Bouquet of Peonies,Claude Monet, 1887

In the last post, I wrote about the hacker mindset—the habit of unseeing the superficial levels of a system so you can get to know the underlying details and learn to manipulate the world in more flexible ways. One example, which I borrowed from Gwern, was how people who do speed runs of video games will study the underlying hardware so they can exploit bugs that let them walk through walls to reach the final level.

In the comments, Thu wondered what I have unseen to get better at writing. I found it very fun to meditate on. I haven’t explicitly set out to “see through” the game that is writing, but when I look back at how I thought about it fifteen years ago compared to today, it is clear that my understanding of writing, both as a craft and as a career, is much more high resolution and technical now and much less stuck in the conventional narratives that I took as truth when I was younger.

The part where I’ve most explicitly applied the hacker mindset has been in relation to the systems that make it possible to turn creativity into a career—how you can finance your creative work and how you can find an audience and peers and mentors who help you develop. So let me start there.

I also have some thoughts on how you can use a hacker mindset to get better at the craft itself, which I’ll get to at the end.

The conventional way to think about a career as a writer, at least in the aughts when I got started, was that you write a book, get it accepted by a publisher, and then… somehow you get money so you can pay rent. I followed this path until I was 25: I edited a magazine, worked in theaters, and toured as a poet.

But then, prompted by my now wife Johanna, I started to think about it more like a hacker. If you take a literary career and break it apart, like a machine, what is it made of?

1. There is text getting written.

2. There is money flowing in, so you can pay the bills while writing.

3. There are readers and peers that create some sort of social context for the writing, which helps you feel like what you do has meaning, and so that you can grow from the feedback from others.

There are a bunch of other things, too, but this is essentially it: writing, funding, social context.

And once Johanna prompted me to take it apart like that, we realized there are easier, better, more fun, and faster ways to access those three things than doing it the conventional route.

If you go through a publisher, you will, in most cases, not earn enough to live off your writing, and on top of that you will have to make a bunch of trade-offs to satisfy your editor. There will be meetings and emails and expectations—all taking time from the writing. And there will be subtle (or not so subtle) pressures to make your work more commercial and less personally satisfying in order to pay for the overhead of editors and designers, marketing people, and accountants.

If you get a decent-paying part-time job, you can, in most cases, afford to write more than if you have a publisher, and you don’t have to make any compromises. This, in turn, means you can write work that is much more attractive to your type of people, so you can, with some work, assemble a more fun audience than you would if you had a publisher. You get more of everything.

You could see a writing career as a flow diagram. Here is Claude drawing it for me:

1. You have the core activity, which is putting words on the page.

2. And then you have a flow of money, which is necessary to pay the bills and fund the hours you need to write. This flow of money can come from the writing itself, or from somewhere else—whatever allows you to write more.

3. And then there is a second flow, which is social feedback—people admiring your work, peers and mentors and editors giving you advice and input. This flow of information changes the work, for better or worse. If the audience or the expectations are misaligned, you can get audience captured and produce bad work. But if the flow is good, you can get into this lovely flywheel where the input you get from others helps you improve your writing, which drives in even more and better input, which again improves the writing, and so on. This is called creating a scene.

In the average, normal writing career of a published author, these flows are not great. There isn’t that much money flowing in, so you can’t afford to write as much as you want, and the feedback that arrives from the audience and your editors isn’t improving your work as rapidly as it could. Also, everything moves very slowly.

But if you think hard about these flows, separately, and tweak them one after the other, I’m pretty sure you can find ways to improve your current machinery, step by step. You can fund more hours of writing (for example by becoming a freelance software engineer, so you can charge a lot per hour, and cutting back on your living expenses), and you can shape your writing so that it attracts the audience and mentors you need to grow in the direction that feels most exciting to you. After enough tweaks like this, you will have a very good machinery, fitted to your needs.

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In March 1991, Robert Rodriguez, then 22 years old, decided to write and shoot three feature-length home movies to gain experience making full-length films, in case he ever received an offer to direct a real one.

Nine months later, having finished El Mariachi, the first part of his planned trilogy, Rodriguez found himself in the office of Robert Newman, a Hollywood agent. Watching the trailer Rodriguez had cut, Newman, who would go on to sell the movie to Columbia in a deal worth $1.8 million, asked:

“How much did it cost [to make] again?”

“$7,000.”

“Really? That’s pretty good . . . most trailers usually cost between $20,000 and $30,000.”

“No,” Rodriguez said, “the whole movie cost $7,000.”

In nine months, he had written, directed, and sold a 90-minute action film that cost a third of what a film trailer would. How was that possible? At the time, the cost of film stock alone would normally run into several hundred thousand dollars for an action film like El Mariachi.

During the press tour, the journalists thought the story about the $7,000 was too outlandish to be true, and Rodriguez had to show them a behind-the-scenes video to convince them. In that video they could see that the reason Rodriguez, the son of two Mexican immigrants with ten children in San Antonio, had been able to make a commercial big-screen action film from his private savings was that he had a hacker mindset.

Hacker mindset

I learned the term hacker mindset from Gwern, a pseudonymous blogger, who wrote about how people like Rodriguez think in his 2012 essay “On Seeing Through and Unseeing.”

To explain the hacker mindset, one example Gwern uses is people who set world records in video games, doing so-called speedruns.

Unlike normal sports, where the athletes are usually at best twice as fast as a healthy adult, video game speedruns can be so insanely much faster than a normal playthrough that a normal person can’t even understand what is happening on the screen. The last game I played was Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, in my parents’ house in the late nineties. I put in some 30 hours, and if I remember correctly, I didn’t even finish it—but when I look at the current speed run record, I see that Bloobiebla & MrGrunz have finished the game in 20 minutes and 9 seconds. I can’t wrap my head around how that is possible.

And I don’t get much wiser when I look at the recording and notice that a substantial part of it is them running backwards with a hen on their head. If we want crazy outcomes, I guess we have to accept crazy behavior.

The difference between Bloobiebla & MrGrunz and me is not, primarily, that they are faster than I. It is, Gwern points out, that they see the game differently. When I played Zelda, I saw “villages” and “hen.” But they have a hacker mindset, so they know that there aren’t actually any villages and hens.

The game, Gwern writes, just “pretends to be made out of things like ‘walls’ and ‘speed limits’ and ‘levels which must be completed in a particular order.’” But what it actually is, at a deeper level, is bits, code, memory locations, processing units, and so on and so forth.

