When I was maybe seven or eight years old, the kid across the street from me told me he could draw. Without missing a beat, I started excitedly telling him about the comic series we could create together: a multi-issue, epic saga, long and comprehensive and just grandiose as all hell. (I did not use those exact words.)
My reaction to discovering Dungeons & Dragons was to start designing bigger, better pen-and-paper RPGs. Nintendo released the N64, and I immediately sent a packet off to Nintendo of America containing illustrations of a cooler console that I thought they could make. I started making video games at 13, joined a forum of game enthusiasts, and immediately pivoted to wanting to design elaborate forum software instead.
I am drawn to scale. Big things, vast undertakings, set me abuzz. I started reading a copy of Ulysses under my eighth-grade desk, simply because I couldn't find a book that was supposed to be bigger and broader and more epic; three years later, I upgraded from that to Finnegans Wake. At around that time, I wrote and self-published a novel, part of which consisted of a two-hundred-page-long shaggy dog story written out as a single, winding sentence. It wasn't great, but the endeavor taught me a lot about what it takes to tackle projects of a certain magnitude. I've spent the whole of my adult life continuing that education.
I've been asking myself what drives me to this pursuit—what the appeal is, to me, of spending so much time working on things that others don't get to see or appreciate until the very end. (And of the risk of choosing to work in such a fashion.)
For a long time, I worried that it was narcissism or megalomania, the sheer belief that I was smarter and better than other people and deserved to be acknowledged as such... but the better I get at what I'm doing, the clearer it is to me that my self-regard is somewhat the opposite. You can't spend as much time as I've spent around ambitious artists tackling massive projects without feeling humbled, dwarfed, by their accomplishments. It is impossibly hard, at times, to imagine myself being capable of even a fraction of what others have achieved.
I wondered, too, whether it was for reputational purposes: a kind of lazy, hyperbolic self-branding, an empty spectacle, a marketing ruse. Certainly I like to showboat; I've got exhibitionism in my veins. But I learned a long, long time ago that this sort of ambition is far less impressive to other people than I might have once believed. At the very least, I'd have to spend a lot more time crowing about how big and exciting and overwhelming my ambitions are as I work on them, and I simply don't. If anything, I've always modeled myself around Steve Jobs' approach of not even discussing projects until their unveiling, which has led to years and years of relative silence as I try to carve out something worth showing off. (I clearly lack the discipline to stay quiet, but the point remains the same: if I was doing this just to furnish my reputation, I'd talk about it far more craftily than I am now.)
Same goes for the possibility that I'm doing this for fiscal, careerist reasons. And certainly I'm aware that, if I achieve anything at the scale I've been gunning for, then it'll be far easier to sell than smaller and more modest works. Uniqueness sells, and I'm certainly drawn to what's unique. But while there was a brief phase in which I could show my work off to important people and impress my way into their network—and did, successfully!—that time has long since passed. I don't show my portfolio to people when I'm looking for new work. My coworkers hopefully like and respect me, but they don't know what I get up to off-the-clock. I learned, eventually, that I was only interested in networking for purposes of finding collaborators: my interest is in the project, not in positioning myself. And now, I mostly don't bother, because it's hard to imagine any kind of salesmanship that would bear more fruit than just working on what I'm working on.
This drive is easily the weirdest thing about me. Some of my close friends barely know anything about what I've spent the last decade and a half obsessively working on. It's simultaneously the single thing that I most define myself by and the last thing that most people would point to when describing me. It serves no sane or productive purpose, other than itself.
The only conclusion I can draw, really, is that at the end of the day, this is what excites me. This is what holds my interest enough that I return to it, again and again, like being drawn into a gravitational well. Other ideas, other projects, come and go: I throw myself into them with a passion, and then I forget that they ever existed. The biggest, deepest thoughts are the most compelling to me. Many of my ideas have been obscenely large-scale and inordinately intricate, but those too faded away, over time, in favor of The Big One: the one that I knew, the moment I caught the slightest glimmer of it, would come to dominate me and my life for as long as it took me to see it through.
I'd describe it like this: at different points in time, the source of my excitement feels different. Sometimes, my work feels profound and revelatory. Other times, it feels like a ridiculous and exciting and delightful business idea. Occasionally it feels glamorous, mysterious, and deeply sexy. Often, it just feels like an elaborate and impish practical joke: a large-scale version of the 200-page-long shaggy dog joke that I wrote when I was seventeen. (Friends of mine who are In The Know are torn between whether my deepest nature springs from an adolescent desire to save the world, or whether it springs from an adolescent urge to set up the greatest fart joke in human history. Both are plausible theories.)
