On Reaching 600 Videos

Originally published on August 25th, 2024

600 daily videos.

My new milestone – since December 2022, I’ve published a 20-30 minute Chinese video every single day, 600 and counting. My volume of vocab has grown alongside my sense of self-discipline.

But why spend the time? What justifies the late nights, daily sacrifice, occasional outbursts at slow wifi? This grid of thumbnails is my response to life in 2024.

In 2024, we’re comfortable fish, coasting downstream, blind to the waters around us. Each day we face a mushy assault from the OUT THERE. The slew of outside stuff endlessly grabbing at us, grabbing for our attention – our precious life beam, our diamond of consciousness, dazzling, iridescent, shimmering bright, bright enough to make streaming platform VPs salivate and snatch.

We all face this outward tug. So normal it feels natural – hearing about a “bombardment of advertisements” or “slot-machine scroll feeds” is mundane. It barely registers. But oblivious fish are still wet. And the comfortable current flows on.

So much life today is second-hand. I’m guilty as anyone. News and clips and shows and Reels and viral posts about stuff happening OUT THERE, you’ve gotta see this, oh and this one too, and that one, and did you hear about THIS??? Hour by hour, this invasion of our consciousness carries on. We’re so thoroughly defeated as to forget this attentional assault even exists. It’s just daily life in 2024. Enjoy the memes.

This conquering of consciousness has a hidden cost. Life is the sum of what we focus on. To live life at second-hand long enough is to forget something better exists. The individuals we could all be – unique, radiant totalities brimming with passion and paradox – that self dwindles to a shadow.

This great externalization leads to an evacuation of interiority. The thing that makes us most human shrivels, replaced by video references and half-baked arguments about celebrities and burger chains and who’s-the-GOAT. I’ve come to believe most people don’t even know what their Inner Self IS, not to mention that it’s mostly gone. Perceiving the vast inner wilderness requires silence, patience, uninterrupted time – all in short supply these days.

So what to do? First is to realize it’s happening. In the past four years, Existentialism has given me new eyes. I see the water, I feel the relentless current tugging my skin. I notice that I have an inner self. Step 1, check.

Then what? Step 2 is different for everyone. You can ignore and enjoy (“The water’s warm, like a lazy river! And The Voice is on!”) You can rail against the “evils of the system”, corporations, capitalism….yikes, no thanks. As for me – I choose to swim upstream. To boldly chase something that no one is telling me to chase. To turn my attention inward. To expand my inner world.

Learning Chinese happens to make me feel ludicrously alive. I’ve written elsewhere about why, but it meets my (self-created) “Big Four” – Flow, Aliveness, Resonance, Attunement. Check, check, check, check. Few things bring me more joy than speaking about my favorite topics (history, literature, philosophy, art) in Chinese.

And so that’s how I spend my time. While working, I devoted thousands of hours to listening, speaking with online tutors, practicing vocab. Then I moved to China in March to study Chinese full-time. And just over 600 days ago, I started filming a daily practice video.

My solution to the comfortable currents of 2024 is Radical Individuality. To do the thing only I can do, the thing that makes my inner self burst with undeniable aliveness, the thing that bats back the Outward Assault and returns my consciousness to me. Language learning won’t be the thing for everyone, not even for most people – but I’m confident everyone has “that thing” for themselves, if they find enough silence to notice.

So here it is, my tapestry of selfhood, my swim upstream, my bid to be a Radical Individual in a depersonalized world. I call it “The First 600 Days”.