And because they see the game at this level—and understand how it’s put together—Bloobiebla & MrGrunz can make moves in the game that I couldn’t, such as “deliberately overloading the RAM to cause memory allocation errors” (perhaps this was what running backwards with a hen on their head did) which, Gwern writes, can “give you infinite ‘velocity’ or shift you into alternate coordinate systems in the true physics, allowing enormous movements in the supposed map, giving shortcuts to the ‘end’ of the game.”

And lo and behold, soon after Bloobiebla & MrGrunz drop the hen, they fall through a “wall” and land in the final “level.”

Because I’m watching the abstraction that the game is pretending to be—a cute fantasy world with villages and swords and horses—this looks bizarre to me. But it makes perfect sense when you understand what the game is at a deeper level.

Most systems can be viewed at multiple levels. There is a superficial system which pretends to be made of one thing (walls, hens). But actually, it is really made of something else (bits, memory allocations). And if you learn to understand that underlying system, you can find ways to use the lower-level details to steer the system in a way that looks incomprehensible to those who only see the more superficial system.

Robert Rodriguez’s classmates must have experienced a bewilderment of this kind when they saw him go down to Mexico with $7,000 dollars and return with a film showing in cinemas across the US. That was not a move that was part of how they’d been told the game that is the film industry works; but it was a move that was perfectly compatible with the facts of cameras, lights, and Hollywood deal-making if you understood them at a deep enough level.

Rodriguez could speedrun a film career, walking through proverbial walls, because he saw through the game to its underlying mechanics. He had the hacker mindset. He was willing to get his hands dirty and learn the practical realities. He saw that a lot of what the other film students took for reality were just fictions they’d been taught at school.

This is a bit vague. Let me give some concrete examples of ways he saw through the system his classmates took for reality.

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At film school, they were taught to work with a crew, where someone specialized as a cameraman, another as a sound technician, and so on. But Rodriguez, who had always done movies on his own as a kid, knew that that was just a convention. If he could figure it out, it would be more effective to do all of the technical work himself, which also meant he wouldn’t have to pay for a crew.

This seemed insane to others. On July 24, 1991, three days before leaving for Mexico, his film teacher asked him who would be the director of photography.

From Rodriguez’s diary, published as Rebel Without a Crew:

I know he’ll shit all over me if I tell him the truth—that I’m planning on shooting it all by myself, without a crew. So I told him, “I’m going to be the director of photography, but I’ll probably have a small crew around to help out.” He shook his head. “No, no, no, no … You’re going to fail! Your actors are going to hate you. They’re going to be sitting there waiting for you while you light the set. Don’t be an idiot. Get a director of photography.”

Instead, Rodriguez bought 250-watt bulbs that he screwed into the existing lamps on the sets, and that was that for lighting.

At film school, they had also been taught to shoot several takes from multiple angles so the editor could shape the scene, but since Rodriguez was the editor, he could visualize exactly what the scenes would be, shooting only precisely what was needed, a single take per scene, which minimized the cost of film stock and editing time.

A thousand small optimizations like this meant he could shoot the film in ten days while staying with the lead actor’s mom in Ciudad Acuña during summer break.

More examples

There are similar shortcuts in most domains if you learn to see through the abstractions and unsee the conventional ways of viewing something. There are deeper levels to most systems if you are willing to take them apart.

For example, when I grew up, I was told that there was such a thing as a “job,” and these were listed on “job boards” where you could read about the “qualifications” necessary—qualifications that you got through something called “education.” This isn’t false. You can play the game this way. But it is a superficial way of playing the game.

A slightly more precise reading is to say that the economy is made up of 8.25 billion people, all trying to solve various problems—and what “getting a job” really means is finding a person with a problem and convincing them that you can solve it for them. This can be done by looking at job boards, of course, where people who collaborate on solving problems (aka work at companies) list some of the problems they want help solving.

Now, you notice more things you could do. You could, for example, go talk to people directly and convince them that you can solve their problems. Or, you could work in public, sharing projects you are building on the internet or elsewhere, so people can see what you do and reach out. If you want to work at a specific company, you could talk directly to the employees you’d want to work with, understand their current problems, and then solve their problems for free, so they lobby their superiors to employ you. People who operate at this level tend to have more interesting careers than those who play the game by looking at job postings.

Another everyday example of the hacker mindset can be seen when agentic people deal with bureaucracy.

Companies and governments like to pretend to be formal, machine-like systems, where things have to be done in a specific way. But this, just as in the case of the video game pretending to be made of levels, is an abstraction. A fiction. Actually, a bureaucracy is just people and some file systems. Calling and asking to speak to a supervisor, or showing up in person, or finding the specific person who handles your case, often lets you bypass the “system.” If you search Patrick MacKenzie’s tweets, you get a long stream of great examples of him doing this—getting the customer service agent at an airline to buy him a ticket from their competitor when his flight was delayed, for instance, or calling pharmacies to create an inventory of the US vaccine stock as he did together with a group of volunteers when the US government failed to keep track of the vaccine stocks during Covid.

How do people develop a hacker mindset?

One thing I personally find useful is to read about people who have it and notice what they do.1 This has helped me see possibilities that I had been blind to because I had a too superficial reading of the system.

It also helps if you can surround yourself with people who have a hacker mindset. I suspect this kind of cultural osmosis played an important role for Rodriguez. His dad was a self-employed salesman and was always trying new things—they seem to have been a family that encouraged taking machines apart and doing stuff yourself. Rodriguez also had a great boss at his first job:

My first job in high school was at a photo lab and I remember what my first boss, Mr. Riojas, told me one day after he saw some of my cartoons and photographs. He said that I had creative talent, but what I really needed to do if I wanted to be successful was to become technical. He said that just about anyone can become technical, but not everyone can be creative. And there are a lot of creative people who never get anywhere because they don’t have technical skills. Part of what makes a person creative is his lack of emphasis on things technical.

My boss said that if you are someone who is already creative, and then you become technical, then you are unstoppable.

This is another common pattern among people who have a hacker mindset. They have gotten their hands dirty playing around with the technical parts, insisting on understanding every aspect of the work, “weaving [the] system into [their] mind[s] so tight that it’s hard to find the stitches after a while,” as Alice Maz writes about her experience becoming incomprehensibly good at Minecraft.