But whatever my motivation is at any given moment, whatever form my excitement takes, this is the excitement. This is the thing that revs my engines. I have discovered countless ways of being thrilled and engrossed with what I'm making, but this is the one thing that manages to thrill and engross no matter my angle of approach.
It goes beyond that, though. Over time, my meta-fascination has increasingly been with the question of what scale means, once you start to work with multidimensional objects of unfathomable scale. How do you compare different massive works to one another? How do you assess the massiveness of things that exist in entirely different mediums, as entirely different phenomena, and reach any kind of meaningful conclusion? In a competition between any and all things that have ever been credibly described as the "greatest," how do you begin to develop a metric by which your answer means more than pure subjective whim?
Developing an answer to that question itself requires a dizzying number of different approaches. Recently, I've begun exploring relatively advanced fields of mathematics, to firm up my understanding of the basic abstractions needed to approach this subject matter with any amount of integrity. I've struggled my way through Derrida and Heidegger and Wittgenstein, so much that I was astonished to learn that some philosophers are in fact enjoyable to read. (Hi, Kierkegaard!) I've listened to five-hour-long piano ragas and I've sat in theaters to watch seven-hour-long movies and I've worked my way through twenty-four-hour-long art installations. My bookshelf includes volumes about linguistics and translation, education theory, formal systems of aesthetics, grand sweeping theories of history, and entirely too much Harold Bloom and Pauline Kael for comfort. (Just kidding. I love my pompous critics.)
I don't bring this up to brag, because I won't pretend like I've done a remotely impressive job of digging my way into all these things. If anything, I've learned just how difficult I find this pursuit—I spend a great deal of time imagining the sort of hypothetical person who'd find all these inquiries genuinely easy, and envying and fearing them. What I'm getting at is that, for all there is a sort of childish grandeur involved in the whole "biggest things ever" obsession, I do my best to take this subject as seriously as I know how to (and I've learned just how daunting a subject it is to take seriously). None of this is for status jockeying or for impressing people at cocktail parties; first of all, nobody at a cocktail party really wants to hear about this, and second, I don't need help impressing people at cocktail parties.
I pursue this because I love it, because I'm fascinated by it, because I'm obsessed with it. I pursue it because it's where all of the neatest things in the world live. I only want to fill my life with things I can be obsessed with, and I take the art of obsession very seriously.
My reaction to discovering Dungeons & Dragons was to start designing bigger, better pen-and-paper RPGs. Nintendo released the N64, and I immediately sent a packet off to Nintendo of America containing illustrations of a cooler console that I thought they could make. I started making video games at 13, joined a forum of game enthusiasts, and immediately pivoted to wanting to design elaborate forum software instead.
I am drawn to scale. Big things, vast undertakings, set me abuzz. I started reading a copy of Ulysses under my eighth-grade desk, simply because I couldn't find a book that was supposed to be bigger and broader and more epic; three years later, I upgraded from that to Finnegans Wake. At around that time, I wrote and self-published a novel, part of which consisted of a two-hundred-page-long shaggy dog story written out as a single, winding sentence. It wasn't great, but the endeavor taught me a lot about what it takes to tackle projects of a certain magnitude. I've spent the whole of my adult life continuing that education.
I've been asking myself what drives me to this pursuit—what the appeal is, to me, of spending so much time working on things that others don't get to see or appreciate until the very end. (And of the risk of choosing to work in such a fashion.)
For a long time, I worried that it was narcissism or megalomania, the sheer belief that I was smarter and better than other people and deserved to be acknowledged as such... but the better I get at what I'm doing, the clearer it is to me that my self-regard is somewhat the opposite. You can't spend as much time as I've spent around ambitious artists tackling massive projects without feeling humbled, dwarfed, by their accomplishments. It is impossibly hard, at times, to imagine myself being capable of even a fraction of what others have achieved.
I wondered, too, whether it was for reputational purposes: a kind of lazy, hyperbolic self-branding, an empty spectacle, a marketing ruse. Certainly I like to showboat; I've got exhibitionism in my veins. But I learned a long, long time ago that this sort of ambition is far less impressive to other people than I might have once believed. At the very least, I'd have to spend a lot more time crowing about how big and exciting and overwhelming my ambitions are as I work on them, and I simply don't. If anything, I've always modeled myself around Steve Jobs' approach of not even discussing projects until their unveiling, which has led to years and years of relative silence as I try to carve out something worth showing off. (I clearly lack the discipline to stay quiet, but the point remains the same: if I was doing this just to furnish my reputation, I'd talk about it far more craftily than I am now.)
