Fact #1: Writing on your hand is a viscerally disgusting experience
Imagine the following—you’re preparing for an important speech. Let’s say that you’re unexpectedly tied up in the days before the speech, such that you don’t have time to prepare for it. You generally understand much of the content of the speech—it’s about the impact of increasing globalization on your small hometown. You have three points you’d like to make:
Larry’s Barbershop has been driven out of business by Hair Inc.
Sally’s Brothel has been driven out of business by Brthl, a new “digital madam” startup
The arrival of finance capital has, surprisingly enough, increased the surplus of available arable land, due to a set of historically rooted circumstances around our specific town and a complex arbitration scheme put in place by Hair Inc. and Brthl
So those points sort of serve as the crux of your speech, the meat and the throughline, the bits that you don’t want to forget. And you know what you want to say about each one, but you’re worried about forgetting one (are you still with me? wake up) or the order that they’re supposed to be in. So you turn to a strategy used by man, woman, and beast since T.I.
You write down your three points on your non-dominant hand.
But here’s the thing. You’re used to writing on paper and sitting down at a desk or table. You have no muscle memory for writing on your hand, a fleshy, doughy mass with a confusing amount of give. Your skin greedily slurps up ink in a way that befuddles, due to your familiarity with the ascetic quantities that paper draws from your nib. Everything about it feels wrong. But you haven’t even gotten to the thing that feels the most wrong yet.
When you write on paper, your non-dominant hand is free. When you write on your hand, your non-dominant hand is the paper.
Do you understand me? If everything you’re doing when writing on paper is an interaction between the system of your brain, hands, pen, and paper, then you’ve removed one of the nodes of the system. Your brain, which previously was used to the sensation of writing with a free non-dominant hand, is short circuiting and screaming in pain. It’s the same feeling as if you were to have cut that hand off altogether.
Don’t believe me? Take out a pen and write the following on your hand: Ǝ⅃ᗺI⅃⅃Uວ.
Fact #2: When did cutting your nails stop sucking?
When I was a kid, I hated the sensation of having freshly cut nails so much that I’d avoid it as long as possible. Now, it feels fine to me. What’s up with that?
Fact #3: This TikTok has made me laugh every time I’ve thought of it
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I can’t watch it, because I’m in India. Hope I linked the right one.
Nabeel’s Footnote
Wonder what the social utility of this newsletter is. People like Substack a lot now, I guess—they use it for product recommendations, spiritual guidance, culture war explainers and heterodoxy. Don’t know if we provide anything useful in any capacity. There’s something to be said for a race to the bottom. Something noble in that pursuit.