Are you serious? - by visakan veerasamy
visakanv.substack.com/p/are-you-serious
visakan veerasamy
Justo Gallego Martínez (1925-2021), working on the cathedral that he spent 60 years building.
(Photograph by Susana Giron)
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. It doesn’t bother me as much anymore, largely
because I’ve since achieved some level of success at the things I care about. I now have
some people who have my back – people who see me for who I am and what I’m doing –
and I’ve also learned to be more patient with other people’s misunderstandings,
misinterpretations, and so on. I’m writing this to share some of my thoughts about that.
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.
Sure, you can catch snippets of it in all the motivational speeches and slogans that
people throw about:
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“The world has the habit of making room for the man whose words and actions
show that he knows where he is going.” – Napoleon Hill
“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” – Eleanor
Roosevelt
…but mostly people seem to use it as window dressing, rather than, something to actually
take seriously. This disparity is something that’s haunted me all my life, and I’ve sought to
understand it, and I think I have a pretty decent (albeit always imperfect) understanding of
it.
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We do live in a world that’s full of unserious people.
As I got older it became clearer to me that not many people are really serious about
anything. Some people go their whole lives without ever having met anyone else who I
might describe as actually serious, so they find it hard to believe that anybody could really
mean what they say, since everything everyone says is bullshit. I remember feeling like
that myself at some of my low points in life, when I was at my most depressed.
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. And my blessing was that I
did still have a little light in the darkness from the authors I mentioned earlier, which felt
like a glimmer of honest earnestness. And that glimmer has kept me going through
everything.
Visakan Veerasamy
⛵️ @visakanv
When I was a teenager, I fell madly in love with the local music scene. It seemed to me
like a dank oasis of sincerity on a sterile, shrink-wrapped island of lies. It was my church,
and I was convinced that it could save the world if only everyone would join in its sweaty
embrace
2:42 AM ∙ Mar 21, 2018
57Likes9Retweets
(Even that isn’t the whole picture, since there was definitely bullshit in that scene too, as
there is in all scenes – but there was also a truth to it.)
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Anyway so– 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. So it makes
sense that lots of people are broadly cynical. Cynicism is a completely reasonable
defense against fraud and bullshit. The trouble with cynicism as a defense mechanism is
that you can get so good at it that you inadvertently also defend yourself against anything
good happening for you. But back to seriousness…
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. "When I started building, word on the street was
that I was crazy. They didn't believe I would be so dedicated... I'm proving them wrong."
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.
"When I started hammering the hill, people called me a lunatic but that steeled my
resolve." You can see the impact of his efforts on Google maps:
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. And so,
at eighty-six I shall progress further; at ninety I shall even further penetrate their secret
meaning, and by one hundred I shall perhaps truly have reached the level of the
marvellous and divine. When I am one hundred and ten, each dot, each line will possess
a life of its own.”
Here are two of his paintings, you might recognize one of them:
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 – that’s part of how I know that I’m serious about
understanding who’s serious, how to be serious, etc. This is a talking point I keep
returning to. You can actually do the reading. You can get surprisingly far with this.
You can only really find out who’s serious over time.
This is true internally too. Fraud and bullshit aren’t the only problems with play-acted
seriousness – even when we’re being maximally truthful, we often don’t know what
seriousness in some context even is, until we’ve experienced it ourselves.
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I would like to describe myself as serious, but… part of the whole point of this essay is
that talk is cheap. Anybody can say that they’re serious. 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. So I
started a writing project called 1000wordvomits, where I set out to write 1,000 stream-ofconsciousness essays of 1,000 words each. 10 years later, I’ve written 821 out of 1,000
essays, and I intend to complete them. I’ve similarly made 200+ youtube videos and I
intend to make over 1,000 of those, too – at least one a month every year for the rest of
my life, or as long as YouTube exists.
I haven’t lived long enough to really demonstrate just how serious I am, and I hesitate to
say it because seriousness is something that really you can’t tell from an utterance. You
can mainly only tell from watching how someone conducts themselves over an extended
period of time. Over decades. Particularly, how they deal with shocks, rough times,
downcycles. Everyone is optimistic when times are good. The thing to look out for is who
keeps going when the going gets tough.
