Why am I on Substack?
An exploration into my motivations for coming here
“We have art in order not to die of the truth.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche - Will to Power
Introduction
Why am I on Substack? What is it that I'm truly seeking to achieve here?
These are the questions I have been asking myself as I continue to dedicate more time writing for this site.
I believe I came to this platform driven by an irresistible urge to write, to finally unburden myself of the thoughts and musings that had been accumulating in my journals over the years.
Perhaps it was Dostoevsky who whispered in my ear, "If you don't let it out, you will probably go mad. Keep this inside you and you will become like my Underground Man.”
Nietzsche’s urging voice probably chimed in “You need to continue creating. You cannot stop! Only in the act of creation can you find who you are. You have to write!”
Tolstoy likely reminded me, "Like everyone else, I lived a tough life. But I left a record of my suffering. A record which now survives me. A record which people can look at and learn from. You need to leave a record for others as well. Especially for those closest to you.”
Rumi likely nudged me out of my fear of sharing my work by whispering in my ears “What are you afraid of? What you see is seeking you! Give up all precaution. Gamble everything. And see what happens!”
And so I finally listened to all these voices that were urging me on to take the leap and started making sense of all my notes, organizing them and putting them online.
To create Art
Maybe this is what they call the artistic impulse. The artistic impulse that drives us to create, to explore the depths of our being, and to connect with those around us, at the same time.
Perhaps what I have come on Substack for is to create art.
Art, which I believe is perhaps more important to create now than in any other time in history.
Now, when many of us have given up on God, left our countries behind, abandoned our families, stopped speaking our languages, and in our rebellion pushed away our culture.
Now, when we have split open the solid ground, that once stood underneath us — the solid ground built on the values given to us by our religion, nation, family, language, and culture.
Now, when we find ourselves more anxious, depressed, medicated, divided, distracted, confused, addicted and disconnected than ever before.
If we don’t create art now, then when?
Art that helps us rebuild the ground underneath us out of the shattered materials and provides us with the solidity we lost and crave for again.
Solidity, this time, built not upon society’s values which we rejected — but our own.
Values which we unearth in the process of the creation. Values which we chisel away at endlessly until they stand in front of the broad day of light like Michelangelo’s David, Rumi’s Masnavi, Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Goethe’s Faust, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.
The work of art which helps us reconcile society’s demands from us by refracting its values through the prism of our souls and in the process not only holding a mirror up to society but also revealing our true selves.
The work of art which helped Rumi reconcile his disparate, opposing, sometimes warring parts which consisted of his studies as an Islamic scholar, his mystical teachings from his spiritual master Shams, and his love for Sama, music and poetry into a unity which he desperately sought.
Only in such work of art can we ever hope to find the solidity which we desire and which the modern world seems to have taken away from us.
Art created not for anyone but ourselves:
“We create our art so we may inhabit it ourselves. […]
We are performing for an audience of one […]
If you think, ‘I don't like it but someone else will,’ you are not making art for yourself. You've found yourself in the business of commerce, which is fine; it just may not be art.”
- Rick Rubin - The Creative Act
Art which might end up being useless:
“Art is creating something that you want to exist, regardless of whether the world wants it or not.”
- Sourced from Johnny B. Truant’s Substack
Art which challenges us to bare our souls and in the process leaves us feeling vulnerable:
“An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world can tell, what it is like to be alive.”
- James Baldwin - Personal Interview
Art which puts us in danger and in whose pursuit the artist:
“…enters a labyrinth, he multiplies by a thousand the dangers already inherent in the very act of living, not the least of which is the fact that no one with eyes will see how and where he gets lost and lonely and is torn limb from limb by some cave-Minotaur of conscience.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil
Art, which by its very nature is all-consuming, which forces us to let go of everything else that is superfluous:
“I am favourable to those moral systems which stimulate me to do something, and to do it again from morning till evening, to dream of it at night, and think of nothing else but to do it well, as well as is possible for me alone!
From him who so lives there fall off one after the other the things that do not pertain to such a life:without hatred or antipathy, he sees this take leave of him today, and that tomorrow, like the yellow leaves which every livelier breeze strips from the tree: or he does not see at all that they take leave of him, so firmly is his eye fixed upon his goal, and generally forward, not sideways, backward, or downward.
‘Our doing must determine what we leave undone; in that we do, we leave undone’ - so it pleases me, so runs my placitum.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche - The Joyous Science
Art which forces upon us our Dark Night of the Soul. The Dark Night of the Soul which looks something like this: Night Season - Why I Removed My Million View Video - Baseline
Or a bit like how it is described in Dr. Seuss’s book “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!”
