Before good writing comes good thinking

My Substack year in review

This is my last edition of the year, and in the spirit of that, I was planning on taking it easy as the days get reassuringly shorter and darker. But then, my subscriber list more than doubled over the last few days thanks to my last post, The Friendship Problem, being featured by Substack Reads. There are thousands of new subscribers here. Welcome.

I’ve been writing on the internet for my entire adult life, and have had my fair share of big traffic moments. But since I quit my last proper journalism job in late 2020, I’ve kept things intentionally low-key. To be frank, my nervous system needed a break from the discourse, the comments, the opinions. So it’s been an interesting and distantly familiar emotional experience to have something I wrote unexpectedly reach so many people. It got me reflecting on what this newsletter is and what I try to do here.

What Do We Do Now That We’re Here touches on issues of the climate crisis, society’s meta-crisis, personal development, self help, spirituality, mental health, connection to the natural world, physical embodiment, recovering from overachievement and more. But on a deeper level it’s about an idea that I think connects all those themes. The most succinct way to say it is this: Most of the things we need to do to heal the planet and our society are the same things that would heal ourselves.

Burnout, loneliness, inequality, divisiveness, struggling to make ends meet in a hyper-individualist culture, anxiety and depression on a scale we haven’t seen before. These things feel like they’ve become the hallmarks of modern life, not the exceptions on the margins. The mistake lies in seeing all those problems — the climate crisis and the crises in our own personal lives — as separate. The value system that is failing the planet is the same one failing us.

Therein lies a hopeful message. Rather than seeing a slower, less convenient, more sustainable life as the price we must pay to preserve our planet’s future, we should see it as a welcome invitation. Because as it turns out, what’s good for the planet is good for us, too. I believe that animating that idea in our own lives is a meaningful form of resistance.

I work hard to make sure this newsletter stays consistent with that idea, as lofty as it sounds. Which means I refuse to let it stress me out, contribute to the need to overwork, or make me feel like I need to do more, faster, better to keep up. Plus, I’m a firm believer in the idea that before good writing, comes good thinking. And good thinking requires digestion, decomposition, and idleness. It’s the primary reason I left journalism, because the media’s business model doesn’t allow time for the kind of thinking (and therefore writing) that I want to do.

If I sent this newsletter more often in the last year to adhere a promised content schedule, it’s very likely that I never would have written pieces like The Friendship Problem. I simply wouldn’t have had time to think them first. So thanks to all of you who pay for this newsletter, even though you don’t get anything extra for doing so. In a very direct way, it pays for the childcare I need to think and write freely, which means more people are thinking and talking about these themes. In my better moments, I believe that makes the world slightly saner place.

Below is a look at my favorite things I wrote in the last year. And if you read and enjoyed the Friendship Problem, please go back and visit the now-voluminous comment section. If nothing else, it feels good to know we are not alone in our loneliness.

Mom friends

This post about the ambivalence of early motherhood and the misguided way we talk about postpartum depression was the one I was most nervous to send. But I’m glad I did. Being honest about my complicated feelings on this topic has helped me on my healing journey since having my kid. (Spoiler alert: I’m still on it.) I think we need way more honesty around this topic in general, because it’s rough out there for new moms.

Evidence of our connection

It took me a long time to formulate the thoughts that became this piece on artificial intelligence. I still stand by this line wholeheartedly: “The big tell about AI is in contained in the name: artificial intelligence. Nowhere in there does it say anything about emotions, embodiment, or spirit — all the other parts that knit together to make a human being, well, human.”

Elemental behaviors

It’s actually hard to pin down what this interview with author and biomechanist Katy Bowman is about, because it’s so expansive. Biomechanics is the study of movement in living things, so naturally we talked about how the way we move shapes how we think, what we value, and ultimately, who we are. We also explored what happens when modern life becomes completely devoid of labor, the existential ennui of privileged people like me, and why having a kid wrecks your body if it’s supposedly “natural.”

The Big Shiny Life and Starting from Zero

One way I think of this newsletter as a kind of recovery space for overachievers, so it’s fitting that two interviews this year, with

Rachel Katz

and

A.J. Daulerio

, focused on recovery: Rachel, from a life of overachievement and chronic illness, and AJ, from a life of validation-seeking and substance use. Both are also incredible writers on Substack who I admire. You should absolutely subscribe to them here and here.

Can’t stop thinking about Ballerina Farm

I tend to shy away from any hot takes or internet discourse in this newsletter for all the reasons described above, but I made an exception when I wrote about the internet sensation that is Ballerina Farm. Something about the conversation that surrounds her was taking up a lot of brain real estate, and I needed to understand why. I was thrilled when so many of you wrote to me saying you also felt uneasy about the BF discourse. Nuance appears to be alive and well, at least among those of you who read this.

A short list of links to read over holiday pause 

• Some might reasonably say leaving the U.S. for more humane countries is a privilege. But you might also say some people can’t afford to stay living in the U.S. if there is another option.

  Kirsten Powers
  artfully illuminates a paradox I’ve thought about for a long time. [Changing the Channel]

• 30-thousand foot questions to shake up your holiday dinner table. I love “Instead of asking, ‘What do you think of that?’ ask, ‘How did you come to believe that?’” [This is Precious]

• The microculture versus the macroculture. Ted Goia nails what’s going on in media. [The Honest Broker]

• Love this interview with the French filmmaker Justine Triet about her buzzy film “Anatomy of a Fall.” The film is part courtroom mystery, part feminist polemic about what it really means for women/mothers to prioritize their art. But it doesn’t tell you how to feel at the end. I loved it. [The New Yorker]

Links to listen to

• Come for a thoughtful conversation on who should be in charge of AI, stay for the succinct primer on the history of corporate governance. [Search Engine]

• If you’re thinking a lot about the themes explored in The Friendship Problem you’ll love this interview with Ezra Klein on Death, Sex, and Money about raising children in the nuclear family model — and what it’s doing to us. I admire Klein for being an influential man in media who talks so openly about this. Few others do. [Death, Sex, & Money]

• My partner convinced me to start listening to his favorite film podcast, Blank Check, on long car drives. We started with their series about one of our mutual favorite directors: David Fincher (Gone Girl, The Social Network, Zodiac, Girl With the Dragon Tattoo etc). The conversations are indulgently long, delightfully nerdy, and wildly tangential. I love hearing obsessive people talk about something they love and I learn a lot about the art of filmmaking and storytelling from the conversations. Next up: the Nancy Myers series. [Blank Check]

Word soup

“This is the guiding principle of my artistic life. I call it ‘investment without attachment,’ which means, we do the work consistently and well, tirelessly, doggedly. And we focus on that—the work, and the quality of the work, because that’s what we can control—not the outcome of the work.” —Jeannine Ouellette

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back early in the new year with a new Q&A I’m really excited to share, plus more of the big thoughts and ideas that help us figure out the most sane way to live now. I really appreciate all of your support in 2023.