In one of my previous essays about earnestness, I linked to a poem that I wrote when I
was 20 that’s basically about how serious I wanted to be. While it’s janky and
overwrought, 12 years later I still stand by every word that kid wrote, and I believe with full
conviction that I will continue to be proud of that kid for as long as I live. Earnestness is
daring to be serious about your feelings.
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. It’s hard to persist for a long time if you ‘take yourself too seriously’. You become
rigid, stiff, the opposite of dynamic, and eventually you bang up against something that
breaks you one way or another, because you weren’t able to back down, or laugh it off.
So the point is to take the work seriously but you don’t take yourself too seriously. There’s
a riff about this in Stephen Pressfield’s War of Art, where he talks about how amateurs
are too precious with their work: “The professional has learned, however, that too much
love can be a bad thing. Too much love can make him choke. The seeming detachment
of the professional, the cold-blooded character to his demeanor, is a compensating
device to keep him from loving the game so much that he freezes in action.”
The word ‘amateur’ comes from amare, ‘to love’, and I will be the first to readily admit that
I can be very precious about my work! I’m almost definitely a more precious than what
would be ideal. But the point is to not be so precious that you choke. I’m still publishing.
That’s the litmus test. Are you publishing, whatever publishing means to you? I want to
see it!
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 – or worse, convinces you that it’s okay to treat people poorly because
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your quest is of such cosmic significance.
Solemnity is pomposity, is arrogance, is rigidity. We can be serious and we can have fun,
joke around, be playful, silly. I even like to argue that silliness is sacred, in part because it
keeps thing dynamic and fresh. John Cleese had a great bit on this too:
John Cleese: “Now I suggest to you that a group of us could be sitting around after dinner, discussing
matters that were extremely serious like the education of our children, or our marriages, or the
meaning of life, and we could be laughing, and that would not make what we were discussing one bit
less serious. Solemnity, on the other hand, I honestly don’t know what it’s for. I mean, what is the point
of it? The two most beautiful memorial services that I’ve ever attended both had a lot of humor and it
freed us all and made the services inspiring and cathartic. But solemnity, it serves pomposity. And the
self-important always know, at some level of their consciousness, that their egotism is going to be
punctured by humor. That’s why they see it as a threat.”
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.
It’s quite poetic how, he only broke through his malaise when he decided to give up on the
whole enterprise of “doing important work”, and simply started fooling around for the sake
of it – and even more poetically, it was his fooling around with wobbly plates that led to
the equations that he won the Nobel prize for!
It’s worth reflecting on this one for a bit. For Feynman, taking physics seriously meant
being playful and silly with it. As I revisit my own drafts and notes, I often find the same
issue – I want to write essays that mean something to me, but when they become
tedious, solemn obligations, then I don’t wanna. That’s the tension to navigate. It’s not
complicated.
If you’re serious, you will optimize for survival, because you can’t keep playing if
you’re dead.
Visakan Veerasamy
⛵️ @visakanv
the big lesson of survivor bias is that you should optimize for being a survivor
7:48 AM ∙ Aug 16, 2020
579Likes71Retweets
One of the stupidest things I’ve repeatedly seen smart people do – I call this Advanced
Stupid – is that they get so fixated on trying to optimize something complicated, that they
forget to optimize for survival, and then they get knocked out of the game. Like having a
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startup trying to do something complicatedly clever, and then running out of money. The
thing here is to 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.
You do the reading. You look up your predecessors and study why they succeeded, why
they failed, what worked, what didn’t. You recognize that whatever understanding you
have is provisional, piecemeal, wrong and not-even-wrong to degrees that you cannot
understand. If you’re serious, you’ll work at managing your psychology such that you stay
motivated to keep going, because if you run out of juice, you’re out of the game. You
recognize that your day-to-day motivations will likely change, and prepare for this. You’ll
periodically review your behavior to see how things are working out for you. You’ll learn to
think about constraints.
It’s not easy, but it’s not ridiculously complicated, either. I remember experiencing waves
of euphoria at some point when it became clear to me how simple it all really is. But of
course, simple doesn’t mean easy. Bullshit is easier.
