(2023-01-08) Visakanv Are You Serious

Visakan Veerasamy: Are you serious? It’s frustrating to not be taken seriously.

When I was a kid, one of my most agonizing frustrations was about how rare it was that anybody would take me seriously

I think I got partially radicalized by the books I’d read. Good books are written by serious authors, and being deeply immersed in their work stirred something in me that made me yearn to live a serious life myself. It just seemed so obvious to me that a serious life is a life well-lived, and it’s always been weird to me how uncommon this perspective really is.

but mostly people seem to use it as window dressing, rather than, something to actually take seriously

We do live in a world that’s full of unserious people. (pop culture)

Looking back now I don’t think I was entirely wrong, the issue was that I was overly fixated on unpleasant truths. I find myself compelled to describe it as “LinkedIn World”, where everyone is performing a bullshit role in a bullshit play.

it’s actually quite rational for most people to assume that any other random person probably isn’t serious. That they don’t really mean what they say. Lots of people play-act seriousness for social reasons, but quit when the going gets tough

Serious people do exist. Let me tell you about some of them.

Justo Gallego Martínez was serious. At about 36 years old, he got stricken with tuberculosis, got better, promised God that he would build a cathedral, and spent the remaining 60 years of his life building it.

Dashrath “Mountain Man” Manjhi was serious. In 1959, Dashrath Manjhi’s wife died from her injuries after a fall, being unable to get medical attention in time. He spent the next 22 years using a hammer and chisel to carve a 360ft path through a mountain, reducing the distance between his village and the nearest doctor from 55-70km to 1km.

Hokusai was serious. Here’s him talking about his paintings after ~70 years of working on them: “From the age of six, I had a passion for copying the form of things and since the age of fifty I have published many drawings, yet of all I drew by my seventieth year there is nothing worth taking into account. At seventy-three years I partly understood the structure of animals, birds, insects and fishes, and the life of grasses and plants

I could go on and on – Gertrude Stein was serious, Erasmus was serious, Mandela was serious… I have a list of hundreds of people throughout history who’ve inspired me with their focus and their devotion.

You can only really find out who’s serious over time.

I would like to describe myself as serious, but… part of the whole point of this essay is that talk is cheap

How can I demonstrate that I’m serious? Well, I could point to work that I’ve done. When I was 22, I decided that I wanted to become a good writer, and that doing that would require doing a lot of writing.

10 years later, I’ve written 821...

When I say serious I don’t mean solemn and tedious... I mean something closer to ‘dynamic persistence’, and a sense of humor is often critical to that.

This tension is also part of what I’m getting at with the “ayy lmao” meme – “excruciatingly meaningful” is when everything you do or don’t-do is so overwhelmingly important that it paralyzes you

There’s also a great anecdote from Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman, where he talks about how physics used to delight him when he used to play with it, but then it started to disgust him when he got burdened by this idea that he was obligated to advance the future of science. That he was supposed to be doing “important” work.

If you’re serious, you will optimize for survival, because you can’t keep playing if you’re dead.

study the failure conditions – how and why have past players failed to do what you’re trying to do? – and be conscientious about avoiding that. (conscientiousness)

If you’re serious, you’ll work at managing your psychology such that you stay motivated to keep going

On the problem of stolen valor polluting the commons

people claiming and pretending to be serious when they are not

people who are loudly, publicly unserious pollute the commons by making everyone else a little bit more cynical in response. This makes it harder for any kid to be taken seriously,

Even if we could somehow successfully discourage all bad actors from their stupid bullshit, we do still have to deal with more foundational problem of knowledge, which is that there are ways in which you cannot know if you’re actually serious until you’re in the thick of it.

Seriousness in relationships

Navigating conflicts about disparities (and perceived disparities) in seriousness can be very contentious

You can’t demand seriousness from other people

If we want to build great scenes that produce great work, we need serious people to be honest with themselves and each other. I am committed to spending the rest of my life trying to be a beacon for serious players to find and connect with each other

Seriousness is love and curiosity expressed earnestly.