it look if it's done skillfully and beautifully without anger without you know like one of my favorite things in the book Easy Way to Quit Smoking by Alan Carr they insist that you keep smoking as you read the book. And it's like, why would they do that, right?
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
It's because part of the cycle of addiction, and this is true for all addictions, and procrastination can be a kind of addiction, part of what happens with the smoker who kind of wants to quit, but is struggling to, and then... He tries to quit, but he's like half-hearted about it. And then eventually he lights up again. And then he feels guilty and shamed that he did that.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And that is a high arousal emotion. He gets stressed and he wants to smoke more. So there's that loop. And then there's like the meta loop that keeps the loop going harder. And when the book says, I want you to keep smoking.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
you're like am i being punked right because you assume that you're supposed to not and that just creates this tension that makes it difficult to mess with the process so same with like budgeting software or even diets and this the good ones say uh don't change your spending just track it don't change your like food habits this the first month just track it just just see what you're doing and like don't judge just observe
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And when people are able to comfortably just observe what is happening, there's a breathing room that opens up. And you're like, oh, maybe I don't have to play video games until 3 a.m. in the morning. And so, yeah. And I had an issue with schedules as a child, like with school timetables and stuff. I found it very stressful and traumatic.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And the idea of even using, opening up Google Calendar and putting, I'm going to do this work today, this work at this point, whatever. I hated that because I felt like I was always dishonest. And when I put whatever... I would get excited and fill in with lots of stuff, and then I would miss it, and then I feel bad, and then the cycle continues.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And what someone suggested that really worked for me was only schedule the fun stuff, which, again, it sounds immoral. It sounds like, oh, gasp. It violates the puritanical thing, right? What do you mean schedule the fun stuff?
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
But if you say, I'm going to play one hour of video games every evening, you no longer feel this anxious, grabby, I might not get to play tomorrow, so I better play three hours tonight. And then you don't sleep. And then your sleep gets fucked and then everything spirals worse and worse. So if you begin with the premise that To do your best work, you have to be emotionally well.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Morale has to be good. Again, which people don't want to admit until it gets so bad that it's horrific. And then they don't even get to enjoy. Then the only rest they get is that they fall sick. And then it's like, what kind of leisure or recreation is that? You're just lying in bed. You don't get to go and see things. You don't get to hang out with your friends. So you schedule the good stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Like, in the long run, the people who are most serious and kind of, there's this quote from this old French poet, writer, Baudelaire, Something like, the great man, in order to exist, has to overcome the resistance of millions of people, his family, his friends, his school, his society.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And then... you will get, you know, like nobody wants to be on a beach vacation for like years. You know, like people feel like, oh, I would like to sit at the beach for a year. No, you wouldn't. Like three weeks, maybe two or three months is about as long as anyone would really enjoy a beach vacation. Most people, I guess. Before you start to go, ah, you know, what am I doing?
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Same for like, you know, there's only like, if you were tasked with eating as much chocolate cake as you could, you'd probably eat I don't know, somewhere between half a cake to one cake or something, whatever your number is. But you would eat... So the people who, when tasked to have pleasure, they tend to contain it reasonably.
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#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
But when they've been suppressed away from pleasure, that's when they eat three cakes. And then they feel horrible and they want to throw up. And then next morning, they're like, I'm never going to eat cakes again. It's yo-yo extremes and it's just chaos. It's just bad. So... You want to dampen that extreme yo-yo stuff. You want to schedule the fun and the pleasure.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And I remember so clearly when I was working and I was like 25 and I felt I don't have the right to have fun. I have overdue work. I don't have the right to... One of the saddest days of my life was I think 2015 or 2016, the New Year's Day. My wife was like... Both me and my wife were at home and I was anxiously trying to get work done because I had gotten myself into such a...
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#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
spiral of self-loathing and whatever that I'm not doing enough work, that my poor wife was sitting in the living room by herself while I was working. And I can't even tell you what I was working on. I don't remember. It's how... So I was like, never again. Prioritize what's important to you. You are a human being who deserves love and space.
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#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And even if you don't think you deserve it, that's what good performance requires. I hope you get to the point where you feel that you deserve it. But even... Sometimes they say LeBron James slept 12 hours a night and freaking God Almighty took a day off on Sunday. Schedule your breaks. Historic cultures have the Sabbath and you're supposed to respect the Sabbath because that's how you decompress.
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#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
The most interesting stuff that's happening for me right now is on my Substack. So if you go to visaganv.substack.com. Okay, most people like my Twitter, but I feel like my action is moving to Substack. Follow both, I guess. You can just Google me, V-I-S-A-K-A-N-V. You get my personal website that has links to my YouTube channel and everything else. Dude, I appreciate you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
So by the time he gets there, he's got this immense strength, or however you want to frame it, immense persistence, immense capability of managing his psyche to get there. And
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Thank you so much for having me. This was great.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
It's kind of a fixation on a particular model of trying to make some number go up. So if you read my essay, the conclusion is that seriousness is love and curiosity expressed earnestly over a long period of time. And that I just think, really, it's like life is a feast and you really want to sample everything you can and find the thing that's yours and really enjoy it.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
In a way, because we live in a world where there's so much information, so many people doing so many things, and I used to work in startups, and you would hear from someone that their startup is going to be the next big thing, and two years later, they're gone. And so, since there's competing... demands on your attention, it's very normal and reasonable, in fact, to kind of dismiss most things.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
So most people assume that most people are not serious, you know, in this frame. Even the ones who say that they are being serious. Exactly, because everyone says they're serious. So the only way to demonstrate it
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
is over time and you just you keep shipping another podcast episode you keep writing you keep showing up year after year after year and i found that um there's something magical about like the seven year mark sometimes it's less sometimes like three to five but like once you've been around for like seven years ish People's memories are not that long.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And so once you've been around that long, it seems like you were there all along, like forever. And so it's just interesting.
