I’ve been online 20+ years and have spoken to 1000s of people over hundreds of thousands of tweets/comments/posts etc and one thing I’ve noticed repeatedly is that its never happy or successful people who feel the need to dismiss the throwaway thoughts of others
there are multiple interesting parts to this, the first being the assumption that the author is trying to be insightful, or obliged to be insightful. IMO this is often some level of envy/resentment at the person having access to an audience, clout, etc that seems “undeserved”
the second bit, which is sometimes intertwined with the first, and the real sad part in my view, is the inability to appreciate that insight is something that emerges from a *process* of study. Which is to say, if you want to be insightful, you have to make “dumb” observations
the more time and energy you spend dunking on other people for having thoughts that you deem unworthy, the harder it becomes for you to say or do anything yourself, because you’ve normalized this sort of dismissive criticism. So these ppl end up screaming from a tiny chalk circle
the more interesting, useful, fun thing to do is to ask, what interestingness might be behind this boringness or ugliness if we jiggle with it a bit? Where could we go from here?
I don’t need the approval of rando internet anon lowbies; I share things like this in the hope that it might help someone notice that they’re on a miserable self-destructive path, and that they can choose to step away from it once they see it
insight is not an utterance, insight is a process. that process needs time and space to make “mistakes”, to be “boring”, to goof off, to be surprised, to entertain, to luxuriate, to play. you’re not going to find much of it by going around trying to discourage or demean others
PS: if you quote-tweet me I will simply assume that you’re volunteering to do free marketing for me, in which case I will always happily oblige
Loading suggestions...