Exit the Cave (turtlespace.blog)

A couple weeks ago I went by myself for a hike through an old lava tunnel cave. I needed a flashlight because it was pitch black. I found a small nook in the wall about a mile in that I could wedge myself in to. I sat down, turned off my light, and let myself feel the enveloping darkness for a long time. I cried. The only sounds were of small droplets of cold water hitting the floor and my body. I let myself settle in to the sensation of being buried alone under the rock where liquid fire once reigned. I felt at peace. When I finally emerged from the cold tunnel a thrill ran through me as warm air gushed over my skin and the distant sun found me once again. I sat and fed the birds that visited me in the remote wilderness while I listened to the gentle whirl of wind in the trees.

> A writer needs readers. An entrepreneur needs customers. An athlete needs competition. A lover needs someone free to reject him. Any worthy pursuit needs a mat.

Nah. I judge myself by how I progressed from yesterday, not by whether what I am or what I built is useful to others.

Is keeping a diary pointless if you're not planning to make it a memoir?

Is staying healthy pointless if you aren't using that health to compete with others?

It's hilarious to me that the author calls the cave "grinding", when to my eyes the "grindset" guys are the ones always trying to very visibly compete with others about wealth/status/women.

I've never heard of some guy trying to build the best Rimworld colony (in what is probably a very cave-like setting, no less) try to portray it as grinding.

Reminds me of a couple things: Nils van der Poel (Olympic speed skater record holder) and his How to Skate a 10k [0]:

> It is not the one who suffers the most during preseason who prospers when the winter comes, but he who gets the most aerobically fit.

and Tyler Cowen on Nervous Nellies [1]:

> Yes. Because ultimately the nervous Nellies, they're not philosophically sophisticated, they're overindulging in their own neuroticism when you get right down to it. So it's not like there's some brute 'let's be a builder' view and then in contrast there's some deeper wisdom that the real philosophers pursue. It's: you be a builder or you're a nervous Nelly. Take your pick. I say be a builder.

and the classic Teddy Roosevelt speech [2]:

> It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

The Cave is fine, but at some point you need to test the thing you're in there for. At some point, refusing to test an untested belief is just protecting a fantasy.

[0] https://www.howtoskate.se/

[1] https://x.com/JosephNWalker/status/1452772819792642054

[2] https://www.worldfuturefund.org/Documents/maninarena.htm

The only thing worse than 100% inhabiting your own cave is trying to fit into someone else's. I had a conversation this weekend with someone in an emerging startup that I initially wanted to join but increasingly didn't as I realized I had gone from starring cast to somewhere between entourage and sub 1% equity NPC. And at that point, startups are horrible bets when you have any sort of sure thing IMO.

But it was instructive to watch him neg, criticize, and dismiss all of my own ideas that weren't in service of his vision thing, occasionally pivoting to deflecting any criticism of the potential for his own vision to succeed. This week I pitched my vision to my current employer. They loved it. Case closed. Ideas are cheap, it's executions that deliver value. And I have a superb record on that.

Conclusion: if you poke your head up for feedback now and then, there's nothing with spending most of your time in the cave to avoid the samsara of influencers, rage bait, and social media algorithms. Anyone telling you otherwise is 'sus.

There is a real tension. On the one hand, you need to grind to develop the horse power needed. Without the horse power, it's just not possible. On the other hand, your ideas need to meet reality for things to get steered and stay grounded. I started a business in 2022 and constantly got the advice to first sell, then build. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You can't sell something that's not good enough, but you don't know if there is demand without selling. This is an awkward balance, at least at the beginning. I tried full throttle to sell but the product just wasn't there. Was it a waste of time? Partially, sales can get time consuming. But some of it I'm glad I did because it provided some real field insight that provides that bit of steering that's needed to guide all the building.

> A lover needs someone free to reject him

As G. K. Chesterton said,

> Marriage is a duel to the death, which no man of honour should decline.

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1718/pg1718-images.html...

Posts like this remind me of a story:

A young Thomas Carlyle was attending church with his mother. Upon returning home, after a lengthy sermon by the minister, Thomas turned to his mother and exclaimed, “If I were the minister, I would simply say: good people, you know what to do, now go and do it!”

His mother replied, “Aye Thomas, but would you tell them how?”

Tangent inspired by the first half of the article: wasting time on the Internet, in front of screens being akin to Plato's Cave is a useful framing device I wish I could internalize. Two or three decades ago getting acquainted with the nascent web felt like escaping the cave to a brand new world, just to now feel discovered we have been trapped into a worse one, and now wishing to escape back to the real world. You know, the one that actually matters.

'Putting yourself out there' is really only a necessity if the validation you seek through your pursuits is external in nature.

Those who seek internal validation need not exit the cave, for it is not a coward's cage; it is merely another space to pursue one's own enlightenment and holds no power over its occupant.

The bar for what is worth bringing out of the cave gets higher every day. Unless you have a huge network of fans or a small network of foolhardy VCs, screaming into the market, with two million other voices, may as well be the void.

It's getting hard to even get a shrug.

> let reality teach me what it required

This resonates with me. I think it takes balls to leave the comfort zone and test our assumptions against the real world, to get actual feedback, good or bad. I think now it’s easier than ever to just stay in our caves surrounded by nothing else but our customised feeds that reinforce our beliefs and the sycophantic AI agents that yes-and all our ideas.

