2025-04-12 Journal Entry

Hello hello we’re live on the internet. Well actually this isn’t really connected to the internet. Anyways!!!!! I don’t know. I’m up, I’m alive, I’m realizing that I am just having a really hard time sitting down to write here. There’s so many distractions. And it’s not even just the usual ones, but it’s also just this draw back towards comfort. Everything is so easy here. Nothing pushes me out of my comfort zone, I can just do my little daily routine and hang with the family and never respond to anyone’s texts. I can just sit here quietly in this house and die.

That’s being dramatic, but it’s also true. I don’t feel hungry here, and I’m not really sure why that is. I think there’s just so many little things that I can do, I need to go put out weed killer on the lawn and change the battery in the fire detector outside and go to the easter egg hunt and duhduhduhduhduh. I can do all of those little things all day, and then by the end of it I’ve essentially entertained myself to death. It’s the homeowners equivalent of snacking work and all that.

And then there’s just being around people for whom a highly normative life is really all they want. And that’s nothing bad, at all – like, Thorne showed me some pictures of him and T3 going skiing for the first time, and that’s amazing and a great experience. But it also requires a certain sacrifice of Thorne’s time in order to afford and pay for that trip and so on. All of that is generally where I have this sticking point – why must we make those sacrifices? Are they really worth it? (And I have no doubt that the folks I’m thinking of would probably unanimously say yes, and yet I feel so strongly that for me the answer is probably no.)

I was thinking last night about what sort of things happen in $BIG_WORK right now. It feels like every character is sufficiently large and multidimensional that it’s hard to fit everything in for all of them. I guess there’s the broader question of how they all fit in together, which I don’t really know. Maybe we just start with a one-sentence jist for everyone’s stories.

I think part of me feels like I’ve just written three characters and am jumping into a whole novel, when in reality it may make more sense to have 100 characters and 10 settings and then sort of pattern match across them to see what fits. Of course they don’t really have to “fit” – I’m thinking of IJ, where the connections between the halfway house, the terrorist organization, and the tennis academy are all somewhat tenuous at best, the only connections basically all being through the father in some transitive sort of way.

And so that seems to be the task – what’s the central pivot point. I think what I want, essentially, is a novel about paying attention through the elimination of distractions or false perspectives: Pete cutting through spiritual materialism as a defense mechanism, Caroline as rallying against workaholicism (word?), and Henry against profound meaninglessness. They all cut through in some particular way. I don’t really know what that means collectively – what is the antidote for all of these? Compassion, wisdom, renunciation, becoming quiet and listening to that silence that drills into our brains. The quietness that we run from constantly, mostly by giving ourselves away over and over again to forces beyond our understanding. Why do we find the quiet so painful? Is that unique to modern society, that when we cease our work, cease our infinite meddlings and adjustments over and over again, that at the end of all of that we’re left with an unanswerable question that we must attenuate ourselves to, must give ourselves in to.

I don’t really know how to write about this stuff. I think that’s just what I’m lost on, how to write about this sort of infinite concern. Maybe a good starting point is just imitation, essentially take the premise of The Soul is Not a Smithy, which I haven’t yet read but know vaguely how it goes, take that premise and essentially rewrite something of it based on my own impression of the thing. That can be my writing assignment for the day: take the vague premise (as you understand it, we don’t care about accuracy or faithfulness) of The Soul is Not a Smithy and rewrite a story in that vein.

[Later:]

I want to make some headway on my argument “Against Scale,” or at least an argument for devoting more of one’s life and work to things that don’t scale. “Scale” is perhaps an overused term in tech, but I think it’s also become sufficiently adopted into the nomenclature that young people also begin to see themselves this way.