But ultimately art, which gives us back more than it takes from us. Which gives us back what we lost and desire once again — the solid ground. The solid ground upon which we can stand firm and rebuild once again:
“Good health’s equated with a strong physique, A healthy soul will make your body weak;
Bodies are wrecked along the mystic way, For their destruction treasure’s brought as pay:
For gold your house is knocked down to the ground; To be rebuilt, foundations deep and sound,
He cuts off water, drains the river bed, With purest water fills it up instead;
He flays your skin to find the blade inside, Fresh skin will heal the wound, however wide;
He’ll raze the castles of those faithless powers; But then rebuild them with a thousand towers.”
- Rumi - Masnavi I, 306-311
In today’s world, where our lives have been left empty leaving us feeling hanging, what other option do we have but to create art?
Unless we want to end up turning into Dostoevsky’s Underground Man.
To avoid the Underground
Ahhhh. The Underground Man.
The Underground Man on whom so much ink has already spilled by so many great thinkers and writers. All of whom are in agreement in seeing in him as the embodiment of the pitfalls that exist in the modern man's splitting the ground underneath his feet.
Who, having destroyed everything that existed outside of him, continues the project inwards.
The Underground Man in whom I see countless of my relatives
I dare you as well to look around amongst your friends and family: your fathers, your mothers, your grandmothers, your grandfathers, your uncles, and your aunts and not find amongst them at least scores who are already underground or with their sharp intellect, perceptive personalities and sensitive natures are building their underground place.
And that, perhaps, is the irony of it. How these Underground men and women are many times the most intelligent, the most perceptive and the most sensitive people we know.
But burdened by their curse of knowledge, they remain stuck underground from where they curse others for their action:
“I envy such a man to the point of extreme bile. He is stupid, I won't argue with you about that, but perhaps a normal man ought to be stupid, how do you know? Perhaps it's even very beautiful.[…]
Only asses and their mongrels show pluck, and even then only up to that certain wall. It's not worth paying any attention to them, because they mean precisely nothing.”
Make excuses for their inaction:
“I'm to blame, first, because I'm more intelligent than everyone around me. (I've always considered myself more intelligent than everyone around me, and, would you believe, have even felt slightly ashamed of it. At least I've somehow averted my eyes all my life, and never could look people straight in the face.)”
Realize the cowardice of it:
“Perhaps to me alone in the whole office did it constantly seem that I was a coward and a slave; it seemed so to me precisely because I was developed. But it not only seemed, in fact it really was so: I was a coward and a slave. “
And end up hating themselves for it:
“I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect.
And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something.”
And so they remain stuck underground in their passive, self-harming, self-sabotaging, self-lacerating ways that keep them there.
An underground which Dr. Seuss, in his book “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!,” calls The Waiting Place.
The underground. The waiting place. A place which I have seen many of my family members, close friends stuck in or making their way towards. And seeing whom I wonder whether I am headed in the same direction?
This is why reading the Notes from the Underground hits too close to home for me and brings out a visceral reaction in me whenever I pick it up as I shared in a previous post of mine below:
A Year in Reading
As I finished reading this novel, my body literally broke out into hives. Turns out it was a reaction to a recent viral infection I had, but until that diagnosis, I was caught in the grip of panic at the prospect of Mr. Dostoevsky breaking something inside me through his revolting protagonist. I intend to reread this soon if anything happens to me again.
In the Underground Man I see so many of my family members and possibly a little of myself.
To Preserve a Legacy
Perhaps that was the reason for starting this Substack. To leave a record for my two lovely, young daughters of my path to avoid this underground place.
So that, if I am not around, they know how to avoid the monsters that threaten to take them to the underground place.
And instead follow a path that takes them to the “wide open air.” A path is lined with the insight of Nietzsche, the courage of Alyosha, and the spirit of Rumi.
A path that would require them to understand and face the cruelty of the world, not let it close their hearts and still love everyone around them unconditionally.
A path which I saw my deceased younger brother walk and whose memory, perhaps, I want to preserve somewhere in this Substack (a topic for another day!)
A path which requires us to have, to borrow a term from the Dutch psychoanalyst Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries, the “Wisdom of Sorrow.”
A wisdom that recognizes the radical potential selfishness, greed, envy, and the cynicism that exists in all men, including themselves, but which then goes above and beyond it:
“Triumph of knowledge over radical evil - The man who wants to gain wisdom profits greatly from having thought for a time that man is basically evil and degenerate: this idea is wrong, like its opposite, but for whole periods of time it was predominant and its roots have sunk deep into us and into our world.
