#mentalisttraceur meta

[mentalisttraceur]

A common reaction I feel as I look at my old posts and drafts circa 2016-2019 is "oh my goddd shuuut uuuuup".

I see the first sentence and my eyes glaze over yet again. It'll be dozens of words before a hint of a point. I can tell by how it is.

A lot of the improvement in my writing over these past few years has been driven by this. 5+ years of distance from my writing finally forcing me to really experience the worst of my posts from the outside.

I have so much more sympathy nowadays for everyone who thought I was pretentious, trying to sound smart, just liked hearing myself talk....

Feeling like a developmentally-delayed toddler learning to walk. Give it a couple years and I'll be decent at this whole "writing" thing. Exciting!

[mentalisttraceur-software]

On this fateful night, I have decided that I want to become the kind of person who doesn't want to code in C.

I want to feel no attachments to C. I want to stop feeling a desire to turn to C.

I want to only want C if it's absolutely necessary or would be exceptionally great for my life - C for an amazing job opportunity, or in the very rare case that it's actually the best tool for the goals.

To recap, my relationship with C is unhealthy: being moved by the idea of an efficient, elegant, and minimal language, but in many ways that's a rationalized aesthetic vibes motivation, not a technically sound optimizing decision; being moved by how portable and universal it is, but this was in large part a confused attempt by my traumatized brain to philosophize a set of values and priorities that would've prevented some past unpleasantness for me; being moved by how much better than most I can be at wrangling C, but that would have far less emotional power were it not for my narcissism having such a need to farm ego supply.

Yes, it's not all bad. I've been empowered to understand and audit the implementations of much code due to my knowledge of C. I've come up with some rather neat, useful, and maybe even entirely novel C tricks. I have a better sense of how computers and the entire modern software infrastructure works, because so much of it is written in or influenced by C.

And yet, it's time to admit that I would be a more effective, happy, healthy, successful, and self-aligned person if I was free of a certain unjustified desire to reach for and think about C. It's time to recognize that self-love and self-care demands something better for myself than the way I currently give C my energy and motivations.

[mentalisttraceur]

A follower just said "I never quite knew how to verbalize this" on one of my old posts.

I get comments like this every once in a while.

Thank you.

That's one of the main reasons I do all of this.

[mentalisttraceur]

I feel like one crucial part of understanding me (although you probably already know this if you stuck with this blog for a while), is that a phrase like

that's my standard mode of music consumption

comes out of me with zero thought, effortlessly and naturally, but I actually have to think to come up with

that's how I listen to music

and even then I have to force myself to omit words like "normally" or "usually".

[mentalisttraceur]

Hearing that both adult and kid literacy is really bad nowadays makes me feel both

like it's hopeless to ever widely improve minds with my writing, but also

really glad I pivoted so hard into trying to speak more plainly.

Nowadays I do a mix of both, but I try to

keep terms I really don't want misused or co-opted weird/unusual/awkward/big, and

use the smallest and simplest words I can otherwise.

I also tried hard to reduce my Effortpost writing to small, simple phrases. I still do run-on sentences too much. But

I don't slip into it or need it as much as I used to, and

for posts that I think should be more widely accessible, I try to break long multi-clause ideas/sentences into lists.

[mentalisttraceur]

I think a big mistake in my approach to posting is the wishful thinking that my ideas could ever have quickly consumable popular appeal, especially among people who haven't already put in a lot of effort to think.

For a few years now, I've been chasing the ideal of a Concise Post for each building-block idea in my mind that I don't see spoken/named or properly abstracted in popular conversation/thinking.

If only I could distill my ideas into single-screen-sized chunks, then more people would actually read and share them.

If only I could give my ideas crisp names, people could easily refer to them in thought and in conversation.

If only I could precisely tune the name for the required level of accessibility and precision, they would resist nuance decay and misuse to the right degree.

If only, if only, if only....

???

Profit! (My ideas catch on, people get exposed to them, especially when they're younger and still have more opportunity to grow and avoid various problems and make the world better than they otherwise would've with their ripples.)

But the truth is, I don't think this really works. Or rather, I don't think that hope is fully reachable. I think I've done a decent job within those constraints, and it really helped me become a better writer, but so often I look back at these short posts and feel like they're too reduced - husks of what they could be.

One of the ideas was to write a second, fully elaborated post for each idea, and put it on @mentalisttraceur-long. I do think that would help, and that's still a goal, but I have yet to get around to it.

But that's precisely the problem: the ideas I am most equipped to contribute are often ideas that demand a larger entry fee than these tiny posts could contain, and trying to appeal to the people who need it to fit on a single screen might just be sacrificing what I'm trying to say for the sake of the wrong audience.

[mentalisttraceur]

I just watched Arrival and I don't think a movie has ever hit me in as many emotional places at once before.

I don't even know if anyone else has quite the same experience from that movie. There is a lot of potential in that movie to emotionally impact people in many different ways - so easy for us to be gut-punched with different effects and think they are the same, or to be hit with the same effects and think due to other factors that we have evidence of a lack of mutual experience.

For me it's like... so many different experiences, so many thoughts and feelings and philosophical unanswerable speculative ponderings, so many fears, so many losses, so much of my bittersweet feelings about connections that are profoundly positive but doomed to loss by mortality, so much acute emotional processing both positive and negative, from all over my whole life up to this point, all being cinched together into an experience by the movie invoking so many different associations all at once, in a way that felt as if this experience was what a lot of the other experiences were building up to enable....

Of course many of those associations could not have been automatically invoked by the movie if I hadn't had life experiences and emotional predispositions and habitualized cognition that I had at the moment of watching the movie.

[mentalisttraceur]

Too often I will reply to people in my head, possibly several times, and then not really have any desire or motivation to actually reply to them in the real world because I'm fully satisfied with how it played out in my mind.