Golden email #8: How to view yourself from an outside perspective

Is it even possible to know who you are? Can something understand itself or can it only understand everything else around it, with itself as a centre around which everything else rotates? I want to know if I'm taking the right decisions and if my art is good, but these things that are the most interesting to me are also the hardest for me to find out. An observer can't observe itself, a measurement device can't measure itself, it can only measure other things (let's hope these are true for the sake of this text...).

If it's only possible to know others and not yourself, you 10 years ago were someone completely else than you today, so if you want to objectively criticize yourself, just wait some time. Travel to other places and see how the things you do at home without thinking about them suddenly seem weird. Read about history and see how non-obvious all the things you do today are. Read about philosophy and realize the same about your thoughts (I came up with these last two ideas while reading about the history of philosophy). Talk to other people and let them point out how non-ovious all the things you do are. Maybe you're cooking spagetti in a weird way and your friend sees it and says "do it like this instead" and that's the first time you had even thought about it. You have seen yourself from an outside perspective for the first time. You are EXPOSED.

So to understand myself, I would take a trip to somewhere completely different than home, like Northern China, and talk to some local monks to get perspective, while simultaneously listening to history podcasts with an airpod nonchalantly hanging out from one ear. Then I can truly see what the basic core of myself is, because I've exposed it. The measuring device has started deconstructing itself and is now looking inwards to see how it works.

Update 230727: I want to add that another way to let time turn you into another person (who can then view yourself and what you've created from an outside perspective) is to wait until you forget what you just created. AT LEAST this works for me specifically when I make songs specifically. When I've made a song, I take a break for an hour and then go back and listen to it again. Then I won't be caught up in the analytical creation phase, because that was a while ago, and I also won't be bored of knowing exactly how the song goes, because it hasn't stuck in my memory yet. It will be like listening to it for the first time.

/kbrecordzz, 2023-06-24