make like no one's watching
I fear success more than I fear failure
During my high school rugby games, our coach would yell “WHAT’S THE SCORE?!” from the sidelines, and we always had to respond, “ZERO-ZERO!”
The whole point was that there’s never any good reason to think about the score, and we should always play like it’s tied. If we’re up, we could get cocky and give up easy points. If we’re down, we could get demoralized and give up even though a comeback is always possible.
My favourite place to be is toiling away in silence at my desk, releasing my creations into the nether, not expecting anyone do read it. This blog is called A ship in the middle of Nowhere for a reason. I’m the captain, just sailing around, no destination or guide in sight. My mind always feels lost at sea, which, when I started this blog, was a scary place to be. But overtime, I realized it’s exactly where I want to be.
A weird thing started happening around 2023. I didn’t feel like I was in the middle of Nowhere anymore. I had 100 subscribers, and every post was read by at least a few hundred people. People would tell me how much they related to my work, that it put into words what they’ve been thinking but couldn’t say. Cool!
Anytime I met someone in person who’d read my writing, I’d be a little shocked. “I don’t know why, I just never expected anyone to read my writing, so it’s crazy to have someone tell me they did,” I’d tell them. “What are you talking about, you’re kinda famous dude!” they’d often tell me1.
Kinda famous. Huh. …cool?
No. Not cool. What the fuck.
I think it was around this time I first started to feel perceived. I used to make fun of people with this fear, because we live in a time where people are more lonely than ever yet scared to be seen by others? Make up your mind.
But I get it now. I kinda stopped making things the way I wanted in 2024. I used to love tweeting every random thing that came into my head, and writing Substacks about my life, and making funny youtube videos. But in 2024, somehow, I felt like I had something to lose. I felt like I was in the lead somehow, and putting out something “bad” would squander it, causing everyone to get mad at me and never read anything I wrote ever again. So whenever I made something, it’d never be good enough to publish, and I’d beat myself up for making bad stuff. Then, because I never published anything, I stopped making stuff entirely, and beat myself up for not being creative anymore.
My friend Sharif described this fear well in his post, Willingness to look stupid is a genuine moat in creative work:
“Before the Nobel Prize, nobody really cares who you are. But after the Nobel Prize, you're a Nobel Prize winner, and Nobel Prize winners are supposed to have Good Ideas. Every idea, every paper, every talk at a conference is now being evaluated against the standard of your Nobel Prize-winning work. Everyone is asking, “is this worthy of a Nobel laureate?” It’s a high bar to clear. So instead of trying and occasionally failing, they just... stop trying. The fear of making something bad is worse than producing nothing at all.”
Ironically, in the same post, he referenced my thinking as the antidote to this:
“A few weeks ago my friend Aadil and I were at Whole Foods buying a birthday cake for a friend. We wanted to write something clever on the cake but couldn’t really think of anything. We stood around thinking for a few minutes before Aadil said "Let's just say a bunch of bad ideas out loud so we can get to the good ones." And it worked! We all said a bunch of terrible ideas, and eventually we landed on a good one – a pretty clever pun based on our friend’s longtime email address.”
[…]
“It feels like there's something like a conservation law at work here: the amount of stupidity you're willing to tolerate is directly proportional to the quality of ideas you'll eventually produce. I'll call this Aadil’s Law.”
I read that and think, “Damn. Who is that guy? Couldn’t be me, must be another Aadil, I’m analysis-paralysis perfectionist Aadil.” BUT NO, IT IS ME!!!
It’s especially true now that I’m jobless. I have no succinct answer to the age old San Francisco greeting “What are you building?” And it hurts. It hurts to admit to people that I have no plan, that I’m throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, that I spend all my days reading and jotting down notes and staring out of windows and fiddling with my Chinese walnuts.
Somewhere along all that I ended up producing some writing that people seem to really love, more than anything else I’ve written in my 8 years publishing online. I love it too. Some examples from my wall of love2:
Somehow my writing can make people cry. Like that’s awesome, and I’m glad, but also I’m really terrified, because what do you mean I have that much power??
So I’m in this really weird state where, to the world, it looks like I’m doing really well. People seem to love my stuff, they offer to pay for it, they find my preview links before I publish and share it in group chats, all the while, I’m terrified after publishing each article that I’ll never write anything as good as the last one ever again.
How the fuck do you get over this???
I have a few ideas.
1. Stop
I’ve currently decided to take a 1 week break. As my dad says, “A break from what?” (in reference to me already being unemployed.) But it’s a break from expecting anything from myself.