When Rodriguez made his first feature film at 23, he had already spent a decade making home videos, editing them by using two VCRs, so he could play the raw material on one and record the bits he wanted on the other. By working hands-on, guided by his own needs, he had learned the details of the work and how things could be manipulated in such a way that his films looked good even if he had no crew or budget.

In an appendix to the diary, he writes:

The most important and useful thing you need to be a filmmaker is “experience in movies,” as opposed to “movie experience.” There’s a difference. They always tell you in film school and in Hollywood that in order to be a filmmaker you need to get “movie experience” so you can work your way up in the business. The reasoning being that by working on other films, even as a production assistant, you get to see firsthand how others make movies. Now, that’s exactly the kind of experience you don’t need. You don’t want to learn how other people make movies especially real Hollywood movies, because nine times out of ten their methods are wasteful and inefficient. You don’t need to learn that!

“Experience in movies,” on the other hand is where you yourself get a borrowed video camera or other recording device and record images then manipulate those images in some kind of editing atmosphere. Whether you use old ¾” video editing systems, VCR to VCR, or even computer editing. Whatever you can get your hands on. The idea is to experience creating your own images and/or stories no matter how crude they are and then manipulating them through editing.

That is, you want to avoid learning the conventional wisdom about how something works—which is always simplified and filled with false walls—and instead focus on getting into close contact with the actual nuts and bolts by doing everything yourself. That is how you will learn to understand the system well enough to “see through” it.

It might sound like a depressing conclusion to this essay: the way to find shortcuts is to first spend ten years learning all of the technical details.

But it is not depressing.

What we’re talking about here isn’t like going to school—it emphatically is not that—suffering through all of the boring prerequisites before you get to do the exciting parts. What we’re talking about is actually doing the fun stuff, playing around with projects that excite you, trusting that you can learn enough to solve your problems. If you keep tinkering, doing one fun project after another, you will eventually see through the system.

Also, it is only the first time that it might take years. After you’ve developed a hacker mindset in one area of your life, it is much easier to see the rest of reality in the same way.

Having seen through the superficiality and clumsiness of the normal way of doing things, you are less likely to trust conventional wisdom going forward and more likely to trust your eyes. You know that there are deeper layers to reality and have a sense for how to access them.

And then all of reality becomes something you can horse around with.

Drafts of this essay were discussed with Johanna Karlsson. The copy edits were done by Esha Rana. Any remaining mistakes are mine.

Evolution of the Cosmos from a single point (Bindu), c. 1700

Since I began working on this essay three hours ago, around 21,000 people have, statistically, died. Now the sky is low and cloudy; I’m feeling tired, and looking at the numbers, I learn that about 10 million people are having sex as I type this sentence.

It can be hard to appreciate just how large each moment of each day is, how much more is going on than we experience.

Even just thinking about the fact that every place I’ve ever visited still exists (however reconfigured) gives me vertigo. In the medical factory where I worked at 21, the production lines are still going, and have done so, more or less continuously, for the 15 years since I last thought of them. There are people living in every house and apartment I’ve ever stayed in: if I were to go back and peek through the windows, I’d see them, as real as I. Also, everyone I’ve ever been on a date with is—I hope—still alive, somewhere, occupied with a life that feels like the world to them. And everyone I’ve worked with, or met on a bus, or been to school with.

I think about this, or rather I feel it—the heaviness of it—as I read the first six books of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume. It is one of the more moving experiences of art I’ve had this year.

The premise of Balle’s novel series is, for those who haven’t read it, that the same day—November 18th—repeats over and over. Every morning a piece of French toast falls from a table at a hotel in Paris. The same football team wins the match in the same way, and the fans get drunk at the same bar. In an apartment in Clairon-sous-Bois, a man boils tea in the morning, always in precisely the same way at precisely the same time. And a girl sits on a train crying after being dumped, over and over again. The clouds retrace their paths across the sky.

Only one person, Tara Selter, whose diary we are reading, notices what is happening. Only she is not trapped in an eternal return. She can do whatever she wants. She is free to change.

Because we cannot move freely in the dimension of time, we experience reality as a series of three-dimensional moments succeeding one another. But if we could observe spacetime from the outside, reality would look like a 4-D object with time as its fourth dimension. Every chair and stone and person would reveal itself as a so-called world line—a four-dimensional object extending through time. In the same way that we can walk around a sculpture and see it from different angles, we would be able to observe the sculpture’s world line at different points in time—in the morning light, in the moment a child tries to climb the sculpture, in the moment the sculptor carved it, three hundred thousand years earlier, when the stone lay hidden in the bedrock. The sculpture would reveal itself as the four-dimensional object that (I’m told the theory of relativity says) it always was.

Something similar happens in Balle’s series.

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Cousin Bichonnade in Flight, Jacques Henri Lartigue, 1905

The second Monday in March, I flew to Copenhagen to record a podcast with my friend Jackson Dahl. It’s now online, and you can watch/listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, X, or Substack, and find full transcript and links here.

Meeting people like Jackson has been very important to me. I grew up in the Swedish countryside, and, as you might know, live on an island in the Baltic Sea. Actually, I live on such a remote corner of the island that the locals call it the Wild West. Everyone who “wants to get ahead in life” moves away from here as soon as they can (and a worrying share of the other passengers on the flight to Copenhagen were sick people on their way to the larger hospital on the mainland: three ambulances waited on the tarmac when we climbed the stairs from the plane). It’s not a world where people feel the possibilities are particularly vast.

But walking along Copenhagen’s canals with Jackson, the world feels very big. And welcoming. I think of one of Venkatesh Rao’s posts from 2014 called “Don’t Surround Yourself with Smart People”: what you need, Rao says, is people who are differently free, people who are free in ways that you are not, and who can therefore point out things you’re blind to, other games you could play. That’s what it’s felt like to meet Jackson (and others like him—I’ve been quite lucky in that regard).

The first time Jackson interviewed me, ten months ago, he was on vacation in Copenhagen with his family and had managed to get hold of an overheated office space where we sat with two microphones and sweated. Since then the podcast has become his job, and when I arrived at the house where we were to record—an old mill that, in the early 1900s, was converted into a home by an eccentric engineer—Jackson and a technician were standing among piles of cameras, lights, and cables.

During the just under three hours we spent recording, we talked about the value of lingering in confusion, using constraints to enable more creative work, how I journal, why love is like eating dogs, and many other things. I won’t attempt to summarize it. But in case you don’t feel like listening to the whole thing, let me cut and paste one thread that felt very alive to me, which was me grappling with what I believe in.

