flâneur

Are you serious? - by visakan veerasamy

substack.com · 4,068 words · saved by 1 readers

When I was a kid, one of my most agonizing frustrations was about how rare it was that anybody would take me seriously. It doesn’t bother me as much anymore, largely because I’ve since achieved some level of success at the things I care about. I now have some people who have my back – people who see me for who I am and what I’m doing – and I’ve also learned to be more patient with other people’s misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and so on. I’m writing this to share some of my thoughts about that. I think I got partially radicalized by the books I’d read. Good books are written by serious authors, and being deeply immersed in their work stirred something in me that made me yearn to live a serious life myself. It just seemed so obvious to me that a serious life is a life well-lived, and it’s always been weird to me how uncommon this perspective really is. Sure, you can catch snippets of it in all the motivational speeches and slogans that people throw about: “The world has the habit

Justo Gallego Martínez (1925-2021), working on the cathedral that he spent 60 years building. (Photograph by Susana Giron) When I was a kid, one of my most agonizing frustrations was about how rare it was that anybody would take me seriously. It doesn’t bother me as much anymore, largely because I’ve since achieved some level of success at the things I care about. I now have some people who have my back – people who see me for who I am and what I’m doing – and I’ve also learned to be more patient with other people’s misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and so on. I’m writing this to share…

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