In a lot of ways, my 2020 has been The Year of the Newsletter. Not only because I’ve been writing one of my own since early April, but also because I’ve begun to consistently follow a couple of other great ones: Ranjan Roy and Can Duruk’s Margins, Andrew Sullivan’s The Weekly Dish, Anne Helen Peterson’s Culture Study, Matt Taibbi’s Reporting and a new friend of mine’s Reality Farm. Unfortunately, a lot of these have moved behind a paywall, so I guess 2021 will be The Year of Deciding Whether or Not to Pay for Content.
Beyond following a few columnists here and there in the past, this year has been the first time in my life when I’ve felt I’ve really gotten intimate with someone’s worldview. A newsletter will hit my inbox and I’m pretty sure, after reading the title, that I know where it’s headed. Anne Helen Peterson is always going to side with the worker. Taibbi and Sullivan hate identity politics. Margins is against Big Tech.
Sometimes that’s great. Culture Study had some unique perspectives on COVID and work-from-home culture early in the pandemic. And Taibbi and Sullivan have, at times, presented refreshing perspectives on some of my least-favorite tendencies of the media (although I probably just enjoy reading something that doesn’t challenge my opinions).
But at a certain point it starts to feel like something’s lacking. It’s like Stephen A. Smith hating the Cowboys – eventually, you start to wonder whether the guy still feels that way or if it’s just too big a part of his identity to back out.
Strong, principled opinions are important. Absolutely. All of the writers above are passionate about issues, and they use their platforms to expand the appeal of their positions. I’m sure each of you can think of a variety of media personalities you follow who do the same. And I’ve definitely tried to do so – for my limited readership – around concepts like optimism and empathy towards other perspectives.
But at times I worry that my writing here will become stale. I’m a big fan of Peggy Noonan and David Brooks in the WSJ and NYT, respectively, but find much of their writing boring at this point. You know what’s coming. It feels like AI has stepped in to churn out weekly pieces on their behalf.
That is a long-winded way of saying: I am trying to keep my subject matter varied and interesting. The super successful writers have all identified a niche readership, monetized it in some cases, and are probably loathe to stray too far from their golden goose. I don’t have that issue, so I’d like to stay fresh as much as possible. Keep you all on your toes. Who knows, maybe next week I’ll write about the critical role of Instagram and Tik Tok in society…
One newsletter that does a great job of staying fresh is Reality Farm.
Reality Farm came to me via one of you readers, who told its anonymous writer about me, we connected, and four months later we’re still in contact and reading each other’s work each week. It’s the exact type of virtual connection that I’d hoped to make when I first started writing my own newsletter.
Reality Farm has a more predictable layout than mine, but it has far more varied content. It’s like having your own personal internet chef to suggest new things you’d never try on your own. I recommend you check it out, and if you like what you read, give it a follow. If you stop reading my stuff because of Reality Farm, it will be difficult for me to prove it but I’ll feel betrayed nonetheless. You’ve been warned!
Here’s something from this past week’s edition about a near-fatal Formula 1 collision:
“I was a bit queasy as the day went on, turning over counterfactuals in my mind. Grosjean is the butt of many, many F1 jokes because he is a Frenchman with historically terrible luck who is notorious for complaining and the occasional bout of incompetence. When his team announced they were dropping him next year and hiring another driver, there was a bit of a collective fare-thee-well feeling and Grosjean later revealed that only one of the other 19 drivers (good guy George Russell) texted him to express condolences.“
“What made me feel shitty is that he’s a genuinely nice guy with a wife and three kids and I watched him very nearly die for our collective entertainment. Had he died, he would have died knowing that he was widely mocked and denigrated by fans for trying to excel at the one thing he loved, and that his colleagues weren’t much bothered to see him go. And I cannot imagine the horror his family experienced in those short minutes when nobody knew if he was alive or dead.“
That’s some good sh*t. I loved reading it and have thought about it often since. And here’s one more bit from this week:
Q: So, if the Electoral College does elect President-Elect Joe Biden, are you not going to leave this building?
President Trump: Just so you — certainly, I will. Certainly, I will. And you know that.
“If you spent a single molecule of brainpower over the last month fretting over whether this man was going to organize a coup I’m sorry.”
Now I’ve gone and plagiarized two great pieces of another guy’s writing. Like I said, please, please don’t leave me for him. We can just as easily share you, my precious reader!
Anyway, it’s moments like these that make writing fun. There’s a whole community of writers out there, and many of them are absolutely willing to engage with their readers (although Andrew Sullivan has still not replied to any of my emails). This week I got in touch with the writer of Running Probably, a new project on Substack, and a few weeks back I got in touch with Fritz, from The Retirement Manifesto, an email which ended up inspiring a post on the books he’s read in 2020.
I’m not sure if there’s ever been a better time to interact with other people who share your same craft, and I cannot wait for the coming year and the 52 editions of this newsletter it will spawn.