For context, before getting to the part about beliefs, I first want to quote a passage where Jackson asked me about my maternal grandfather, Nils, who was my first, and most important, role model.

(I’ve edited what follows for brevity.)

Jackson: You wrote about your maternal grandfather, Nils, who passed away last summer:

Life is not a story that builds to a climax; it is a story that meanders. Every single moment in life is as worthy of care and attention as the climax of a story.

What I grieved wasn’t Nils’s worn-out body finally giving up. That felt good, actually; it was a relief for him. What I grieved was all the moments that were gone.

Even more, I grieved all of the moments he had been alive to himself, all of the moments that no one else will ever remember. The feeling of sun on his skin. The long nights in the snowplow, clearing the roads through the pine forests.

The feeling, if any, of his last night when Maud the Elder held his hand and he seemed for a moment to slide out of his dementia sleep and smile. It was the goneness of all of those moments that hurt.

Are there any other moments that come to mind that you would like the world to know about Nils?

Henrik: He was a very special man and meant a lot to me. He retired as a road worker when he was 60, which was the same year I was born. So he spent a lot of time caring for me when my mom started working again. He would take me camping. He was a very down-to-earth kind of person.

There is one beautiful story that says a lot about how he was.

When he was four years old, he and his siblings would get one sugar cube on Saturdays and put it over the fire to make caramel. He did that, and it slid down his throat so he couldn’t breathe. But he was so sensitive that he didn’t want to disturb anyone.

He just went around hugging his mom, his dad, and his seven siblings. Then he went out and lay down in the meadow and prepared to die. Then the sugar melted and slid down.

He wasn’t the most talkative person, but he was extremely determined to do well and to help people. Even during COVID, when he was 92 and basically not holding together anymore, he would still take his walker and walk 500 meters down to the house where the elderly people were in quarantine.

He would go from window to window, sit on his walker, and talk to them. He would always try to find some way that he could be of use.

When I met Johanna, we bought my grandparents’s house, and they moved to a senior apartment next door.

That was a special experience. For the three years we lived there (until, sadly, we had to leave Sweden to homeschool our daughter), Nils was the closest friend I had. I spent more time with him than any other friend between the ages of 25 and 28.

Toward the very end, he couldn’t speak and was completely lost and had to move to the retirement home himself. I don’t think he recognized almost anyone. But he still had that instinct to care.

One of the nurses told us there was another elderly woman in a wheelchair who was having a panic attack; she was acting out and throwing stuff. Nils saw that and, although he couldn’t speak or do anything, he just got up and moved slowly across the room and took her hand. He just sat there for two hours holding her hand; he could feel that his presence made her calm.

He never cared at all about himself and was never self-centered in any way whatsoever. When he died, he instructed that he didn’t want a grave. He wanted to be put in the communal grave without a plaque.

Maybe my atheism comes from him. He didn’t believe in a life after this. He just believed in being of service, being of use, and disappearing into the night. He formed me in so many ways.

In another part of the conversation, where I mentioned that God wasn’t a concept that was alive to me (apart from in the Spinozan sense that God is the totality of reality), Jackson asked what I do believe in.

I had never actually tried to articulate it, so I might change my mind if I think more about it. But this is the answer that arrived when I tried to feel into the question:

Henrik: I believe that we all have something we can contribute.

The universe itself is so extraordinary, with quantum particles, black holes, and evolution. We get to come here and explore and take part in this unfolding creation, and that is remarkable and big in itself. On top of that, because of the accident of your genetics and the place you were born, there are going to be certain things that will only be possible through you.

There will be certain things that only you will be in a position to care for. For some reason, it feels imperative to me that you should protect and be a guardian of that possibility and make sure that you leave the universe a better place.

You should strive to be a force toward higher complexity. When you leave the planet, the fight against entropy should have been won a little bit. Civilization should be a little more coherent.

We should have better theories of the world, richer relationships, more diversity, and more perspectives. It would be super boring if the universe were just rocks floating in dead space because that wouldn’t have as much complexity as biological evolution. I want to be a force for increasing complexity.

Jackson: Is it fulfilled potential? Is that too simple?

Henrik: That’s a good way of defining it down. But what is of primary importance isn’t what I feel. I am not all that important in myself. Of course I value myself because I have to live in my body.

But what matters more to me is this continual unfolding that my ancestors were part of. How can I play a part in this ongoing evolutionary dance?

We’re in this big jam session. How do I make sure that when I leave the stage, the music is still going?

Jackson: The music was going on. It kept going.

Henrik: Hopefully, it is going in an even better direction than when you entered because people around you have grown and are playing more interesting stuff in reaction to what you did.

Jackson is a wonderful interviewer. I think you will enjoy the full episode (and the one we did last year). I also recommend the one he did with Cyan Banister—that was a special one.

The Promenade (study), Claude Monet, 1886

1. Opening up new surfaces in relationships

Two weeks ago, I asked people to send me stories about situations where they had done what felt right to them, even though they feared social pushback.

Generously, more than fifteen people messaged to share their experiences, ranging from coming out as lesbian in Ireland to removing a headscarf in a Muslim community—one person recounted having his life changed by a sudden urge to stay in place when shot at with tear gas; another told the story of getting laid off from a tech job, spending six months living in their car while their friends worried and they slowly regained a connection with themselves that their work and life had disrupted.

It is one of the privileges of having this blog that I get to discover, again and again, how small the sliver of reality I’ve experienced is.

Several of the stories mirrored what I’ve felt in moments when I’ve done the socially awkward but inwardly aligned thing. People described how, despite some initial friction, acting from within brought a sense of lightness and relief.

As Hannah put it,

When you prioritize what you yourself value, everything around you shifts, and asserting that value creates a kind of gravitational pull on the world so that things, systems, relationships get a chance to find new arrangements. What surprises me so far is that my “demands,” contrary to what I expected, haven’t been a burden to others but have opened up new surfaces in my relationships.

But many people also had very different experiences from Hannah and me. When they gathered the courage to act on their own impulse—their own sense of what was right—they were punished. They lost friends, had to leave communities, and, in one case, were thrown out of their group house and ended up temporarily homeless.

What explains these different experiences?

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2. Beth’s story

One of the stories that moved me deeply was from Beth.

Beth’s mother, who was dying of bone cancer, was very attached to Beth’s fiancé. He was a good and kind man. Beth’s friends adored him. But Beth, watching her mother struggle, realized she did not.

