On Not Belonging
When I started this site, I honestly had no clue about where it would lead me to. But I always felt like I never belonged anywhere. I never really liked the traditional social media or the enshitificatin of those platforms in general. Trying to be visible admist a plethora of voices never made sense to be anyway. That might be one of the key reasons for building this perky litte digital nest.
I never really cared whether people read my writing and I still don’t. But the innate need for validation as a social being, stemming from our human nature brought about by the evolutionary advantage of belonging to a group could be one of the reasons I still might want people to read it. I know I’m contradicting myself, but I don’t really care. Maybe it’s just a paradox of expression. It’s your choice to read on, or not. With the diminishing attention span day after day, I doubt anyone’s reading this anyway.
To live in a hype-chasing reality where the brightest brains of our generation are working on making people watch ads - could be the tragedy of incentives. It’s not that the tech is bad - it’s just that it’s misaligned with deeper human aspirations. Most of the cool products which are being built today are nothing but fancy LLM wrappers.
I do embrace LLM - nothing against them, also I do enjoy vibe coding, would continue to do so as well. It might sound idiosyncratic but the level of abstraction we have achieved in computing right now kinda makes me eerie.
I’m trying to find answers to questions that would never mount to anything. This petit piece of writing is as well one such quest, born from a simple thought I had - i.e about being mediocre layered with a impostor enhancement syndrome.
Most people know ‘Vincent van Gogh’, some people love his paintings. But I, on the other hand, admire van Gogh for his writings. Here are a few lines from his letters:
“I would like to leave this world and never return. I severed my ear, but how I wish that I had severed my heart. I shall never amount to anything.”
“In spite of everything, I shall rise again; I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.”
“What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.”
“My opinion is that the best thing would be to work on, till art lovers feel drawn towards it of their own accord, instead of having to praise or to explain it.”
“To suffer without complaint is the only lesson we have to learn in this life”
“I must continue to follow the path I take now. If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it — keep going, keep going come what may. But what is your final goal, you may ask. That goal will become clearer, will emerge slowly but surely, much as the rough draught turns into a sketch, and the sketch into a painting through the serious work done on it, through the elaboration of the original vague idea and through the consolidation of the first fleeting and passing thought.”
I’m not sure if you get it. But van Gogh was right all along. Being mediocre, lost, eccentric and disillusioned is all just part of the process. Even though he didn’t live to experience all the love his work would eventually receive, he was right all along.