Not enough is written about the nyc social club scene. It is an ethnographer’s wet dream, assuming the population of interest is PE guys and Wilhelmina models. My buddy invited me to Casa Cipriani the other night.

There is a certain etiquette at all these places. Usage of normal, functional access tends to be looked down upon. You don’t, for instance, open the door for yourself. It is, for all intents and purposes, part of an automatic machine that for some reason involves a stiffly clad man in a suit rather than technology that even my local Gristedes can afford to employ. Economic inefficiency is the luxury good par excellence. At these bastions of high society, luxury isn’t only or even primarily about the output. It is a matter of some maximization function involving semi-concealed effort of input against minimal energy expenditure on output. Inefficiency of spend in a potlatch-type way is a feature, not a bug. They want to bend over backwards for you, and make it mountain-movingly apparent they are doing so. But not, of course, in a sweaty or unappealing way. That would be uncouth.

Entrance always looks the same: member check-in. This is where, as an invitee, you are immediately and ceremoniously depantsed. Made to feel like you’re sullying the sacred in a social darwinistic sense. They aren’t particularly kind, or unkind for that matter, but cold, disinterested in your kind. To members, their binary switch flips and they welcome you back, by first name and with deference. In a world where status games operate effectively only inasmuch as they maintain subtlety, this members club treatment offers an exception that to me seems downright distasteful and dare I say low status?

Anyway, when you do manage to make it past the guards, the inside is, I must admit, quite nice. It’s opulent, borderline ostentatious. You are flanked by so many beautiful women that you’re made to wonder whether they work there or simply accept the perks of being beautiful via more indirect means.

As far as the people at this place, there is a somewhat disappointing lack of speciation. This presents itself both physically and metaphysically, in looks and in affect. I believe in some form of Jungian physiognomy, innards reflect outwardly. Something must happen when you spend enough time talking about deals and the same private school you both went to and how your distant relative is none other than Cornelius Vanderbilt, that manifests in distinctly physical ways. To my fellow prosopagnosiacs, good luck out there.

In these circumstances I tend to be more of an observer, not by choice but in a state of paralyzing curiosity. I wonder how many times you can talk about a Hamptons party or that trip in St Tropez and whether I’ve heard the same story from many different people or this is just The Story in some Homerian archetypical type of way. Or, I’m beginning to think, St Tropez is not actually a place in the physical sense but rather some collective experience engaged in by this in-group in the same way hitting the slopes or going down the k hole doesn’t actually involve any skiing or snowboarding or jumping down some hole. And The Story works as a social semaphore to establish the status hierarchy. You’re either someone who’s been to St Tropez or you’re not and you would do well to behave accordingly.

I struck up a conversation with a woman, probably around mid- to late-twenties. The usual first topic at these places centers around who you know, reminiscent of fraternity greek life but probably finding deeper roots back to the private school you attended (I didn’t attend one). I learned she had started a jewelry company. So I asked her about the inspiration for her designs. She said she didn’t know, she’s just always liked jewelry. And that was the end of that.

How about any other forms of art, visual, musical, cinematographic? What do you enjoy?

“I really like art. I like to go to museums,” she said.

“Yeah isn’t that one of the coolest parts about living here,” I continue. “Not that I can say I take advantage of it enough, but we have unparalleled access to some of the best art in the world. I did make it the Frick finally, the other day.”

“Oh I love the Frick. I was just there.”

“Did you have a favorite piece?”

“No,” pause, “not really.”

Ok, glad we had that talk.

I was reminded of the essay I wrote about finding people routinely boring and how that actually may mean you yourself are just boring. Casa Cipriani changed my mind. These people have, like with material possessions, a proprietary manner of appraisal when it comes to boringness, as if boringness itself were a form of curation, incuriosity the final luxury good.

If it were an acceptable and feasible thing to do, I should like to have a membership to all of these clubs. Or someone should write an ethnography of nyc social clubs. With this many people playing the field, these places are overdue for some fieldwork.

There are probably two things going on when I think about it:

1. I am currently braving a 4-block trek up to a nearby CVS, championing a 4-day running 102.8 degree fever. It takes this type of handicap to realize just how amphetamanized so-called normal nyc walking really is (that or being a tourist). Tragic(?)

2. I am re-reading Infinite Jest. Comic(?)

In hindsight, walking to the pharmacy was probably ill-advised, a term I believe I have now officially earned the right to use, for rather than in spite of any irony it implies here. You have to understand that at the time the antibiotic I was after represented in my mind a deus ex machina of sorts1, something completely orthogonal to what I had been doing which evidently up til now had not been working (see thermometer reading). As far as I knew, the antibiotic could be a magic pill that makes everything better, I thought.2 And really why shouldn’t it be!

I was steps inside the pharmacy, surrounded by the typical things: fun-size bags of Reese’s pumpkins and looming refrigerators stocked with waters and coconut waters and reverse osmosis waters and boxed waters. The place was cast in a hazy glow, something like a moderately foggy day in San Francisco sans actual fog. The same lighting that gaslights you into questioning whether your blood sugar is low or you’ve been transported into a David Lynch film.

Focus, Zach.

My body plowed on. I imagine it looked more like forced motion, my locomotion that is. Like gravity along an alternate plane. It also then occurred to me, skulking through the CVS aisles, that my sweatshirt’s hood was pulled up over my head. I must’ve done this at some point along the walk over, figuring it would conceal what I had carefully avoided looking at in the mirror but knew approximately as the visage called zero sleep and sauna-sweating dehydration and sickly sunken cheeks with a sallow and dull glow. In short: a bit scary. What I hadn’t thought through, and now that I do think through it is probably why I attracted stares that lasted just a tad bit longer than what felt normal or natural, was that trying to cover this type of thing up with a hood is like a middle schooler’s attempt to spray Axe deodorant over post-gym BO-drenched armpit. It’s a little too late for that. Not only is it too late for that, the purported method of concealment or counteractment actually does the opposite of its intended purpose. That is, it serves to attract more attention to the very thing which it seeks to conceal. The only thing worse than inhaling air reeking of BO is inhaling air reeking of Axe deodorant and BO at the same nauseating time. Anyone who has been inside a high school boy’s gym locker room knows I am not making this up.

By this point, the store had taken on the form of a closed ecosystem in my mind, with its own sort of dynamic equilibrium defining how matter and energy flowed and the rhythms of the various lifeforms inhabiting it. Where the real action takes place, food-chain type assertions and re-assertions of dominance, and the place to be as the de facto ecologist of this place is the pharmacy counter, where I had now finally managed to wander to in my delirium. I was surrounded by various species ranging from the placid to the real equilibrium-shakers. A woman, mid-thirties, sat cross-legged in a chair, minding her own. An older gentlemen who probably shouldn’t be wearing jean shorts in jean shorts skipped up to the counter with a swiftness and gaiety that gave me second thoughts about my assessment of his age or whether jean shorts are actually not exactly what he should be wearing after all. But the real specimen of intrigue here was the man at the pharmacy counter. Well there were several, men and women of various sizes and shapes, manning the counter. But there was only one. He was the closest thing this world had to a supreme being, an orchestrator, and unmoved mover.3

Jenny, came his voice in something far too light on decibels for how far it carried. The woman’s legs uncrossed and up she was all in one yogic motion and to the counter she went gently receiving the brown bag from the orchestrator. He emitted a warm but subtle smile and off she went, and onto the next he went. Next was the jean shorts guy who seemed to have some rapport with the orchestrator but now that I think about it everyone seemed to have some rapport with the orchestrator. Did I also have rapport with the orchestrator and just not know it yet?

Every system has its disruptors, the ones who make damn sure you know which way the entropy arrow points. A man, short in stature, baggy jeans and some kind of gauche faux-leather jacket with decals and a head of dreads emerging from beneath his hat entered the vicinity. The orchestrator took notice. The man wore tinted wayfarers, the type that block out 80% of light and seem actively hostile to one’s ability to navigate in a world so sight-centric. Beware of people who wear tinted sunglasses inside; they know things we don’t. He craned his neck into a near perfect angle of projection, bellowing, I need my eyedrops, to no one in particular. Far back behind the counter, the most doctor-y of the bunch emerged up from behind the file-foldered stacks of pill bags with a look of recognition.

We sent them to you, they’re being delivered to your place, the doctor-y guy knew this was his grenade to jump on.

I need my eyedrops, the sunglasses repeated with slurry determination.

The delivery guy is making deliveries right now so by the time you get back home they should be there, he responded in what I admired as nothing short of a profound, homophonic demonstration of the bounds of human patience.

But I need my eyedrops now, the stone-cold sunglasses persisted.

I understand that, but we can’t just write you another prescription and give it to you here. He paused. Do you want me to call the delivery guy and see where he’s at?

Yeh I need my eyedrops.

The sunglasses were a bit closer to me now, regrettably, and I think there are more correlative rather than causative explanations for what I’m about to say, especially when one considers I am most probably de facto unreliable narrator by virtue of my own enfeebling fever, yet still I feel obligated to mention, for the sake of completeness, that with his nearing in proximity came a certain smell typical of a certain substance typical of bloodshot eye-irritation. The skunk barged its way into my mucus-plugged nostrils. Here again though, I was reminded of my own warning just mere minutes ago: the sunglasses know things we simply cannot.4

Meanwhile all else was good in this microcosmic CVS world. The orchestrator continued dancing to his own rhythm. I think there was music but I am not entirely sure I wasn’t just hearing things. A young adult woman and a Swedish guy exchanged equally amicable encounters as he received and parted with them both elegantly. He made some comments to the girl and she smiled and laughed. He made her day genuinely and irreversibly better. It was clear: the orchestrator was meant to be here, now, bending the ecosystem around him one brown pill bag at a time.