When Beth called her fiancé on the phone to seek comfort during her mother’s treatment, she noticed that she would always end up being the one who comforted him in his grief over her mother. This had been a pattern that had worn on her before—her role, it seemed, was to help him with his insecurities. And it was a pattern that recurred in many of Beth’s relationships—none of her friends had the patience to listen to the grief she felt for her mother; they wanted to talk about their own problems.

Beth says she might not have noticed this pattern if not for a new friend she’d recently met, who (to quote her)

showed care and listened to my pain and didn’t ask me to carry his. The contrast illuminated the position I had created for myself where I did not matter to the people closest to me except in how I served them. Once I realized that it felt wrong. I asked myself where I felt alive and able to hear my own thoughts and it was not with these people and these attachments and they confused me from hearing my own voice. I spent a lot of time alone, confused about what I wanted from my life but knowing I could not find it in these circumstances.

Meeting someone who could listen to her, and “the recognition of the kind of love that was possible,” gave her the courage to step out for herself. She decided to break off the engagement.

But then, she writes, “the worst did happen.” Her friends and family took her ex’s side. Her parents, disappointed with Beth, continued to call and visit him and tried to make Beth change her mind. Her friends talked behind her back and rejected her.

3. Reorienting your position in a group vs with individuals

I will return to Beth in a moment, but I want to get back to the question of why these kinds of decisions lead to deepened relationships in some cases and rejection in others.

One obvious answer is that it depends a lot on how open-minded people you are interacting with are.

But perhaps a more interesting answer—or at least a pattern in the cases I heard—is that things tend to go badly more often when people try to reorient their relationship toward a group, rather than toward individual people.

It made me think of something my friend Alex once said. The context was that he was frustrated by the attitude of a group he’d given a presentation to. I asked him if he thought it might be good for them to know that what they’d done had made him mad. And he said, “That would require a level of emotional maturity that I gladly ascribe to many people. But certainly once you get into groups of people, the odds go way, way down.”

This fits with the stories I heard. When dealing with individuals, people could (almost) always find a way to reach common ground and create, as Hannah put it, “new surfaces in the relationship.” But with groups, there was a whole set of social dynamics that made people turn on whoever challenged the status quo.

Those who had good outcomes in group contexts often didn’t address the group as a whole (at first), but instead had conversations with individual members of the group one-on-one so that they could, in more incremental steps, update their relationships and gather support.

4. Disagreeing warmly

Navigating social dynamics requires a lot of skill, especially when you’re going your own way and want to minimize conflict. The difference in these skills, I suspect, is another reason why some people find it easier to go their own way than others.

One person I chatted with, a French engineer, made an interesting observation about three disagreeable men at their workplace. All three are vocal when they have differing perspectives on issues, the engineer told me. But two of them are well-liked by their colleagues, while “the third seems to build up resentment internally and to sometimes offend and alienate people,” even if his disagreements are “still often quite beneficial.”

None of them are selfish. They all defend what they believe is globally good according to their values. The main difference is that the two who handle dissent well are extremely warm people. They wear their hearts on their sleeves. It’s clear that they deeply care about people and can make space internally for negative feelings. The less skillful one is more analytical, more cold. He cares about people but in a less embodied way. And generally, I guess he’s worse at reading the room and making space for others.

Talking this over with my wife Johanna, she observed that when you are not able to process your negative emotions—and instead let feelings like frustration, vindictiveness, and hurt bleed out into the conversation—it makes it much harder to talk about difficult things. Dealing with a disagreement, or a situation where you need to update how you think about something, is hard in itself. If you are at the same time asked to deal with someone else’s feelings, that might be too much to ask. People get infected by the nervousness or frustration or cageyness, and then their capacity to process new information goes way down, and you end up polarized.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t voice your perspective if you struggle to contain your emotions. It just means that if you can process your own feelings, you will be more effective at voicing your needs and perspectives.

Going your own way is a bit like playing a countermelody when jamming music with others. If you are just playing along, filling in the same melody as everyone else, you don’t need a lot of skill. But the more dissonant your ideas are, the more skill it takes to make them work. There is a clip of Jacob Collier where he talks about this and demonstrates how there are no “wrong notes” you can play in a song: you just have to figure out how to bring them home—how to resolve the notes in a way that makes sense with the overall music. But if you want to do something really spicy, you need to deeply understand what everyone else is doing (you need empathy), and you need to be attuned to yourself, so you can find an elegant way of weaving the off-scale melody into the harmony.

5. Coda

So let me bring this all home by giving you the coda of Beth’s story.

After Beth had broken off her engagement and had to face her parents’s hurt and disapproval, she felt that the hold they had had over her gave way. She was still “kind to them and loved them and respected many things about them,” but they didn’t enter into her calculations anymore.

After a few months, when it was clear that Beth wasn’t backing down, her parents stopped trying to change her mind. They continued to call and visit her ex, but they didn’t involve her in their attempts to maintain the bond anymore and eventually stopped.

There was a long period where she struggled to make sense of the implications of the choice she had made, and what she wanted to replace her old life with. It is easier to know that something isn’t right than it is to figure out what to replace it with. But over time, the act of paying attention to how she felt and making choices aligned with that helped her develop “a better ear for [her] desires” and grew her “ability to make choices based on a clear understanding of [herself] and [her] own values.”

Beth realized that she was in love with the friend whose openness and care had given her the courage to go her own way, and eventually, they decided to get married. It was tough for him, she says, to be brought into this situation, especially with Beth’s mother undergoing aggressive cancer treatment. But he was so helpful “that it softened things,” and Beth’s mother accepted him as part of the family.

“I also don’t discount what facing death did to my mother’s willingness to change her very strong opinions and let me live my life without fighting it,” Beth writes.

Overcoming the difficulty of the situation for Beth required acknowledging the pain of her decision and “also recognizing the freedom that [she] acquired in making that choice.”

By asserting myself in this way, I also fundamentally remade my relationship to those who mattered and discarded the rest. My mother ultimately came to love my current spouse and was able to participate fully in our wedding before she died two months later. The decision felt at the time like a leap into the unknown and abandoning social safety, but in reality I gained a deeper safety that has provided a more secure foundation for building a flourishing life.

Acknowledgements + chat

I feel immense gratitude and care for everyone who was willing to share their stories and reflections. You know who you are. And a special thank you to Johanna, whom I always turn to when I need to think things over, and who probed me to make serious revisions of the current essay. And Esha Rana, who did the copy edits.