> Better to be pinned in public with courage than to train endlessly in private like a coward. Ship that product

Funny, I didn't read this as career advice, but social advice. Like, get off the apps, get off the couch, go sit at a bar alone, ask someone to hang out.

Frighteningly, I've also found that you can be in the cave together with a group of people. I went to an MMA gym for a long time, and it was very common to see overconfident 'experienced' new members start sparring and get their ass handed to them. It was always someone from a small town or a gym that didn't participate in the larger MMA community. Those smaller gyms followed the same ruleset, but are made up of individual egos that always want their own hand raised. You can go for years in a group that has collectively agreed to hide from actually bumping up against the limits of their abilities.

I play a character who is a little like Thomas Jefferson at Colonial Williamsburg and practically I practice a kind of "outside-in" acting where I inhabit the character and half-ass it if I must [1] and then feed back my experience towards preparing to do better next time.

I am in the middle of writing my own version of a "legendary" story where over the course of centuries years of retelling a fireteam of 3 men becomes an army of 80,000, fictional sources don't agree on who exactly was involved, people who speculate about real life people the story might be based on left an obvious suspect out, etc. I am in the middle of writing up a rather long document which tells the story in such a way that I can memorize the names, the dates, the places and be absolutely confident about the details -- and of course I have to be able to speak authoritatively about the historical period and explain what people believed, why they did what they did, etc.

At the moment the story is getting harder to tell but I'm practicing at starting with the most bombastic story first and working towards a historical explanation but it is worth it because it's a personally meaningful story which is the centerpiece of a backgrounder for my character.

My wife says "don't tell the story to people until you get it right" and I just blow that off because I've been telling this story for a while and doing all the work because I want to do it better. And it's going to be the foundation of how I do all the writing for this character.

[1] e.g. rule one is to break character before I get seriously flustered and talk about my immediate experience

I like this article, but on some level I vehemently disagree with it?

The summary is this:

  > A writer needs readers ... Any worthy pursuit needs a mat.
  > ... Better to be pinned in public with courage than to train
  > endlessly in private like a coward.

And then I think of various shut-in artists that I admire. Take, for example, Henry Darger[1]. He clearly did not seek public recognition; he never showed his work to anyone. But I find it beautiful and fascinating. He was dealing with various internal issues through his art, and I feel lucky to observe it, even long after his death.

If I produced art like Darger (or Van Gogh or Kafka or others who did not try to push their work into the public view), I would be happy with myself.

But, on the other hand, I do appreciate some aspect of this article's thesis. "Putting yourself out there" does have value. This line from the article resonates with me:

  > Yet the Cave, despite its darkness of solitude and dampness from
  > sweat and suffer-porn, is comfortable. It lets us tinker with
  > our own delusions.

There is a certain risk of complacency when you spend a long time in your own bubble. Knowing that you'll be under the public eye does help dissolve that complacency, I find.

But it's not necessarily the solution. Some people get addicted to public recognition, and it twists their work for the worse. Some people know they've done something good, put it out for people to see, but don't receive the recognition they wish they had, and get depressed. Nick Drake comes to mind.

I think it really comes down to your own personality and which of these traps you're prone to fall for. Once again, "know thyself" is the real nut worth cracking.

Anyway, good article. Made me think (:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger also see various images of his work at: https://www.wikiart.org/en/henry-darger

You must have skin in the game. The real shame shall be cast upon those without the courage to try, not those who fail.

Or, put another way:

> I don't see how you can hate from outside of the club. You can't even get in!

> I find Paramore playing in my head.

> > “See, it’s easy to ignore trouble, when you’re living in a bubble.”

With respect to the problem of trouble in bubbles, my mind goes to a very different song...

    If you're livin' in a bubble and you haven't got a care
    Well, you're gonna be in trouble 'cause we're gonna steal your air
    'Cause what you got is what we need 
    and all we do is dirty deeds
    We're the Spaceballs! 
    Watch out, 'cause we're the Spaceballs

Looking forward to the sequel. Moving on...

> But I had made the comfortable mistake of believing that because I could measure and control them, they must determine the outcome.

This seems related to the McNamara Fallacy [0], although not so specifically quantitative.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

I'm reminded of Ze Frank's "Brain Crack:" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sHCQWjTrJ8

The idea is that unexecuted ideas can actually become addictive. You keep telling yourself, "boy, that thing is going to be amazing whenever I get around to making it!"

And the more you tell yourself this, the more you become petrified that it won't be great, making you even less likely to actually work on it.

I've done this experience several times using Meta Quest. It really is awe-inspiring being at one with nature. The world is a beautiful place, if only more people felt engaged enough to get out there and explore.

Puts one in the mind of Plato.

I think this is a bit of cynical take, but that entire article to me seems to be the author as trying to just say "you didn't want it bad enough". A position I've always hated because it makes every failing a personal one. If that's the learning took away from their wrestling career, it's the wrong one.

But I did like the idea of them not being entirely clear about their own motivations, even to themselves - and that is a dangerous cave to play it.

'This masculine urge to “grind”'

I recall recently reading an essay by a woman who described at one point how important simply trudging through was.

Not sure that "masculine" is apposite here

You ever spend a decade working on something really great? I mean something truly brilliant and clever and next-level. And you bring it all the way to solid results. And it's real and beautiful. And nobody cares.

I have. I think that's the dev parallel here.