Everyone been helped? he whisper-projected.

Looking around and seeing no one else, I walked up to the front. I typed my name into the tablet. The orchestrator gave a nod and a smile and swiftly returned with my own brown bag. Zach, here you are, hardly even audibly. I thanked him and backed away.

I made my way through dense aisles, shampoo and soap, dental and then cosmetics, to the front of the store. Opening the door to the outside felt at once refreshing and overwhelming. Inside, I had found something self-contained, a world of its own. Now I swam right back into traffic, the bustling streets of nyc. The sun shone and no single person seemed to play any larger role. The orchestrator, a big fish in a tiny tiny pond, would remain relegated to his corner.

I made it back to my apartment, antibiotic in hand, and collapsed on the couch. Infinite Jest was still there, bookmark holding my place somewhere in the middle of a footnote about a footnote. The fever was breaking, I could feel it. Things were starting to make sense again, which is to say I was starting to filter out the strangeness again. But I’d seen it. The real absurdity. Not Sisyphus and his boulder, tragic and alone. But the orchestrator and his pill bags. The sunglasses and the eyedrops. The yogic woman and the jean shorts guy. All of us playing our parts in a tiny ecosystem that means everything and nothing at the same time.

What struck me about this whole situation was the absurdity of it all. But not the capital-A Absurdity that Camus wrote about—the cosmic meaninglessness, the silence of the universe in response to our deepest questions. That kind of macro-absurdity, the kind that leads Gen Z to the performative nihilism of the “gen z stare,” feels like an overreaction to me. An overtreatment for what the world actually is.

The real absurdity is right here, in the micro. Two people interacting at a pharmacy counter. A man in sunglasses demanding eyedrops that are already en route to his apartment. An orchestrator dispensing brown bags with monastic calm. When you actually sit there and watch people, really watch them, without the usual filtering, the little things they do are truly, canonically absurd.

We would do better, I think, with less macro-absurdity and more micro. Fewer gen z stares, less performative nihilism. You don’t need to perform attentiveness to absurdity when everything around you already is absurd. Everyone moves to their own rhythm, syncopated or synchronized, and there’s a kind of magic in both. The harmony and the disharmony. There’s a natural irony in the gap between what people think they’re doing and how they actually move through the world, and it’s a hell of a lot more honest, not to mention downright comedic, than the manufactured kind.

Maybe Sisyphus is more like a guy handing out pill bags, bopping to his own beat, than an Adonis rolling boulders up a hill considering himself happy, whatever the fuck that means. It need not be so serious. I will lie back down on my couch, fever abated, and reopen Infinite Jest. It really is an absurdly funny book.

For the first time since I landed in SF, sunlight floods my hotel room. The evening glow casts a pleasant light as I sit listening to this DFW interview. He squirms in his seat, never quite comfortable. There’s a question asked, hesitation on his part. A flash of anguish. Not responding directly, he instead rather jaggedly offers this:

“Let me insert one thing… most of the stuff that we think we're writing about in books is very difficult to talk about straight out. You know, question and answer. In some sense, it probably can't be talked about directly, and that's why people make up stories about it. This is all a big defense, because I feel like what I'm saying is so simple and so reductive.”

He hates what he’s saying. More than the words spoken, one cannot help but notice the way DFW’s face contorts. He seems to reel from the sincerity of his own words, as if reckoning with some painful truth for the first time. But he’s not. To know DFW as a reader is to know how deeply he understands what he’s saying, this Wittgensteinian conundrum: the irreducibility of certain truths.

Then it’s not the recognition of some heretofore unknown truth washing painfully across his face but rather the inevitability of it, despite and even in true, vindictive spite of knowing it so deeply. To see the richness of his own experience in what he’s saying only to reduce it to a Q&A response in an interview is, for him, to fall knowingly and unavoidably into the very trap he is discussing. It’s almost physically painful for him. He is, left with no other options, choosing irony, the song of a bird who has come to love its cage.

If irony isn’t the way to talk about the thing we can’t talk about directly, then what is?

I, perhaps unwittingly, had an answer as a kid. I used to read almost exclusively non-fiction. There’s still a running joke in my family about The Guinness Book of World Records, the only thing I agreed to read as a kid when my mom suggested I stare at books for fun. I liked to look at the outlandish pictures of the biggest rubber band ball ever spun or the expression on the face of the guy who made it his life’s goal to hold his breath underwater the longest. I now think also this habit was borne of a deep hunger for learning things about the world, because if you want to know true things about the world why not start with the hyperbolic, I thought. And as a side effect, if these things were interesting to me I could share them with others and be more interesting. That was my original solution: facts could be talked about directly.

Though I can’t pinpoint exactly when it happened—it was sometime in early high school—these so-called truths about the world grew stale on me. It began with Orwell. If Animal Farm and Anthem broke the seal, 1984 exploded my world open. In it I found a story about a guy Winston Smith who I deemed almost immediately unremarkable in every way. He was an ordinary guy, down to his very name, and yet his world seemed so strange to me, the surveillance and lack of freedom and the weird language that seemed to carry a power much greater than language as I had been using it my entire life. The further I read the more I was pulled into this world, and the way it functioned felt real in the way my teacher assigning the chapters felt real.

I had encountered, though I couldn’t articulate it at the time, the stories people make up about the things we can’t talk about directly. This story held deep truths, I discovered. And truth didn’t have to be some stripped down numbers and a statement about the most x or longest y in the world. Yet still, it seemed so non-intuitive to me that the best way to convey deep, important truths is through something fictional, something completely made up! One thing I knew though was Doublespeak was a hell of a lot more interesting than the dude who could hold his breath under water for the longest.

The story about the story

Orwell led me to others. From the early days, novels like Siddhartha and Frankenstein and The Great Gatsby stick out. But there were many more. Then a couple years ago a friend recommended Infinite Jest.

Infinite Jest was a lot of things to me. But if I had to strip it down to the most important, it is this. It is about the relationship between truths and stories, and what can and cannot be said, but not in the conventional sense of refusing to say things or not wanting to say them. It is about the inability to express the most fundamental things because of their irreducibility. Language is our best, and maybe only, shortcut for expressive transference, the most profound of which take on a form that must be experienced if not directly then in some powerfully proximal way. We can talk about what it’s like to fail or to fall in love, but how much of that can we really capture? In a sentence? A paragraph? A novel?

This is what Hal tried to do. Infinite Jest is the expression of his experience. We read this behemoth of a novel and feel the weight of it. It’s tragic—we think we understand, we see parts of ourselves in his struggle. But the reality is Hal will never, in his case in some literal sense, be understood—not really. But it’s also hilariously funny, Infinite Jest, in the same way, depending on how sincerely we choose to read it. And when you look at it this way, there’s almost nothing funnier than making DFW talk about Infinite Jest.

If you don’t find people routinely interesting, you yourself are boring. This insight, though not new, came into sharper focus since moving to nyc.

One of the cool things about a place oversaturated in social interactions is that your ability to run experiments goes way up. With sufficiently high n, most things worth observing happen more than once. Things that appeared outlandish on first notice become more explicable when seen enough times, and if you pay close enough attention you can start to see patterns.

This happened to me within my first week here. I was out with my brother and, on separate occasions, wandered into a similar conversation with strangers several times.1 My initial hypothesis saw me as object: perhaps the way I look or my gait or affect draws this type of encounter. But something felt too passive about this.

So I thought hmm this is a new thing, why this, why now? A simple explanation went something like oh yah I’m in a new city and the people are different. To me, this could adequately account for one, but two?? three??? four???? Each successive one made me exponentially less certain of this conclusion.

What else then?

Beyond moving to nyc, I had started a new job. It was also in a physical office versus previously remote. Taken together, these things, new job and new environment, are evolutionarily taxing. What if I was fried? I thought. Perhaps social fatigue, like other forms of depletion, nudges us into low battery mode at some point. If you think about it like a spectrum stretching from agent to automaton, depletion renders you closer to the latter—passive, less present, disengaged. Was I the boring one after all? This seemed promisingly unpromising. The question I wanted to ask, to put it in Wittgensteinian terms: what would it look like if I were socializing with a depleted social battery?

I know what it looks like. The same thing happens when lazy Zach interacts with language models. Uninspired prompting causes Claude to default to generic conversation, relying on billions of dreary, predictable patterns. These are well-trod grooves, and without sufficient coaxing to do so, models just like humans, fall into the low-effort answers, because what reason am I giving to think this would not suffice?

Prompting Claude with tell me about Ana Karenina is much less interesting than with I recently read Ana Karenina and The Age of Innocence and noticed striking similarities between their protagonists, but the differences were even more revealing. How do these differences reflect variations in core personality traits, as well as society’s attitudes toward these behaviors in their respective eras?

This was the key insight: I was being boring, and all along I knew how to be less boring. Being less boring is a matter of being less bored; the key to being less bored is stringing together the right prompts.

Conversations, much like interactions with a language model, thrive or die based on the quality of our input, both implicit and explicit, reading and writing, listening and speaking. The richer the prompts, the richer the responses, and the richer the responses the greater texture from which to weave ever more intricate prompts.

Prompts are not atomic; there is context built up over time during the course of a conversation (or even multiple conversations). Like my second Ana Karenina prompt, prompts with context lace conversation with open threads to pull on and tie together as your converser sees fit. This context is the sinew of conversation, without which its muscle catabolizes to fat and nothing robust remains for you to build on top of. You and the person you’re talking with need this shared context to build, thread by thread, a tower that supports ascension to the things most interesting. It’s at this point, high atop the tower you’ve built together, where you can mutually overextend, stepping out with light airiness, unafraid of the weight of ego falling to its death. At this height, boredom simply can’t exist. Into each conversation you take your maps, imperfect, of the world and other people and, if you so choose, chart a new path, curiosity your compass.

