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Nov 1
Films and plays are perfect dreams from the collective conscience. Video games induce lucid dreams for one’s waking conscience.

Rather than as pure speculation, read this essay as fiction, as if it were written by a young man reflecting on death in a world where the afterlife is confirmed to be one long dream…

One of the greatest highs of life comes from being on the edge of understanding with a eager partner in an organic conversation. Those moments are beautiful and exciting for both their rarity and their impact.

Aimlessness is one of the unique privileges of human consciousness. We may look at animals and envy their simple, anxiety-free lives; we may want to inhabit a head that isn’t flooded with worries about the future and insecurities in the present. But animals lack the ability to be aimless. Every subtle movement is spurred on by some bodily function for survival.

As humans, we understand what’s required for survival and can grant ourselves time and space where we don’t have to worry about it. We have the privilege of spending time being aimless, yet we fail to indulge in that pleasure — one of the most blissful and creatively generative practices one can have.

[[Ideas Come from Aimlessness]]

Nov 3
‘If You Don’t Like the Weather, Wait Five Minutes’

In Iceland, there’s this saying: “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes.” It’s a joke about the severe and volatile climate of the island-nation, and it’s a philosophy that propels its people. Even in the deep dark of winter, where ice covers everything and you see the sun for twelve hour per week, wait five minutes and you might see the Aurora Borealis. In the summer, when you trek into the countryside to camp or resolve to climb that mountain on your bucket list, you’d better do it before the weather changes, before a storm banks the corner five minutes from now.

There should be a second part of the saying that goes, “If you like the weather, pray for it to stay.” In Iceland, every square foot of blue sky is a gift. And when you’re living outside, like I was, the weather can have a pretty big impact on your days. I can tell you from experience that the saying is not always true. Sometimes, the bad weather sticks around for more than five minutes. Sometimes, you hike all day in the rain, and pitch your tent in it, and wake up to the sound of it.

But regardless of whether this saying is an accurate whether forecast, it’s still a useful mindset. It’s a form of faith. Even when the weather is bad and not getting better, you can find comfort in the idea that it might be better in just five minutes, and it’s not a lie. The could always change in the next five minutes. And believing that is enough to get you through the bad stuff before it’s better.

When you stop worrying about the future and embrace the idea of “this too shall pass,” you can sink into the present moment and fully absorb your surroundings (elevate your experience). The majesty of Nature and the chaos of her weatherly whims makes you feel 1) small and 2) grateful.

That feeling is my favorite feeling in life; you feel small on the scale of the Universe and ultimately significant on the scale of your self.

A litmus test for whether you’re learning from a piece of media: “Would I ever want to read this information as a transcript?” If the answer is “No, never,” then you’re being entertained, not educated.

Nov 4
Pascal’s Wager works as an argument for living a moral life but not for enjoying life.

The argument goes like this: if you live a good life, according to the morals of the Church, then if the Christian God exists, you’ll go to Heaven and have an eternal afterlife; if He does not exist, you will have still lived a good life on Earth.

But if you live as if God exists, you’ll regularly forget the very likely reality that your time on Earth is the only time you have to exist. If you live life as if the Christian God exists, you will fall into living as if the Christian afterlife exists. Like an elder with dementia, you will operate as if there’s an eternal, blissful life beyond the one you already have, and only certain moments in life will remind you that life is finite and fleeting (empirically, maybe not absolutely).

There’s a way to live a moral life for the sake of this life alone, and not as penance in hopes of Heaven. There’s a way to live where, in every moment, I am aware of the finitude of life — an awareness that imbues each moment with meaning and gratitude. Without a belief in God, there is a way to live an ethical, enjoyable life until the day you die.

In matters of physics or statistics, your feelings don’t matter in determining what is true. But when it comes to deciding what you believe, how you feel is a valid criterion for deciding what is most true to you.

New Rules:

• No video games in a day until after I’ve exercised
• No social-media scrolling (save Substack) until after I have meditated (for 15+ mins) or written (for 45+ mins)

Why? After I exercise, workout, or write, I will no longer want to play video games or scroll on my phone. Dangle a carrot in front of the pig until the pig loses its appetite for carrots.

[[Manifesting My Ideal Information Diet]]

Every writer needs an editor, but editors are hard to come by. What writers really need is a writing coach who can help them become better self-editors, so that their writing improves enough to attract editors and readers.

