I. State of change

After my overly optimistic year in review, my life has completely changed. I have a new job and a new baby, so my free time is limited. And even before the baby was born, I always had some excuse why I wouldn't be able to sit down and write that day. I'm hoping to break that cycle, but I've been through many cycles of trying to get and stay on the writing wagon, and I don't see why this time would be any different.

I think it'll be valuable for me to publicly document what things are like right now, though. I'm covering the nighttime feedings for Baby Lily. For the first two and a half weeks of her life, I covered 9:00pm-3:00am, but now I'm covering the entire night up until her last early morning feeding, which is typically around 4:30. My caffeine consumption has doubled; I'm now fueled by cold brew coffee and black tea. I'm using the weekends to catch up on sleep, typically sleeping in to 11am or 1pm. By the end of the workweek, I'm delirious with fatigue.

When I'm doing the nighttime feedings, I'm typically indulging in my latest hobby: chess. For reasons I can't quite remember, I picked up chess in early April as a distraction from doomscrolling to keep up with Trump II / DOGE. While I have one hand occupied holding the bottle for Lily, I can use the other hand to make moves on a virtual chessboard, playing on lichess.org or chess.com. Playing a chess game forces me to wake up and pay attention, which helps me take care of the baby, though it comes at a cost to my player rating as I blunder away pieces more frequently early in the morning as the quality of my cognition declines.

I'll write more on chess in a separate post, but I want to give a shoutout. I've become a big fan of IM John Bartholomew's Youtube channel. His are just about the only chess videos I watch. He is an excellent commentator with zero bullshit. The most popular chess YouTubers out there, like GothamChess, have classic clickbait, hype-man nonsense. Or they're like Hikaru Nakamura, who has negative charisma in my opinion. Bartholomew is honest, humble, and clearly loves teaching the game. Most impressively, he is humble and gracious when he loses. He's a fantastic role model.

II. Lowering my expectations for this blog

The title of this post is poking fun at my aspirations to write serious essays like my extended book reviews. I am resigning myself to the fact that I won't be able to work on very detailed essays if I want to maintain a reasonable posting schedule or share anything at all. Not only do I not have enough time to write extended pieces, but I also have much less time to collect the inputs to give me interesting things to write about. Even listening to audiobooks is not enough to generate ideas for me. This is a tradeoff that I can't escape.

What I think I should do, then, is to make this blog my cozy Internet home, having total freedom to post on whatever subject I'd like. How I'm thinking about this transition is turning my work from formal to informal. Instead of writing very long book review essays, I'll be content with posting some riffs, like my post on Kafka's The Castle a couple of years ago. I'll also expand my list of topics, like posting about movies more often. The goal is to maintain a commitment to posting at least every month, since that's a good forcing function for me to carve out the time to write for a few minutes every day. If I have zero forcing function, there will be zero output; I still haven't published my essay on Middlemarch because the process to edit it is painful enough that I find new reasons to push it off every day.

In making this tradeoff, I'm making the judgement that the act of writing and publishing is more important than anything else. Sleep is at such a premium right now that it seems crazy to sacrifice it for something optional, even if my writing commitment is just 10 minutes per day.

I have had the idea for a post — or a manifesto — called What You Do Changes You germinating in my head for the past 6 months or so. The title is self-explanatory, but one of the main points of the post is that doing something hard like writing a blog post — or writing something with any rigor whatsoever — is important because it causes you build the muscle you need to make sense of the world. I know I've repeated it on this blog before, but the Tyler Cowen quote (which may be apocryphal based off being unable to find it after a few minutes of Googling?) "I don't know what I think until I write it," applies here. Trying to write something imposes a challenge to the mind to bring order from all of its inputs about a given subject. The process by which we bring order from these inputs — digesting them — is called thinking. And thinking deliberately is very different from experiencing the jumble that is one's uninhibited internal monologue. I find that the mental motion I make when trying to think clearly is to first exert effort to stop my monkey mind in its tracks, then, when I feel stable, forming my thoughts with carefully chosen words.

The point is, "use it or lose it" is a principle that drives a surprising amount of behavior. Taking it seriously forces us to own up to how we can make life worse for ourselves if we are not vigilant about it. I'll refrain from saying more until I actually post on it... But this is the reason why I want to post more often.

III. The Cursed State of Content Creation

I would be remiss if I didn't remark on just how shambolic the state of internet content creation is. It's not just a problem plaguing YouTube. It's everywhere.

Over the past two years, I have felt increasingly vindicated for choosing Ghost as my platform because of how terrible Substack's interface is. Substack has pivoted to trying to capture refugees from The App Formerly Known As Twitter by introducing a newsfeed called Notes. The "home" state that the app opens up is the newsfeed, but it's just called "Home", which of course has algorithmically-selected content into the newsfeed, and god help you if any of the writers you subscribe to have bad taste. There is a chat function for paid subscribers that no one knows how to use. There's a algorithmically driven short video option as well. The writers there, even the good ones, are falling victim to the need to pump up engagement and paying subscribers, much to their detriment. And that isn't even getting into the issues with retrieving posts. The search function is absolutely terrible and it is difficult to look up an archive of posts created by specific writers. I'll never forget spending over 15 minutes trying to find a specific substack post when I knew its title and author. It's, frankly, a mess.

The other problem is the flood of bullshit content created by LLMs. Writers don't even need more than an idea to pad their work to epic lengths. There are some bloggers I respect who openly use LLMs in their workflows. Using it as an assistant to write the more obvious points of one's arguments may be fine. But I can't help but feel that compromises the quality of the writer's underlying thinking, which — at least to me — is most of the point of writing anyway. This is easy for me to say as someone who isn't trying to make any money off of my writing. But I stand by it nonetheless.

It's no accident that I'm pointing out these twin forces — algorithmic feeds and LLMs — are essentially toxic to good content. They're both toxic to thinking. And they are forces that completely dominate the current information environment. If you don't know how to protect yourself from their deficiencies, you will find yourself totally hosed. Unfortunately, based on the behavior of the tech and VC execs lining up behind Trump II, they are unable to cope with the downstream effects of the machines they've built.

Continuing to scroll the timeline instead of pausing and taking stock of what you're reading is always a danger. And LLMs can lie to you if you're not careful; in my experience they are most useful when you're doing something practical, like coding, so you can easily try their suggestions and call them out on their bullshit when things break.

I am fully aware that I sound like the technophobes who tell you to throw your smartphone in the nearest body of water. But that is not where I am going here. Every technology has its use case. My personal line in the sand is I will not use LLM-generated text in my blog posts. Are they useful for talking to as part of the brainstorming process? Absolutely. But every word I print will come from my mind.

I'll stop here. Hopefully there isn't another 6 month gap between posts.