dear k,

I was thinking about your dad, I don’t know if it was in a dream or as I was waking up, about what a wonderful resource he is

most parents: how badly I want my child to take shape X, I’ll do everything to help my child take shape X

your dad: you, my child, are in whatever shape you happen to be, you are a consciousness that feels from the inside, I love that consciousness, I called it forth, I accompany and support it in its being in the world

dear parents,

it’s a simple principle really, perhaps not so simple to live by, but how come so many parents can’t be this to their child? this is the wealth that compounds

There are so many frameworks and approaches to understand self and take care of human pet—and this popped up into my head as maybe a helpful, shortcut, simplification to regulate oneself. Does your mind need quicker or slower waves?

to do slower

• slow down

• read something longer

• do something boring

• do physiological sigh: (very slow inhale and normal exhale with audible sigh)

• there is this beautiful qi gong exercise i like to do which quick description is: do the crawl hand movement except one hand goes opposite direction and you always look at the palm of one hand and, switch to the other hand at the bottom of the movement, do it for a few minutes and switch direction of arm movement

slowing down is maybe like connecting to longer processes, it feels like peacefulness, acceptance, inter-connectivity. Other things that work here are:

• focus meditation (take one sensation and just attempt to keep your focus on it, you will fail billion times, so just be okay with it and keep coming back)(or be with your body parts, put your attention into feet)

• slow breath

• do nothing meditation (Practice nothing, the most profound of all practices)

• listening to very slow music

I often benefit from slowing down my mind. My brain waves run excitable, they jolt, jump around, here I let them be more peaceful, stay grounded in one spot or slow movement

• also there are these other qigong exercises, like just standing still, or holding belly

• do a deliberately slow movement, or a movement in slow motion (i just poured my tea in morocco very slowly from considerable height, it was awesome)

to do quicker

sometimes i also may benefit from recognizing when my system needs speeding up, maybe it’s hard to recognize it when it is in slow mode or one it is slow and feels something “difficultish”, in the is moment of sadness, loneliness… no no no… maybe this is a wrong model. Mark Brackett has a couple of great lectures and a great app How we feel—where he lays out emotions on two axes. positive/negative, high energy/low energy—so let’s not mix this app, pawel… we are just focusing here on recognizing slow/fast, and slow doesn’t mean even low energy, there can be a lot of energy and focus, but channeled differently, maybe channel into inter connectedness or focus on what is rn

to have quicker:

• drink coffee

• do excitable body movement (sprints, something as quickly as possible)

• expressing bolt: jump excitedly, shout, murmur, do the weirdest noises and poses your body wants to do, or your mind is curious about trying

• energetic music (plus dancing)

• publish something online where your friends are

honestly examples for quicker waves are way harder for me, maybe bc my system is there more by default, other things

• therapy (connection w therapist makes me often feel excited, like i am my most sociable afterwards and I need to call a friend and laugh and be silly)

I am sure there is more, i may add more later. If you have any, please let me know what works for you. But maybe my biggest takeaway is that, even rn writing this, i feel how much my system needs the slower waves, it loves l o v e s s l o w n e s s

What is the best book you ever read? What’s your fav writer, artist, intellectual? I used to create these lists and ask this type of questions. It’s funny to find oneself on the opposite side of the spectrum here.

(here is one of my lists from my art years, plus i just added papyrus rn :). I really felt that sharing these was important. Like if these things transformed my world so much, I want you to have a chance to transform yours)

I see a spectrum here between two points of relating to how we think influence works in culture, and I think the way we answer this question has quite a lot of consequences on how we create culture and relate to it. So I think there are two points like (A) you are the important artist, capitalized letters, a unique talent, often creating alone, genius, your work is transformative, distinguished etc.

Or you are (B) a diffused node in a network. The creative act comes from a confluence of forces, and it’s hard to pin-point from where exactly. Your impact heavily depends on your context and the context of the recepient, on who are they, their experiences, developmental stage, current sensitivities, preferences etc.

Okay, quick reveal, no need to wait until the end of the article. If this spectrum is A and B I have been somewhere around 16% (towards left) and now I think a lot more accurate how influence in culture work it’s more like 63% (towards the right).

We are in this acute labyrinth of knowledge. Communication is much more context dependent than i thought. We are each on different heights of a knowledge ladder in each of knowledge areas. Things that are epiphanies, that break my mind, may be obvious to people on steps above, not understandable or not even graspable why they seem important to people below—and maybe there are very few people on similar ladder height, with similar contexts, for whom this may be also important.

Like let me give you a tiny, non-exahaustive example recently i created this mental model Weak ties — no strong tie gets you to wellbeing like one big epiphany, but large amount of weak ties I was a little embarrassed to put it on my wiki. I expect this won’t be particularly helpful to anybody. But I was like I want to be true to what feels important to me and weirdly this definition helps me. This may be a small bit that at the current stage of my knowledge, in my current tensions with reality, is helpful. But I don’t think its helpful to a lot of people nor will be important to me in ten years.

Antithesis

Okay but there are strong differences in strength of impact, length of impact and qualities of outputs. Yes, I don’t want to deny this. On both axis, impact and quality, there are orders of magnitude differences. There are some really great movies, books, buildings, essays, poems that transformed disciplines and are engaging for centuries.