Same goes for the possibility that I'm doing this for fiscal, careerist reasons. And certainly I'm aware that, if I achieve anything at the scale I've been gunning for, then it'll be far easier to sell than smaller and more modest works. Uniqueness sells, and I'm certainly drawn to what's unique. But while there was a brief phase in which I could show my work off to important people and impress my way into their network—and did, successfully!—that time has long since passed. I don't show my portfolio to people when I'm looking for new work. My coworkers hopefully like and respect me, but they don't know what I get up to off-the-clock. I learned, eventually, that I was only interested in networking for purposes of finding collaborators: my interest is in the project, not in positioning myself. And now, I mostly don't bother, because it's hard to imagine any kind of salesmanship that would bear more fruit than just working on what I'm working on.
This drive is easily the weirdest thing about me. Some of my close friends barely know anything about what I've spent the last decade and a half obsessively working on. It's simultaneously the single thing that I most define myself by and the last thing that most people would point to when describing me. It serves no sane or productive purpose, other than itself.
The only conclusion I can draw, really, is that at the end of the day, this is what excites me. This is what holds my interest enough that I return to it, again and again, like being drawn into a gravitational well. Other ideas, other projects, come and go: I throw myself into them with a passion, and then I forget that they ever existed. The biggest, deepest thoughts are the most compelling to me. Many of my ideas have been obscenely large-scale and inordinately intricate, but those too faded away, over time, in favor of The Big One: the one that I knew, the moment I caught the slightest glimmer of it, would come to dominate me and my life for as long as it took me to see it through.
I'd describe it like this: at different points in time, the source of my excitement feels different. Sometimes, my work feels profound and revelatory. Other times, it feels like a ridiculous and exciting and delightful business idea. Occasionally it feels glamorous, mysterious, and deeply sexy. Often, it just feels like an elaborate and impish practical joke: a large-scale version of the 200-page-long shaggy dog joke that I wrote when I was seventeen. (Friends of mine who are In The Know are torn between whether my deepest nature springs from an adolescent desire to save the world, or whether it springs from an adolescent urge to set up the greatest fart joke in human history. Both are plausible theories.)
But whatever my motivation is at any given moment, whatever form my excitement takes, this is the excitement. This is the thing that revs my engines. I have discovered countless ways of being thrilled and engrossed with what I'm making, but this is the one thing that manages to thrill and engross no matter my angle of approach.
It goes beyond that, though. Over time, my meta-fascination has increasingly been with the question of what scale means, once you start to work with multidimensional objects of unfathomable scale. How do you compare different massive works to one another? How do you assess the massiveness of things that exist in entirely different mediums, as entirely different phenomena, and reach any kind of meaningful conclusion? In a competition between any and all things that have ever been credibly described as the "greatest," how do you begin to develop a metric by which your answer means more than pure subjective whim?
Developing an answer to that question itself requires a dizzying number of different approaches. Recently, I've begun exploring relatively advanced fields of mathematics, to firm up my understanding of the basic abstractions needed to approach this subject matter with any amount of integrity. I've struggled my way through Derrida and Heidegger and Wittgenstein, so much that I was astonished to learn that some philosophers are in fact enjoyable to read. (Hi, Kierkegaard!) I've listened to five-hour-long piano ragas and I've sat in theaters to watch seven-hour-long movies and I've worked my way through twenty-four-hour-long art installations. My bookshelf includes volumes about linguistics and translation, education theory, formal systems of aesthetics, grand sweeping theories of history, and entirely too much Harold Bloom and Pauline Kael for comfort. (Just kidding. I love my pompous critics.)
I don't bring this up to brag, because I won't pretend like I've done a remotely impressive job of digging my way into all these things. If anything, I've learned just how difficult I find this pursuit—I spend a great deal of time imagining the sort of hypothetical person who'd find all these inquiries genuinely easy, and envying and fearing them. What I'm getting at is that, for all there is a sort of childish grandeur involved in the whole "biggest things ever" obsession, I do my best to take this subject as seriously as I know how to (and I've learned just how daunting a subject it is to take seriously). None of this is for status jockeying or for impressing people at cocktail parties; first of all, nobody at a cocktail party really wants to hear about this, and second, I don't need help impressing people at cocktail parties.
I pursue this because I love it, because I'm fascinated by it, because I'm obsessed with it. I pursue it because it's where all of the neatest things in the world live. I only want to fill my life with things I can be obsessed with, and I take the art of obsession very seriously.