september thoughts

By Anastasia Trusova

Autumn has slowly snuck in, so the rainy days are becoming more common. It’s not the summer storm rain, but a nice light rain that sounds awesome in the background. Common scene: crackling candle, slow jazz, great book (I’m currently re-reading Crime and Punishment). The best season. It makes spending time inside much more enjoyable.

This is what I’ve been thinking about this month:

• Twitter has become a net negative for me, but I still don’t want to delete it completely. There is an endless list of things that annoy me, and every change makes things worse. That said, discovering interesting people is the best part of Twitter, and direct messages are its best feature, even though there have been idiotic changes in that department as well.

• Thankfully, people have invented something that existed long before Twitter DMs, will exist long after Twitter DMs, and is also resistant to these kinds of changes: email. I’m seriously considering stopping social media consumption altogether and investing all that time/energy into emails. It’s wonderful that more and more people are crafting their personal sites and inviting people to email them. It reminds me of the internet before social media. The biggest problem with this is discovery, but I have that problem with Twitter as well: it’s only easy to find famous accounts that are not interested in interacting with small accounts — it takes time and energy to find interesting small accounts.

• Keeping a note with opinions on a piece of writing is useful. I track the best and the worst essays I’ve read there. I’ve recently stumbled upon probably the worst essay I’ve ever read, and since it would be rude to give that kind of feedback to the author, I’ve kept it to myself but still wrote what I dislike about it.

• Kepano (the maker of Obsidian) recently wrote that she writes the first draft of an essay and then doesn’t look at it for six months. Later, she goes through all of her drafts and tries to find what’s still interesting to her, which she then polishes and publishes. This is an interesting alternative to the unedited stream-of-consciousness publishing that is more common.

• What I regret most about my journaling practice is not taking more photos. Photos of the mundane day-to-day are very valuable later, but they seem worthless in the moment, which is why I still don’t take that many photos. I would like to develop a habit of taking one great photo per day, but I’m currently struggling with that.

• Intelligent people usually think they would be better with more intelligence, but they would profit more from investing in other domains where they are more average. Instead of gaining 10 additional IQ points, they would benefit more from gaining 10 EQ points or 10 courage points.

• The TV show Friends gave people the wrong picture of friendships and how they look for most people and caused people to think they are weird if they don’t hang out daily with their small group of friends.

• Living in a small town open to new people restored my faith in humanity. People are generally better and care about other people more when compared to the city. Neighbors want to help without expecting anything in return. Strangers apologize for being in your way in the store. The small things like that are very surprising in a very positive way. I wouldn’t have thought that the way locals treated strangers would affect me as much, but I’ve realized that that’s also an important factor in the place where I live.

• I’ve recently met a guy who told me he knows me from somewhere. He later remembered that he once read something on my blog. I never got any feedback from him, yet he remembered my article. The 1% rule also applies here: 99% of people only read, while 1% give feedback.

As always, thank you for reading my article. If any of this sounded interesting to you, don’t hesitate to let me know by simply responding to this email or leaving a comment.