A Meandering Reflection & Two Recommendations

Sometimes when my wife travels, I end up with these long stretches of time alone in the house. The only other person here is my teenage son, who is, appropriately for his age, avoidant and reclusive. We’re both avoidant and reclusive. Though, as the parent present, I actively combat this tendency for stretches in order to foster “healthy interaction”.

On weekends like this, I end up with the opportunity to become bored for periods of time.

I usually try to write in these stretches.

I feel the perpetual and growing sense that too much time has passed since I put CONTENT on Substack, where I am literally earning dozens of dollars per year. I owe you all CONTENT. And it has been too long since I put something on Patreon, where I am earning literally dozens of dollars per month. What are they paying for if not CONTENT…

I am sometimes successful at creating.

Or maybe I always am successful… I just end up mostly creating things that aren’t ready to share. I am not successful at creating CONTENT, because CONTENT is that commodity which gets shared for consumption.

I frequently stop myself in the act of writing because I often realize that what is propelling me to create is the wrong thing. The commodification piece really messes with my motivations.

I write a lot of music but I’ve never tried to make money with it (besides doing some gig work in jazz groups as a teenager). I always wanted that pursuit to be joyful and playful, and open to possibility. I make music primarily for myself.

But I write to be read. I write in an effort to make my mind and experience useful for others. I write to connect and be connected with. When I write for myself, things get weird… and I meander far off paths like the one I laid for myself in that Patreon project.

Sometimes I play video games. I think I’m about to do just that…

In periods of boredom, I am successful at one thing almost always. I am usually at least successful in the gathering of metaphorical bits of thread and dry plant matter which might later weave together into a bricolage nest for holding ideas. I store these—quotes, videos, articles, and other bits of text in a Commonplace Book in Notion.

I rummage through them sometimes like they were shiny things in my shiny thing pile under a bush because I am a crow (myth?).

I start a lot of drafts. I am up to 14 open drafts in Substack. I have 5 open drafts of chapters for the Patreon project. Most of the time, the most I can do is post something on LinkedIn. The shorter format there proves a valuable space for the development of early ideas. I feel a twinge of success and satisfaction when I manage to get a coherent blob of thought drafted and posted there, never mind a meticulously crafted nest…

I know for a fact some “creators” would consider such a practice unhelpful. The old “getting the satisfaction of a sense of having created by sharing unfinished work diminishing likelihood of finishing said work because you’re no longer craving said satisfaction” problem. Pressfield would scream at me with all the fury of his warrior myths, something about “the resistance”. Let him scream. He’ll get tuckered out soon enough and fall asleep.

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I actually wanted to post today to share two creators I discovered this weekend (and have thus been added into my Commonplace Book). The first is CJ The X, whose video essay about the Folgers Coffee Christmas Incest Commercial 2009 is an incredible, hilarious, and unexpectedly moving work of cultural and aesthetic analysis. Highly worthwhile, though the pace and humor might… probably will require you to buckle up, unless you happen to be under the age of 33.

The second I would consider a work about philosophy and epistemology and is much more accessible, so maybe do this one first:

My favorite quotes from that video, which I also saved for future rummaging and bricolage.

Is it possible that the world isn't getting worse, but that our tether to the world is sprouting thorns?

To learn about the world was to learn about how little power I had in it. But social power, I saw, among other things could be granted to me so long as I believed the right things.

If we’re in the midst of any crisis, it’s not just epistemological, it’s not just a crisis of truth—it’s a crisis of communication, of understanding. We have access to everyone’s ideas with no training about what to do with them or how to handle what they make us feel. We’re so certain of our own realities, so convinced of the doctrines on which our personal philosophies teeter, that surely the only reason someone would argue against them is because they’re evil or insane or an idiot. It’s not true. I will not cite my sources.

And if our beliefs are this powerful, could we too be creating a worse world simply by imagining one? And further, do we, by being here, have some kind of responsibility to try and name all of the illusions we're susceptible to--the tricks of thought that make us believe one thing or another--and move past them to access the best truth that exists?

The idea surgeons are working on these questions, but of course doing surgery on ideas just gets more ideas all over the place.

That last line is the reason I subscribed to Savannah Brown on Patreon.