I. Free-Form

I've hesitated somewhat in publishing or writing an annual review, so I've missed peak "Wrapped" season. It seems dumb to me, though, to publish all of those things before the year actually ends. Luckily, my birthday is at the end of January, so it's natural for me to do an end-of-year retrospective as a meditation on getting 1 year older.

I think I'll remember this year for its intensity. Work reached an intensity that it hadn't reached before. I had many, many more late nights and all-nighters than in prior years. Now that I am a few weeks removed from the peak intensity period and can actually view it objectively, I think the late nights took a toll on my cognitive capacity. With some rest accumulated over the holidays, I can actually think long-term again, rather than bracing myself for a sprint that is going to exhaust me. I've often felt confined by trying to make the optimal short-term moves, instead of taking steps back to think strategically.

This intensity is tied to my natural commitment strategy — which is to be a "backstopper", as defined by this (paywalled) post by Venkatesh Rao:

Commitment style is about how you commit to projects or efforts where others are relying on your contribution. This spectrum goes from opportunistic to backstopper.

An opportunist is someone who contributes (in whatever style from creator to maintenance) only when the incentives are very advantageous. A collaboration equivalent of a fair-weather friend.

A backstopper is someone who contributes (again, in whatever contribution style they’re talented at) when the health of the system most demands it.

And later:

The biggest indicator of backstopper commitment style is that backstoppers show up regularly. They commit a pattern of unconditional participation. Their participation is not contingent on favorable incentive winds, whether or not others are showing up, or whether or not things are “fair.” They commit to showing up so long as they believe in the effort overall, and think it will repay collective effort overall.

They are particularly motivated by the thought that they may be creating spillover value that’s not even captured. While they are not necessarily self-sacrificing saints, they are not too hung up on getting their fair share of rewards. This does imply that backstoppers tend to have lower marginal sensitivity to rewards, which implies privilege and resources elsewhere.

Their attitude tends to be: so long as I get enough, and the overall results are good for all, I’m in.

In particular, true backstoppers are not martyrs-in-denial. They are not low-self-awareness types contributing in unsustainable ways until they break, at which point the unconscious sense of being underappreciated turns into a conscious sense of vicious resentment.

There is a sense of public-spiritedness to all backstopping, but also a willingness to underwrite the very idea of public-spiritedness so that others can contribute with greater confidence in the long-term survival of their contributions.

I think the intensity of my work has pushed me to my limit of my backstopping, and closer to becoming a martyr-in-denial. Being a backstopper means, on some level, giving up your slack to benefit the collective. My problem has been running out of slack completely, forcing me to very tightly manage my schedule to be able to meet all of my commitments.

With the increase in intensity came a change in my perspective and approach to some interactions. I became much more of an adversarial actor this year in response to increased demands. Maybe this is better described as "strategic", but I chose "adversarial" to draw the contrast to a people-pleasing, overly cooperative stance that I considered my default stance prior to this year. I spent much more time thinking to myself, "it's time for some game theory" and actually sitting down and thinking several moves ahead on what approach was best in specific interactions, and how different actors would respond to my strategies given my understanding of their personalities and their interests. I think this has made me more effective, but it's also made me realize how difficult it is to convince people to work against their own interests and incentives to see the bigger picture. Most negotiations, I find, are about persuading the other side to adopt your view of the capital-G Good, and my interlocutors are typically not disposed to giving me what I want in a zero-sum situation.

The main area where I fell short was in follow-through. Without infinite time and energy, many of my ambitious plans fell by the wayside, and without some structure keeping me on the rails, I was not able to to ensure execution, which is a disappointment. This was a hard lesson to learn. For now I have scaled back my ambition somewhat and focused on what is under my direct control.

Speaking of a lack of follow-through, re-reading my review of Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks has been humbling. I'm ashamed to find that I succumbed to the pressure and did not maintain the boundaries I aspired to set, especially in the August to October time period. The weekly journaling practice fell by the wayside, as my weekend time became more crammed with activities and work. Do I regret it? A little bit, but I also think I didn't have a proper place for my journaling practice at the time. With the passage of time, I see that it's intended to be a snapshot, to capture the way things are. As I've seen turnover at work, things shift a lot over time. The ground is not stable.

Luckily, parenting was great this year. I can't complain about it, aside from general complaints about how parenting shrinks your world. But things are as good as they can be: my daughter Rose is the essence of beauty itself. She is so happy, so adorable, so very much a toddler, that it is impossible to resist her charms. But she demands attention, and it is a daunting task to get anywhere on time with her. One genuine challenge this year has been to realize that, despite the stress of work, I hold all of the wealth in the world in my hands: a happy home. As C.S. Lewis says:

To be happy at home, said Johnson, is the end of all human endeavor. As long as we are thinking only of natural values we must say that the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him; and that all economics, politics, laws, armies, and institutions, save in so far as they prolong and multiply such scenes, are a mere ploughing the sand and sowing the ocean, a meaningless vanity and vexation of spirit.

