🌻 tryhard

one must imagine sisyphus happy

Dec 31, 2023

I like watching game shows because I like watching people try. Deep in the Top Chef archives, a New York Italian who has spent six episodes inflating his abilities finally loses, turns lobster-red, and wells up with gasping, blubbering tears. A fellow competitor—a Vietnamese woman half his size—kisses him gently on the forehead as he departs. I know reality TV is trashy, but I can’t help but stare. I like watching people act like assholes to fight for a title only one can end up with. I like watching chefs’ gruff exteriors fade into glee and camaraderie and pleading eyes at Judges’ Table when you know they really, really fucking want it. The token villain line on Top Chef is I’m not here to make friends—for the veteran viewer, herein lies the dramatic irony of knowing the contestant is wrong—that he will make friends, whether he wants to or not.

In high school, Jessica and I did debate because we so often lost. We attended a school full of smart kids who were used to winning. In other clubs like DECA (the business club) and FPS (a strange futurism exercise), our classmates racked up trophies effortlessly. We were all already academic superstars, trained 14-year-old bullshitters. Debate, meanwhile, was full of nerds like us—who would read academic journals and write research papers for fun on the weekends—and were therefore immune to rhetorical tricks. It was a meticulous activity by design; it rewarded preparation rather than posture. If you didn’t care for the work, there were far easier ways to polish a college application.

I started running this year because I wanted to become more resilient to pain. I kept at it because the views were good (I live near the park) and I liked seeing the numbers on Strava go up (or down, appropriately). I read the requisite Haruki Murakami: “Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day. These are practical, physical lessons. How much can I push myself? How much rest is appropriate—and how much is too much?… To what extent should I be confident in my abilities, and when should I start doubting myself?” Since running is so solitary, it’s easy to get in your own head. I’m still slow, and probably will be forever. Maybe it’s the first thing I’ve tried at without hoping to beat someone else.

There are so many activities in life that are both hard and fundamentally pointless: game shows, marathon running, climbing the ladder at work, getting good at Go, designing typefaces, making puff pastry from scratch. C. Thi Nguyen puts it best in Games: Agency as Art. Play—irrational striving, disposable ends, false obstacles constructed for the sake of the struggle—this is what makes us human after all.

I thought a lot about the writing process this year. Craft talk, as they say. I read Working by Robert Caro, In the Margins by Elena Ferrante, The Writing Life by Annie Dillard, and listened to countless episodes of the Longform podcast (highly recommend). I talked to my most productive creative friends about balancing freelancing with full-time jobs. I attended live talks by Brandon Taylor and R.F. Kuang and Jenny Odell (twice); I subscribed to Garth Greenwell and Junot Díaz and Carmen Maria Machado on Substack so I could marinate in their literary minds.

And here’s what I learned from all that: The ones who succeed are often simply the ones who try harder than everybody else. They wake up in the wee hours to write before their first meeting of the day; they turn down social invitations to practice their craft. They kill their darlings; they do the reading; none of this sounds easy because it’s not. In Monsters, a great essay collection about bad people, Claire Dederer writes that “Finishers are always monsters”—that is, behind every completed oeuvre is a trail of broken promises to people you love. The dirty secret of the creator economy is that there’s no such thing as overnight success, and when there is, it often goes away just as fast. I notice a direct correlation between the success of a piece and how long it took to write; it’s funny when people ask how I balance Reboot with my job because it’s less an active prioritization decision and more a fixed cost like sleep and showers and brushing my teeth. My therapist likes to remind me that I’ll never build a habit that I only squeeze into my “leftover time.” I hate to sound like a self-help book, but it turns out that trying works.

Not everyone’s an artist, unlike they say in second grade. It’s so pejorative—we wouldn’t talk this way about lawyers and pilots and software engineers. Are you a real physician if you never see a patient? Can you call yourself a plumber if you use a plunger once a month? Blowing the gates of inclusion open seems like another way of taking the arts less seriously than other disciplines—like, you have to try to get a C in a Stanford humanities class—which obviously becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in the end, because nobody respects skills where awards come too easy.

(This whole take is a big self-own. I talk far too much about writing for the scraps that I put into the world, and maybe I’m only saying this to gift myself the courage—or the shame—to live up to the things I profess to love.)

For many years, I obsessed over the “hedonic treadmill” and “cruel optimism” and all these other catchy phrases for feeling bad about achievement culture. What’s the point of working so hard for what you want, if you’ll simply adjust your expectations and revert to the mean after? What if the system is designed on purpose to keep us from success? But it’s Nguyen who gave me peace of mind: These questions are inverted. I don’t play in order to hit the goals; I set goals so I can play.

It’s about the journey, not the destination. The view is always prettiest after a backbreaking hike; the meal tastes better when you’ve prepared it yourself. I tend to get restless when things are easy. Have I ever accomplished anything effortlessly that I’ve really, truly liked? Is an important part of the process feeling like I might die along the way?

