I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
I wrote on Friday, and yesterday, about feeling self-conscious about putting my work out in the world when it’s not getting much attention or recognition. Why am I bothering? I ask myself.
I feel an inner drive to keep writing, and sharing the writing, and painting, and sharing the paintings, and document what it’s like to try to reinvent yourself at midlife.
I am telling myself this morning that, if I ever see any success with this, it will be so useful to have a contemporaneous record of how it felt when I was only making progress in internal ways — building painting skills, developing philosophical frameworks, improving my writing ability, learning to use artificial intelligence in a way that enhances the quality of what I create rather than diminishes it. I will be able to say to someone else contemplating a radical change to the way they live in the world: it’s not going to be easy. You are going to doubt yourself. You are going to go long stretches of putting your work out in the world and having it go unnoticed. You will feel like maybe you should quit. You will have little glimmers of hope — a painting that sells at a show, a comment on one of your articles from someone you don’t know saying how much it resonated with them, someone reaching out to you asking for advice.
I’m also cognizant of the tension between, on the one hand, being driven to create and, on the other hand, knowing that creating is its own reward and wanting to see some sort of external validation and recognition that what I create has merit. I see that I am caught up in Byung-Chul Han’s achievement society, pushing myself more and more towards external success rather than being content with the time and space I have to contemplate, to write, to paint, and to share what results.
What’s Byung-Chul Han up to lately anyway?
His latest essay-book, The Spirit of Hope, was released last year. Some quotes from a January 2025 review by Mark Rappolt:
Poetry is a language of hope…. In the information society, language loses all auratic distance and becomes shallow information. Digital hyper-communication makes us speechless.
Also
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
Meaning, says the reviewer, “art has the capacity to embrace thought without limit, the kind of thinking that leads to hope, freed from the logic of a world that the philosopher has already established as being pretty shitty already.”
I haven’t read the book but only even skimmed that review. But it gives me a way to proceed: with hope, and with a particular hope of not becoming speechless in the face of digital hyper-communication but rather using the tools of digital communication to express meaningful ideas that — I hope! — make a difference for someone.
In an act of hope, that I can discipline myself to read it, I have just purchased the Kindle version of The Spirit of Hope so I can absorb the ideas directly and not through reviews. I’ll share some ideas in the Tuesday Book Club post this week.