There have only been a few times in my life when I've been stopped in my tracks—moments when all awareness of my surroundings simply evaporates.

One that comes to mind was seeing The Night Watch in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam several years back. I saw it from a distance—it’s rather large. It drew me closer and closer until I was at what felt like the right viewing distance in a non-technical way. I moved forward unconsciously until I was stopped in my tracks. There I stood; hours passed.

Just last week I travelled to Agra. It is a place as rich in history as it is poor in other ways. Centuries of dynastic rulers live in the air—a thick dust to keep my eyes dry. My hotel was a stone’s throw away from that most famous marble structure: the Taj Mahal. Indeed I first spotted it from a distance, a glass of Indian sparkling wine in hand. Looking off the hotel bar balcony, sometime in the evening, it was a brilliant white among a sea of muted brown. Luminescent, almost. It too immediately drew me in.

I awoke well before sunrise the morning of, wanting to avoid the crowd. A short drive took my friend and I within walking distance. The first steps out of the car were ethereal. Our tour guide took us in, meandering into tales of the Mughal Empire: Akbar and Jahangir and, yes, Shah Jahan. That is when I saw it. Through the arches, casting a darkening silhouette effect, the Taj Mahal shone like a white-hot sun. Now, caught in its gravitational pull, we moved closer. I wanted to hear what the tour guide was saying. I knew vaguely the history surrounding the Taj Mahal. The story of the ruler and his wife. But, like that day in Amsterdam, things around me washed away.

This time was different though. The first thing I noticed was an intensely palpable sensation of beauty. It is a warm sensation that is energy-giving, like the beginning of a new romance. Your eyes feel wider and the air feels thinner making everything sharper. We were a hundred or so paces away.

I moved in closer until at some point things changed. It was sometime before I entered. The intense warmth had given way to its opposite—a quiet subduing. If, in the context of romance, my earlier approach constituted the prologue—all the vivacity of a burgeoning love—this now was the epilogue: reflections on what once was but no longer is. I had experienced these feelings of longing and nostalgia before, but usually they map to some specificity in my own life: an ex-lover or old friend perhaps. In this case it was pure longing without an object.

The Taj Mahal was built by Shah Jahan for his wife Mumtaz, who he loved dearly. It is undeniably beautiful. You look on this brilliant marble palace in pictures and wonder what it must have been like to inhabit. You could imagine asking Mumtaz, but then again she wouldn’t know. You come to learn the Taj Mahal isn't a palace after all—it's a memorial. Shah Jahan built it as a dedication to Mumtaz, whose death in childbirth left him inconsolable. It was created for someone who would never witness its beauty. Beneath the marble floors, hidden from view, Shah Jahan and Mumtaz rest quietly side by side. Perhaps it's fitting that love’s truest resting place remains unseen.

When you encounter the Taj Mahal, you’re made to wonder how something so breathtaking comes into existence. It is a deeply romantic place. Those blocks of marble are imbued with love just as they are with longing. Shah Jahan must have really loved Mumtaz. I’ve heard it said, flippantly, I want someone who loves me enough to build me a palace. While maybe crude and unpoetic, this does capture part of the story: love is grand. It’s grand enough that even from afar, its brilliance transcends space and time. Yet distance misses what intimacy reveals—the meticulous devotion evident in every carved marble block, every engraved detail. So much work in carving and engraving and building went into the creation of this mausoleum. Maybe it’s a shame that something so exquisite was never more than a dedication to someone who would never be able to behold it. Or maybe that’s not the right way to think about it. Love isn’t a beauty demanding witness; it is precisely because it can live without recognition that it persists eternally.

I often get this question: why do you work out? There’s a canned answer, the one I’ve become accustomed to giving: mental benefits, I say, the sanity and clarity it unlocks.

This is only partially true, in the sense that I do put significant value in the way working out seems to rewire my brain chemistry for the better. I’m a more emotionally contained person; I can tighten the valve and be okay and not leak onto others.

Two people, on separate occasions this past week, asked me the question, prompting me to reflect on it more deliberately: why do i work out?

I already talked about the first reason—mental benefits—but there’s a more honest one, and the more I’ve reflected the more I believe it to be the primary one. I work out largely for aesthetics. I don’t really care about how much I bench or squat. When someone asks for these numbers, I answer, mostly out of curiosity about their reactions. Surprise? About how much or how little weight? I take both positively, because what I care about is orthogonal. It’s the question that matters.

So what is aesthetics qua telos for working out? In one word it’s beauty. I imagine reading that is as unsatisfying as writing it. What does beauty even mean, especially when it’s so subjective and can vary dramatically across people?

The best approximation I have is a feeling. Something is beautiful when it registers with a deep, profound internal resonance. When it comes to aesthetics being the goal of working out, the meaning of this can look proximally like self-obsession or narcissism in the least charitable first-order determination. This is probably in large part the reason most people don’t admit to it. I like to look in the mirror and like what I see. Is it deeper than that? I don’t know.

I did read something recently that seemed to offer a compelling alternative. Peter Sloterdijk’s interpretation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem Archaic Torso of Apollo at least gave me a clearer vocabulary for understanding this aesthetic impulse. He discusses how aesthetics, far from being trivial, can represent a powerful call to ethical self-transformation. So I can claim ethical transformation instead of wanting to look hot? Here is what Sloterdijk says:

You must change your life!' — this is the imperative that exceeds the options of hypothetical and categorical. It is the absolute imperative — the quintessential metanoetic command. [...] The numinous authority of form enjoys the prerogative of being able to tell me 'You must.' It is the authority of a different life in this life. [...] In my most conscious moment, I am affected by the absolute objection to my status quo: my change is the one thing that is necessary.

(Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life)

My change is the one thing that is necessary. Okay, that’s dramatic. But maybe it's not all wrong. How does this relate to working out though?

Sloterdijk proceeds to explicitly connect this aesthetic imperative to athleticism, describing how bodily discipline and physical ideals function as tangible, authoritative exemplars:

The authoritative body of the god-athlete has an immediate effect on the viewer through its exemplarity. It too says concisely: ‘You must change your life!’ [...] Give up your attachment to comfortable ways of living—show yourself in the gymnasium (gymnos = ‘naked’), prove that you are not indifferent to the difference between perfect and imperfect [...] admit that you have motives for new endeavors!

(Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life)

Ok well this seems dramatic too. Building an ethics around working out feels too hand-wavy when really I could just say I like whatever external validation and other vain rewards come with looking good, the female gaze or whatever. It’s not that deep! To be clear, I don’t see any issue with this and it need not be deeper. But then I ask myself: is this enough to drive the drastic changes I’ve made to and in myself in pursuit of these aesthetic goals?

If I put any stake in this Sloterdijkian call to a deeper internal ethics, answering this question becomes more sensible. For one, it equips me to better think about the akratic’s conundrum.

This is something Agnes Callard explores in her book Aspiration. She describes aspiration as the pursuit of becoming someone who values differently—someone who not only intellectually acknowledges a higher standard but actually reshapes their desires accordingly. Callard highlights akrasia—the phenomenon where we fail to act according to the higher values we recognize—as a natural but challenging part of this aspirational journey.

This is the classic cookie dilemma. If I am someone who cares about my health, why would I eat the cookie, knowingly engaging in something that compromises my goal of improving my health? The answer is I am operating from two intrinsically-conflicting value-perspectives. In other words, I do not have the ability to put both of these options out in front of me like menu items to select from when I’m hungry. In the case of the dishes, I may be looking simply to decide from the value-perspective of asking which of the two items will better satisfy my hunger using taste or pleasure or whatever as proxy. This is not something we have the ability to do when deciding between those other two items—that is eating the cookie or prioritizing our health. These can only be judged from two, mutually-uninhabitable value-perspectives, as if I’m essentially two different people where these value-perspectives “collide,” insofar as such a collision even makes sense to discuss. Callard puts it as follows:

Has the akratic taken the tastiness of the cookie into consideration or not? My claim is that the tastiness of the cookie gives rise to two different rational considerations. One of these—the fact that the cookie will contribute just this much pleasure to my life overall—gets taken into account, and outweighed, in the akratic’s deliberations. The other—the fact that I want something tasty NOW—has not been reckoned in those deliberations. This is because it shows up as a consideration in favor of eating only from a value-perspective that conflicts intrinsically with the one from which she deliberates.

(Callard, Aspiration)

What this means, in effect, is the fact that the cookie is tasty does not pull me back into the deliberation to weight the cookie’s tastiness against my goal to be healthier. Rather it pulls me out of this entire framing, into a value-perspective of simply valuing the cookie’s tastiness. The cookie is TASTY!

As far as how the akratic’s situation relates to the aesthetics of working out, it should follow naturally. Despite fully understanding the imperative to change, to move toward aesthetic self-improvement, I don’t always succeed. Some days the subordinate reasons win out and the value-perspective I take removes me from any such deliberations about the benefits of working out in reaching my aesthetic goals. On other days, the authoritative call Sloterdijk described feels powerful and motivating. This pulling in opposite directions is something I experienced quite often when I first began working out, heavily driven by an aesthetic aspiration, but somewhat distanced from the deeper root-value underpinnings of that aspiration. This is precisely where Rilke’s imperative reappears, now more sharply defined: You must change your life. It is a deep call to action, less intellectualized as part of the deliberations and more this undeniably authoritative call to action. It became not something I merely ought to do but something I must.

It’s tempting to dismiss this interpretation as overly intellectualized or even pretentious—maybe I really do just want to look attractive. But I genuinely feel it is something more. Real, lasting change requires more than vanity; it demands confronting deeper values, and once confronting them, actually changing them.

