81 - (Re)Learning To Fly
notes from india (part 1)
👋 Hello.
This post marks one week in India. I haven’t done enough exploring yet, what with the big bad virus and the big bad AQI (early winter in Delhi means heavy air pollution). But I’ve seen some things and done some things. That’s what this post is about.
✈ How to go East
I chuckled while explaining to people back home that my flight from Vancouver to New Delhi would be going ‘west to go east’. The counter-intuitive idea is that if you keep going west for long enough, west becomes east. It’s a funny world.
But when I glanced at the flight path on our screens, the plane appeared to keep going north. We climbed up British Columbia, then the rest of Northern Canada. I expected it would soon turn west, but it went up and up and up. How bizarre, I thought, it’s like we’re heading to the North Pole!
Then it struck me that this was another way to go east.
We would go up from the west, until up became down, and thus end up going down to the east.
I guess there are advantages to being on a spherical planet. If only you stick to the course, west can become east, and up can become down. Flat-earthers don’t know what they’re missing.
⏪ Jamais Vu
The flight from Vancouver to New Delhi was my first time at the airport since arriving in Canada late January, exactly 10 months ago. I did a lot of familiar things - checking in my bags, passing through security check, walking to the gate, and waiting for the boarding announcement - but all of it felt unfamiliar and uncomfortable.
Jamais vu is the experience of unfamiliarity in a situation that is actually very familiar. It is the exact opposite of deja vu.
Dear reader, I want to tell you that jamais vu is stranger and more disconcerting than deja vu.
I foresaw two big challenges during the 14 hour flight to New Delhi -
😷 Wearing a mask the whole time, and
😴 Trying to sleep at the right time to minimize jet lag
Staying masked for so long proved a lot easier than I expected. But trying to stay ahead of jet lag didn’t work out at all.
Taking the time difference into account, the effective strategy was to stay awake for the first half of my flight, and then sleep right through the second half. If I did this, I would arrive in New Delhi in the early morning, fresh and ready to take on the day. I would hit the ground running.
But this did not happen. I slept in fits and bursts, and although I arrived not too tired, I feel that it didn’t matter anyway. Because jet lag is slippery and deceptive. It stays out of sight for most of the day, then sneaks up on me in the early evening. Even if I stay up all day, and am tired when I go to bed, I keep waking up in the early hours of the morning, after only half a night’s sleep. Then I am drowsy again at noon. It’s about to be a full week, and my body is not done messing with me.
(I am typing these words at 5:30am on Friday.)
🎙 The Seen & The Unseen
After only a day in New Delhi, I took a flight to Mumbai. It was a short trip - there and back again in 24 hours. I went to record a conversation with Amit Varma, who makes the Seen and the Unseen podcast.
Seen/Unseen is one of my favourite shows and over the last 3 years I’ve heard Amit speak with all kinds of intelligent and accomplished people. It is more than a little surreal that I would speak with him, and join the list of his impressive guests!
Ever since he invited me, I have gone through a rollercoaster ride in my mind, simultaneously excited and terrified. During our recording, I said this to him -
“It’s taken me half a decade to get over my Imposter’s Syndrome, and just by extending this invitation, you’ve brought it all roaring back.”
An Imposter’s Syndrome is tied deeply to a hilarious quote by Groucho Marx. It was also part of the famous opening monologue in Annie Hall:
“I would never belong to a club that would have someone like me for a member.”
The first time I heard this quote, I thought it was a witty rejection of exclusive clubs and cliques. At that time in my life, I liked having witty rejections and put-downs and repartes. To others they were weapons I used against them mercilessly, but to myself they were just armour and shield. It was a whole thing with me, to turn people down before they could turn me down. We speak about that on the episode too.
In several ways, I have weeded such cynicism and self-loathing out of myself. But can we ever fully get over our past selves? The Imposter’s Syndrome will play itself out, and I wonder what it will mean for my relationship with this show that I love very much. I see two paths to choose from -
Permit this unique and incredible life experience to elevate my self-esteem, and take it as an opportunity to feel proud of all I have achieved. Permit myself to believe that I deserve this and this is good.
Conclude that it surely cannot be any of those things, and it is everyone else that is mistaken.