On the problem of stolen valor polluting the commons
Visakan Veerasamy
⛵️ @visakanv
if you say you're ambitious, but you don't have a body of work you can point at, you
should STFU and build the body of work first. even if it's a bunch of notes and drafts and
crappy prototypes or whatever. code your apps, write your plays and poems. I will die on
this hill.
11:25 AM ∙ Oct 21, 2021
675Likes59Retweets
From time to time I get very angry about the idea of stolen valor, by which I mean people
claiming and pretending to be serious when they are not. I probably still have some
personal issues to work through here, but I don’t think I’m crazy or wrong to be mad about
this – 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, which in turn means that as a society we get less of the glorious output of
serious players. We crush the caterpillars and complain there are so few butterflies.
There’s some complication to get into about fraud, delusion and the problem of
knowledge. 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. There’s a kind of cruel injustice here about the nature of life itself,
of being a mortal, a finite being with limited knowledge.
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When I talked about this with my ex-boss Dinesh, he said, “You never really know what
being serious means in your context till you try to be serious. So people might in good
nature start out wanting to be serious. But you might not prepared for the fact that your
notion of serious is going to possibly change quite radically and disillusion you.”
I’m in two minds about this. On one hand, some amount of it is inescapable, and it is very,
very important to anticipate dealing with the inescapable. Life has a surprising amount of
detail. But on the other hand, so much of it IS avoidable, too. Literally by doing a little
preparation. Yeah, you can’t prepare for everything. But you can prepare for a lot, in a
surprisingly short amount of time and space, if you’re methodical and thoughtful about it.
Visakan Veerasamy
⛵️ @visakanv
people are really not used to dealing with someone who's well-prepared
7:35 AM ∙ Jun 16, 2020
417Likes31Retweets
This is where I get to this strange situation of… am I being too harsh? On myself? On
others? Are my expectations too high? I don’t think so. I think I just want more out of life
than most people do. And I don’t say that to flex on anybody, if anything I’ve come to
become kinda sheepish and embarrassed about it. You could say that I was infected with
brain parasites, from all those books that I read as a kid. I’m choosing to write an essay
about it in part because I don’t like subjecting random people to it mid-conversation. I
don’t want anybody to ever feel bad because of me, or feel like they’re not-enough, not
doing enough, etc etc.
The solution here is to have clear boundaries and to communicate them clearly. For me,
that looks like this:
Visakan Veerasamy
⛵️ @visakanv
periodic reminder (more for myself than for you) that I tweet for 0.1% outliers in optimism,
thoughtfulness, creativity, kindness, competence, ambition, drive, curiosity. all are
welcome to read and hang out, but I won't dilute my writing trying to be "more accessible"
Visakan Veerasamy
⛵️ @visakanv
0.01% of people is a lot of people
2:40 PM ∙ Jul 24, 2021
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176Likes6Retweets
You’re completely welcome to think that I’m full of shit, or that I’m unlikeable, or
overwrought, dramatic, annoying, arrogant, all of that stuff. You’d be right! I used to be
rattled hard by negative feedback, and I would to twist and bend to try and accommodate
everyone, and that actually often made things worse. So now I’m finding that it’s easier to
say, look, this is what I care about, this is the game I’m playing, you don’t have to play it,
you don’t have to like me, cheers, have a nice day.
It’s pretty funny when you see how, being comfortable with being disliked, actually makes
you even more likeable. It’s one of the many ways in which life can be really unfair.
Seriousness in relationships
Navigating conflicts about disparities (and perceived disparities) in seriousness can be
very contentious. It can maim relationships – people have vicious, ugly fights over it, and
sometimes they end relationships over it, and sometimes they don’t when they probably
should. “I wish you would take this seriously” is a request that can get parsed as an
attack. And sometimes people don’t know how (or are unable) to make that request in a
kind, gentle way, and so they go for the attack.