Conveniently, aesthetics uniquely captures this. It externalizes the ongoing tension between aspiration and akrasia, discipline and desire—making it visible, tangible, real. Sure, my workout routine is partly about physical appearance and mental clarity, but more fundamentally, it’s about continually answering the deeper call for self-transformation. Some days I answer; others I fall short. Yet each day offers a new chance to move closer to the imperative articulated by Sloterdijk, echoed by Callard, and confirmed by my own reflection: You must change your life.

And wow I just sprayed 1,500 words saying what Rilke did in 115:

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

(Rilke, Archaic Torso of Apollo)

It’s always impulse. Nothing more profound than that, though God knows I've tried to dress it up as something loftier. This was well before I routinized my writing on Substack. Seemingly out of nowhere a raw desire to write took hold. As for who put it there, I have no earthly clue.

It happened in strange places — in between sets at the gym, on a walk around the neighborhood, wherever. This habit began to form where I would open my notes app, the moment an idea struck, and begin typing furiously. Onlookers be damned if I looked manic. There was no slowing down because slowing down meant watching the only worthwhile thought I would ever have slip through my hands like the sand in one of those hourglass timers.

Often what I wrote would, when I sobered up, come to resemble a rusted old penny, not worth the effort to polish. And so I had this sort of unspoken rule: it had to be one sitting or nothing at all. A fevered burst of typing, editing on the fly (letting the internal critic scream but never quite listen), thus depriving time of its enervating quality. And then, why not? — blast the thing off to my ig story because, in that second, the idea of a disappearing act seemed kind of poetic, or at least justified by the fact that the stakes felt non-existent. It’s better not to care what people think anyways, right?

Writing like this felt like play — the kind where you're so absorbed you forget to be self-conscious, which is probably what those phenomenologists were really getting at with their flow-state theorizing, except I was just thumb-dancing in my notes app like a teenager with a crush.

The irony is that in times like these, writing freely, I felt least like a writer. Shouldn’t I be bolt-upright in a chair, word document open, Roget’s at the ready? Crank out a crummy first draft. Read it, then give it an intense furrowing of the brow as I ceremoniously crumble and toss it. Spin up a second draft — better, hopefully, nowhere near ready, questioning all the while what it even means to be ready.

But throwing out process entirely would be like yapping into a voice transcriber, pretending to be Midas shitting gold. I only wonder whether something is lost when practice insists on squaring up against play, a match I’ve witnessed enough times to know that play always submits when put in a de-oxygenating rear naked.

What I’m after is some kind of third way — a way to carve out space for play without it devolving into some lazy man’s excuse to dodge the real work. Not just indulgent unstructured wandering for wandering’s sake (though God knows there’s a seductive pull in that), but a deliberate kind of looseness where you let the mind drift just enough to stumble upon something unexpected and sharp. Sharp until you sit down to edit. There’s nothing quite like the agony of editing your own stuff — this brutal, almost solipsistic exercise in self-surveillance where every word is a reflection, and every reflection feels like a judgment. It’s what I imagine every girl in her twenties faces as she applies makeup in one of those mirrors with the magnification cranked up too high, forced to confront every pore, every wrinkle she’s somehow managed not to notice until now, and there’s this twisted satisfaction in “perfecting” what’s already imperfect, knowing full well that the more “perfect” she becomes, the more glaring the flaws she started with seem. This is purely fictitious, of course.

Where does that leave me?

So I’m stuck mediating between two versions of myself — Process Zach, who treats sentence variation with biblical reverence, and Playful Zach, who's basically a crow distracted by shiny objects but somehow stumbles into better sentences. When Process Zach gets too loud (you can tell because he starts having strong opinions about em-dashes), I have to let Playful Zach out for a walk. And yes, I mean actual walks, where I pretend to birdwatch like some retiree with binoculars, though it turns out there's something to that whole noticing-things business. But let Playful Zach run the show too long and suddenly I'm that guy posting stream-of-consciousness drafts to Instagram at 3AM, which is its own kind of problem.

One thing I've learned is that I don't expect to reach some big epiphanic moment where everything clicks, and I suddenly know the exact ratio of play to process, inspiration to perspiration, or whatever. It's more like this ongoing exercise in recalibration, constantly tweaking the dials and listening closely for the frequency of me resonating through my writing. Does it sound too flat? Loose-brained? Does it hum, or does it whine? Sometimes I think I'm getting closer to that sweet spot between structure and chaos, like a radio picking up a clear signal through the static. Other times I'm just a guy staring at his phone, deleting and retyping the same sentence while pretending to notice birds. I need to go for a walk.

Here’s the scenario: you’re a celebrity at a social gathering. A stranger approaches, bearing the warm affect of familiarity. You don’t recognize her at all, but she seems to know you. You talk and she listens, probing you with deep curiosity. Is it sincere? It becomes clear she had brought a map — a representation of you — that to her may as well be the territory. She laughs at your jokes and the conversation is pleasant and then it ends.

The unfurling of her map marked the beginning of the interaction. As she traversed you, she overwrote some things, changing mildly standoff-ish to actually somewhat warm. Better looking in the photos. She formed new opinions too, venturing into uncharted territory — places kept secret from the public eye. You wonder, after all this, how much did the person she conversed with come to resemble you?

I’m no celebrity, and it’s likely neither are you. But we all have maps out there. These projections are often what stand in as t=0 expansion points. Think of them like the seeds from which new relationships sprout, waiting to be unpacked. Maybe I meet a person and the first thing I ask is his profession. Professor of economics, he answers, adjusting his glasses and rolling back stiff shoulders. This is my expansion point. I studied economics in college so I know he’s rational as any human can be, a true homo economicus, or so he believes, and a Keynesian to the bone. He’s an EMH maximalist and this flattens the world to him: everything has a price where supply meets demand.

I used to think about this a lot as an investment banking analyst fresh out of college. I hated my expansion point. I dreaded the “what do you do for work?” I’m an investment banker. Blehhh. I work in investment banking? Mildly better, still unpalatable. I felt hemmed in from the start, pinned to a caricature I would fight hard to blow apart, each and every conversation a parachute run away from this ill-fitting seed: investment banker. It was as if this was my most self-defining feature, and everything else branched from there.

It’s easy to see the bad in this, but there is some good. There are times when I want to attack MMT or vigorously champion the merits of Bitcoin and decry the airy dollar. If we could start on some firm ground, the fact that I studied economics and worked in investment banking, I could skip the part where I demonstrate I know how inflation and currency devaluation work, opting to cash in on my map & jump right ahead to the fruitful part of the conversation. How quickly can we get to mutually agreeable fertile ground?

At the extreme, imagine we all started with blank slates. In this world, I would need to build from simple arithmetic all the way to long-term debt cycles and Bretton Woods and beyond to convince someone to engage in a back & forth on Bitcoin. A world without maps demands too much re-tracing.

In both these extremes — the overdetermined and the blank slate — agency has been stripped. These are illustrative and that's not how it actually plays out. The space between holds more possibility.

Over time I got better at choosing my expansion points. Sometimes it meant letting the investment banking thing sit dormant, unexpanded. Other times it meant leading with it deliberately, knowing it would unlock certain conversations faster. The trick was learning to read the territory before unfurling any particular map. Each expansion point carried its own momentum, its own gravitational pull toward certain topics and away from others. The goal wasn't to hide — it was to optimize for signal over noise. Sometimes this meant making a direct line to settled territory as a waystation to wilderness exploration. Such navigation requires extreme attentiveness, not only to your own territory but to the other’s. You need to find a place to meet, comfortable enough to feel like stable ground, but not so firm that every step forward is predetermined. Shaky ground is where the GPS goes dark — hic sunt dracones — and real exploration, both personal and mutual, begins. Here, the territory writes the map.

I've been trying to make sense of what I'm building here. Each essay is like a node. There's a dating node, a karma node, and, oh, a Conversations with Friends node. Maybe there are lines connecting these nodes but the pattern refuses to make itself clear. Though I guess CWF maps to dating in some way.

But mapping makes it sound too intentional, too planned. What I'm really doing is more like this: I picture myself like a painter, thick brush in hand, dipping into a big bucket of colorful paint and flicking it at a massive white wall in the distance. A few dots make it to the wall, but from afar it looks like — well it looks exactly like a few random dots of colored paint engulfed by whitespace. Like stars scattered across an empty sky. Those dots are my nodes.

One thing the paint-dotted wall captures well is how sparse and unrelated these nodes appear. To a passerby with no clue they all came from my paintbrush, they'd hardly register. To say this more bluntly, my essays are irrelevant... oof.

That’s not exactly right though.

Sure, to the Sally Rooney enthusiast, my essays are mostly irrelevant as a category. Why? I've only written one essay about her novel. The same is true of dating: someone looking for that type of content would wander to many other places before my home here.

The places attracting the avid Sally Rooney reader or the karma explorer have node density. They are places overflowing with words on these things. Each node connects to several others which connect to still more nodes, creating this dense constellation for the curious wanderer. Not my tiny colorful dot on an otherwise naked wall.

I could solve this by creating node density. What I would need to do is walk up super close to the wall with a bucket of green paint and dab one solid dot. Then another green dot right next to it. And another and another until I have all these green dots right in front of me. A perfect cluster, beckoning all green-dot admirers out there to come admire my beautiful wall of green dots.

But wait, why am I painting green dots again?

And so here is the problem with that strategy. It's like being told to pick a lane and drive ahead in a straight line. But if you don't know where you want to go, that's a good way to get you there fast, but not much else. A bunch of green dots, and a question: why the fuck did I make so many green dots?

I like having no destination, even though it can make driving seem pointless at times. But that is what my essays are. They resemble my internal dialogue, and you become a fly on the wall — perched right there on one of my paint dots. Ha! When I reduce you to that size my dots don't look so small anymore do they?

