(2026-03-28) Visakan Inner Sanctums

Visakan Veerasamy: inner sanctums

The most pressing questions for me right now are a little more mundane:

• How do I rest?
• What do I do with all my notes?
• How do I make anything, let alone anything good?
• How do I be a good dad and husband?

I’ve been rereading Christopher Alexander1 lately, and Rich’s description above pairs nicely with the ideas CA puts forth in A City Is Not A Tree (1965). My read is that interesting, complex, beautiful things emerge out of ecologies rather than hierarchies.2 Things have to be able to influence and be influenced by multiple things simultaneously in order to develop in non-stilted, non-flat ways.

So one of the lessons here for me is to try to think about making ecologies out of my drafts and notes

One way to begin doing that is to simply share snippets more freely, which I’m trying to do.

Also, you can think of this “100 day project” that I’m undertaking now as a kind of container that’s challenging me to make tradeoffs… It’s slightly embarrassing to admit it, but it’s almost like I needed a “real deadline” in order to force me to make those tradeoffs.

the context is always collapsing

My favorite essay of all time remains The Information (2011), written by Adam Gopnik for The New Yorker. It’s an essay about the Internet that manages to elegantly describe the history of media technologies (such as the advent of the printing press, and television), and the prevailing reactions that people have each time

I remember rewatching TED talks from the early 2010s about the future of the Internet, and it’s striking to me that none of the techno-optimists of the time seemed to think seriously about the possibilities of misinformation and abuse

But the context is always collapsing, the meta is always changing. Why is blogging dead? I like to remind people that we used to watch 3-minute-long lip sync videos. My personal favorite is a now 20-year-old(!) video of two Chinese guys lipsyncing to the entirety of Backstreet Boys’ I Want It That Way. Nobody has time for that kind of thing anymore.

We don’t really live in that world anymore, I think in large part because YouTube is now a place where people make a living. I don’t know if I would be quick to say that this is better or worse. Maybe it’s both. It’s different. Nobody in Matt’s video was looking to get famous or make money, they were just having fun. And the tragedy is– if a kid today wanted to do what Matt did then, they wouldn’t quite get the opportunity to, because people will now often assume that the kid is doing it to grow their channel.

unfolding the whole

While putting this together I found myself thinking about the first page of Moore & Gillette’s King, Warrior, Magician, Lover (1990) – “he just can’t get himself together.” He is fragmented.

Alexander: Every individual act of building is a process in which space gets differentiated. It is not a process of addition, in which preformed parts are combined to create a whole, but a process of unfolding, like the evolution of an embryo, in which the whole precedes the parts, and actually gives birth to them, by splitting.”

but he trusts me

Ideally, parents create a context for their kids where their kids can feel safe, loved, supported, heard, attended to

“this is not a place of rest”

One simple thing that’s resonating with me right now is that home should be a place where you can truly rest. As another friend Wendell once tweeted,
The places I can’t rest are places I’m not sovereign.

For me to rest, I have to trust that everything is going to be okay. And I think it would be accurate to diagnose the whole thing as a problem of self-trust. I know intellectually that it’s counter-productive to withhold rest in exchange for productivity, but emotionally I guess I’ve been anxious that I’d perform even worse otherwise. This is very bad management– I am being a shitty boss/manager/custodian of myself, in a way that I would never treat my children