This essay—like all my free essays—was entirely funded by the contributions of paid subscribers. If you enjoyed it, give them your thanks, and if you can spare $8 dollars per month, consider joining them:

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Here is a separate chat for paid subscribers if you want to discuss today’s essay in a more private setting. I think I will need to write another essay about the emotional work necessary to deal with these types of social frictions, but I feel like I’m too stuck in my own life experience to say much that is generally useful; I would love to hear from (and talk this over with) more people.

/Henrik

The Dancing Class, Edgar Degas, 1871-72

• Here are some notes about something I’m trying to get my head around. I would appreciate feedback and reflections!

• At the end are some recommendations of films and books I’ve found interesting lately.

In Récoltes et Semailles there is a famous passage where the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck writes about the years he spent as a young man isolated from the mathematical world, and how the experience of solitude was the key to his creativity.

Because of the Second World War, which Grothendieck partly had to spend in the internment camp at Rieucros, by 1945, as a seventeen-year-old, he was almost entirely self-taught as a mathematician. Too poor to get into a good school, he spent three years as a student in Montpellier, where the teaching was inadequate for his capacity, and where he therefore almost entirely avoided the lectures to instead pursue his own questions (and pick oranges to pay for his rent).

Three years later, when Grothendieck arrived in Paris to study at the École Normale, the French elite school for the country’s most gifted students, it became obvious how far behind his new classmates he was; they had spent their childhoods in private schools and with tutors.

Grothendieck writes that,

I admired the facility with which they picked up, as if at play, new ideas, juggling them as if familiar with them from the cradle—while for myself I felt clumsy, even oafish, wandering painfully up an arduous track, like a dumb ox faced with an amorphous mountain of things that I had to learn (so I was assured), things I felt incapable of understanding the essentials or following through to the end.

While the other students had been attending lectures, Grothendieck had, among other things, spent his time being confused by what length is. None of his teachers had been able to give him a satisfactory answer—they thought it was obvious what length was. His new teachers also brushed away what he had spent his teenage years on—the insights about length he had arrived at had already been known for thirty years as the Lebesgue integral! In the eyes of the faculty in Paris, his effort had been wasted.

But in Grothendieck’s eyes it had “not been wasted in the least.” In his eyes it was precisely that solitary work, when he had reinvented what a more competent teacher could have taught him—it was that work that allowed him, over the course of the next thirty years, to leave a mark on the history of mathematics, while his more competent classmates failed to do so.

Grothendieck, again:

In those critical years I learned how to be alone. [But even] this formulation doesn’t really capture my meaning. I didn’t, in any literal sense learn to be alone, for the simple reason that this knowledge had never been unlearned during my childhood. It is a basic capacity in all of us from the day of our birth. However these three years of work in isolation [1945–1948], when I was thrown onto my own resources, following guidelines which I myself had spontaneously invented, instilled in me a strong degree of confidence, unassuming yet enduring, in my ability to do mathematics, which owes nothing to any consensus or to the fashions which pass as law....

That is to say, the work in solitude had trained his ability to autonomously navigate to interesting and valuable problems—an ability that is crucial for navigating skillfully at the frontier of human knowledge and expanding what we know. (I also suspect that Grothendieck underrates how much more naturally gifted he was than his peers.)

(Johanna and I have written about Grothendieck in more detail here.)

One way to think about what happened during those years of solitude was that what Grothendieck developed was mental proprioception.

Proprioception (without the adjective mental in front of it) is our ability to, without the help of sight, determine how our limbs are positioned. It is a kind of three-dimensional sense for our body.

Ballet dancers have extremely good proprioception. In fact, a large part of the challenge in becoming a skilled dancer is precisely that kind of feel for the position of the limbs: it is at least as important as having the muscles required to execute the movements. A large share of ballet training is devoted to developing proprioception. You stand in front of a mirror and execute movements while observing what you are doing, so that you can more accurately correlate the shape of a good movement with how it feels in the body when it is performed. When the dancers have a deep, precise understanding of how it should feel when the back is straight in the right way, and the ankle bent correctly, and the leg lifted just so … then they can, during the performance, follow their feeling and know that the form is correct, and they can notice precisely what is wrong when they deviate.

The thought I am playing with is that the same is true for our thoughts: it is possible to have a better or worse sense for how our thoughts flow around in our heads. And it is possible to train your mental proprioception so that you can feel when your state of mind has the right shape for generating valuable thoughts and solving the problems in front of you, or when your mental posture is wrong.

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Peatery in Drenthe, Vincent van Gogh, 1883

In the 1930s, people on the island where we live would go down to the old coal pit after thunderstorms, the village historian told me. They went looking for pink fragments of stone, the size of a finger—fossils after a kind of 120-million-year-old squid that had been hauled from the ground by the miners. But the villagers thought the pink stones were the arrowheads of lightning that had struck, and they would put the lightning tips they gathered under their beds to keep themselves safe. Lighting will not strike the same place twice.

There was still a thin drizzle in the air when, after the next rain storm, our four-year-old and I parked our bicycle next to the coal pit. There was no life in sight: it was all soot and sand, a black desert. A century after the production had closed down, not a single straw of grass. The rain, pouring in thin streams, had carved the black sand into a labyrinth of ravines.

We walked the labyrinth toward the sea. I told Maud that this is what the earth must have looked like 500 million years ago, before life seeped and wriggled out of the sea and conquered land.

Rolling down the walls of the ravines were scraps of coal, few of them larger than my thumb. The village historian had told me that a sculptor, a stone cutter, who lived nearby, used to go down here in the winters to collect these scraps of coal to heat his house. In the early 1960s, when he was in his twenties with two kids and few prospects of selling his art, he had been brought to such financial despair that he could be seen out here with a wheelbarrow, crawling on his knees.

In the years after I heard about the sculptor scavenging stone coal by the sea, I began collecting information about him. When artists who had known him came into the gallery where I worked, I would interview them. I looked for pictures of his sculptures. In our archives, I found a self-published book he had made and read what he had written.

These, our first years on the island, were, as I’ve written elsewhere, difficult years. Johanna and I had two young children, whom we raised at home. To have time to write, I would go up at 5 am and write until 9, when I took care of the kids until I had to bicycle down to the art gallery, where I built exhibitions and did the bookkeeping in the afternoons. I remember us climbing with lamps on the roof, late at night, tarring the wood on the new roof.