What I don’t want is someone seeking words on Sally Rooney or karma or dating. I don't not want them either. What I want is to stay on nodding terms with these dots as they appear. I'll keep on splashing paint at the wall, letting them decide how they appear. As they proliferate, it will be like looking at the night sky for a constellation, something I was never any good at. Only here there's no good at and they're not supposed to look like anything. The node density that develops will be organic, enigmatic, localizing around one ill-defined thing: the nebulous source of this madness.

There’s this framing I find helpful. Think about walking into a room full of faces, some you know, others unfamiliar to you. It could be a kind of social gathering. A party. Before you entered, the room was a certain way. What I mean is it contained a latent energy. All the people in the room, talking and drinking and laughing, casting sideways glances. And the room itself — dimly lit, perhaps a few pieces of carefully selected artwork adorning the walls. Everything contributed to creating this latent energy. And then you stepped into the room, and you changed it.

What exactly did you change?

This is not a question of charisma, like lighting up the room. That’s too monolithic. This framing is, more abstractly, about your force field, the way you contort the world around you everywhere you go. It’s about what I’m calling your energy.

What is interesting about energy is how little we attend to it. There is a reason for this. It becomes clear when we contrast it with other things we focus more on.

Try to recall the last time you left home without looking in the mirror. It’s the way we see through the eyes of others, looking at ourselves in the mirror, nodding agreement with how we present visually: ok not my best hair day but good enough, I guess.

We have other mirrors too. Therapists are mirrors of the psyche (at least in theory). They reflect our inner worlds so we can see ourselves more clearly (and sometimes painfully).

The problem with energy is there exists no clear mirror. Nothing for you to look into that will cast a reflection for you to see or feel or cognate or whatever the medium would call for, allowing you to process your contortion-making presence.

I want this. I have wanted an energy mirror so much I’ve long tried to create my own. The best I’ve come up with so far is incomplete, but not nothing. I see it as a make-up mirror. It’s microcosmic. It reflects fragments, glimpses of how we contort the world around us, but never the full picture.

If you pay enough attention to conversations — specifically one-on-ones — you can view something of your energy projection through this make-up mirror. You have to notice across conversations. Do you open people up emotionally? Are you that person who everyone entrusts with their secrets? Please don’t tell this to anyone else, you’re the only person I’ve told. Do people always seem to approach you for some reason or other, as if you invite conversation merely by being there?

Sitting in an Uber the other night, with my youngest brother, we began talking about something. It was nothing, fodder conversation. The driver chimed in, uninvited. She was affable, effervescent though a bit goofy, but altogether someone you don’t mind letting in. We started talking — my brother and I — about a friend. Specifically about the difference in the way this friend comes off, like a book, from his cover vs. the pages contained within.

Once again the driver commented, so I turned the question on her: how do you think you affect people? I was curious about what she would say vs. my read of her. An extended pause, and then: no one’s ever asked me that before. I smiled, meeting her eyes briefly in the mirror, leaving room for the silence to settle.

On the way to Casa de Campo I stopped into the EWR bookstore for beach reading, a category I’ve stretched to include quite literally everything under the sun.

On this occasion Conversations with Friends called out to me from the shelf. I like Sally Rooney — at least my sole exposure to her via Intermezzo. I found her latest book to be engrossing in the way listening to your friends’ problems can be, but sans the personal & psychological costs (i.e. the need to respond/express sympathy). This is convenient because offering actual emotional support can be burdensome and often is the opposite of rewarding. Beyond requiring your energy, it strips you naked and exposes you to just how little of your own advice you actually follow.

So yes, that’s what Intermezzo is: it is all the intrigue of psychoanalyzing your friends without the costs. The book is written in such a way that you as the reader are made to feel always like the stable friend lending an ear as the Houellebecqian protagonists, Peter and Ivan, tread water trying to navigate a cruel world. They are marooned in their own existential inertia, unable to act decisively or to confront their own dissatisfaction with the world around them. There’s a grim familiarity to their malaise, a sense that no matter how pitiable they might be, they’re too resigned to seek anything better. I don’t think it’s quite schadenfreude but it’s not far off.

Having read Intermezzo, I opened CWF with certain expectations, mostly about the characters, which turned out to be totally wrong. I found the characters in CWF to be wholly unsympathetic. Frances in particular I would liken to the friend who you constantly waver between wishing you could sympathize with but still can’t and knowing that by doing so you are inadvertently fueling her crippling pathologies. By giving her an ear you are validating what she’s doing as, in some sense, reasonable when it is better seen as uncompromising narcissism.

What is she doing exactly?

Well for starters I should state plainly that Frances knowingly enters into an adulterous relationship with a married man. That’s a tough look. And though it is in theory possible to make all sorts of arguments about the utility of breaking up a loveless marriage, or even that Frances demonstrably helped reinvigorate the marriage, just because we can doesn’t mean we should, and I remain thoroughly unconvinced of ultra new agey luxury beliefs on these types of things. Turns out these arguments would be counterproductive anyhow; more to the point, to absolve her of blame would actually be at odds with what she wants.

And what does she want exactly?

Understanding what Frances wants requires looking beyond what she does in her spare time — that is fuck a married man — to what she says and what she thinks, much like what I do when larping therapist with friends. This is the point at which I paused writing in the hopes of coining a portmanteau for therapist + friend but quickly realized the most phonetically harmonious option was, unfortunately, the one best left unsaid.1

When she’s not busy sleeping with a married man, Frances spends the rest of her time doing God’s work, by which I mean scrutinizing the other characters from a place of detached moral superiority and blinding lack of self awareness. Indeed years later, she still sees her now “friend” and ex-lover Bobbi as some cruel & wicked person for breaking up with her way back when, failing to grasp how blaming others for her own emotional vapidity is the reason why she can’t sustain a meaningful relationship. The worst part is, her reason for wanting a truly deep and intimate relationship is at odds with sustaining one: she wants — no needs — one in order to anchor her value as a person in the world.

Fortunately for us, her narcissism knows no bounds, and she decides that if her place in the world cannot be bolstered by love, she can resort to war. Whereas creation requires contribution, destruction does not. So that’s exactly what she resorts to. She engages in Sherman-like total war.

How does this help her establish her place in the world?

Frances isn’t just destructive; she’s a wannabe victim, a Girardian scapegoat whose actions are governed by a pernicious mimetic desire. For Frances, it’s never enough to simply want something — her desires are defined by what others covet. Bobbi desires Melissa, Melissa desires Nick (or at least what he represents in her own warped telos)2, so Frances’s mission becomes clear: she must make Nick desire her. It’s not even about Nick, or Melissa, or Bobbi for that matter; it’s about Frances climbing to the top of this doomed hierarchy of longing, where the prize is never love or connection but the hollow triumph of being desired. By making herself the center of this triangle of desire, she transforms herself into the axis of destruction, her envy the centrifugal force spinning everyone out of balance.

This works for a while. The problem is this is not a stable equilibrium. It is a web of relationships held together by movement — by chaos — instead of by structure — by order. Since Frances lacks the integration required to sustain a deep relationship, at all times she must push for the escalation of desire which is inherently fleeting. So long as she can keep things unstable in a three-body-problem type of way, she has a place in the world, each escalation of desire fueling the next.

But as is always the case, things eventually become too entropic for even dynamic stability to be an option. In the apotheosis of instability, Frances seizes her final role — arguably what she has wanted all along: to be the ultimate victim, the scapegoat. For the first time, her place in the world is fixed, defined not by her own chaotic longings but by the unanimous agreement of others. She is no longer a fractured, ambiguous figure but a singular, objective fact: the source of all the turmoil. Her expulsion promises resolution for everyone else, and this external clarity is precisely what Frances craves.

She absorbs the blame, centers herself in their outrage, and transforms their condemnation into a validation of her identity. Through this martyrdom, she convinces herself of her moral superiority while evading any need for internal reconciliation. Victimhood becomes her ultimate currency, the only thing she has left to offer. Like Narcissus gazing into the pool, she admires the beauty of her sacrifice —not for what it redeems but for how it confirms her tragic role. Everything around her fades into the background as she clings to this distorted self-image, fixed at last by the collective agreement of her guilt.

Yet this isn’t an ending for Frances — it’s the next turn in a relentless cycle. Her martyrdom absolves her of introspection for now, but the chaos she thrives on will inevitably rise again. As always, Frances will return to the center of it, spinning everyone around her into disorder until the cycle resets once more.

“Don’t look now, but on your left” is all my brother says. I don’t.

I know this game and we’ve spent enough time together where non-verbal usually suffices; verbal communication contains layer upon layer of shared meaning. I know it’s a girl.

The music, blaring and bad, had me wanting to leave an otherwise cool bar. But now I had reason to stay. And when I do finally turn my head, I find, yes, exactly what I had expected: a girl, mid-twenties by the look, sheeny blonde hair & a New York complexion. Cute.

I turn back to my brother. It’s just us two, out for a drink after work, some weirdly-named cocktail-concoction (concocktailtion?) for me, martini for my brother.

He informs me, hushed tone, that the girl next to me had migrated from her table of friends to take the seat next to me at the bar. Right on cue I feel a sudden brushing against my left leg. I turn, knowingly, meeting her eyes and an “oh sorry, my bad,” as she finishes situating her coat on the hook under the bar. My intuition tells me she is neither sorry nor is it her bad.

I don’t quite remember what she opens with, or what I open with, but we begin talking. Conversation is good, though I feel mildly bad as my brother sits there probably listening in but hopefully not.

Not even five minutes into the conversation, mostly around my recent move to New York, she asks me “who’d you vote for?”

Here we go.

On principle, I refuse to talk about politics with friends let alone complete strangers. And she approached me! Bold.

