I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
Ray asked if I wanted to go skiing today and after pondering for a while, I told him no.
“Skiing feels like a chore this year,” I told him. I felt guilty saying no, but a sense of guilt is not a good reason to do something.
The snow conditions are poor, so there are icy and crusty patches. In these conditions skiing requires a lot of focus. I feel nervous because I crashed badly on my first day out last November. I’ve lost my ability to let go and let go and let go on my skis.
I don’t want to ski just to check boxes, just because I think I should go skiing. Skiing is real, and skiing can be exciting. But when I can’t let loose and really enjoy it, when the drive up and back feels like a slog instead of a privilege, when I dread almost every bit of it, it’s time to take a break.
Writing to check boxes vs to feel delight and to learn new things
I love writing my morning blog post each day. That, along with the promise of a hot cup of coffee lightened with half and half, gets me out of bed, ready to fire up my WordPress post editor. I write first thing, in my PJs and bathrobe, after feeding Bo and the cats. It’s an everyday joy and delight.
I also enjoy writing for my newsletter although there I try harder to write in a polished way, for an audience. Sometimes that stops me from writing anything there. It’s easier to write here, where I do it to learn, to express myself, to feel flow and presence. But I’d like to write and publish newsletter articles more regularly, if only because that’s the venue that brings me into contact with other people. I get back-channel commentary on every article I write there from my subscribers, and every time I publish something there, my views here spike. I’m not into the views so much for their own sake. I want to write things that people are interested in reading.
Some part of me feels like all of this writing needs to pay off externally somehow, pay off by my making money from it, or building a huge audience (so as to make money), or publishing a bestseller (which would make money). I don’t need more money so it’s not about that. But money represents external validation: it says that people find my writing worthwhile. And anyway regardless of how much I have, I could always put more to use!
The writer’s journey
Visakan Veerasamy, who has been succesful as an online writer, says this about the creative life:
- rapid success is not as desirable as people think; it’ll be overwhelming and disorienting in a bad way. it’s often better to grow at a steady pace such that you can adapt and learn as you go without unpleasant shocks to your system.
- just as with aging, or with parenting, every stage of a creative’s journey has desirable and undesirable qualities to it. but it can be hard to appreciate in the moment. when you’re a nobody, you might not think to value your freedom and privacy to do/say whatever you like. but once you ‘become somebody’, you’ll likely look back on your earlier obscurity fondly, as a time of innocence. (it’s also true that obscurity can be lonely and isolating for someone who feels like they have something important to say, or are otherwise just yearning for connection.)
- it helps to know the struggles of those who have gone before you. look up the people who were your predecessors; people who had your approximate personality type, pursued your interests, lived out their version of your struggle. reading biographies are especially great because they give you long views of entire lives. many people struggled for decades with little to show for it.
To distill those lessons a bit: (1) no need to find “success” fast (meaning external success) (2) enjoy every stage of the journey and (3) look to people who’ve trod the same path before.
That last one especially resonates with me. I have lately been studying philosophy but not just philosophical ideas, also the shapes of philosopher’s lives.
I learned that Danish philosopher Sóren Kierkegaard, often considered the father of existentialism, died in his forties after producing incredibly profound work that left the world changed.
Iris Murdoch, in addition to being an esteemed mid-twentieth century philosopher, also was a prolific and celebrated novelist, winning The Booker Prize in 1978 for her novel The Sea, The Sea.
Friedrich Nietzsche was largely a recluse, living in self-imposed solitude for the last decade of his productive life, due to poor health and because he viewed solitude as a necessary state for a free spirit to escape the chains of tradition and conventional thought.
French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil died at age 34 of heart failure in 1943 while working for the Free French government in exile in Britain. She had been restricting her food intake in solidarity with those still living in Nazi-occupied France.
I could tell more true stories of the lives of philosophers that would show how deep and influential philosophical ideas emerge from real human lives lived in many different ways. These stories show me that I must find my own way through this, that my own philosophical ideas might emerge from my own contingent, limited, seemingly mundane life.
That is not to say that I put myself with those intellectual giants, only to say that to create output that influences the world, even in very small ways, can be done in my very own way.
Newsletter topic ideas
I would like to get in the habit of publishing newsletter articles on a weekly-ish basis. I have a few ideas for articles:
- Talk of a Commodity Supercycle: What Does It Mean for Investors and for How the World is Changing?
- Meeting Life Recklessly When You Don’t Know What the Future Holds: A New Philosophy for Changing Times
- Trump Is Not the Problem, He Is a Symptom: The Emergence of Populist Leaders in Debt-Ridden Times
- Why You Should Invest in Gold Redux: It’s Not Too Late
- Can Agentic AI Really Replace SaaS Systems? (probably for my AI newsletter? or merge it into my main one?)
I feel excited about getting started on one of those. Maybe I will today.