It was, I think, in order to handle the exhaustion and loneliness I felt, that I began collecting stories of local artists who had struggled and seen little external reward. It felt good to know that we weren’t alone, even if no one Johanna and I knew shared our obsession and were willing to make the tradeoffs we made. These landscapes had known others like us. There had been an autistic farmhand who spent his spare time painting the fields around our village; his paintings were discovered when he was 61, a year before his death. There had been a homosexual German art collector who had fled the Nazis and hid in a boat house, where he hung the walls with Matisse and Kandinsky. At the local museum, I had bought a stack of postcards of paintings done within walking distance of our house, and I kept them on my writing desk.

All of the artists had been outsiders. They had not been part of a scene. But when you grouped them, they looked like a constellation—like lone suns, hung in infinite darkness, that from afar revealed themselves to be part of the same pattern. It was a pattern of people with a compulsive need to look at the landscapes around them, at their small life worlds, and to capture what they saw. I imagined myself and Johanna as a part of the constellation and took comfort in that.

I knew that artists always struggle with poverty and social ostracisation, unless they are born wealthy. But whenever I read about famous writers or painters or filmmakers, it was hard not to read the stories of their hardships in the light of the fact that they would eventually succeed. And I couldn’t relate to that. It is cute when someone calls a plumber and then gets shocked when the American composer Philip Glass appears to fix their toilet. Well, how do you expect artists to pay the rent? But it is cute, precisely, because Philip Glass is Philip Glass and will eventually have his operas playing on every continent.

I found much more comfort in the stories of artists who fixed toilets but never got famous, and who did it anyway. It helped me remember that that cave man desire to populate the earth with your art is normal.

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The sculptor had moved to the island in 1957. Looking for a place with good granite, he and his wife, K, both young art students, had bicycled around the island, looking at old farms. The one they bought cost 18,000 kroner (about $30k, inflation-adjusted). It lacked electricity, running water, and sewer.

By the time they moved in, their first daughter had been born. The daughter, who later married a Japanese stone carver who came to study her father’s work, says growing up with two working artists was, despite the poverty, a beautiful experience. “It felt like we [kids] owned the forests, the fields, the cliffs, and the small ponds with salamanders.” “Dad would always whistle Bach while he worked.”

In 1961, the family had grown to four, and their annual income was 1,800 kroner ($3k, inflation-adjusted). Their daughter says the municipality refused to believe that they could survive on that. But they kept sheep for milk, meat, and fur; they grew what they ate; and the granite for sculptures, the sculptor quarried himself on the farm and pulled without machines, using rolling logs and pulleys.1

The sculptor’s wife, in an interview in 2004, says he had an unfathomable capacity for work. He would rise early, eat breakfast with the kids, and then work in the quarry or carve or tend the farm until lunch, when he’d sleep—as the old stone cutters he had apprenticed with would sleep each lunch, sitting up—before going out to work until dusk.

A local art historian, who knew the family, says, “The only thing that could keep him from the stone was if it was so cold that he couldn’t be in his workshop. Then he would sit inside and work with clay instead.”

The work was what kept him connected to himself and to the life force he felt in the world. “The more you work, the more things come to you. It’s a very amusing function,” the sculptor writes. “You get into a good circle, where the more you make, the more you can do, and the more ideas come to you. And conversely, if you’re away from it, it’s very hard to get going again. And your stomach starts to hurt, and you get depressed. Then you just have to throw yourself into it, but that can be hard. … I love the feeling of stone dust between my teeth after a long winter.”

Describing the work with the clay, he writes that he would sit with his eyes “almost closed,” feeling the shapes take form in his hands. When a shape gave him a deep tactile pleasure, he would open his eyes and study what had happened. “I fill both my warehouse, but also my head with experiences of form, so that I can scoop freely from it [when I stand before a rock to be carved]. And the fact that I’ve had the form in my hands means I can remember them much better.”

He spent a lifetime exploring which shapes spoke to his hands, the hands of this particular man, who loved children and nature and who will not be mentioned in the history books. Then he took these small, intimate, and often sexual feelings and made them permanent as rocks.

“If you look at the cliffs that have been carved by the glaciers during the ice age,” he wrote, “you can still see the carvings there 10,000 years later—so these shapes will live on for a long time.”

The feeling of a hand in 1972 made into an object that will stand for millennia… It is hard not to see a parallel to some of the oldest preserved cave paintings, which are hands that have been held up against the cave wall and preserved as silhouettes by color pigments blown at the hand. We were here; we felt this.

In the late 1960s, the sculptor began working with a local factory that produced sewage pipes. In the winters, when his workshop was too cold for him to carve stone, he would go to the factory and pick up unburned clay pipes, place them in his living room, and start bending and reshaping the pipes into sculptures. When he delivered them back to the factory to be burned in their 100-meter-long tunnel kiln, there would come a glimmer into the workers’s eyes as they offered knowing assessments of the sculptures—often abstract penises or vaginas, or abstract penises penetrating abstract vaginas. Again: like cave art. The workers were delighted to participate in an art project like that.

There was no economic logic in doing what the sculptor did. But it spoke to a deep human need. We need sewage pipes, yes, but we also need to honor the sense of aliveness that rushes through us. As in the apocryphal story about a legislative session during the Second World War, when someone suggested cutting the arts funding to support the war effort, and Churchill answered, “But then what are we fighting for?” It is ok to sacrifice yourself to the hunger for art; that is what the sculptor’s work says to me.

Some of his works were sold as public decorations, but many just filled the forests and fields where his children played. Their reason for existing was that he wanted to make them.

In 2023, Karen and Mette, two women in their late 70s who volunteered at the art gallery, told me that the sculptor’s farm was still intact. Why no one had told me this before, I do not know. They had been out there in the morning before work, looking at the sculptures, and they giggled when they talked about it.

“You have to go there,” Karen said. “It’s…”

Instead of finishing the sentence, she touched her face in a way that looked embarrassed.

Given that Johanna and I had so much work to do with the gallery and the farm, the kids and the essays, I didn’t have time to search for the sculptor’s farm.

A year passed. I wrote 40 essays, made 24 exhibitions, and tore out an inner wall in our kitchen where I found a mushroom the size of a man.

But then, in October 2024, I found myself with four hours to kill. The air was still warm from summer heat captured in the sea when I got up on my bike and set off in the direction I had been told the farm was.

