i know a lot about a lot of things

a message to the void

whoever started this trend of photoshopping snoopy into movie stills is a genius btw

this substack post officially marks 80 days since i left my corporate job, and within those days i have:

• picked up writing fiction again (added approx. 16,500 words to an ongoing project)

• watched 59 movies in total (rewatch included) and finished both seasons of FX’s the bear

• gave my notion journal + mind garden dashboard a complete makeover (which i’m gonna write more about in the next few weeks)

• gone on a 5 days trip to thailand

• organized this super nerdy ethan hunt the eras tour custom shirt purchase for my friends

if you’re looking for some spicy behind the scenes of why i left the job, i don’t actually have one! it was a pretty decent job in some analytics company with mid to high paying wage - when people asked me about it, i like to tell them my previous role can be summed up as ‘i do the talking so the engineers don’t have to’. somewhere around may 2023 i grew out of it and left.

i guess the only spicy part of this whole business of quitting came from people around me who thought that ‘outgrowing it’ is not enough reason for anybody to resign from their full-time job, but then again when have i ever fitted into the boxes that people create for themselves? paul graham on how to do great work: but fields aren’t people; you don’t owe them any loyalty. if in the course of working on one thing you discover another that’s more exciting, don’t be afraid to switch.

one of the straws that finally broke the camel’s back was the realization that i’ve been writing noticeably less than before and i really don’t like that feeling. writing online has been an integral part of my life ever since i got introduced to the internet in the early 2010s - it’s part of who i am, and i wanted to honor it more. there is something incredibly liberating in finding out that i write and build better things when i ‘make’ time for it as opposed to only ‘finding’ it. leaving corporate job was the first of a series of steps that would allow me to gain that agency back, that was once lost amidst all the chaos that is working nine-to-five, to structure my life around writing and connecting with amazing people through the serendipity that it creates.

also, don’t let the list above fool you - i might make it sound like i’m already living The Ideal Life, but i’m actually pretty far from where i want myself to be. i still have a lot to figure out and i’d love for this newsletter to be a living manifestation of that journey. at this point in my life i’m quite still excited (and potentially, naive) about the type of audience i can reach and the communities i’ll be able to keep building through writing and nerding out about Notion, which is perhaps why launching this newsletter series feels like the right decision that will hopefully tie everything together.

you can read more about what i’m currently up to will help shape this newsletter here.

you should subscribe to this newsletter if you are:

• someone who’s trying to rack up their visibility points in 2023

• someone who jokes about depending on Notion to run their whole life and then makes the surprised pikachu face when they find out they have been depending on Notion to run their whole life

• similarly, someone who is nosy about how other people run their lives and/or businesses in Notion

• someone who, like me, doesn’t mind other people typing exclusively in lowercase

• someone with a habit of compulsively clipping articles and hoarding quotes in hopes of luring the Secret Knowledge of the Universe that’s lurking just right around the corner

• someone who believes that how people rank mission: impossible movies will someday replace the astrology and MBTI personality test

• someone with a STEM background but also has a complicated stance towards how AI is being leveraged in the creative industry and is therefore resigned to misery

• someone who is still on tumblr in the year of our lord and savior 2023 not because twitter is becoming more and more unusable now than ever but because they simply just haven’t left since they stumbled upon it in the early 10s and all their friends and stuffs are there

• someone who is always constantly thinking about how the ever-growing creator economy impacts an artist’s creative process, the art that follows, and their relationship with it

• someone who thinks movies should go back to being grainy and textured and sweaty

• someone who is like, the second they start doing something that fifty other people can do just as well they need to quit that thing and do something else

• someone who voted for al pacino during the big 2023 twitter poll showdown

thanks for reading me

to kick this off here’s an excerpt that i really like from carl phillips’ beautiful essay:

How to avoid repeating ourselves, how to keep seeing things anew, how to separate habit from habit’s predictability—and how to find the stamina to do so? I think this is where self-awareness—about ourselves, yes, but also about the work—is key. I’ve written plenty of poems that interested me, but later, sometimes minutes after finishing them, sometimes months, I’ll realize I’ve merely echoed what I’ve written somewhere else before. Or I’ve used an image I’ve used often—fair enough—but I haven’t used it any differently than I have before. For me those poems aren’t worth holding onto. That doesn’t mean they weren’t worth writing, since everything we write is a necessary step to the poems we need to write, but I don’t find that I need to publish them. This may be the most important requirement for a career, the ability to look at one’s own work with enough detachment to be a useful monitor and critic of the work, across decades.

i believe starting this newsletter is just my subconscious trying to say: here’s a piece of my soul! here are the parts of me i didn’t know what else to do with! i wrapped them up in something i love in an attempt to understand my own feelings and curiosity and maybe the whole world. hope you like it. let’s be friends.