Dynamic Hypocrisy

For me, the first seems to be having confidence in your thing. Finding a thing is easy enough. I’ve found and subsequently dropped plenty of things by now. But finding the confidence to keep a thing has been much harder. Am I a good enough coder? Am I a good enough designer? Am I a good enough writer? 

I’m mostly at “Sure. I find it enjoyable for the most part, so fuck it.” 

On the good days.

The second is then reconciling how to go about doing that thing versus how I think that thing should go. 

Coding should be structured and organized and built to scale.

Up until that deadline changes, and turns out the project is bigger than anyone anticipated. 

So do I forgo the deadline, and keep my coding principles. Or do I uphold the deadline, and write messier code? What’s more important to how things “should” be done? 

30 years in (age-wise), it seems I prefer pragmatic delivery over the idealized execution. Pivoting away from a basketball defender rather than plow through him.

The third is evolving my thing. Most everyone has an idea of how a thing should go. So when you ask for feedback, they’ll tell you based on how they believe the thing should be. 

Are they right? Are they wrong? 

If I open an ice cream shop, and 60 people say strawberry. But another 60 say chocolate. Which people do I believe?

Or do I screw it all, and ignore both opinions? Or do I screw it all, and double the flavors I have to create?

Not sure where I’ve landed on this one just yet. My stubbornness gets me to reject all at first blush, but then I struggle with how to deal with options. 

It’s a strange thing to realize that there isn’t a true way to live. That many options and paths are open. And that makes it hard to check on if you’re on the right path or not. It’s an uneasy feeling to reconcile, and I haven’t nearly found a consistent answer for myself yet. 

“Doing something innovative,” is something that still scares me. 

Because innovation means new. And new is inherently not familiar. It cannot be normal by its very nature. And normal is comforting. 

So it’s a strange thing to try to internalize the discomfort. To keep with it long enough in-hopes of hitting on something new and innovative. 

And it’s scary to think about that I may not have the gumption to stick with that long enough. 

I wonder if I do… 

Obvious: college is hella expensive in the US. 

And when you see MIT or Havard releasing all of their courses over podcasts and online. It’s hard not to go “See? Even the colleges admit it’s overpriced!”

Heck, it’s eight years for me, and I barely any facts. I forget the periodic table of elements, I forget which artist painted what in which era, and Spanish…well, allow me to formally apologize in their tongue, “Hola, me llamo Phong.” 

That said, however, I would push back that it was overpriced. Expensive? Yes. But overpriced? I wouldn’t say so speaking for myself.

Because the damning truth was that facts were always cheap. It’s not like college has some special version of the periodic table or exotic version of Spanish. That knowledge is commonplace. 

What I paid for was the space to grow. The time to make mistakes in all respects. Mistakes mentally and mistakes emotionally.

To meet rare people that I would have never met staying in my home-suburb. To even make friends with them.

Even the professors. Some are indeed extraordinary, but most are normal people (granted, only -ish, but nevertheless.) But it was them interacting with both commonplace knowledge and with you that was the magic sauce for me.

YouTube videos and reading textbooks would have only taken me so far. But it was the people who I still get to interact with eight years later (and hopefully longer.) And getting to see them crush it at life. 

That…that is what I think is priced properly. It’s expensive, yes. But overpriced? I would argue against that.

I was lucky to grow up Vietnamese culturally. There’s many little things to that. But one detail that sticks out to me is the food.

Not just the pho and banh mi sandwiches. But when the food is on the table. 

When my mom would make spring rolls, there were no rolls on the table. There were rice paper, rice noodles, pork, herbs, lettuce, dipping sauces. But no rolls. 

Because we had to make them. At the table.

The meal didn’t come finished. We completed the meal. And we could choose how to make it. 

Early on, I would just put meat and noodles. My mom would have to sneak in a cucumber or two. Over the years though, I would lean really heavy on the vegetables on my own. I would tweak the ratios each time. Heck, I would tweak them roll-by-roll depending on my appetite and mood.

And that’s a spectacular thing to practice. Being able to make something on your own based on your needs. 

It’s hard to say if the rolls were just symbolic of that sensibility, or was the cause of it. But either way, it was a simple exercise for practicing it. It’s something I think about every time I make them.

The Philosophy 101/Nihilist in me always wants to ask “How much attention do we deserve?” 

To the grand scheme of things, it’s zero right? It’s a bunch of rocks flying through space moving until everything dies into entropy of dead heat. Nothing will remember the past. 

In a weird way, it’s sort of comforting. There’s a release valve from “having to do something great.” Not to use as an excuse. But rather as an appreciation that it’s all sorta extra credit.

It’s a brief window to make something out of nothing. 

Every flicker of emotion, every brush stroke, every word written is a net positive from that dead heat of an universe. 

Life is a weird extra credit that certain things get, and that’s rather grand. 

Normally, I would say don’t marry an asshole. But the thing is that assholes exist. And I don’t really know who you are. 

So you might actually be an asshole yourself. At which point, you actually should marry an asshole. Y’all be perfect for each other. 