I paused on the roadside for 20–25 minutes and observed a crowd of horses behind a fence. One was visibly horny and behaved identically to how any man my age would in a bar. The male was chasing after the female, and another female was biting at the dude’s haunches, fending him off from her friend. She wasn’t in the mood, and after a while, he wasn’t either. The moment had passed. I took a beat to reflect on how much I saw of myself in the horny horse. It was a humbling reminder that we are merely animals. Then I picked up my pack and continued my hike.

[[Feeling Fire and Ice]]

Nov 6
We each have an illimitable essence; the primary characteristic of man is his ineffability.

We are wholly insignificant on the scale of the Universe yet holy and significant on the scale of ourselves.

We are insignificant on the scale of the universe and ultimately significant on the scale of ourselves.

Nov 7
Iceland was not life-changing; it was life-affirming. It gave more depth, breadth, and clarity to the life I was already living, the life that I want to live until I die.

They say that the opposite of love is indifference, and it’s true. Love and hate are merely two moods of the same passion. The opposite of hate is indifference too. (Either you want so dreadfully for the other to be different, to be more like you; or you long so dearly to be different yourself, to be more like the object of your love.) Iceland is incapable of indifference. It’s summers shine with the midnight sun, and its dark winter nights are adorned with green wisps of Aurora. In Iceland, there is no apathy, no indecision — only obtuse expression. What is it like to be in a place incapable of indifference? The place fills you with passion and evokes the full range of human emotion. In Iceland, you feel fire and ice.

(In Iceland, you love and hate, as She does — the Land of Fire and Ice.)

[[Feeling Fire and Ice]]

Nov 8
What is the one thing? As an editor, for every piece of writing you touch, identify one thing the writer can do to most improve their draft and one thing that would most improve their craft. Be specific with feedback on the current essay, and use the current essay as an example of a concept that could be applied to all future writings.

Nov 9
No piece of writing is ever truly finished, because it could always be better. So, you have to decide when to stop revising. I say, revise a draft until it has taught you at least one way you can improve your craft.

For each draft, ask:

• What is the one thing that improved this draft the most?
• What is the one thing this draft has taught me about how I could improve my craft?

(I don’t yet do this, but) keep a running document of all the one things you’ve learned from revising your writing. That document will be your touchstone for becoming a better self-editor, which is the best way to become a better writer.

Adventure sports, like skiing and scuba diving, sit at the pinnacle human experience. You are using technology to do something that no human would otherwise be able to do, while using your mind and body to operate the technology, to take you to a place on Earth that few if any humans have ever seen. It’s the tech-aided exploration of Earth, and every experience sets you further apart from every other human that’s ever lived.

Nov 10
Let your fleeting thoughts go. The more you identify with them, the sooner you will delude yourself into thinking that your thoughts are different than they are. If you identify with your thoughts, you won’t let yourself look at them without tinted glasses or a fun-house mirror. Look at the shadow and see it for what it is: a part of you.

College is not the time to prepare for your career. College is the time to figure out the life you want to lead. You have enough responsibilities for each decision to have real stakes, and the consequences of failure are mild enough for there to be every reason to give anything that interests you a try.

Success is a feeling. We measure success relative to our expectations. So, the more you expect to feel happy all the time, the less you will feel successful, because you will constantly, cyclically, be falling short of or away from that unrealistic expectation.

There’s a fat left tail on the satisfaction vs. salary curve, meaning low-income people are much more likely to love their jobs.

It’s because:

• They haven’t built their lives around work and use work as a means to live the life they want, within their means;
• They have made their passion into their work and have oriented their whole life around the very thing that they long to do every day, and they’ve found a way to get paid to do it;
• Or, they have a heart of service and derive more utility from seeing the direct impact of their labor on people’s lives than from adding to the balance of their bank account.

High-income people, disproportionately:

• Prioritize their income over their interests, their paycheck over their passions;
• Sacrifice time with their families and communities to do business with strangers;
• Or live in a place or work in an industry that’s misaligned with their nature, because it offers the best economic opportunities.