Visakan Veerasamy
⛵️ @visakanv
Wife and I were laughing about this last night: the thing nobody quite tells you about
marriage is: you’re choosing the person in life who’s going to upset, disappoint annoy and
frustrate you more than anybody else
5:47 AM ∙ Nov 7, 2018
1,541Likes289Retweets
Marriage is a serious proposition. It’s a commitment for life. And… a lot of marriages do
end up in divorce. And I really, really don’t want to offend or upset or hurt anybody when I
say this, I say this with love and sadness… the fact that so many marriages end in
divorce is, to me, further proof that we are not very serious. I don’t say this to victimblame people who have suffered in unhappy marriages. I think divorce can be a good
thing, and I have cheered full-heartedly for friends who have separated for the better. I
think what I’m trying to say is that we’re pretty unserious as a species. We don’t do
enough to prepare ourselves for such a serious endeavor. I call this “the divorce mystery”
– why do so many people divorce someone they thought was their favorite person? It’s
not really a mystery: it’s mostly because good times are a poor predictor of how you’ll
handle bad times. But as a species, as a culture, we have not truly internalized this.
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And… I think we can improve it! I think we can do better. That sounds like an idealistic
teenager thing to say, but I’m in my thirties now, and I believe I will continue saying this for
as long as I live. I believe we can improve the human condition. We are culture workers,
some of us more conscientiously deliberate than others. With our actions and our
utterances we contribute to the building of culture. This is one of the things that I’m
serious about. I’m willing to die trying. The work will not be done in my lifetime, or the
next, so it’s important to enjoy the process.
You can’t demand seriousness from other people.
You can really only encourage it. You can’t bully people into becoming truly serious,
because even if you ‘succeed’, they’ll mainly internalize that bullying is how you get things
done – and they’ll likely get twisted up about performing seriousness, rather than being
serious. So the best way to encourage it is to demonstrate seriousness yourself, in your
own words and actions. Review your own life, and ask yourself what you’re serious about
and what you’re not.Strive to be honest with yourself and others.
Parents often try to demand seriousness from their children, and fail. Spouses often try to
demand seriousness from each other, and fail. I’ve lost friends from the bitter fights that
can arise when you try to discuss this stuff with people who haven’t yet developed the
finesse of navigating one’s deep emotional and psychological wounds. I look back on
some of those with grief, because oftentimes those friendships were borne out of a
seeming mutual interest in being serious together. But again, talk is cheap, and the road
is long, and you’ll see for yourself along the way who sticks around and who calls it quits.
I do think it’s important to be gentle and kind with people who quit. No matter how great
any of us might be, it is true that we’re all some accident or event away from not being
able to keep going. There is no reason for cruelty, harshness, judgement, etc.
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. And in my
model, if you’re serious about your work, you also have to work through your personal
issues – you have to be kind, you have to be gracious, and so on – so that your work can
really shine.
Seriousness is love and curiosity expressed earnestly.
I took a bit of a roundabout way to get to saying this but I mean it.
This sets my earliest statement in an interesting light, doesn’t it? “It’s frustrating to not be
taken seriously” becomes “It’s frustrating to be treated without love and curiosity”. And
here I feel this deep sadness at realizing how lonely and despondent I felt in my formative
years, but also a deep gratitude for the books and art and music that kept my soul alive.
And I feel a rekindling in my heart to pay it forward.
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It renews my convictions. I want…
to be as serious as I can about the things that matter to me,
to be encouraging to everyone else who wants to be serious too,
and to be kind to everyone who doesn’t quite manage to be.
❤️‍🔥💪🏾
Visakan Veerasamy
⛵️ @visakanv
TIL about Justo Gallego Martínez, 96 years old, who has spent almost 60 years building a
cathedral by himself on the outskirts of Madrid. He has no formal plans, works 10 hours a
day, 6 days a week. And he has such a lovely spirit. I would dearly like to visit this
cathedral
12:32 PM ∙ Oct 1, 2021
408Likes83Retweets
If you liked this essay, you’d also like my pdf ebook INTROSPECT, which you could read
as a guide to taking yourself seriously.
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By visakan veerasamy · Launched 2 years ago
"And that's how we measure out our real respect for people—by the degree of feeling
they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate—and enjoy. End of
sermon." – Ted Hughes, to his son Nicholas (1986)
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