A thing I noticed fairly early-ish on is that people care about things more once they’re framed properly. Like, if you watch a documentary about a pit crew or a kitchen or a tattoo shop, you become invested in those people’s struggles and you start to care about them personally
And so like… witnessing this, I think I always thought… I want that! I want people to care about me. What I’ve been grappling with recently is whether that was some innate thing all along, or a response to perceived injustice. I *was* a pretty reclusive bookworm. Still am tbh
If you think about it, this broader phenomenon also explains why people so often have stronger feelings about fictional characters (the ones that make it are well-framed) than real people (seldom well-framed)
Once I witnessed this I could never unsee it. You can manipulate words to make things more valuable, seemingly creating value out of thin air. It’s “just” about better framing
2018-07-12
My goal in life is to be a word artist-magician. Words are proxies for thoughts, and a master manipulator of words is a skilled navigator in the tumultuous ocean of meaning. Moana, but the ocean is the mind of humanity
Dumpster-diving for meaning
2019-03-09
What I have taught myself to do, as a nerdy marketing guy who is philosophy-curious, is to invent status and social capital out of seemingly thin air.
It can look like magic, but it’s just dumpster diving, like selling bargain-bin clothes at a markup on eBay, Girlboss style
https://x.com/vgr/status/1011860681526661120?s=21…
I think most people understand this when thinking about presidential candidates and campaigns. Elections can be won or lost because of frames.
And…
It’s something that affects personal livelihoods too. It can be a matter of life and death
2019-11-26
crying in the uber 🥺🥺
if you’re not born into a supportive environment, all you can do is find one! (or make one, but that is not the advice i would give the average person)
tragically a lot of the shared environments of co-sufferers are often themselves full of cruelty… I’ve come to think of the bigger picture as a sort of ladder, and each rung has a homeostatic effect that will keep you on it, and it’s a whole new jailbreak to leap to the next
this is true. i tend to think of this as something like “outgrowing your pot.” you grow as much as you can where you are, and when the walls start to feel close, you need repotting. hopefully you notice before becoming rootbound(turning back in on yourself, taking on pot shape)
One of the reasons I‘ve always been drawn to study fiction, marketing and philosophy is the following, non-judgemental observation:
People care more about fictional characters than real people.
It’s because fictional stories are told more skillfully, and framed better
I think there are things I’ve come to learn about charm and likability that are practically too dangerous to discuss openly
It only takes two retweets to end up in completely hostile territory
there’s a reason I tell all my friends to write their memoirs. once you’ve articulated your own story you can hit “inspect element” on it, edit it, modify it. It is a source of tremendous power. You can use stories to get yourself to care about you, too