Nov 11
There are first-graders playing soccer across the harbor from “The Troll’s Throne,” a seat-shaped, concave part of one side of the fjord. It’s 9:00 PM in June. They’ll play here for another two hours before biking home for dinner, spurred on by the energy that oozes out of the never-setting sun. In six months at this time of day, the first-graders may be at a friend’s house beside a fireplace slurping down fish oil as their daily vitamin-D supplement. In six months, the soccer field, when it is not covered in snow, will see sunlight only four hours per day, even less when the east side of the fjord or a dense set of clouds get in the way. Six months from now, the soccer field will be silent and still and barren, but it will be no less beautiful.

(Six months from today, those first-graders might ride their bikes through the snow-plowed streets to watch backcountry skiers turn down The Troll’s Throne.)

There are two life-changing aspects of lucidity (applying the lucid-dream state as an analog to waking life):

1. You realize that what you perceive is merely your filtered view of the world and not reality itself.
2. You start to believe that you can influence what you perceive and how you feel as you move through life, just as you can in a lucid dream.

You realize that the world you perceive is a world you create, and that you can re-create it.

What’s more important than money? Meaning. What’s more important than salary? Satisfaction. What’s more important than ROI? Relationships. What’s more important than accolades? Adventure. What’s more important than fortune? Fulfillment.

Success is a feeling, and it’s a feeling that many traditionally successful people do not have.

Examples:

• David Foster Wallace
• Steve Jobs
• Robin Williams

Nov 12
The most practical use of recalling my dreams is that they reveal open loops and unresolved relationships in my life. Whether it’s a good friend I haven’t checked in on or an old boss that deserves a thank-you note, when they show up in a dream, I know I need to reach out to close the loop and shed the guilt of my neglect.

There’s nothing more humbling then realizing you don’t know how to shit. In Iceland, I had the unsettling realization that I had no plan for going if I were ever out of range of some porcelain or a drop-toilet. Am I a fully functioning adult capable of navigating the wilderness with a backpack? Or am I merely a toddler who needs to be told where to place his doo-doo?

[[Feeling Fire and Ice]]

Nov 13
My promise as a writing coach is not that you will amass a massive audience, land a book deal, or make your first dollar online. My promise is that you will write your favorite piece of writing — the one you are most proud of — and that you will learn how to make each essay better than the last by becoming better at revision.

It’s not just that the journey is the only thing that matters. The journey is the only thing that exists. Every destination is fleeting and illusory, like hallucinating a small island at sea. Destinations are merely moments in time along the journey. So, concern yourself with your heading, not with where you’re headed. Clarify your direction rather than calculating your displacement from where you want to be.

The Hierarchy in Your Head

An ideal is a conceptual aim that is approachable but in attainable — like batting 1.000, never lying, or living like Jesus. A goal is an concrete aim that is attainable — like doing ten pull-ups, publishing a book, or landing a job. An idea is a thought that helps you achieve your goals or approach your ideals.

This is the hierarchy in your head: ideals, goals, and ideas. Clarity comes from linking all these things together, when you’re ideas help you achieve your goals and your goals will help you approach your ideals.

Nov 14
Iceland taught me how to find harmony among the light and heavy. I learned to live within the duality, rather than betraying truth and deluding myself into choosing one side of a false dichotomy.

Nothing that is true sits on one side of a dichotomy. Everything that is true is some gradient within a duality.

Concision vs. Brevity The more concisely you can write, the better a writer you are. But concision is not the same as brevity. It is not about the length of your writing but about your writing’s economy, the density of ideas. If you’re editing for concision, you’re not just cutting away; you’re rewording and restructuring to make each sentence and each paragraph have more depth and meaning. An error people make in revision is trying to cut away information or ideas for the sake of brevity. The best writers simply repackage that information and fold the ideas into tighter and tighter strings of prose, for the sake of concision.

Trim the fat from your writing, but only after you’ve put enough meat on the bone.

Morgan Housel: “Brevity doesn’t mean short. It just means there’s no rambling.”

Paul Graham: “Succinct doesn’t mean short; it means a high ratio of ideas to words.”

[[Concision ≠ Brevity]]

Nov 15
Satisfaction is Relative to Expectation

We feel satisfaction relative to our expectations. So, the only way to feel more satisfied is to lower your expectations or bring reality closer to your expectations. The former solution is simple but hard to implement. We are bound to expect to receive more than we can reach. Those ever-higher expectations keep us motivated, and they often come from comparison, envy, jealousy, and greed — habits that are hard for us humans to avoid.

