I. Reboot

For the past month, I’ve kept to a daily writing routine of 10 minutes per day. I sit in front of my computer, pull up a draft of a post that I’m working on, set a 10 minute timer, and go. The timer is underrated as a commitment device.

It’s worked out so far, even though I don’t have much to show for it. Here’s a spoiler alert for the posts that lie ahead: they are mostly about work life, since I don’t have much going on right now aside from work. Maybe that makes me a workaholic, something foreshadowed by the series of posts I wrote last year.

I intend this post to be a public signpost of where I am in my life right now. It is a rather grind-y time, where every day is a 17 to 18-hour long sprint from one obligation to the next. There don’t seem to be too many original ideas - at least, ideas that have significantly changed how I think. I have struggled to take notes of books that I’m reading, which hasn’t reduced my enjoyment much, but it is a significant barrier to producing essays. Robert Jackall’s Moral Mazes, Tony Judt’s Postwar, and Robert Kegan’s The Evolving Self are all recent non-fiction books that I rather enjoyed, but will require a lot of work to craft coherent post on.

The great news is that these 10 minutes don’t have to be spent typing on the keyboard - I have the opportunity to go back and page through the books that I’ve read and compile notes. Certainly, this will be a Herculean effort for my current book, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation: A History, which will require a thorough set of of notes for me to answer the major questions that I have. (I’m not sure if MacCulloch is at fault, or if the sweep of history is so broad that it is impossible to spend enough time covering each major event, but I find myself losing the thread of each subplot frequently, as the story jumps between parallel religious developments in England, Scotland, Spain, France, Italy/The Vatican, the Holy Roman Empire, Poland-Lithuania, and the Low Countries. )

I have some resistance to going down the rabbit-hole of taking notes, and using this blog as a vehicle to do so. The main reason is that my rate of consumption will go down. There is a part of me that has vanity and ego invested in quickly moving on from book to book. The other problem is one of mortality. If I am only able to get through a book every two months, that shakes out to six books per year. Even if I keep this habit up for the next 30 years, that’s still less than 200 books left to read in my life!

II. Religiously

What got me back into writing? Listening to a few podcasts of Tyler Cowen’s when he released his new-ish book Talent. One thing Cowen points out is how good of a signal simple persistence is - if someone does a project because it’s useful and no one is telling them to do it (perhaps because it’s something unconventional), and they stick with it for a long period of time (measured in years), that’s a signal that they are someone special. I agree with this, as compounding the way to obtain advantages in any domain.

But in another podcast, where Cowen was discussing his personal approach to writing, he described it as “doing it religiously, every day.” For some reason, “religiously” clicked for me. That all I had to do was show up every day, setting the 10 minutes aside, and it would add up.

This requires a kind of faith: that your future self will log in, put in their 10 minutes, and continue the project. This has been challenged recently: I have found myself skipping the daily entry because I tell myself I can make it up tomorrow.

One of the more humbling aspects of getting older has been seeing faith as an essential ingredient of life. As a very aggressive, maybe even belligerent, nonbeliever, I have always scoffed at the idea of faith. Me, a rational person, believe in a thing that is explicitly beyond reason? Ridiculous! Or so I thought.

But that was before I had truly grappled with the uncertainty of life, and that there is not always a clear justification for what is right. As an absurd example, sometimes you do not have the time or energy to make a proper utilitarian calculation to determine whether something is worth doing or believing in.

I will save expounding on faith for a future post (or posts) on Kierkegaard. He was clearly onto something when he described the modern condition of anxiety - we have anxiety because we are free, and to be free is to be free to fail. I have always fallen short of taking Kierkegaard’s leap of faith into God’s arms because of my conviction that God is not there, but at least I have to think twice before refusing him now. How comforting it would be to believe in his God! But ultimately, I believe (ha!) much too strongly in objectivity and reason to delude myself into a belief that, however useful, would ultimately be untrue.

Where this gets interesting is, by definition, faith is based on something that is potentially untrue. So where do I draw the line? I don’t think I have coherent beliefs about that, beyond considering how likely it is that something is untrue against the impact of holding that belief.