But only if you’re an asshole too. Otherwise, try not do. 

Or do it. Whatevs, it’s your life.

Topic #1: Imposter Syndrome
Feeling that you’re a fraud in your respective position. That you’ll be discovered as a liar and a fraud.

Topic #2: Skills on a Spectrum
Obvious statement is obvious. People have varying skill levels in any given task. Some can run marathons. Many can’t. Some of those who can run marathons do so at world-record speeds. It’s a spectrum of performance, and everyone falls somewhere along that spectrum. 

Topic #3: Adequacy vs Excellence
So given that there’s a spectrum: where on that spectrum is “good enough,” and where along is it is “truly excellent?”

Is it contextual to the situation? (Do I judge my art skills dependent on if it’s on a napkin or paid project?)
Is it contextual to the historical tradition? (Do I compare myself to Picasso?) 
Is it contextual to my peers? (Dammit Jerry, stop not sucking.)
Is it contextual to my standards? (Do I have standards?)

I suspect it’s some combination of the four. But I lately I look harder at the last one. If it’s all relative, then why not anchor it to my sensibilities? (Unless I don’t trust my own taste. At which point, it’s all over anyways.) The fear is that I’m fooling myself. (Or really “the fear is looking foolish.”) But that’s a black hole, isn’t it? Everyone at a different vantage point leads to different opinions. Different realities. 

“Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” ―George Carlin

During my four years of college, I was lucky in being a bit weird. I was an organized art major. I was allowed to be non-linear and free-flowing. But I could structure a schedule around those exercises. It was a river cutting through bedrock. So I sweated and worked like everyone else. But I could be pretty chill about everything. Because everything stayed in-scope. The river could flood, but I had sandbags ready.

So it was strange to see how flustered and frustrated my friends were. They would complain about how much work there was. How many exams there was. How much they had to study. How much they had to be in the library. 

And my brain would go, “Well, you did sign up for all of these things. You do cut this, or do less of this, or change this…” It would try to find solutions. And sometimes I would say it out-loud, and those friends would shrug and not disagree.

Then they promptly continue to do all same things, and continue to lament all the work and time and effort everything it took.

But one day it clicked. They liked that way.  It was the stress that was fun. It’s the rumbling of the ground as the avalanche was coming down that was thrilling. 

There was joy in the frustration. And I was taking that away from them with my solutions. So I stopped. It’s weird, but then again I’m weird–so who am I try to change that?

It’s existed since forever, but it’s tragic nevertheless. The celebrity death. Months later, when we find out that they were under a lot of pressure. Or couldn’t handle the scrutiny, or glaring lights anymore. That our collective expectations buckled their ability to cope. 

And often that’s in-spite of all the Hollywood machinery around them. The PR teams, the agents, the handlers. These people are supposed to manage those pressures. Provide release valves. (When they’re part of the pressure itself, of course, but let’s keep it simple for now.)

In a different world, technology has been on a tear. Lowering costs and making tools available to the masses. 90’s desktop publishing made everyone a reporter (-ish.) Photoshop made everyone a designer (-ish.) Uber made everyone a taxi driver (-ish.)

And social platforms has made everyone a celebrity (-ish.)

(-ish) because while some rose up to create incredible things. Those came to understand the nuances and requirements of those respective fields. Reporting has its needs of objectivity and research. Design needs the understanding of aesthetics versus functionality. Driving requires to understand the social contract of strangers and trust.

And the latest one: celebrity. The costs of celebrity can be onerous. To manage hundreds of conversations. Thousands of wants. Millions of feelings. Billions of expectations. Technology has only replicated the most visible aspects of celebrity. 

But in the same way that Photoshop has yet to create functionality to account for taste or composition. Technology has yet to catch up the many aspects of celebrity. 

So when thinking about all the breakdowns and suicides we’ve seen in the entertainment business, there’s a weariness when it comes to the upcoming crop of YouTube and Snapchat stars. You want that 15-year old to pursue their dreams, and to enjoy the fruits of their labor. But there yet isn’t an app that tracks when someone being consumed past what is tolerable. So we’ll have to fill in that role until then.

We’re approaching peak-podcast. This was after peak-blog. Peak-email happened like hella long ago. Peak-TV happened when the last season of Sopranos was still on your first TiVo. (Let’s not talk about your Netflix queue.) Skrillex is waiting to drop the next beat, but we hit peak-EDM last year (well, 1994 if you’re old enough.) 

Seems we’re peak-cable news as viewership dwindles. Maybe we’re peak-news? It’s all pretty dreary really. We probably hit peak-tabloid some time ago. Probably peak-talk show around then too. (I mean who follows Oprah really?)

Peak-books probably…a couple years after Gutenberg? I mean who had time to read when you lived ’til 40 and probably illiterate anyways? 

Soon though, we’ll be peak-peak. Our brains have gotten pretty big over the last few millennia, but there’s only so much to cram in there. Every upcoming generation going, “I have something to say!” And that’s great, truly it is. But just put it on the stack over there.

No, not that stack. The one next to it.