This was a really important update for me. I remember being afraid of lots of things before I started publishing more publicly on the internet: how my intelligence would be perceived, if I’d make some obviously stupid in retrospect point and my reputation ruined forever, etc. Then at some point in this thought loop I was like wait the most likely thing is just that no one reads this, right? More like a “huh” or a nothing at all rather than vitriolic hatred of my soul or whatever I was fearing. This was very liberating, and still is. I probably ended up over optimizing for invisibility because of the freedom I feel from it—being mostly untethered from myopic social dynamics has been really helpful for my thinking and writing.
This was a really important update for me. I remember being afraid of lots of things before I started publishing more publicly on the internet: how my intelligence would be perceived, if I’d make some obviously stupid in retrospect point and my reputation ruined forever, etc. Then at some point in this thought loop I was like wait the most likely thing is just that no one reads this, right? More like a “huh” or a nothing at all rather than vitriolic hatred of my soul or whatever I was fearing. This was very liberating, and still is. I probably ended up over optimizing for invisibility because of the freedom I feel from it—being mostly untethered from myopic social dynamics has been really helpful for my thinking and writing.