Over the course of my life, I have taken the second path more often than the first. And the two sides will fight several times over the next few weeks. There will be fierce conflict on the battleground of my mind, and many casualties before a grudging truce is struck.
Then the episode will release, and the sparks will fly again. Sigh.
Amit and I spoke for just over 5 hours. Our conversation is going to be the longest episode of the Seen and the Unseen. We took two short breaks during which I made this drawing.
We spoke about my journey to become a writer and artist, the origins of SneakyArt, and why I use the term ‘creative entrepreneur’ to describe myself.
The subject of creative entrepreneurship versus artist (or perhaps creative entrepreneurship in addition to artist) came up in Episode 29 of the SneakyArt Podcast with Koosje Koene. The basic premise is that over the past ten years, the internet has offered two great and unprecedented freedoms to creative professionals -
The freedom to build an audience without traditional gatekeepers (like galleries and art-curators).
The freedom to monetize directly from one’s audience (via Etsy, Substack, BuyMeACoffee etc) without the intervention of intermediaries or even affiliate marketing.
It is a good time to be an artist, I argue. But these freedoms come with great responsibility. We have to be entrepreneurs - crafting our own brands, marketing ourselves, releasing our own products, maintaining our own client relationships. Read about this idea in Post #74. I discuss it further in Post #7 for SneakyArt Insiders.
Towards the end, Amit and I spoke about my understanding of the crypto-verse. I am deeply conflicted by many aspects of it (including the environmental concerns), and these feelings are exacerbated by the scummy salesmanship of crypto-evangelists towards artists on Twitter. Here are my main thoughts, based on what I understand so far -
NFT-evangelists display phenomenal ignorance about art and the process of creative work. This includes tech-utopians like Balaji Srinivasan, Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant. I am appalled by the immaturity of some of their takes. For reference, listen to Lex Fridman speaking with Vitalik Buterin, Tim Ferris speaking with Balaji S, and Tim Ferris speaking with Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant. (It brings to mind the Gellman-Amnesia effect. More on that below.)
Most people shilling NFTs are delusional or malicious. They have a ridiculous concept of value and often imitate the same gatekeeper practices they pretend to despise. The king is dead! Long live the king!
I don’t believe in artificial scarcity in the way that I have seen it defined. It is the real-estate-ification of the internet, and that is not the open internet which has taught me all the things I have learned.
The negatives aside, here is what excites me:
I am bullish about what I can offer with NFTs and social tokens (something like $SNEAKY). I don’t care for the big dollar numbers crypto-artists fixate on, but I have good ideas for better providing true value to thousands of fans and patrons.
I believe in the possibilities of the meta-verse. Or rather, the many meta-verses that I believe will be created.
I believe in the real value of virtual products. As a creator, this belief manifests as the opportunity to play many interesting games. In the physical world, selling prints is a game, and making books of my art is another game. This newsletter, for example, is a digital product with real value. Every week I play the game of writing something that engages with me. I win from making a good argument, and from meaningfully informing my audience. It is a game we play together when we discuss ideas in the comments or share it with others on our social networks. There are many virtual products of real value I see myself creating around SneakyArt.
To the NFT-enthusiasts in my readership, if you have resources that would better educate me, I would love to hear from you. Hit reply to this email or leave me a comment. If you have other thoughts/questions on crypto or NFTs, I would love to hear those as well. Let’s talk.
🧠 The Gellman-Amnesia Effect
I thought of the Gellman-Amnesia Effect when I heard Chris Dixon speak about art, Naval Ravikant on the future of great novels, and Balaji S on India.
Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next week with a new episode of the SneakyArt Podcast, sights from India, and sketches from an Indian wedding!
Very good read. It’s a good time but still a hard time to be an artist but as with the gatekeeper, few reach that meteoric rise. On the other hand, perhaps a lot more people have can make a decent living being their own brand and boss.
When I see people with no former interest in art suddenly hawking AI-generated "art" as NFTs, it all seems like a get-rich-quick scheme that everyone is buying into. That bubble will surely burst, but I hope that some realistic uses for it come to pass, like micropayments to "average" artists/writers/musicians.