“I abstained,” I tell her.

I know exactly what she wants to hear. I’ve read enough nyc girly substacks. They’re great writers, ok! Why do I need to explain myself..

I didn’t expect my response to get me off the hook, but a man can hope. Please, please don’t do this. Silent pleas don’t tend to work. I take a stultifying sip.

She takes the floor, and a whole lot more. She lectures me on civic duty and how I should vote and whatever else the script calls for. Telling me why it was bad that I didn’t and how I’m part of the problem, all in a tone of self-righteousness, undeniably awesome in its zeal. I can’t shake the sense of feeling like a punching bag for something that is unlikely to be solved via punching. All I want to do is drink my concocktailtion in peace.

Oh and she saved the best for last. Her final question, the cherry on top, her ne plus ultra: “do you like women’s bodies?”

FATALITY

I treat this with the candor warranted a real question. Why? Because maybe, just maybe, I can resort to Hanlon’s Razor here, or plead the fifth if only I had the empty bottle to prove it. “Of course I like women’s bodies.”

The conversation wraps up quickly after that; her work here is done. She doesn’t get what she came for, and I didn’t come in the first place. But that’s how these things tend to go when one person wants emotion and the other just wants to sip his cocktail in peace. I think she asked for my number?

This encounter left my mind as quickly as it entered, and I hadn’t given it much thought until I read the intro to this essay. She’s right: there is nobody left to date. What’s worse, there might even be no one left to not date! Is it too much to ask to drink a concocktail with my brother and marinate in shitty hip-hop mashes after a long workweek?

I sometimes imagine it as a single raindrop. If you pay close enough attention, I mean really focus hard, you can locate a single droplet several feet above your head and track its descent until it splatters onto the ground and disappears in a sfumato of colors and textures. It’s so brief, and there are so many other raindrops, that I would hardly consider it remarkable or even worth remarking on.

This is how I feel about brief encounters. The girl you pass by, walking her bernedoodle in the early morning hours, the sun still reticent. The cheerful bagger at the grocery store who seems to exhibit a strange pride in slowing you down. The Uber drivers, often enough trading time for these moments of connection as much as for money.

It was just shy of noon when I stepped into the dusty grey Tahoe. The driver was nondescript, a man in the most generic sense. Although how much can one really discern from the back of a head and the way it imposes itself on the neck and shoulders.

“Nice houses around here,” he remarked. It wasn’t so much an aesthetic observation as an in.

“Yep,” I said, “it’s a nice neighborhood.”

“You know it wasn’t always like this. I’ve been here since ‘96.” He turned his head back, making an appraisal, only secondary to his hope of being appraised. He looked to be in his forties, above average height, athletically-built, with an imperviousness to signs of middle-age strife. Was it because he had learned to cope or did he merely avoid?

“Huh,” I said giving him room to unravel.

“Well I, I was thinking about moving to this area, when I first moved out here, with my ex-wife.” He turned to face me again, flinty-eyed. “Isn’t that funny, my ex-wife?” he chuckled. “I’m just tryna make you laugh.”

I let out a laugh, for the plot.

“I didn’t like the way the houses looked,” he continued, “they were old.”

“So it was an aesthetic thing,” I said, following. “Where’d you end up living?”

“Oh up north, Desert Ridge area,” he said. “Of course, turns out it’s really nice here now. But at the time.”

He paused, and I was content to listen to the quiet hum of the air conditioning.

He broke in again, “I was with her for 24 years.”

I didn’t have much of a choice at this point. “How old are you?”

“61, if you can believe it.” And he sure as hell wanted me to believe it.

“Well you must keep yourself in good shape,” I responded.

“Yeah, best I ever felt,” he said. “You see, women, they just continue to go downhill. They get used up. Let me tell you something. Mind if I speak openly?”

I was caught between nagging curiosity and mild revulsion to what I would enable by saying yes, but I relented.

“I like women a lot, but I’m over all the bullshit,” he began. “All that, you know what I mean. I like to date younger, the physical stuff. That’s what I’m attracted to. But man, I just can’t deal with it anymore, you know?”

“I get it.” I didn’t get it. “But don’t you want to meet someone?” I asked.

“Yes, sure I do. But I’m happy to die alone. I don’t need anyone. And I hire a hooker now and then, does the job. Sex for me is a 4 now, used to be like an 8. Importance in my life.”

He didn’t need prodding at this point. “You know, Zach, I just. I have money and I, I do this to get out of the house. But here’s the thing. What I’ll do, and I know what’s gonna happen before I do it. The conversation will get to the point where she’ll ask what I do. And I say I’m an Uber driver. And you should see the expressions on their faces. They transform.”

“Right,” I said, acknowledging that I was still listening. “I know you said you could die alone, and your life is good, but don’t you think. Let’s say you found the perfect woman. Don’t you think that would be better, all else equal?”

“Yes, of course I do. I haven’t found her. But I know what I want and I’m not getting that. I need her to adore me. She needs to adore me.”

We were nearing my drop off point, but he wasn’t finished.

“It took my relationships to figure that out. My marriage. I cheated on my wife. She knew what she was getting into. I was a promoter, she knew the gig. I was constantly around girls. She knew. It was just sex though, nothing more. She asked me how I would feel if she fucked another guy, and I told her it wasn’t the same. It’s different with women.”

I stared out the window.

We were pulling up to my apartment. “Over near the circle, is that good?”

“Circle’s good,” I said as I reached for the door, amused and relieved.

Stepping out, I heard him call back, “Hey, Zach. Check this out.” He brought his fists above his shoulders and began moving his arms back and forth like a monkey, flexing. “Look at that, pretty good, right?”

There was nothing to see, but I didn’t say so. “Nice,” I responded, meeting his wild-eyed expression.

“I’m just tryna make you laugh,” he chortled.

I would take another Uber later that day, luckily with a different driver. The new driver took me through his life story, the amputation his son suffered from an electrical accident and the way he sends money to him in Guatemala, to support him and his two young daughters. It’s difficult to find work with one arm, but he’s trying. He also told me I should take more videos with the people I love, with my parents. Pictures are good, but it’s not the same. He was still lamenting the death of his mother.

As I stepped out of the second Uber, I thought about both these brief encounters. Like the single drops of rain, they had already vanished. Just as soon as they had come into my life, they had left.

To me, both of these people were drivers, taking me from one place to another. They told me about their lives, and I listened to them like you read a story. So so different did their lives unfold in all that time before. And to me, all of it amounted to the same. It didn’t much matter where they had been before they picked me up and dropped me off. And yet somehow, still, it was remarkable.

Now that you answered, I must confess to a rigged poll. You were ostensibly given three options but there were really only two.

I thought at least one person, some maverick edge-case vice signaler, would choose happy 😊. But no. No not even a single person!

The obvious question is why? Why did not a single person respond that she would be happy if I bought her 10k instagram followers?

The answer is hidden in option three, Indifferent 😐.

The vast majority of you chose this option. The first thing to know is this group is actually two groups disguised as one. Within the group, there is subset of people who are actually indifferent — the way they voted matches their true preferences. However, a significant portion of this group are hiding their underlying preferences. Their revealed preferences differ drastically from how they vote in public, or in this case a public simulated by your perception of me seeing and judging the way you answer. The fact that I get to watch you at the ballot box changes the way you cast your vote.

A preliminary question to elucidate this further is why haven’t you already bought 10k followers?

If you have NOT bought 10k followers already, you either:

1) do not want 10k bought followers under any circumstances

2) would, ceteris paribus, prefer 10k bought followers to not having 10k bought followers but deem it not worth the price in a general sense

I would argue that nearly all those who fall into category (1) would vote for the annoyed 😠 option. I find it difficult to believe that if you specifically do not want 10k bought followers, me buying them for you would bring your emotional valence up to indifference. Why? For starters, you probably don’t even know the cost of 10k followers. And lacking this knowledge, you cannot consider the financial aspect deeply enough for it to be a reliable basis for indifference. Even if you did, I would be skeptical of anyone who tries to tell me with a straight face that he actually weighed the economic transfer against his negative emotional sentiment toward having 10k bought followers and came out confident that the domain-specific value transfer cleared his hurdle.

So that leaves category (2), a category that suggests if you voted indifferent you actually have a preference for 10k bought followers assuming you didn't purchase them yourself. Does this imply it's just about the money?

I don't think so. Perhaps part of it is indeed about the money, in which case one would have to assume you know the price of 10k followers and decide against it just like you do the purchase of a nice watch or something else you desire. This could be true for some of you, but it cannot possibly account for all indifferent responders. Why? Because people do in fact buy followers!

This mismatch between voted preferences and those actually revealed suggests a hidden value. There’s something being concealed by people who voted indifferent. Something they are implicitly paying for even if they don’t recognize it. Specifically, they are paying for the ability to distance themselves from the decision to purchase followers. They wish to relinquish agency in an action they find shameful despite a result they would appreciate. They want the bought followers but without admission to having bought them. Should this be the case, these people would actually be happy 😊 if they woke up one day with 10k bought followers.

Looking at this from the lens of revealed preferences, I would rephrase the groups to represent the differences in your private and public preferences. Your public preferences are how you vote in public in an open ballot where someone can see how you voted whereas your private preferences are how you vote anonymously, in a blind ballot where no one is watching.
Group 1: Happy 😊

• Public: Indifferent 😐

• Private: Happy 😊

Group 2: Annoyed 😠

• Public: Annoyed 😠

• Private: Annoyed 😠

Group 3: Indifferent 😐

• Public: Indifferent 😐

• Private: Indifferent 😐

As you can see, there’s no group of people in this scenario who publicly vote Happy 😊. I ran a public poll, and so it comes as little surprise to see no votes for Happy 😊. The people who would be happy if I bought them 10k instagram followers all voted Indifferent 😐.

