Modern Wisdom
#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
Sat, 09 Nov 2024
Visakan Veerasamy is a writer and an entrepreneur. It's perhaps the biggest competitive advantage no one ever talks about because it's so obvious. But just what does it mean to be a serious person? And if it's such a help, why is it so hard to find? Expect to learn why being serious is so important, how to deal with being too harsh on yourself and holding high expectations of others, how to get better at being disliked, the relationship between seriousness and earnestness, ways to deal with procrastination more effectively and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a 20% discount & free shipping on yourThe Chairman™ Pro at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM20) Get a Free Gift, 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why is being serious so important?
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
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.
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.
Yeah, and actually, the way I would answer that question other than that is,
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
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...
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Chapter 2: How do we deal with unserious environments?
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...
So I was at a bachelor party, a stag do, in the UK about two years ago. And we were playing shuffleboard. And we'd been going for maybe six hours or so. So people had kind of gravitated into whatever their normal social groups were. Some of us had priors. Some of us had known people from before. But a lot of the people in each of the groups were new.
And I looked over at the other table of people, and the guys were sort of like flicking the little pucks, and they were sort of being playful and messing about, and no one was really keeping score. Meanwhile, on the table that I was on, we were whispering tactics to each other. We were talking about, oh, he's really weak when he has to come short, so blah, blah, blah.
And I was like, dude, we're at a bachelor party. But we had separated ourselves out. We had literally triaged the group by seriousness. And I realized in that moment that I like to be around people that take things seriously.
Chapter 3: What is the connection between seriousness and curiosity?
And it doesn't mean, I really appreciate you saying this isn't sort of solemn, tedious, rigid, stodgy, use this term dynamic persistence, sort of a sense of humor being critical to that because it's difficult to persist for a long period of time if you take yourself too seriously. So you become rigid and you become stiff and the opposite of being dynamic. And yeah, I just, I saw that thing.
I saw that situation occur in front of us. And I saw a group of people that were, they had resonated with the people that weren't taking things seriously. And I realized I was on the serious people table. No better, no worse, but just I'd found my tribe, so to speak.
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.
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.
I love the idea of this. I also think I became quite frustrated. One of the reasons I really wanted to speak to you was reading your blog post was kind of like a It's an allowance for people who are serious to not feel embarrassed in their seriousness.
You know, because there is... The person who doesn't seem to be taking things too seriously, who doesn't seem to be paying that much care or attention, they're kind of lackadaisical. They're chill, man. You know, just fucking relax a little bit, dude. That person... often comes across as sort of more fun, more cool. They're more vibey, right? The vibes are vibing.
And I've always found myself as somebody who prefers to be on the serious table as opposed to the non-serious table. And seeing that as a virtue, not in a virtue as in like some superiority complex of some guy in a stuffy fucking library somewhere, but genuinely just, this is a predisposition you have.
It's some weird personality trait, probably orderly, some form of orderliness, conscientiousness, a But beyond that, it's an amalgamation of you pay care and attention to the things that you do and you think that there is utility in effort and there is utility in trying.
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.
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Chapter 4: How can we navigate being disliked?
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?
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.
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.
So basically, the way that I see it is that the fact that so many people want to be seen as serious and so few are, and that you don't really have a way to expedite working out whether or not somebody is legitimate in their claims of seriousness beyond just waiting, which is the exact opposite of expediting, That causes cynicism to occur as a defense mechanism against sort of fraud and bullshit.
And the trouble, you say, with cynicism as a defense mechanism is you can get so good at it that you inadvertently also defend yourself against anything good ever happening for you, too. Yeah.
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.
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.
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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Chapter 5: What lessons can we learn from famous figures about seriousness?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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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Chapter 6: How do we manage seriousness burnout?
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...
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
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 7: What is the relationship between seriousness and earnestness?
basically that like i'm kind of a nerd whisperer i'm nerdy in general but i'm not like all the way intense to the point where i'm like tinkering with stuff so you're able you're able to translate for the ones who are too far down the autist ladder to be able to communicate you're like the gateway drug to normal civilization yeah
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.
Well, so you said before about you had this sort of sense that you as a kid was yearning for role models, for somebody to give you an encouraging word in your ear. And I think I was very similar. I came up with this idea of the reverse role model because you've heard of food deserts in America. I think I was in the equivalent of a role model desert in the UK, classic working class town.
Not many people like the person I wanted to be like. And I realized that I think most success from life doesn't necessarily come from expediting success, but from avoiding tragedy and failure. Like if you multiply by zero, you're completely out of the game. So at least there is much more downside to be had than potential upside. So what I found was...
People who are very much like the sort of person I didn't want to be. So I don't want his relationship with gambling and I don't want the way that he cheats on his wife all the time. And I don't want the fact that this person never really seems to be able to speak their mind and so on and so forth. And they're way markers in the ground.
You sort of place these different way markers of stuff that you don't want to be like. Correct. I think that's reassuring to anybody that feels like they haven't yet found a role model or an encouraging word in your ear, because if you haven't had a single one of those, the likelihood is that you haven't just been sort of moving through some really boring gray middle zone.
What you've been exposed to is the opposite end of the bell curve. Lots of people like the person you don't want to be like. And, um, it was just a, I thought that was an interesting and nice way for me to, uh, rationalize, uh, alchemize, um, the, uh, situation that I'd been in. And it's, uh, for the people who don't have that many role models around them, uh, I'm, I'm sort of here for it.
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?
It was intuition, I think mostly, that I just, I didn't fit in. I didn't resonate with the people around me in the way that they resonated with the people around them. And, you know, you find little glimpses every so often of someone that you can sort of get on with. And much of this is your problem, right?
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Chapter 8: How can we cultivate meaningful relationships?
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.
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.
I had a great conversation with this guy that researched the history of humans discovering their own ability to destroy themselves. So a history of existential risk. And he's got this great term that is apparently in the literature called conceptual inertia. And let's say that we have a Copernican revolution.
We go to learn that the universe is perhaps constructed in a different way to the one that we believe. And first off, people will deny that it's true, and you will continue to need to push with evidence and data and so on and so forth, observation. And then after a while, maybe some of the elites will begin to accept that it's true.
Then maybe some of the normal people will begin to accept that it's true, but they still don't behave as if it is. And that's conceptual inertia. It's the archetypes. It's the stories that we tell ourselves. It's the way that we see the world. And this just lags behind this lumbering behemoth that we need to fucking drag along.
And the other thing, just to kind of round out the social element, because I do get the sense that that's a really important...
uh seriousness derogating uh element that um the social incentives will align for you to go back to the mean with anything whatever it is that you do even if it's aggression you will be socialized to be less aggressive if it's funniness like if you're too much of a comedian it's like dude come on we're trying to be it's a it's a fucking funeral let's be serious here um but and
I always wanted, especially because I was very sort of lonely as a kid, I always wanted to work out how to make people like me. I wanted to be accepted. I wanted to have friends. I wanted to have a support system. And it took probably until about a year ago for me to realize that
I always thought that people wanted to be around charismatic individuals, other people around them to be charismatic, to have some sort of gravitational sense, some sort of pull. And then I reflected on the friends that I like to spend my time around, and it wasn't the people who were the most interesting. It was the people who made me feel like I was the most interesting.
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