anecdote 1:
sam hacker: come to the party with me! you have to go to one at least once. let's do it.
evan: [reluctantly] okay...
[we stroll to the party, where we meet some familiar faces]
sam: what are they selling at the corner? let's go check.
[we walk toward there]
ceferino, at the moment i couldn't recognize due to lighting conditions (perhaps drunk, perhaps sober): yo evan, are you still considering to transfer?
me: no? [i have never had the thought, let alone making that claim throughout my time at amherst]
anecdote 2:
sam becht (my other roommate, after listening to my constructive argument against going along with what maxx proposed): yeah taking that offer would be detrimental to your education.
[i internally stopped wanting to continue the conversation.]
anecdote 3:
me, speaking to william: bro, you know what i really want to do? i want to be on a podcast. as a guest or smth; be interviewed once every 6 months or smth. i miss doing podcasts man.
william: Then get successful, and people will love to have you on
me: yea. thats the plan. byproduct of success
william: Best of luck
for the past few days i have been internally unsatisfied about my current locational predicament as well as the aspiration of that hypothetical moment where i can reveal my true self to everyone who didn't understand and/or disrespected at amherst.
in retrospect, i think that's a bad idea. the strategic reasons are simple to immediately understand. but outside of that, what am i optimizing for? if that doesn't serve any core purpose (love my family and friends, build the startup, maintain health) but inadvertently waste my time, drain my social energy because i would stay online to witness what people are saying about me, and distract me from doing whatever is immediately useful (not in a workaholic way, but generally).
i wouldn't really benefit from anyone in amherst knowing that i have left the school. and think of the opposite outcome with sosv sf/ny. what if i failed? i wouldn't be doing such things anyway. why should achieving sosv sf/ny acceptance grant me any actual reason to play any social games with people who never understood me in the first place? and going back to the strategic aspects... IP and data won't be the only moats i should obtain, but also informational secrets. ppl spreading this potential "viral sensation" in an already small campus would just compound. and im not there yet.
and again, recalling what i said about feuds a while ago, if im not there yet, don't be distracted. if im there, i wouldn't care either. this is already true with most of things happening back in high school with chris or whatever trying to sabotage (and succeeded) me in student gov election. i don't remember the details and thats the exact point. i should feel like that when im physically distant from amherst, working on what at the end of the day actually matters to me. i should be making new friends, creating new connections, and just keep building or chilling and or anything that's actually meaningful. not taunting anyone in amherst who will never understand me, might actually hurt me if they unintentionally reach my competitors (information travel fast, and this is a small world, however unlikely).
i should drop the urge to even do a podcast in the first place. drop the idea to ragebait people at amherst. posting on linkedin, instagram about whatever im doing. vagueposts are even worse because that's even more careful setup and won't even deliver the actual points that petty version of me would even try to say in the first place. the romanticization of not posting for the sake of isolation is also dangerous not because it's strategically wrong but because it's missing the point. it's the wrong thing to optimize for to begin with!
so whenever i want to post something out of spite, i need to tell myself that there are only two reasons im doing it:
- i haven't made it. if i did i wouldn't care about this
- i have too much time. spend it on smth else. sleep. work. eat. call/talk to team/friends/family. whatever. don't spend time on social media. it is a very well-engineered trap in the first place. stay offline.
ofc, if posting creates net positive returns for the startup, sure. but per dan: "then i think what you are working on requires no marketing and should stay as a secret for as long as possible. i see no reason why you would ever need to post about anything you do. that's a good thing."
and finally, per naval: "you want to be rich and anonymous, not poor and famous."
now keep social media disabled on both your mac and iphone. go to sleep.