If you voted Indifferent 😐, ask yourself: would you still vote indifferent if no one was able to see how you voted?

Before I wrap up, there’s a further paradox worth mentioning. It doesn’t take much discernment to tell who has fake followers on instagram. What this tells me is that there is a group of people who do not want me to know that they would be happy if I bought them 10k followers but they would not care if I found out by looking at their instagrams. This is not just a matter of framing; it’s about the power of commission and the relinquishment of agency — where the act of choosing or not choosing and being seen doing either speaks volumes about our hidden desires and the lengths we’ll go to keep them concealed. And in terms of desires, social status may be the one that beckons loudest for concealment.

I don’t know whether it’s a cultural thing or something more deeply biologically rooted, but we tend to characterize periods of our lives by circumstances or places or people. External things. It was back when I was working in investment banking or when I was dating P. We used to shoot the shit more often when I was living in NYC.

Where you live and who you’re dating do, after all, dictate many things. You localize your life around what you have access to in your city and even more parochially in your neighborhood — the food you eat, the culture you drink, the trails you run. In the same way, any decent boyfriend shifts his center of gravity at least some distance away from himself. How much these things impact one’s life and how steadfastly one holds on vary by person, but attachments seem a suitable eponym for such things.

I had this thought recently, precipitated by a feeling, that perhaps an alternative exists.

A few weeks ago I was hit by this sudden onset of what I can only describe as random uncontainable energy. I want to create something, and I want whatever it is to be so ambitious that I’m scared to tell anyone about it for fear of never being able to see it to completion. If that sounds crazy it’s because it is. Setting out to do something, the scope of which you can’t even fully wrap your own head around, is daunting if not downright self-defeating. Who wants to sign up for a marathon to only run 1 mile? But I feel as though anything less amounts to using a firehose to pour myself a glass of water — too little space for such vastness.

Redoubling my efforts in keeping my Substack, writing more words and more often would satisfy this urge, or so I initially thought. That has been proven demonstrably wrong as what I have come to experience is something more akin to l’appétit vient en mangeant. I’ve been nibbling and nibbling and instead of reaching some endpoint or even checkpoint of satiety, my appetite won’t stop growing. It’s even painful in its restlessness, in that somewhat sharply satisfying way extended fasting can be. The appetite analogy makes this seem counterintuitive, but I believe that’s more a result of how we view things versus some inveterate law of the universe; we accept our current perspective as if nothing precedes it.

Instead of accepting this framing, I’ve come to see the nibbler’s appetite as much more like a child’s creativity. While distance has cast on the child’s mind the bleary dullness of a dream, I think that is perhaps what has been reawakened in me. Instead of a narrowing of my aperture — the world shrinking smaller as I grow from kid to adult — an expansion is taking hold, and at an accelerating pace.

I’ve come to see it as undoubtedly the preeminent force in my life right now, this random uncontainable energy. Where I live and who I spend time with matter, but their hold on me has receded into the background. That’s not to say I won’t meet any number of impactful people, developing lifelong friendships and pursuing passion projects all the while. It’s more just that what I end up creating, whatever it may be, will be a product of this period. And when I look back at this time in my life from some future vantage point, here I will have left ineradicable evidence of the centrality of this state of being rather than something I fancifully conjure up a posteriori out of intellectual intrigue. This vitality is here now, and I feel it enough to acknowledge it.

I say this all as I write a short essay, aware that hitting publish will only make me hungrier. The truth is, I feel some need for externalizing continuity, and that solitary output fails in this regard. In some sense, I remain beholden to that arbitrary force always blurring the line between artist and performer, incessantly asking whether one is creating or being created. I believe, as I’ve spent time thinking and feeling it, that I create mostly out of some inexplicable compulsion, of which very little has anything to do with audience reception (not that I have much of an audience to speak of!). Thus far, the deepest I’ve tunneled into the raison d'être leads me to this visual of a glowing white orb within me, its source of energy unknown, casting blinding light in all directions, always seeking a way out. This feels like the punchline to one of those dumbly clever riddles: what grows larger as it escapes its confines? Perhaps, like all riddles, its answer too will be head-clutchingly obvious only after. Yet somehow I don’t expect there to ever be an after.

So often we’re occupied with searching for answers, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the question. Questions open doors, answers close them. It’s something that comes more naturally to me than the average person, and not in some I’m-better-than-you type of way. It’s just how I’m wired; I don’t like talking about myself because I am the sort of person for whom solitude is a necessity, and in those long stretches of time alone, I do too much probing of myself. So when I get the opportunity to probe others, I take it and selfishly hold onto it. How do they think about things differently than I do? What do they like to read and watch? Do they believe freedom requires lack of attachment? Do they think forgiveness should be freely given and not earned? Would they agree that avocado is overrated as a result of avocado toast qua mimetic social carrier virus?

Questions are portals. They allow us to hop into new dimensions, traversing time and space at the speed of speech. But as you know if you’ve seen any time travel movies, weaving together a plot without holes is finicky. That’s part of the art of the good question: you need to guide your interlocutor across dimensions with you, being careful enough to ensure smooth leaps of logic, all the while avoiding whiplash and grandfather paradoxes. I may really want to ask someone about her view on white lies, but launching into this line of inquiry from a conversation about her overly dirty martini would hardly be considered good practice (unless of course she told the bartender it was delicious!)

I’ve also come to believe questions carry charisma, although this often goes unrecognized. If charisma is a phenomenon predicated on the impact someone has on you, it only makes sense that the most profound of effects is the one most directly tied to you (i.e., a question that makes you discover something new about yourself). And it turns out you can actually see and even feel this when you ask the right question. How it manifests in the other person is this sort of richly expansive searching look and expression, beginning in the person’s eyes and cascading into the body via an integrated body language — more a reflection of what’s going on in the mind than the typical dualistic modus operandi, and then an unleashing of words interwoven with this palpable sense of awe emanating from a shared journey into parts heretofore unknown.

It’s not always easy to guide conversations to these lush gardens, but it’s always possible. People talk about boring people, but for the most part I don’t think they exist. Everyone has something interesting to say; we just don’t always know how to navigate their mind mazes. It’s precarious! One wrong turn can lead you crashing headlong into a wall that not only precipitates a flat answer but also orients your conversation partner in a way ill-disposed to fruitful wandering — a dead end.

There are no cheap tricks to this, at least as I see it now. The thing that works for me is the maximally effortful thing: you need to be genuinely curious in the person you’re talking with, and that requires strapping a telephoto lens to your attention. When you do cultivate this curiosity, the rest falls into place. You yearn to explore their minds, often happening upon several new questions you’re dying to ask but must impatiently delay in the name of social grace as you wait for them to finish their answer. This can be such a drastic change from what a lot of us are used to that, once tapped into, you may even notice your own mild displeasure when your interlocutor co-opts the conversation by asking you questions when all you want to do is ask more about them (something I wrote about here).

Reflecting on this has me wondering why more people aren’t as interested in asking questions. Talking about yourself is boring; you have many an idle moment for it. I suppose someone needs to do the talking about themselves in order for me to ask the questions. I wonder, does this create an intractable problem? I don’t think it has to. It’s only when someone asks the lazy questions, the ones that have us retracing steps in our mind mazes already deeply imprinted, that my eyes glaze over as I lamentably launch into monologue. When someone asks me a good question, it’s as if I’m borrowing it to query my own mind maze, as I also get to play listener, electrified with anticipation about how I’m going to answer it and surprised at how much more there is to discover about myself. That’s really the power of conversation. At its best, it is a novelty-generating machine, harnessing as its energy all the latent potential contained within, only to be unlocked by the right questions.

This strange thing started happening when I began writing. Some people — close friends — read my writing and told me, on separate occasions, you don’t sound like that.

I don’t sound like what? What do you mean, I wrote it.

To me, there’s just me and whatever comes out. I say things and text things and type things. I do these at different times and places, true, but they’re all me. I don’t want to discount their perspectives; my friends see things I don’t, so I try to listen. This is something I find endless amusement in musing about, especially when it comes to relationships. Somehow, we confidently say we don’t see our friends’ girlfriends as right for them, but when one of our friends sees the same with us, we invoke our own privileged access to nullify their opinions. They can’t possibly see what I see. It’s some type of asymmetry we grant ourselves; is it always hypocrisy?

I hope not. Hypocrisy is an allergy of mine. I will be the first to sniff it out in others. And yet I can recognize, in poisonously brief and palatable doses of humiliating self-honesty, how much I let myself get away with. I try to minimize it, but I’m too weak to fork over all my hypocrisy chips. I eat meat and know about animal cruelty. I tell white lies to make people feel better, as if it’s my decision to make, even though I don’t want others to dictate my own tolerance for truth.

The truth is, we’re all a bunch of hypocrites. The problem isn’t that we do these things. That we act differently at different times. The problem is that we expect consistency, as if when we were born into the world some voice from above commanded we be the same person at all times — act the same, talk the same, think the same. And I think that’s a load of nonsense.

The things I write, at first, are not the things you read. I splatter words on a blank page. They come from me. I keep going and sometimes go back and change things here and there and then continue on. I write and rewrite and at times go crazy and delete it all out of some passion of embarrassment, thankful no one will ever know about it. Out of this frenzied jumble, a shape takes form as words contort around it, and eventually an idea emerges, one as yet unfamiliar to me. These ideas are as new to me as they are to you, even though they, too, come from me.

When I say they come from me, the problem isn’t the they — the ideas and the words, and the way I present them, whether eloquently or punctuated with breathy ums and uhs. The problem is the me. In writing, I feel a liberation, a freedom to not be confined by the things ordinarily nudging the way I talk. How many times do we respond to someone asking how we’re doing with good as if that bears any relation to how we’re actually doing?