Falling for a great creator

That, said there is also an effect of falling for a great creator. One side of it makes sense as a mechanism that is just pretty universal. Something is good, and because it’s good it becomes popular, like say 98 percentile popular. Then it becomes even more popular because of its popularity. So one mechanism is people will go see a thing because it’s high quality, and the second is they will go see a thing because people are talking about it.

And there is another mechanism that is… plain stupid 😤. I think there is this need to have heroes, gods or equivalents. We want to idealize things and people, and put them on a pedestal. And I think this is another mechanism that’s working here. Oh, artist? I am not talented enough to be that. This person is a great master. This is a masterpiece. This may be one of the largest motivations for creating, to try to be that loved one. We want to be as desirable and impactful.

Updates

So my long-term shift is that the more correct model of influence is a much more diffused, multi-player game. For example, Edison the great inventor of a lightbulb, right? No, expect in cases like this, and in fact what have been the case here, some thing like twenty different attempts, some already working (Joseph Swan had a bulb running in London around the same time), and some that succeeded but haven’t been as well known and celebrated (Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans patented one in Canada in 1874). The great lone creator probably had less unique influence than default culture assumes.

At the end, my epiphany

I see monuments as a society delusion, a want to find the ideal, to preserve it. It’s a misrepresentation of reality and a distortion of the more correct (B) multi-point model. All monuments will fade at some point, literally decompose. We will understand it’s a misrepresentation of where the love comes from, who really deserves it, where its real channels are, ready to be unclogged. Sending love to people of the b-sort, weak, poor, shy, uncool, unconnected, sending it to animals on the factory farms, forgotten in their numbers, and bugs who can be easily squeezed or shrimps killed inhumanely

Even if you are Adam Mickiewicz type (an influential Polish poet from romanticism) please agree that Adam Mickiewicz from a pedestal is a distortion. Accepting this feels like abandoning something, abandoning this want to be great, desirable, original. But I also feel a little ecstasy there. That I am in contact with something truer. Model (B) shows me I am finite. All my actions will be forgotten. (do u even remember all names of your great-grandparents?). Sure, I can still create a cultural wave, but this wave isn’t coalescing into remembrance, but into a big emptiness around. We are just mortal nodes in the network of something larger, exchanging things, doing things in the now. It is unremarkable, unglamorous, unmonumental. But after agreeing to it, it feels more beautiful, maybe because it feels like connecting to something larger, to emptiness, or maybe because it feels like more true to what is.

when i think about it i literally have a mini-spark of ecstasy

I aspire to be a little unhinged (oops… scary). I admire people who express themselves courageously in life. That said, I also want to do so with respect to others and love for creation. Saying truth regardless seems to me like one of the most important qualities in the idea space.

The truth doesn’t lie in the middle, truth lies where it lies.
(from Polish: Prawda nie leży pośrodku, prawda leży tam, gdzie leży.)
—Władysław Bartoszewski

I think we have an elephant in the brain. There is a lot of stuck knowledge, or a lot of people with beliefs that are stuck (me included, hello!)—fundamentally stuck around our identities and around what we perceive will bring us love and resources (these are often not conscious processes, again read this fantastic book Elephant in the Brain). I believe burning witches for the wrong beliefs is not a thing of the past but a design of our minds, and feature of our discourse all around the political spectrum. And this is also an emergent force: our networks, peer groups exert pressure to think in a certain way. What I will say here may sound weird to some. I want to be inclusive in the way I write, inviting to people who think differently or come from different contexts, but I am also okay if what I think will auto-select off some people (oops… scary)

I intend not to use LLMs aside from spell/grammar check. See my Sophie txt prompt that I use often.

The main unburdening that I want from this, alongside a couple of others, is to be able to post something quite complex, and if I have uncertainty around it, if I don’t know fully how to phrase it, describe it, if things don’t fully glue together, I will just work around it by describing my IFs. And maybe I will just say, Oh, yep, something doesn’t fully square here, but it seems important, my mind somehow comes back to this, please let me know how to think better around it? So treat all of my word vomits as drafts. I also may improve some posts after publishing or repost them later.

Word vomits is a sub-section of “Pawel world” Substack and at least for now I am not subscribing anybody to it. Hello zero readers :) :) :) Also, people who subscribe to my Substack won’t be automatically added to it. That said, feel free to subscribe to it, but lowest-of-low-quality warning! hihi

Also, another intention is to write as freely as I write to a few close friends on iMessage. Like stylistically there is a fire there. I know that when I don’t think this is going to be a big write-up, my style is better, lighter, fresher, quicker, clearer.

Lately, my writing has been influenced by Kaj Sotala’s piece proposing to write the way people do Ultraspeaking. Let’s see where it takes me.

Oh and the name “word vomits” is from Visa. I am inspired by his creative process, by the way he partakes in the idea exchange: lightly but with high commitment and high volume. Read more here Compelling projects or in his fantastic spell FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD v1.0. I want more of Visa energy in my creative lajf.

I am creating this to connect to people interested in similar things, so disagree, ask questions, say hallo, or post links!