That means I recognize the tragedy of failing to appreciate it in the moment. There is something like a Parkinson's Law for anxiety: worry takes up the space that it is allowed to occupy. And it is easy to get consumed by the constant demands that a toddler places on me in the moment so that I never take a step back and think about the big picture. As Ferris Bueller says, "Life moves pretty fast — if you don't stop to take a look around once in a while, you could miss it."

I've known for a long time that exercise is the single-most important factor governing my subjective well-being. My wife Leeza and I started a shared exercise tracking google doc as a mutual accountability mechanism when we returned from Berlin and it worked wonders for forcing me to stay on the right track. Within a few months, I was in the best shape of my life, at least as measured by the results I got on the erg. I set lifetime bests for the 5km and 1 hour rows in November of this year, and came extremely close in the 10km. I think this, more than any other intervention, improved my well-being in 2024.

II. Reflecting on 2024

Influential Blog Posts and Podcasts from 2024

(Note: It is interesting that all of these blog posts come from Substack, as an indicator of just how dominant it is as a platform)

1. Kevin Baker, Avoidance Machines, Part 1
2. Zvi Mowshowitz, Book Review: On the Edge
3. This exchange between Zvi Mowshowitz and Patrick Mckenzie on Complex Systems podcast (emphasis mine).

Zvi Mowshowitz: But at the same time, so many people see this new AI tool and they say, “huh! that's kind of cute. This does some cool new things.” And then they just kind of forget about it. And they never think about what would happen if they invested somewhat more resources into figuring out how to make this improve their workflow, figure out how to learn things better.

This alien just showed up on your doorstep that knows all the things and will explain them to you, and respond to whatever you want.

You are so bizarrely incurious. You asked it to write three poems and then you had some laughs and put it away. What's wrong with you?

Patrick McKenzie: I think this is a story of our lives for writers as well. I've written about 5 million words or so and people ask me for writing advice. I often tell them, “however much you think you want to write right now, that's kind of homeopathic relative to the amount you'll write if you become a good writer.

“Can you just decide to write a lot more right now, about anything? Any topic, any format, any cadence, whatever works for you, just write 10 times more than you think you need to, and then 10 times more than that.” Visakan on Twitter has a good articulation, “do a hundred things – the same thing a hundred times. Write a hundred blog posts, record a hundred videos, etc.”

1. Dan Davies's posts on betting on horse racing
2. DR MacIver's post on "spellcasting"

Music I Will Associate With 2024

Like anyone else, I go through music phases. This year was all about classical. I got seriously into trying different recordings on Spotify and started building a CD collection so I would never be without them. With the progressive degradation of many subscription platforms, I've started to place bets on physical media.

2024 was the year of Beethoven's Eroica (Symphony No. 3). It is, at the moment, my favorite symphony ever written, mainly on the strength of the first two movements.

It helps that my daughter Rose requests that we listen to the first movement every time we get into the car: "Beet-e-hoven Three!"

Herbert von Karajan's recordings with the Berlin Philharmonic are perfect to me, particularly his remastered "Karajan Gold" final version from his 1983 cycle, though his analog 1963 version is also outstanding. Check out this 1982 video.

A second piece that I'll always associate with this year is Brahms's Violin Concerto. It all started in Berlin in May, when I saw Lisa Batiashvili perform as the soloist alongside Daniel Harding conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. Regrettably, I didn't have the piece memorized before attending, so the performance didn't leave as strong of an impression on me as it should have. As a Brahms fan, I've come to love it as much as his symphonies.

Yet again, I've selected a Karajan Berlin recording for this one: Anne-Sophie Mutter's performance, again, on the "Karajan Gold" remastered edition. She performs with real fire and weight, and Karajan strikes the perfect balance in support.

Since I'm all about sequences of three bullets, I think the third spot goes to Claudio Abbado's recording of Brahms's Fourth Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic. His recording of the Third is one of my desert island disks, along with the aforementioned Karajan '83 Eroica. This one has quite a bit of power and I put it level with the classic Carlos Kleiber Vienna Philharmonic recording.

Other recordings I came to love in 2024:

• Simon Rattle's Mahler Symphony 9 with the BRSO
• Kyung-Wha Chung's Mendelssohn Violin Concerto w/ Charles Dutoit and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra
• Leonard Bernstein's Mahler Symphony 5 with the Vienna Philharmonic

Best Books of 2024

I'll remember this year primarily through five books.

1. Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady
2. Becca Rothfeld's debut essay collection All Things Are Too Small. I liken Rothfeld publishing an essay collection to my version of being around for the publication of David Foster Wallace's essay collections. She's my favorite living essayist and I wholeheartedly recommend it, even if I don't agree with everything she says.
3. George Eliot's Middlemarch (post to come in February 2025)
4. Dan Davies's The Unaccountability Machine — truly a great management book. So good that it foolishly inspired me to go out and buy Stafford Beer books. I've held off on writing a post about it, but seeing the world through the lens of W. Ross Ashby's principle of Requisite Variety changed how I viewed the world a lot. This substack post by Davies captures a lot of the basic principles.

What I mean by that is that the key task of management and leadership is to prevent the control function from being overwhelmed and unable to do its job.  The fundamental principle of organisation is W Ross Ashby’s “Principle of Requisite Variety” – a system can only be stable if the regulator has at least as much capacity to absorb information as the operations have to generate it.  Organisation – and reorganisation – is all about ensuring that principle is respected, by changing the kinds of decisions that each level of management has to make, in order to match them to capacity.

5. Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay. Two big, fascinating tomes on history, including Chinese and Ottoman history that are major blindspots of mine.

Best Movies I Watched in 2024

In rough order of preference. Unfortunately, the time to watch movies was very limited this year.

1. The Fellowship of the Ring, Extended Edition (2001, in theaters)
2. Vertigo (1958)
3. The Silence of the Lambs (1992)
4. Challengers (2024)
5. Past Lives (2023)

III. Looking Ahead to 2025

Mantras for 2025

1. Rest in motion, as recommended in this post by Nate Soares. I am certainly among the class of people who has assumed they take damage just by expending effort.
2. Make space out of nothing. This is related to the above. I've long understood that being able to make space out of nothing, though I haven't always phrased it that way, is the main benefit of practices like meditation. What this means to me is being able to find ways to be relaxed, patient, and engaged in situations that are stressful, like getting a toddler out the door. Having the ability to ignore the pressure — which is externally imposed by our minds — and simply pay attention to the situation at hand is a potent way to de-stress life.
3. Kayaks, not superyachts. This is a phrase from Oliver Burkeman's latest book, Meditations for Mortals, and it's not obvious what it means without explanation. What he's getting at is that we must navigate life in our 1-person kayak, directly bouncing off the currents around us. The comparison to the superyacht is from the perspective of someone who spends all their time managing, coming up with a "system" to run their lives, but never getting to the actual work of living. This could be reframed as focus on the core practices, which is less catchy. Another Oliver Burkeman phrase is "Do things daily-ish". If you miss a day, no big deal, just get back on the horse when you can and keep doing it. I'm still going to balance this with tracking what I do on a daily basis, but the main purpose is to focus on actually doing the things instead of spending endless valuable time on overhead.
4. Write faster (and publish more). This is some old writing advice from Sasha Chapin. If I just give myself the space to write and stay non-judgmental, I can write things down to figure out what I think. In my experience, data is not the limiting factor, but the narrative sense-making capacity. Simply writing things down in a somewhat structured way helps force me to make sense of the inputs I'm exposed to. My commitment for this year is to stick to a monthly publishing schedule. I think some sort of structure is necessary to keep me honest, as I've found myself aimlessly editing random drafts instead of focusing on finishing one piece. The last time I published something was in August 2024!

In 2025, I'm going to spend more time on...

1. Obsidian. I've spent time migrating my personal notes to this app after getting sick of how sluggish Notion is, and it is so, so, so much better. It's going to take quite a while for me to migrate over to Obsidian — it's probably a year-long project — but it's already paying dividends. Obsidian is where I do all of my writing and most of my journaling, so spending more time on Obsidian means spending more time writing.
2. Parenting. We'll be having another baby in May. I'm preparing for my world to be turned upside down, having an infant again. The 1-to-2 child transition scares me more than the 0-to-1 transition did., simply because Leeza and I will have to manage both kids at once, instead of being able to have one parent "on duty" and one parent "off duty" at a time.
3. Google Sheets. I haven't taken the time to figure out how to make Obsidian database-able, so Google sheets will be my cloud-based spreadsheet solution. I'm using it for key work infrastructure like time logging, task management, and a daily journal. In my work life, I've loved using Excel for just about everything because thinking in tables comes naturally to me, Google has made Sheets 95% as good as Excel for all of the things I care about.
4. Audible. I've joked that becoming a parent has made me understand the plight of 1950's housewives. At its worst, being a parent can feel like I just need to be physically present doing repetitive tasks and let my mind go numb. Having a good audiobook to expose myself to the wider world during my commutes helps me endure the monotony that normal life can bring. The subscription is well worth it. I was hooked on Fukuyama's Political Order volumes, and am now investing time in other works of history.