The better route to satisfaction is not to lower your expectations but to partition them. Divide your expectations into two categories: what you can control and what you can’t. Effort, attitude, focus you can control. Outcomes you cannot. If you want to maximize satisfaction without sacrificing ambition, reduce all expectations you have to zero, except what you expect of yourself.

Expect nothing from the world and the world of yourself. If you only set expectations for those things that are within your control, you give yourself the ability to determine your satisfaction. When you set expectations for outcomes, for what you should receive from the world, you will be perpetually dissatisfied, or at least, your satisfaction will depend on the whims of the world and not on your effort, attitude, and focus.

What does this look like in practice? Imagine a man arriving at a five-star beach resort. He’s been anticipating this vacation for months, and after a long travel day, he’s ready to relax. The room is immaculate — just his style with the perfect view from the balcony. He kisses his wife because of how grateful he is to be there with her.

Then the man goes to the bathroom. After a few minutes on the throne, he needs to wipe. And what do he find? “One-ply toilet paper?!” he yells. “This is unacceptable. Five stars but one ply?” He struggles to finish his business, writhing in frustration. When he finally emerges from the bathroom, he b-lines for the room’s telephone, about to punch 0 and request luxury TP.

Before the man has a chance, his wife — always the voice of wisdom in his life — grabs his arm and says, “You know, you could just make two-ply out of the one-ply. Take twice as much from the roll and fold it an extra time.” The man pauses and listens. His wife continues, “If you want to be satisfied in life, expect nothing from the world and the world of yourself.”

My summer in Iceland was not a life-changing experience; it was life-affirming. It gave me permission to live the life I wanted, and it validated how I already saw the world: bursting with beauty and opportunity.

The Lumineers say that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. And it’s true. Love and hate are merely two moods of the same passion; the opposite of hate is indifference too. Iceland, known to its people as “The Land of Fire and Ice,” is a place where love and hate harmonize in the voice of Mother Nature. She expresses love with a midnight rainbow, illuminated by June’s never-setting sun, or by draping Aurora’s flowing green dress across the black winter sky. She expresses hate with the summer’s sideways storms and jet-stream winds or with the winter’s unrelenting darkness and hazardous cold. Iceland is incapable of indifference. There is no obscurity, no indecision, no apathy — only obtuse expression. The island fills you with passion and evokes the full range of human emotion. In Iceland, you feel fire and ice.

Nov 16
The paragraph-break is sacred. Don’t abuse it. Every chunk of white space taps into the ineffable, linking two related ideas by an invisible string. The space between two paragraphs is like an electron cloud, with some subatomic — or more accurately, telepathic — elements in a superposition. For each reader, the electron cloud collapses into a measurement of the particles’ positions. As he goes, the reader comes to a concrete, though implicit and subconscious, understanding of why two paragraphs are placed together, and how those two fit in the whole logical chain. Great writers don’t explicitly state why two paragraphs go together; they use the paragraph-break, transitional phrases, and cross-paragraph allusions so that the link between any two paragraphs can be inferred by the reader. That white space is the single best way to convey meaning without words. It’s is a miracle.

Thinking in the unit of the paragraph is the most important thing to master as an essayist. Everything within the paragraph should be opaque and clear, concise, so that the space between paragraphs can operate in the subatomic or ethereal realm where human minds connect without communicating.

Dorothy has a lucid dream that teaches her to love her home and the people there, and that she has agency over her experience.

You need clarity to set your heading, and you need courage to change it.

Title: Catchy, Mysterious, and/or a Coined Phrase

Subtitle: Context for the title, opens a big question-loop

Hook: Anecdote, pithy statement, visual, question, thought experiment

Thesis: Provocative, specific, refutable claim

Conclusion: argument recap, offering open questions, answering “So what?”