Year-End Reflections
Speaking of 2021, we’re getting to that point where the end of the year is a given. We’ve got a month left, but if you’re anything like me you already feel as though 2020 is over. Thanksgiving bleeds into Christmas and then New Year’s and then next thing you know you’re writing /21 at the end of your dates.
This week I wrote a short post about passing the 150,000 word mark on this site. It’s one of a couple of “reflection” posts I plan to write in the next month. It’s an offshoot of the single, all-encompassing journal entries I have written at the end of each of the last three years, in an attempt to memorialize what I’ve accomplished in the preceding months and reflect on where I want to go from there. Check out the 2019 post if you’re interested.
As a society, we have an unhealthy relationship with the end of the year. We view it as we do our birthdays, as the tearing of one sheet in the desk calendar instead of 365. We’re 26 and then all of a sudden we’re 27. It’s 2020 and then all of a sudden it’s 2021.
That psychological contortion leaves us susceptible to major disappointment. We’re unable to fully account for everything that has happened in the preceding year because we don’t focus on it in its entirety. Recency bias leaves us feeling as though the year was a bust, when really we’re giving far too much weight to the dark, dead time between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and not enough to the other months of the year. I remember being shocked, at the end of 2018, to discover that was the year I’d moved in with Anne, done my first Great Saunter and finally felt like I had good friends at work. Major milestones, things to be personally proud of, and I would have completely overlooked them had it not been for a dedicated process of setting goals, tracking throughout the year, and spending an hour or two in reflection in December.
Another issue with our scrunched up timelines is that we see the first week of January as the do-or-die moment to set ourselves on a new course. No one ever asks you what your July resolutions are, do they? But why shouldn’t they? Deciding to do something in July is just as valid as doing so in January. Oftentimes, it may not be until the middle of the year when circumstances line up that make a change possible. Try becoming a cyclist in January and let me know how that goes.
So we become gluttons for punishment. We give ourselves little credit for the year gone by and put far too much pressure on ourselves for what’s to come.
Here’s my entreaty to all of you: Give yourself the time you deserve to reflect upon 2020. It wasn’t all garbage and time wasted indoors. And only you can convince yourself of that fact. What we don’t want, and what I’m starting to sense may be the case, is for all of us to head into 2021 feeling as though the past year has been a mulligan and that 2021 has to be so much better.
Because that is a recipe for disappointment. To re-quote my favorite internet writer Tim Urban, from Wait But Why:
“So while thousands of Jack’s Todays will, to an outsider from far away, begin to look like a complete picture, Jack spends each moment of his actual reality in one unremarkable Today pixel or another. Jack’s error is brushing off his mundane Wednesday and focusing entirely on the big picture, when in fact the mundane Wednesday is the experience of his actual life.”
Brushing off 2020 is like brushing off a mundane Wednesday. He continues:
“Perhaps the first thing Jack needs to do is learn to feel more gratitude, another scientifically proven route to happiness and the area in which he falls the most woefully short. Jack spends so much of his time looking up at the great things that will come his way and planning his future happiness and not nearly enough time looking down and thinking about how badly he used to want so many of the things he currently has.“
One major thing I’ll be adding to my accomplishments this year is time with family – over two month’s worth between Anne’s family and my own. That’s a goal I certainly didn’t write down back in January, but have pivoted towards willingly in the months since. The same could be said for catching up with friends, reading more books, and walking every single day.
A blogger I like, Brad Feld, does something similar on his December 1st birthday each year. In this year’s post, he wrote: “At 55, I’ve decided I’m in the ‘every day is a gift from here on out’ mode.” I’m not saying we all need to share Brad’s thirst for life, but the practice of reflection makes realizations like that one far more likely.
Give yourself the time to reflect.
– Emmett
Recent Posts:
150,000 Words! – Recognizing a landmark
What I’m Reading:
Why Suicide Has Become an Epidemic – Tony Dokoupil, Newsweek, 2013
“Every year since 1999, more Americans have killed themselves than the year before, making suicide the nation’s greatest untamed cause of death. In much of the world, it’s among the only major threats to get significantly worse in this century than in the last.”
This Is the Real Virus to Fear – Ryan Holiday
“When we are overwhelmed, hurt, and scared, we tend to grasp for something, anything, that explains the unexplainable. There is a simplicity to the idea that the pandemic is really a hoax, or that 9/11 was an inside job.”
What I’m Listening To:
Jim Collins: The Return of a Reclusive Polymath – Tim Ferriss Podcast
“You never know when the people you might want to say something to might disappear. Any number of things can happen: accident, disease, life just expires. And I hope that I take in this idea that if you have it to say, don’t wait too long.”
Family Over Everything – Bigger Pockets Podcast
“Do not wait until life decides for you. You know what you need to do. You know what is important. Make it happen.”