To understand ourselves we must understand it; but to climb higher, we must then climb over and beyond it.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche - Human, All Too Human
And rather than blaming, tries to set an example by elevating itself:
“New Precaution - Let us no longer think so much about punishment, blame and improvement! We seldom change an individual, and when we do succeed, perhaps something else occurs without our realizing it: he may have succeeded in changing us! Rather, let us see to it that our own influence on all that is to come offsets and outweighs his influence! Let us refrain from direct conflict - and that includes all blame, punishment and desire for improvement! Instead, let us elevate ourselves that much higher!
Let us make ourselves an ever more shining example! Let our light put others in the shade! No! We do not wish to become darker ourselves on his account, like all who punish and are dissatisfied! Let us stand aside! Let us look away!”
- Friedrich Nietzsche - The Joyous Science
Which recognizes Goethe’s insight:
“If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.”
―Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It is because of this insight of Alyosha’s that in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, everyone wants to talk to Alyosha about their problems, struggles, worries, and anxieties. Because in him they can see and access not the person they are but the person they can be.
This is why Alyosha survives the novel while Ivan, who cannot begin to treat people as they ought to be, despite all his intellect, or maybe because of it, goes mad.
Ivan embraces Nietzsche’s insights about human nature but finds himself unable to summon the courage of Alyosha and the spirit of Rumi that would allow him to transcend that insight: that would allow him to treat people as they ought to be, not as they are.
Art, like love, can help us summon this courage and transform us from Ivan’s and The Underground Man to Alyosha’s because:
“Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.”
- Chuck Klosterman - Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
This is what Nietzsche meant when he said “We have Art in order not to die of the Truth.” This is why Rumi wrote odes and odes to love. This is what Dostoevsky meant when he said “Beauty will save the World.”
Nietzsche, Rumi, Dostoevsky — Art, Love, Beauty — they are all trying to say the same thing. They are all trying to lead us away from the underground.
To Build a Community
However, only in the act of being experienced and appreciated by others does a piece of art finally find its true meaning and purpose.
Without that, art remains inert. It remains simply an expression of the artist’s inner world when wants to become much more.
It wants to communicate with an audience. As Tolstoy puts it:
“Art is one of the means of intercourse between man and man.
Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a certain kind of relationship both with him who produced, or is producing, the art, and with all those who, simultaneously, previously, or subsequently, receive the same artistic impression. […]
If only the spectators or auditors are infected by the feelings which the author has felt, it is art.
- Leo Tolstoy - What is Art?
Only in the act of showing his work to others and engaging in a dialogue does the artist truly discover the meaning of his work and his purpose as an artist.
Perhaps that is why I came to Substack — to put my thoughts online and to connect with and engage in a dialogue with a community with whom my message resonates.
Through my writing, I am hoping to find others who see the world the same way I do.
Who, possibly, in my writing, can find someone going through a similar experience and trying to forge a path similar to theirs.
A path that might not be completely clear but one that is being forged with each step forward.
A path which tries to avoid the prison of knowledge, the underground, the madness.
And a path can help us avoid these destinations and possibly lead us out of them in case we find ourselves there.
Conclusion
Why then am I on Substack?
I came here on an impulse. An impulse which is perhaps all too well captured by Nietzsche’s humorous take on it.
“But Why, Then, Do You Write?
A: I am not one of those who think with pen in hand; and still less one of those who entirely give way to their passions before an open inkwell, sitting on their chair and staring at the paper. I am annoyed and ashamed by all writing; writing is for me a necessity - even to speak of it in parables is repugnant to me.
B: But why, then, do you write?
A: Well, my friend, let me tell you in confidence: I have yet to find any other means of getting rid of my thoughts.
B: And why would you want to get rid of them?
A: Why would I want to? Want to? I have no choice!
B: Enough! Enough!”
- Friedrich Nietzsche - The Joyous Science
The artistic impulse which urges me to write and embrace everything that comes with it: self-discovery, crisis, meaning, connection, legacy.
Which urges me to write despite the difficulty. Difficulty which reminds me of Rousseau’s reflections on his own tortuous writing process in his confessions:
“It is with unbelievable difficulty that my ideas arrange themselves into any sort of order in my head. They circle there obscurely, they ferment to the point where they stir me, fire me, cause my heart to palpitate; and in the midst of all this emotion I see nothing clearly; I cannot write a word, I must wait.
Imperceptibly, the great movement subsides, order succeeds chaos, everything finds its proper place; but slowly, and only after a long and confused agitation.