Kicker: Aphorism that repackages the thesis into something you can carry in your pocket; or restating the thesis in a new, surprising way; or a provocative question that helps the reader see the broader implications of the piece

Nov 17
Maybe, in our technologically advanced Western culture, we neglect sleep and nutrition and exercise because our day-to-day occupations require less kinetic energy than those of ages past. Compare, even, typing on a typewriter to typing on a keyboard. You don’t have to depress the butterfly keys on a MacBook even a quarter of an inch, but to leave any meaningful marks on the page with a mechanical typewriter, you have to strike the key with force and intent. If you haven’t slept or eaten breakfast, your fingers might not have enough energy to do any good work that day. This, obviously, is even more true when you compare a day of Zoom calls and Excel to a day of coal mining or farming. When “putting food not the table” requires minimal physical effort, we tend not to care as much for our physical wellbeing. It’s an evolutionary characteristic: use as little energy as possible to procure what’s necessary for survival.

There are at least three reasons to use repetition in your writing: emphasis, rhythm, and analogy.

Analogy is the most interesting use-case. If you repeat the structure of a sentence or paragraph yet change the content, you can relate two ideas without explicitly stating their relationship. You can communicate it implicitly through a parallel, repetitive structure.

Example:

Iceland taught me how to find harmony among the light and heavy. Iceland taught me how to feel fire and ice.

The structure is repetitive, not the content. And the repetition lets you equate two concepts: “finding harmony among the light and heavy” = “feeling fire and ice.”

Nov 19
Joan Didion is the best paragraph-craftsman I’ve ever read. Her paragraphs are, on average, longer than those in any contemporary nonfiction book or news story, but that’s because Didion sees the world with such depth, through so many layers. For that, her paragraphs require a few more lines than those you’re used to reading. But what you’re used to reading lacks the craft and attention of Didion’s prose. Despite their length, her paragraphs are more dense and concise than contemporary nonfiction and journalism. Each one is a three-act narrative, including an inciting incident; rising action, with the occasional plot twist; and a resolution.

The masculine impulse is to nurture ideas (and business plans and blueprints). The feminine impulse is to nurture people (and pets and plants).

Nov 20
Life is the whole cake. Living is the icing.

When you use an image or reference art, describe it enough for the reader to understand your point without the image. This makes your writing versatile. Your online article, which features the image, could be featured in a print anthology without the image. Or, someone could listen to the article and still understand it, without seeing the image.

This value of “versatility” is a counterpart to that of “timelessness.” The more applicable your writing is across time and across media, the better it is, the more opportunity it has to endure and connect with people.

My Top-Five Values

• Autonomy: Being self-reliant and self-directed
• Stillness: Maintaining the sweetness of solitude in the midst of the crowd
• Honesty: Telling the truth early and always
• Uncertainty: Reveling in mystery and detaching from outcomes
• Introspection: Reflecting on who I am and who I aim to be

Honorable Mentions

• Reciprocity: Returning favors and expecting no favors in return
• Adventure: Expanding my world by communing with Nature
• Conversation: Regularly and deeply connecting with others
• Openness: Being willing to change my ways

The story of original sin in The Fall is man’s justification for his own anxiety and self-deprecating insecurities. It is a story whose truth we must acknowledge, as a condition of being, and a justification we must discard, as a lie we tell ourselves about how we were meant to be different, and that we are insufficient as we are. That’s the next evolution of Western thought: we are sinful, and it is a righteous gift to be so. Sin but no shame. Self-awareness but no salvation. Morality for the sake of it, when we stop lamenting the fact of our mortality.

What does it mean to master writing? It means that no idea in your head could be better expressed by the hands of another.

Nov 21
If you start a story in media res (in the midst of things), make that moment in fine rerum (at the end of things). Stephen King, in On Writing, says that en medias res is an honorable tradition but one he dislikes because it necessitates flashbacks. It’s a tactic to hook the reader with action and create suspense and open questions. It’s better than opening with boring backstory, but it usually serves no other purpose than being a good hook. It doesn’t offer the reader anything; it’s more of a trick. But if you start the reader in the midst of action at the end of the story (without telling them it’s the end), then the suspense lasts the whole story; there’s no need for flashbacks; and you can plant seeds in the opening scene that help the reader track their progress through the story — where they come to understand the opening scene and that realization spins up new questions about how the story will end.

