For the last couple of years, I have put out an essay on this blog pretty much every week.
I am a beast and I know it.
But that has never been the point. I will risk naivete and admit I am kinda impressed with myself. As much as I have had this urge to rest on my however obscure laurels and take a break — when I ask myself what that break would look like, the answer is it would look like exactly like this: sitting in front of a laptop, typing away the seemingly deep shit I am pondering.
And that’s the reason I haven’t been able to bring myself to quit.
Writing is not what I love. It’s hard, draining and neurotic. And if you haven’t figured it out by now, it doesn’t come naturally to me. Sometimes, it doesn’t come at all. But I don’t love those days any less (or more) than I love the days when I smash out an essay in an hour.
This is less about the *loving* and more about what goes into the living.
The point is not in the writing at all. But in living the life that involves being a writer. It’s knowing how everyone and everything is becoming content; it’s noticing the most ordinary things, inevitably allowing them to affect you and wondering what a nut you are; it’s pondering over the kookiest questions, and finally about how knowing, deep down, all of this could be a whole load of bullshit and going for it anyway.
A life where self-doubt is self-preservation.
We wonder when to quit, but rarely think about what we are really quitting. If I quit, I am not quitting on my weekly streak. That’s insignificant. When I quit, what I am really quitting is the kind of life I am living. Writing is a side effect of that life. Most often, we think of writing as the process. It’s what the world of art regularly goes batty over.
But writing is the result. Living, the process.
When you are quitting, what you should really think about is the kind of life you want to live. If pulling off all-nighters coding and waking up the next morning to go pitch your product is your tall takeaway of thick oreo shake, becoming an entrepreneur is just the result of that.
There’re elements of that result that truly suck: Begging some douche bag who got lucky for money; listening to said douche bag spout leadership dictum; having this deep urge to punch the douche bag on the face; and of course: being rejected by the douche bag.
But you put up with the suckage. Not because you are a lobotomized hustler and shit like that. You take it because you find meaning in life that involves becoming an entrepreneur. And that’s your art. Or more nauseously, the grind.
Creating is the closest you can get to playing God. These are mere words, but what a ride it took to getting here.
When I stop writing, I haven’t moved on from writing. I have only chosen to live a different kind of life. It’s not that I have stopped doing what I love, it’s that I have started living a life that takes a different process. I don’t know what that is. And I don’t so much care about the result of that. I only hope I am not scared of that day.
And when that day comes for you I hope you realize how lucky you got.
For now, though, I am good, thank you.
Meditations 