Of course, we ought to pick the right games to play, ensure that we struggle toward the right kinds of ends. There’s nothing that makes me sadder than watching a friend bust ass for a job or relationship that doesn’t enrich them. Effort must lead to reward. The feedback loops have to work out. There was this essay on competitive math that spread around my Twitter circles lately. The author mourns the pointlessness of the activity, the divergence between the math problems that get you into college and the math problems that push the field forward. I think the problem was actually that he didn’t like the game enough. I have an old rule for myself: Never spend time on something I’d end up regretting if it didn’t lead to the outcome I hoped for.

My greatest fear is producing work that sounds like ChatGPT. I assume most creatives feel this way about generative AI; it’s the classic sneer of this work is derivative taken to its dystopian modern end. This reaction makes sense, but misses the big picture. In his piece on ChatGPT, Ted Chiang writes:

Some might say that the output of large language models doesn’t look all that different from a human writer’s first draft, but, again, I think this is a superficial resemblance. Your first draft isn’t an unoriginal idea expressed clearly; it’s an original idea expressed poorly, and it is accompanied by your amorphous dissatisfaction, your awareness of the distance between what it says and what you want it to say. That’s what directs you during rewriting, and that’s one of the things lacking when you start with text generated by an A.I.

That’s the human difference—not the final output, but the spark of creation. The fact that you start bad and get good later, the work of figuring out where you’re going while still on the way there. I hope we all keep writing once it stops being an insult to sound like ChatGPT. Robots have been better than humans at chess, Jeopardy!, and lifting heavy objects for a long time now, but that doesn’t supplant our interest in playing ourselves.

When I started running, I found myself surprised at its nonlinearity. The first mile is always the worst. You can hit an invisible wall on mile five then feel an energy surge at mile seven; as soon as I swear I’m all gone and hit stop on Strava, I feel sure I could sprint the whole way back. It’s a strange law of runner’s physics that if you keep going, things will get better. People call this running through it—it meaning the pain, dehydration, mental blocks, whatever—and I wish my other selves could hear the same. Usually, I see too much in black and white. If you don’t anticipate a bounce-back, you’re bound to quit too soon. I say one wrong thing and think the friendship is over; I cook one messy meal and I’ll never host again. The essay I think is dogshit probably will come together, if I put the hours in; sometimes you have to type four hundred hackneyed sentences to write one that reads like the word of God.

In October, I run into a guy I’ve never met at a Russian sauna on the outskirts of San Francisco. We’re there with a group of friends; it’s Sunday, so it’s crowded; and we’re all near-naked and vulnerable, slick with sweat, towels wrapped precariously around our waists. I tell him my name; he says, Wait, I know you, why don’t you write anymore?; I say I don’t know, I got busy, but keep thinking about the comment. I suppose I never thought that anyone would notice.1

But this stranger noticed, and I notice, and to be really honest, all I’ve ever wanted to be since I was little was a writer but I honestly don’t write that much and I don’t think I can call myself a writer unless I publish more. Maybe this essay is just a long way of saying that I might start sending you more emails. Some of which will surely be boring or unpolished or frankly kind of bad. Like always, it comes down to that Ira Glass bit about the taste gap: “It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions… It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

🌱 little life updates

I still live in San Francisco. I love the sun and my home and the hills and the fog. Friends, if you’re around, let’s grab a coffee (even/especially if it’s been a while); if you aren’t, I’ll probably try to convince you to move next time we talk.
Reboot brought on its inaugural editorial board. I feel honored to get to hang out with these people and am regularly wowed by their intelligence, humor, and good spirit. The Kernel team released the third issue of the print mag (order here!) and hosted more parties. I wrote one essay that I’m proud of.
I’m still a product manager at Substack, where I had fun launching a new writer dashboard and reader app home, among other things. P.S. I honest-to-god, not just-because-I-work-here recommend the app (if you like reading) and starting a tiny personal newsletter (if you like writing or friendship). I’ll also suggest you Substacks in the comments if you tell me your favorite writers/articles!
I have new year’s resolutions for the first time in… forever? I’m running a half-marathon in February and hope to pitch/land one essay in a Real Publication™. I want to go to more live arts events (concerts, readings, etc.), which I never regret attending. I want to be less avoidant, I want to be more equanimous, and I want to stop cringing at myself and others (to be cringe is to be free, etc.).
My favorite books of the year were the ones mentioned in this post, plus Stay True by Hua Hsu and Immortality by Milan Kundera.
The essays I thought about the most this year were becca rothfeld’s debate essay; Sheon Han on software criticism; rayne fisher-quann’s ode to interdependence; Elizabeth Wurtzel on age, love, and beauty; Helena Fitzgerald on nostalgia and The National; this pseudo-manifesto from Taco Bell Quarterly; Henrik Karlsson on why he blogs; and Sam Kriss’s incredible, indescribable “Numb in China” series.