Vision

• Write and self-publish a book on the practice of introspection and my personal philosophy.
• Publish short fiction in literary journals/mags and, later, my own collection.
• Become the editor of my own publication, featuring “self-investigative journalism”: introspective essays, drawing on the author’s experience and expertise, that prompt readers to reflect on their own experiences in new and revelatory ways.
• Own and operate a writing coaching business, where I train coaches and take clients for essays, short stories, and books.
• Make most of my money from editing and writing coaching so that I can always write what I’m interested in, never only for a paycheck. I’d rather always choose what I write and never make money from my writing than make money with my writing by completing assignments for others — hence the impulse for self-publishing.
• Be commissioned by magazines/publications to go on adventures in nature and write about them (e.g., backcountry skiing in Alaska).
• Book speaking gigs and slowly become an expert orator.
• Build a community where I regularly facilitate group discussions on philosophy.

A simple fact that you’d never think about but that drives so much of our social and cultural dynamics: To maintain our population, every woman, on average, must give birth to more than two kids (2.1). That’s because of a few even simpler facts:

• Men can’t have children
• Everyone dies
• Not everyone chooses to have children
• And some people die before they are able to have children.

To make no moral statement about it but just to highlight the fact, if a woman has two or fewer kids, she is drawing down the average fertility rate (currently 2.3) and directly impacting the population growth of our species.

Reference: “Forget About Overpopulation”

Isn’t it poetic that we figured out nuclear fission before nuclear fusion? What better proof is there that the fundamental law of the universe is entropy — a trend toward chaos and disorder? It is simply easier in our universe to split atoms apart than to fuse atoms together. The latter requires more energy. And for what is that not the case — nations, businesses, people? We are easier to split apart than to bring together.

We fall into chaos, yet we must summit mountains to achieve order.

Nov 22
There is almost nothing concrete to glean from dreams. Anything you see in them is actually the content of your waking consciousness superimposed onto the dream-content. The real value in dreams is not in premonitions or revelations but rather that they give you an implicit sense of the mood of your mind.

[[Dreams as an Aesthetic Experience]]

Nov 24
We are so beholden to batteries. Barely anything anymore operates using kinetic energy. Almost everything operates by drawing from a stored energy source, which means we must constantly work to fill those batteries. Think of a washing board versus a washing machine. Think of a typewriter versus a laptop keyboard. Think of a rake versus a leaf blower. The mini adventures of our lives end when we return to an outlet to tether ourselves again to the wall. How much more would we see and do if we weren’t plagued by the anxiety of being disconnected?

We measure all outcomes relative to our expectations. Satisfaction, or dissatisfaction, is the difference between our expectations and reality.

Nov 25
Kundera’s “kitsch” is the aesthetic impulse toward anything that is easy to like, like children playing on the playground on a sunny day or an immaculately played Michelin-Star meal. For Kundera, kitsch is the denial of shit, the attitude that nothing worth seeing stinks.

My ideal information diet optimizes for a few things:

• Ad-free content
• Long-form writing
• And rigorous editorial standards.

[[Manifesting My Ideal Information Diet]]

Nov 26
Iceland has 1% the landmass of the U.S. and 10% the population density. In Iceland, there are 10 people per square mile. Imagine if Yosemite National Park were only 12 square miles and had fewer than 120 visitors per day. That’s how it feels to be in Iceland as an American.

I spent ~$750 total on campsites in Iceland, which, over 72 nights, averages to only $10.50 per night for an entire summer of lodging.

Nov 27
Familiarity porn: the endless drip of hearing ideas and seeing faces we know already, so that we can remain who we are and not be prompted to change

It’s non-fiction writers name-dropping tech founders. It’s Hollywood giving every high-budget lead role to an A-List actor (for a remake of another film, using legacy IP). It’s people on your feed regurgitating your opinions, the opinions for which you chose to follow them. And the most popular and lucrative genre of familiarity porn is nostalgia.

Morgan Housel, James Clear, Mark Manson, I love your work, but I don’t want to read another anecdote about Bill Gates’s self-assurance, Warren Buffet’s discernment, or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s discipline. Give me something I don’t know, or even better, something about your life that only you could write.

The antithesis of familiarity porn is David Foster Wallace writing about the adult film awards convention or about how his favorite tennis player (not the best tennis player of the time) broke his heart in Consider the Lobster. Or, it’s Joan Didion writing about her experience at the California state water control center and her experience at the Hoover Dam in The White Album.

Approach universality not through familiarity but through intense specificity, the sort that you can only access when you write from your personal experience, rather than paraphrasing some tired anecdote or pandering to the people’s demand for nostalgia.