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#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Oh, that's a good question. I think, and you know, the messy thing is that Nobody has it all figured out at the start, right? I love to look up, you know, anybody who's like very successful now, I love to look up their earliest, like if you see like Obama's earliest speeches or like Jason Mraz's first concert, they look nervous. They don't look like they know what they're doing, you know?
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#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
So in the earlier stages, I think if anybody has any like intellectual honesty, they are going to be like, well, I think I got a shot, but I'm not completely sure, but I'm going to try, right? And, you know, so there will be self-doubt and If someone tells them, you're not serious, they might be like, am I? I think I am, but I'm not sure. There's that cluster of people.
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#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And then, okay, there's also the cluster of, I imagine Kanye is probably an extreme end of just radically certain of themselves. And that group probably splits into those that don't crash and burn and those that make it. And then there's like out of survival bias, you hear from a lot of those who do make it. I'm drifting from your question. You were asking about... How that causes cynicism.
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#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Tasks failed successfully, yeah. I think it's especially difficult when you're starting out, which is why I tend to think about and focus on teenagers and people in their early 20s a lot. Because that's such a... I do think as you get older, if you've been somewhat rigorous, you have some hygiene principles in how you examine things and who you talk to.
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#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Over time, you cultivate a social graph, a social network that's the people in your life. If you have other serious people around you, um, who are serious about figuring out who's for real and who's not, it gets easier a little bit.
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#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
You might still make some errors here and there, but like, you know, after a while, you know, I think Steve Jobs has this quote about how, and he's talking about a company and running a team. Like when you hire a people and you put them in a context with other people, they become self policing in only welcoming other people and like pushing and like kind of, um,
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#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Yeah, and actually, the way I would answer that question other than that is,
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#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Not necessarily pushing away, but they keep out the B people, I guess. But yeah, so if you are not rigorous about your information environment and who you allow to take up your time and energy and attention, cynicism becomes a natural response because you keep seeing failures and you keep seeing evidence of people bullshitting you.
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#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And if you look out into the world, there's always people bullshitting. I have an essay I want to write. I haven't written yet. It's called Shitwatch. And it's like, it's already funny. It's like the social media algorithms incentivize high arousal emotions. And so there are people who, whether coordinated or not, end up... So the analogy I give is, imagine there's a group of people in your city
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#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
who go around looking for like the worst public toilets they can find. And then they look for the shit and then they scoop up the shit and they present it to you. And he say, Hey, Hey, here, look at this shit, smell it, taste it. I don't know. And you'd be like, that's disgusting. What's wrong with you? Right. But we do the equivalent.
Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
having lived through the opposite which is you know being around unserious people going to school or other institutions where there's like an unserious energy where people are kind of you know just not taking things seriously and they might have their reasons maybe the job's not that important to them and they want to focus on something else which is fine but what I found is that when I reflect on my life and think about when are the moments when I've really had a great time it's
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#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
equivalent with, like, information and content and be like, oh, here's these people fighting. Here's this... And it's like, you know, in a city of millions of people, there's going to be someone fighting somewhere. And if you can scroll through some feeds where it's, like, fight compilations and it's just, oh, my God.
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#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
In five minutes of scrolling, you would think that the whole world is, like, full of people fighting. But if you go out into a restaurant, everyone's just sitting around having lunch or dinner, you know? And it's... So there's that... With regards to cynicism, I think it's very much a function of how well you curate your information.
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#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And I think there's this unfortunate tendency for people, especially intellectual types, who want things to be objective. And I remember thinking this way as well. I need to know all of the bad things. I need to know the truth. You know that somewhere out there, there is shit. True, you don't need to be in denial of that. But you also don't need to go around sniffing it. You know what I mean?
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#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
You don't need to immerse yourself in that. So my recommendation is always to do an audit of what you have been consuming, what you have been reading, who you're talking to. How does that make you feel? Does it inspire you towards action? Does it inspire you to make things better? If it doesn't, if it's making you feel more helpless, more angry, all of those things, then what's the point? Yeah.
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#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And even just knowing that you can experience different realities by modifying what you allow in, I think that's a huge... As a way of overcoming cynicism. And to be fair, as a species, we are new to having smartphones. It's been like 15 years, 16, 17 years. And it takes time for the collective... to develop antibodies and proper protocols.
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#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
It's funny, you can read up about when the telephone was invented, people didn't know how to use it. And they would just call randomly at any hour of the day. They wouldn't say hello. They would just start talking. And they would have to write into magazines to complain about people crank callers and all that. And it took a while for healthy norms to develop.
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#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
And I think we're still in the process of figuring out how to... have healthy, chaotic information environment diets. But the scary thing is that AI and all these things are coming up. And so by the time we adapt to whatever is happening now, new stuff is going to happen faster. So it's a challenge.