Have you ever been to the opera in Italy? While the scene is being changed in the great theatres there, an air of disorder prevails, which is disagreeable and lasts for quite a while: the sets are all muddled together; on every side there is a heaving and a pulling, which it is disturbing to watch; you are afraid it is all going to topple over.
And yet little by little everything finds its place, nothing is missing, and you are astonished to see emerge from all this tumult a delightful spectacle. This process is more or less what goes on in my head when I am trying to write. If only I had learnt to wait, and only afterwards to render in all their beauty the things I had seen in my mind's eye, few writers would have surpassed me. […]
Hence comes the extreme difficulty I have in writing. My manuscripts crossed out, scribbled on, muddled, indecipherable-bear witness to what they have cost me. There is not one of them that I have not had to copy out four or five times before giving it to the printer.”
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Confessions
And thus my art, here on Substack, if it can be termed that, probably leaves a lot to be desired. It is probably too long and needs to be shortened to suit the platform a bit more.
But I hope to adapt if I continue this. For I am not even sure how long I'll continue to do this.
It started based on an impulse. But it will likely only continue if it finds an audience.
And that is why I appreciate all of you who have chosen to join me on this journey while I get better at this.
‘Chosen,’ because I have not shared this Substack with any of my friends and family. They know that I'm writing and putting it online but so far I believe none of them have made it to this Substack.
I hope to keep it that way for a while. As it gives me an opportunity to really understand those with whom my writing resonates.
I hope to continue writing — for now.
Further Explorations
Most of my posts have been about the process of self-discovery. But there are other topics I would like to explore in future posts.
Leadership being on top of the agenda. Over my not too long, but not too short career, I have not only built, developed and scaled teams but also worked closely with some great, and not so great leaders from whom I have picked up invaluable lessons.
I believe that leading people requires radical self-awareness and a Wisdom of Sorrow which forces us to lead with the insight of Nietzsche, the courage of Alyosha and the spirit of Rumi.
I believe that many leaders today do not recognize this. That the leadership books they consume have lost their connection with the philosophical roots Peter Drucker built them on. I would like to rebuild that connection with my writings if I can.
Technology is another area that I would like to write more about. Having worked in the tech space over the last decade, I see Artificial Intelligence as the most exciting thing to have happened since the advent of the Internet. But while it excites me, it equally scares me. Language is unique to humans and it forms the bedrock on which we built knowledge, stories, societies, and civilizations. It is not clear to me what it means for us, as a species, to hand it over to an outside entity.
I’m not sure if it makes sense to integrate all this into one Substack so I would love to hear what you guys think?
In the meantime I want to leave you with this lovely translation of Rumi’s poem which tries to communicate the essence of love — It reads a bit like a Zen Koan. I cannot stop reading it.
Colorless, nameless, free—
that's what I am.
—
When will I see myself as I am?
—
Put mystery in the middle.
Where is the middle in the middle I am?
—
And this silver-tongued stream in me—
when will it grow still enough to know
the streaming stillness I am?
—
The ocean I am drowned in the ocean I am—
shoreless, boundless, wonderful.
—
Don't look for me in this world or that world.
Both worlds are lost in the world I am—
—
a luminous void beyond profit and loss.
Wonder abounds beyond fear of loss
and lust for gain.
—
My soul, you are my true eyes.
—
What are eyes in the invisible visible I am?
—
Then what do I call you?
—
Silence.
Words can't name what I am.
—
Then praise the wordless speaker I am.
I raced through emptiness, footless like
the moon.
Praise the footless runner I am!
—
Why are you running—to reach me?
Settle in the placeless place I am.
Settle in the nowhere everywhere I am.
—
The moment I saw Shams of Tabriz,
I saw the supreme sea, treasure,
and gold mine I am.
—
- Rumi - Ghazal #1759 - Translated by Haleh Liza Gafori
You might like this piece from Rachel Katz about her decision/experience of coming out from anonymity
https://raekatz.substack.com/p/im-getting-official-about-this
Thank you so much for writing this! All I can say is that I'm in the same storm as you. It is to preserve my spirit, its a fight for my very soul. I too have not shared my Substack with anyone I know because I want it to be a space of solace where I can begin to see myself for who I am without anyone's knowing eyes. But it's also terribly frightening because vulnerability and speaking your truth is a Herculean endeavour especially for those who prefer solitude. But writing and shaping our words to their bare bones is like removing veils of abstractions, the more we write the more we are stripped down to the Truth. But it's important work because it allows others, those who truly see the act, to speak their own truth. It is an endeavour to live honestly and I join you on this journey.