Nov 28
I literally said this out loud to a friend today and had to laugh at myself: “Doing things unconditionally is my jam.”

Often, the answer to “How could that be?” is “It just is.” The trick is to ask the question and pursue an answer and be honest and accept the fact that there may not be an answer at all.

One thing online-native writers do not understand is that grammar and mechanics do matter. Voice and style emerge from a writer using language in the same way over and over, and that way being different than everyone else’s. Distinctiveness is built on little decisions like when to use a semicolon, when or whether to make up a word, or when to use an em dash rather than a comma. The best writers have distinct and memorable voices because every linguistic decision they make is implicitly and ineffably consistent. You know it’s DFW or Didion or Emerson. And, if you’re always writing for Twitter, sandwiched between the noise of the rest of a random feed of content, you have no chance of developing such a voice and style for yourself.

In Praise of Four-Act Narratives

A two-act narrative lacks resolution (like if Return of the Jedi cut before the Death Star exploded and didn’t include Anakin’s burial sequence on Endor). A three-act narrative is complete and familiar (any famous story you know). A four-act narrative reopens the plot and makes you question whether the resolution was authentic, and the fourth act is brief, like an ellipses and a question mark. It doesn’t say much, but in spins up all kinds of questions that you carry away from the story, unanswered (as in Eternal Sunshine, which ends with a loop of Joel and Clem running on the beach, suggesting that the story we just witnessed is inescapable and will repeat, or that it has repeated many times already). All of these structures can work, but only three-act narratives will have mass appeal, because they are the most legible, because they require the least amount of participation to comprehend.

One of Steven Pressfield’s principles of writing, with which I completely agree: “The female carries the mystery.” And the female doesn’t have to be a woman; it can be the sea, the desert, a storm, a crop field. In Arrival, it’s the oval spaceships (my example).

Lucky breaks happen by doing the right thing at the right time. So, you can make your own luck by doing the right thing all the time.

My entire approach to life, in a way, is in an effort to avoid emulating the almighty narrative structure of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. The resurrection part is great and essential. (Resurrect yourself whenever necessary, to rebuild — re-erect — yourself.) What I want to avoid is the Dark Night of the Soul, the point of no return, the all-is-lost moment, rock bottom. I want to live each day beneath the everlasting light of clarity and self-awareness and gratitude, so that I can foresee the fall and catch myself — bring myself to rest before I topple over. The best lifestyle is not the one that brings the most success or pleasure or happiness; the best lifestyle is the one that can sustain you for a lifetime.

Steven Pressfield on How I Write: “Are we material beings having a spiritual experience, or are we spiritual beings in a material world?”

I want to write essays with the linguistic control of David Foster Wallace, the perceptual layers of Joan Didion, and the self-evident insights of Emerson.

Nov 29
Female artists that have the vibe:

• Florence Welch
• Caroline Polachek
• Orla Gartland
• Nanna Hilmarsdóttir
• Sorelle Amore

This vibe is that of the feminine archetype, that of a siren, a mysterious goddess, an agent of chaos, the source of life and the voice of death. These are ultimately confident women who don’t hide their insecurities. They are perfectly still, have deep self-awareness and captivating personalities. They move their bodies fluidly and authentically. They dance and sing and live for themselves, not for anyone else, and it’s why they have so much gravity.

Evidence: Florence in this interview and this performance, Caroline in this interview and this performance, Orla, Nanna in this performance and this performance, and Sorelle

(And one more example of the vibe)

Nov 30
It’s too much to ask that we marvel at the fact of our mortality; the best we can do is accept it, and, along our ways through life, be sure to marvel at the majesty of Nature. Live within this harmony, where you appreciate the gift of existence and accept the fact of death.

I’m in the midst of an existential crisis — but have no fear! This is part of the regularly scheduled programming. It’s not so much a crisis as an existential jaunt or a tasting. It’s like a race-car driver stopping for a pitstop and asking all the tough questions, even if there aren’t any evident issues: “Do I have a flat?” “Any fluid leakage?”. The most deadly crashes are those that come from faulty mental mechanics, so I schedule time to ask the tough questions and evaluate myself. I’m in the midst of an existential pitstop; give me a minute, and I’ll be back on track.

The patriarchy is not a society where men hold positions of power; it is a society that disproportionately rewards masculine virtues with power.