I write about Buteyko, breathwork, internal alchemy, and other stuff.
Joined December 2019
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The internet-influencer complex did help a lot of talented people to find their way into their respective industry but it also created another layer of competition to participate in. Not only you have to showcase expertise, now you need to capture an audience AND compete with marketing agencies, "baddies+hobby", amateur influencers turned pro, and navigate this new terrain alongside the hyperpolitical vultures that have infiltrated your field and made it highly hostile to differing (political or not) opinions.
Developing and maintaining this type of zettelkasten quickly shows you how sloppy your thinking is without writing BUT also how randomly inspired it can be. Better to have both, however.
What do you mean "I don't know what to read, any recs?" You don't have a library of unfinished manuscripts and dozens of TBR indexes???
If a crazy guy kept showing up, yelling that an arrow would strike and kill you one day, you'd likely ignore him cause he's just crazy! But if one day you saw the same crazy guy buying wood and bow string, what would you do then?
>cheap film camera
>lamy safari/pilot metro fountainpen
>blue blocker glasses
>midori/hobonichi notebooks
>subscription for a mag/audiobooks
>used leather jacket
>le creuset or hasami coffee cup
>japanese steel kitchen knife
>chef press
If you're lucky or hunt deals you can get all of them for $250.
a desire for a quiet life is both normal and unprecedented:
normal because historically a "quiet life" was all you could hope for since the alternative was war, famine, disease.
unprecedented because it's the first time in history that you have the opportunity to choose the quiet life.
that said, the quiet life *today* is proxy for "less complexity"
Going from adolescence to adulthood for men requires sullying what you find pure and venerated, so that you can understand, on your own, that striving to find purity means you'll reject everything that contains some ugliness and badness; by rejecting the bad in someone or something, you never learn what reality is made of.
If you need to do all that to read a book just give up. Maybe you just don't actually want to read, you know? There are more pressing matters in your life rn apparently and that's fine.
01. Start with shorter books and build up your reading stamina. Possibly your ability to focus has been sapped by other media. Luckily, this is a problem with a simple solution. The more you read, the easier reading will become.
02. Carry a book with you. I find it very unsettling when I visit airports and everyone—babies, kids, parents—is glued to a screen. We spend a good chunk of our lives in DMV lines and sitting in diners. You can get a shocking amount of reading done in those spare moments.
03. Read before falling asleep. This is actually where I get most of my reading done. Resolve that for the next hour or however long, you’re not going to look at your phone. There’s something almost hypnotically soothing about reading in silence at the end of a day.
04. Reduce the level of non-book entertainments. This is the main reason most people struggle with reading, because we live in a world of infinite diversions. Harold Bloom said, “There are enormous obstacles to deep reading now. The tyranny of the visual is a frightening thing.”
But once you realize those diversions are the very things keeping you from reading, it becomes easier to prioritize reading as a hobby. Books are both good for the brain (in the same way exercise is good for the body) and more emotionally rewarding than much of what we consume.
05. Keep a reading diary. It can be something as simple as jotting down the titles of every book you complete. Seeing those titles begin to add up is enormous fun, and will motivate you to want to keep reading.
06. Remember that reading is supposed to be fun. There’s a reason books were the chief entertainment for American pioneers and British coal-miners of the nineteenth century. We once had a massively literate working-class, and I believe we could revive a culture of reading for pleasure.
Thing is, the difference in "how much time you have left" in your 20s vs your 30s is negligible practically speaking. It's just that your 30s is the first time you realize your time isn't infinite so every bad decision you made in the last decade is contextualized within new information that you didn't have when you made said mistakes. And that sucks for most people (ie regret, loss, injustice, etc)
Unironically funny account because it does the "complex subject is actually straightforwardly simple" shtick and reads everything prima facie.
