I want to tell stories about a free, highly skilled, post-consumer, purpose-driven life. That’s what I want my life to be like, and I want it so bad I’m willing to try and fail at it. But I’m not there yet, not by a long shot. I can’t write about having that life yet because I’m in the process of getting it still.
I can’t tell anyone how to get to where I’m trying to go until I’ve actually gotten there myself. But I’ve absorbed the writing style of authoritative non-fiction, from the perspective of someone who has actually figured out whatever it is they’re writing about. Cal Newport, for example, has quite clearly Arrived at the state of being someone who is a digitally minimal, Deep Working, So Good he’s Impossible to Ignore fellow. His books are authoritative and rightly so.
But I’m not Cal Newport. I haven’t arrived anywhere. I started writing about a year ago with the idea that I’d be doing something like travel writing, except for the journey of becoming a nonconsumer. But my instinct is to go to the depersonalized argumentative essay, and looking back that’s mostly what I’ve done. Oops.
It’s safer to write dry essays. Less vulnerable. I can pretend to know what I’m talking about, spin up theories and principles about how the world works, and add hypothetical anecdotes to support my point. But who cares about theories and hypotheticals? What good is it? It’s boring and maybe it’s all wrong to boot - there’s no way to tell as long as we’re lost in the realm of abstractions.
I’m resolving now to come down out of the realm of abstractions and anchor this project to reality, to stories. Stories are the only thing that really matter to us humans.
This is coming up for me now because I’m trying to start my podcast off by explaining my worldview, my guiding principles, my idea of how things do and don’t work. The first few episodes are going to be theory heavy, because otherwise I fear listeners will be completely mystified about where I’m coming from.
Once the fundamentals are out of the way, though, I want to shift to talking to and about real people. I want to find people who’ve gotten approximately where I want to go and ask them how they got there. I want to find other people trying to get there and ask them how it’s going, where they’ve stumbled and where they’ve gotten a boost.
And here on the blog I’m going to shift to something like travel writing, but for the journey of becoming a nonconsumer, a highly autonomous individual who can hardly tell the difference between work, leisure, and play, and is putting his efforts to the service of untangling the metacrisis.
The trouble is that I don’t know how to do travel writing. I’ve never done it before. I’m probably going to cock it up a bunch. That’s the wonder and the terror of a blog; all I have to do is hit publish and it’s out there.
Anyways, I thought I’d give you a heads up, because it might get a little weird around here until I figure out what the hell I’m doing.