intentional obliviousness

okay so a bit of a preamble that may or may not have anything to do with the rest of the piece. some days ago, i read a tweet from dhh (which i sadly cannot find now) about how he takes out ~20 minutes to write something on his mind, publish it, and move on. it got me thinking on how much wasted cycles i spend ruminating on what (and sometimes, how) i want to write instead of just getting on with the writing. maybe this will take 20 minutes of my time, maybe it will take longer. but i’ll definitely revel in the payoff after i hit the publish button.

yesterday, while mindlessly scrolling through substack, i happened on a post whose title caught my attention - things that are none of your business. reading it reminded me of a term i wrote down in a draft doc about yet another article i was once moved to write but somehow haven’t gotten to finish or publish despite publicly berating myself a few times. the term? intentional obliviousness. i think this phrase encapsulates a core pillar of the cozy little bubble i have built for myself in the chaotic mess that the world is today.

the internet is great because it made pretty much everything you can think of within reach, but social media and the unwavering quest for attention inverted the contract and we ended up with algorithms pushing everything our way. when you yield, you teach the algorithm you want more of the same, and before you know it, you’re sucked into a vortex and drained of agency in thought and eventually, action.

avoiding this outcome requires intentionality. discover what matters to you across the stack (career, relationships, hobbies) and zero in on nurturing those. curate the things you consume and avoid gratuitous distractions evolving into attention traps. develop your values, and unabashedly live by them. growing up, conformity is often perceived as a virtue and it takes a bit for it to settle in that at no point was humanity homogenous. yes, various groups evolved shared customs over time but history is littered with notable individuals who were celebrated for their unique attributes.

i was fortunate to experience the internet take shape as a child, and actively participated in forums relevant to my leanings. intentionally staying clear of certain content (gossip blogs, pop culture, etc) meant i was often lost in certain settings, but not once did i perceive it as missing out on something. if anything, it made it such that what i consumed or contributed to continued to reinforce the sphere of my desires. algorithms haven’t been all bad either. leveraged right, they are powerful tools for discovery. but like the transmogrification of twitter’s “for you” feed in recent years, they can also drown you in a cocktail of worthless slop.

i mentioned relationships as part of the stack of things that matter previously. that’s because building a community of like minds is important, and you can trust that whatever you need to know but are currently unaware of will find its way to you through it.

breathe, and fuck fomo. your mental bandwidth is finite and best expended on what truly matters.

p.s. this took a little longer than 20 minutes to write but who’s counting?