When I write, it’s just me. And when it’s just me and unlimited time and space, I get to explore all these unknown paths, finding corners in my mind more discrete but no less a part of me than the autonomic responses I jettison off in casual conversation. Our patterns of speech dig these grooves, and they grow deeper as they become more comfortable. I don’t want to be confined to walking those same paved paths over and over again, always prioritizing smooth social interactions. At times I do, but I’m not always doing good and I don’t always agree with what you’re saying. Writing is a way out; it is also a way in, into ever deeper caverns of a me that, although they may seem contradictory to others, are every bit a part of a boundless whole. I never agreed to be one person. As Walt Whitman said I am large, I contain multitudes.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

— Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass)

As far as I could tell, I had been sound asleep. Last night. But can you ever really know? It’s like that DFW short story, about the wife who can’t sleep and blames the husband’s snoring and the husband who suggests the wife was sleeping and so in actuality heard snoring in her dreams, and so they eventually visit a sleep lab to get this sorted out, find out who was the sleeping one, and, well, I won’t ruin the rest for you.

All I remember, and this I recall firmly, was the sudden intrusion of a thought. It stabbed me like a pinprick, sharp as it was thin. These types of inspirations are fleeting; you either feed them with action or they evaporate like a light mist, leaving little trace. I told myself I would write about it tomorrow; I wouldn’t forget it! No. No way. I’ll remember.

I didn’t.

I woke up the next day and went out for my usual sunrise walk, bright smile like an idiot unaware. Unaware of what I was unaware of: that an exciting thought had even woken me up last night.

Later that day, the moment came back to me in a sort of tip-of-your-tongue type way, itching in its insatiability. Part of me thinks I would have been better off forgetting. At least then, like a tree falling in the forest, no one would’ve been around to hear it make a sound. But life is a tease, and I’m trying to learn to live with that.

That is why I’m here. I was, and maybe still am, hoping to unearth the thought by writing about it, or around it. No luck yet.

Instead, it seems to be leading me astray. Writing tends to, let’s say, make me wander. Down passages, through doors, into rose gardens. In particular, not getting out of bed and writing my thought down that night, then, only later, scribbling madly in an effort to remember it made me realize something. I don’t want to remember. What I actually want is to never forget.

Those are not the same thing. They can feel the same, far out in the future, when the mechanism which bore the thought disappears into the background, leaving just some thought, and you, unaware of how it got there.

But remembering is fickle. It is, emotionally and spiritually speaking, empty, sapped of vigor, and dependent on some unknown future action like scouring your memory as you chase an invisible thread. And even if you do find something, you likely chased some phantom thread through memory, the unreliable narrator in your story. It is what I am doing now, remembering, writing about a thought that once contained so much passion and excitement, even if only momentarily, only to arrive here, enervated like a wilted plant ready to deform or blow over at the slightest gust of wind.

Never forgetting is making a mark. It is doing something the moment inspiration strikes, gushing with that restless, fidgety passion that either needs to be killed or unleashed. It is the difference between engraving something into your amygdala and etch-a-sketching a faded transience onto your forebrain.

When inspiration strikes, you need to just go for it. Get your tired ass out of bed and write about that thought. Call the friend you haven’t spoken with in a while for no good reason, even if it feels weird. Go say hi to the girl who catches your attention with that undeniable aura about her. Doing these things instead of thinking about doing them at some future time substantiates them into a solid form. A draft, a conversation, a phone number. Once you’ve substantiated them, you no longer have to remember. If it’s enduring, you will continue with it. If not, well, it’s probably forgettable anyways, but you wouldn’t have known that if you hadn’t tried.

Do things you never forget so you never have to remember. You are an evolving experience aggregator, not a contained counterfactual conjurer.

These are the best trades you can make. Trading omission for commission, passivity for agency, future for present.

I want to trade remembering for never forgetting, and in a weird way this is the answer to the question I posed upfront, about whether you can ever really know. Living a life centered on remembering is sleeping, with the hope that somehow you’ll wake up tomorrow, acted upon by an outside force like some fairy sprinkling dust on your eyes. Instead, I want to be awake — truly awake — engaging with life in each intensely present moment with all its jagged passions and mercurial gyrations, fully conscious and alive, never merely sleepwalking through it and only waking up later to search an old dusty attic haunted by the indefatigable ghosts of what-ifs and should'ves.

Short Stuff

bookbear express

looking for rejection

Cecily Brown, Rainy Day Women, 2007 dear bear, i recently graduated college and am faced with soul-crushing anxiety about jobs and career that i've been trying to keep at bay for the past few years. i'm infinitely lucky that i've found what i love to do (and am quite good at, i think?) but that just leaves me with anxiety about how to do the best i can i…

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2 years ago · 121 likes · 15 comments · Ava

Knowingless

how to be respected as a teen girl

i think more women tend to have insecurity about their gender than men as a girl, like a young girl, maybe you get the impression that boys are cool in a way girls aren't. people praise and laugh at b…

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2 years ago · 301 likes · 195 comments · Aella

Ask Polly

How to Be a True Romantic

The Moonstone Effect (1959) by Dorothea Tanning Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the balance between daring to believe that you deserve joy (a radical belief, when you’ve settled for less for so long) and focusing on joy so much that it becomes just another form of overachieving that distracts you from the mundane satisfactions of daily life. This m…

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2 years ago · 261 likes · 21 comments · Heather Havrilesky

starting from nix

obsessive

The most enjoyable part of working in venture capital is constantly meeting smart and obsessive people. This isn’t limited to venture as an industry, but because startups are so arduous and, by definition, hack on the edge of what’s possible — there tends to be a high concentration or density of obsessive pe…

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2 years ago · 87 likes · 8 comments · Nix 🕊

Long Stuff

Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery by Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson

It’s almost scary to witness my friends jump out of the page as I read these personality profiles. Their good traits, the things I love them for, and their bad. I think reading this has already given me more empathy. I understand the things people in my life need, even if I don’t need them myself.

He is one of 19 people to have won all four of the major American entertainment awards: Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony (EGOT). That was enough to convince me to pick up this biography. This is one of those escapist biographies where you’ll find yourself engrossed in a story only to pick your head up every so often and realize it’s not fiction.

I don’t even think I can preface this except to say just read it. Love, family, romance, relationships, friendships. There’s something deeply moving and universal in every page.

My bedtime read. You will feel at home and relaxed, and you will ponderously drift into a sleep full of soulful meditations on life. It’s beautiful.

Sonic Stuff

Visual Stuff

I started Such Stuff a year ago as a playground for my thoughts. Now seemed a fitting time to share some things I’ve learned from swinging on the monkey bars and sometimes falling off. It’s my playground which means I make the rules, starting with Rule 0.

Rule 0: Make your own playground, and play!

Rule 1: You’ve made it too far not to have made it this far. We treat imposter syndrome with the impersonal distancing of an ugly yearbook picture rather than the warm embrace deserved by one of the only sure signs of becoming.

Rule 2: Ideas just fall out the sky you know. No, you absolutely should not under any circumstances save that idea because you think it’s the best one you’ll ever have and you want to wait til you have more experience with the craft. Write it, publish it, be embarrassed by it, and move the fuck on.

Rule 3: Shitting means your digestive system’s working properly. You probably didn’t do your original idea justice with whatever rubbish you excreted. But hey, you’re never going to stop eating, and what’s left after you publish those shitty first drafts are all the nutrients you’ve absorbed. Ideas are cheap; experience is priceless.

Rule 4: If you ask someone how they get their ideas and they respond prescriptively, you will know they too come up with bad ideas.

Rule 5: You’re the kid in the sandbox. Sometime between when we were kids at recess and when we become adults, we decide it’s cool to stand on the side and point. Kids have names for the ones who don’t play: LOSERS. Kids are mean; losers deserve our sympathy.

Rule 6: If you were famous, you would take advantage of the access. You’re not famous, so why the hell not take advantage of that. If you’ve been writing about tech and have a desire to write about the deeply-moving film that made you tear up, do it. Fiction, write it! You don’t risk losing the audience you don’t have.

Rule 7: Writing is a state of being, at times seemingly impossible to conjure up, other times an undeniable possession. Learn to do the mechanical thing in both.

• Sometimes my best writing comes after writing and deleting and writing and eviscerating scrap for 30mins straight.

• On many occasions, halfway up a dumbbell curl, an idea strikes me from above like someone reached into my head and planted it there. Finish the curl, take out your phone, and type like mad. I take notes in Obsidian. I text myself things. I Sublime. It doesn’t matter.

Rule 8: It’s ready when you believe it’s ready. You can change how ready it is; you can also change your beliefs around what ready is.

Rule 9: No one should wear a fedora, but everyone should try one on. It seems so commonplace to try out new styles in your wardrobe, and yet we’re scared to take that approach in writing. What would it feel like for you to emulate the prolix, belletristic style of DFW? Or the succinct minimalism of Hemingway? If only to look in the mirror and say I don’t think this suits me but I kinda think a hat of some sort — maybe a trucker cap — could look good.

Rule 10: What if you were a reader? Before you hit publish, send a draft to yourself in a format where you have no ability to edit. Read aloud. This feels like cheating in the best way possible.

Rule 11: Try hard to be consistent; try harder not to be hard on yourself when you inevitably are not.

Rule 12: Sharing half-drafts is like asking others to invade your personal space. You’re being lazy or self-conscious, welcome to the club! But sharing incomplete drafts won’t help. The times I’ve done this I’ve felt either (1) unsure of how to interpret the feedback and more stuck than I had previously been or (2) less motivated to continue due to a perceived ceding of authorial ownership.

I feel like a kid again! And of course, kids don’t like to follow rules.