I think the root of feeling perceived is a fear of what someone might find if they look closely enough. There was a time where I very much didn’t feel whole, so I berated myself and tried to achieve all I could so that some day, someone (ideally everyone) would acknowledge me. Look at all my great work, because I made that great work, so I must be great, right? I wished I could say that
Now, it almost feels like I have that. Again, people like my stuff. I think I’ve made some of the best work of my life. Yet it’s kind of obvious to me, after seeing many men driven to madness and unicorn startups by a fear of not being enough, that there’s no way the world can make you whole without your own participation.
All this wondering about meaning and purpose and pondering is just exhausting and tiring. I kind want to just stop, and see if my fears that I’ll become lazy, ugly and irrelevant actually manufacture. And, if they do, whether they’ll actually bother me or not.
So this week, my only objectives are to:
be in bed by 1 am
cook 2/3 meals per day at home
go to the gym 4 times
go to the pottery studio twice
Everything else is gravy.
2. Make anything
Some of the best advice I ever got was from my friend Darshil at 16, where he said:
Just start a lot of stuff. Don’t worry about finishing any of it.
Every single post I’ve written has left at least a few Apple notes, shower notepad scribbles and half-baked drafts in its wake. I look back at some of my earlier work and think about how I used to just be able to write a full post in a day that was actually pretty good, and curse myself for not being able to do that now.
I almost feel like I can’t anymore. Back then, I really didn’t care if they were good or not, just if I said what I wanted to say. If I thought at least 1 other person might like to read it, I’d publish. Some days it feels like if something comes easily, it’s not good enough.
I think the idea of suffering being baked into the creative process is so common but so stupid. It’s painful to not be able to get what’s in your head out into the world, sure, but to see that as a prerequisite rather than a symptom is arbitrary.
What you’ve chosen to do, on your own terms, should be fun. If it’s not, there’s a million other things to do, go choose something else. Money and status get in the way for smart people, but again, these are arbitrary and also a solvable problem in any field.
When I was worried that being a writer in Silicon Valley was low status, my friend Jasmine, who’s been writing since she was 10 and is now a famous capital J journalist, told me:
Doing what you really want is high-status.
It’s only low status if everyone can see you don’t really want to do it, or you falter at the easiest steps. In a similar vein, I truly think you can make enough money doing anything. In the back of my mind, I know if nothing works out, I can save up $10,000 and live a first-world life in Shenzhen for a year, or like a king in some village for ten.
We live in a world where people buy houses off selling bathwater. I’m sure with that much time, I can create something of enough value to support myself, and if not, it wasn’t mean to be anyway.
3. Leave
I live in an environment where no one has kids or pets, and the dominant mode of hanging out is doing laptop work beside each other. I scroll a feed split equally between AI agents and talking about how there’s only 7 girls in my city. Maybe I’m in a bit of a bubble.
It feels like literal life or death if your social group is dependant on how hard you work, like it often does in San Francisco. My friend Farza commented on this:
“When I moved to SF, one thing I hated was how much people would judge you for what you were working on. They’d be your friends one day, then if you stopped working on your idea or your company was struggling, suddenly you weren’t cool enough to hang out with. Like, that’s so ridiculous.
But the rest of the world isn’t like that. Even just visiting a California suburb I realize how much better life is when people look up and smile at you on the sidewalk. I’ll go to China and it feels like everything can be solved with some street meat and a cigarette.
What really did it for me was holding my friends baby. If you’re worried about life and meaning right now I promise you the answer will become very clear after holding a chubby ball of happiness for 30 minutes. Even when they cry, you still know that you’ll do anything for them, and having that makes everything so much more doable.
I’ve talked to a few mothers in the past year, and they all talk about how bad pregnancy was, and the early years of raising a kid, but you just somehow… forget. (And then you want to have another they’ll tell me.) I think that’s just true of almost anything painful. After a while of not being in it, you just forget how bad it was, and if you have a deep seated desire to do it, you will.
The key here is not expecting a fix. It’s to actually forget. You can’t take a trip hoping to fix yourself or forget about something bad or find what you’re looking for. It’s like if someone tells you, “Don’t picture an elephant right now!” You can’t help but see it.
But putting myself in a situation where I realize there’s more to the world than just making stuff for an audience generally helps me get out of a funk.
I don’t really know how to end this. This post was for me and also my friends who might gain something from it, particularly Anna. A sort of return to form. I didn’t talk about nearly as much as I wanted to, nor do I think this post flowed that well or had the best prose or anecdotes or anything. I do hope you got something from it, but if you read all this way and are kind of unsatisfied, remember I’m just some unemployed dude who’s at least as dumb as you and probably dumber, writing this without thinking much from a coffee shop on a random Tuesday without even buying a drink.
If you like this weirdness tho, consider subscribing! #smooth
Granted they were referring more so to my twitter, where I have more followers and plug my Substack sometimes.
A collection of screenshots of notes from people who appreciate my work to remind me why I do it, and to be grateful for the ability to touch people so deeply
This made me smile
Great work man