I rode on the curving paths among hazels, maples, hollies, and oaks. The roads got narrower and narrower, and I spent twenty minutes going down dead ends that led to pig farms and summer houses.

But then the landscape changed: cliffs of granite shot up among the oaks; there was bramble stretching its arms across the road.

Coming around a bend, I saw them. It was a herd of sculptures. They looked primordial, like the remains of a forgotten ice age fertility cult. I saw abstractions of flowers and testicles (“flowers are balls, essentially… so I won’t keep myself from making those even if people go around saying: he’s naughty, that one,” the sculptor had written). I saw a rock that held the essence of a voluptuous woman, a Venus of Willendorf. I saw a giant, four-ton penetration that was, on closer inspection, titled The Priest.

I had already seen some of these works, depicted, but it had not prepared me for the emotional impact of walking into his landscape.

I think the effect came from the deep resonance between the art and the nature it grew out of. The nature around the sculptor’s farm was unusually wild and fecund, with bramble and ivy climbing the trees and mushrooms bursting from the ground. And these forces and forms were mirrored in the art—it was the fecundity of this land, this precise land, that had worked itself into his subconscious and returned as stone. As he wrote in his notes, “It is fantastic to look at, for example, moss and lichens or the smallest flowers through a loupe. Rich independent worlds.” It was here he had spent his life, crawling in the grass, observing the life around him.

But the influence went both ways. By being mirrored in his sculptures, the surrounding nature was changed—it got charged with the eroticism he must have felt for it. The moss, the same moss we have on our farm, here, I felt, was very clearly fornicating, making moss babies, spreading, putting out their forms. The robins sounded like they were getting into it, too. The mushroom caps, with their rich musky smells, revealed themselves as what they are: sexual organs, as did the autumnal pollen blowing in the air—I was surrounded by acts of sex.

Walking to the edge of the farm, I found one of the quarries and thought about the fact that he had carved this world with his own hands. He had torn it from the bowels of the earth. He had quarried and carved stones, and made and fed babies, and quarried again, until, after 45 years, the land had been transformed—had absorbed him.

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This essay is a part of series about art works / artists that have moved me. See also:

At the end of the post, I’ve listed some good things I’ve read / watched / listened to recently.

Here is something I’m think about—

The day before we left for Málaga, Johanna was talking to me about how a lot of consumption tends to make us lose touch with ourselves.

If she goes to check something on the internet, for instance, she often forgets what she meant to do and discovers, half an hour later, that she’s aimlessly scrolling things that make her feel ambiently bad. Even just having internet turned on at home makes her—and me—feel less in touch with ourselves, as if some distracting noise is heard in the back of the head, making it harder to fully tune into ourselves. The internet (and other similar types of consumption, such as TV series) often creates some sort of insatiable hunger that makes you lose touch with yourself.

And then there are the other kinds of consumption (if consumption is even the right word): the kinds that tend to bring us back into ourselves. Looking at paintings, for example. In the evenings, when we’re too tired to work, Johanna and I sometimes open a page in an art book and look at it for 10 minutes (we can’t do it for much longer than that: paintings, unlike reading the internet, spit us back out after a while). And despite having allowed ourselves to get completely absorbed by something external, when we close the art book, we feel more attuned to ourselves.

On the ferry, traveling to the airport, Johanna and I discussed why this is.

There’s this passage from the memoirs of the composer Philip Glass, which I think can shed some light on why art—good art—can bring us into a closer connection with ourselves. Glass writes that,

[when I compose music for films,] I don’t spend a lot of time looking at the image. I look at it once. Maybe twice, but not more than twice. Then I depend on the inaccuracy of my memory to create the appropriate distance between the music and the image. I knew right away that the image and the music could not be on top of each other, because then there would be no room for the spectators to invent a place for themselves. Of course, in commercials and propaganda films, the producers don’t want to leave a space: the strategy of propaganda is not to leave a space, not to leave any question. Commercials are propaganda tools in which image and music are locked together in order to make an explicit point, like “Buy these shoes” or “Go to this casino.”

Because art has a gap, a distance, a space we need to fill, well—there is little wonder that, at the end of a session sitting before a painting, we feel more connected to ourselves. To make a painting meaningful, we need to fill it with meaning; we need to listen inward and channel the felt sense that the painting evokes into the gaps left in the art. We need to attune to ourselves. And so when we step out of it, we feel closer to ourselves.

Art can in this way be seen as a kind of guided meditation. It is an external structure that guides our attention until we’ve achieved an interesting and deep connection to what happens inside of us. But it is not only art that is like this. Many things can attune us to ourselves if we attune to them.

I thought about this a lot during the week we spent in Málaga.

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From Lessons in Darkness, Werner Herzog, 1992

I recently reread The Path to Power, the first part of the biography of President Lyndon Johnson, which Robert Caro has been working on since 1976. Before I first read Caro seven years ago, my understanding of how political power works was, as I recall it, very limited and flawed. I thought about power—to the extent I thought about it at all—in abstract and formal terms, along the lines of how it was explained in school. There were branches of government vested with different kinds of powers, and rules and laws governing how they can be used and by whom. If you got elected to a public office, you gained power; if you got a job as CEO, you gained another sort of power, and so on.

In Caro’s biographies, it is clear that the real political operators don’t think about it like this at all. To them, power is something you frack, something you force out of the stone by pumping fluid into the cracks. If you pay close attention, you will discover that there are drops of power everywhere—in the good feelings someone’s mother holds for you, in being able to get your college friend a job, in knowing embarrassing facts about your mentor, in having someone’s trust, and so on. To any normal person, these drops are so small that they barely register, and anyway, it feels wrong to treat someone’s mom as a reservoir to frack. But Caro’s subjects are willing to do anything to win, so they will, so to speak, pump fracking fluid into the ground. They will press it into every little crevice, forcing drops of power mixed with sand to the surface. And as it turns out, if you extract all the small things and pool them together, it can be a massive reserve of power, indeed.

It is not that the political “technicians” don’t care about the official sources of power—Lyndon B. Johnson is willing to do anything to become president, however appalling and degrading to himself or others. But a presidency, or a senate seat, or a seat in congress—that is like a big, well surveyed oil field. It will be intensely competed over, unlike the smaller crevices of power. And unless you have been able to frack enormous amounts, being elected to office is of limited use. Kennedy, for instance, struggled to push his programs and reforms through Congress, but the week after he was assassinated, the very next week, the reforms got unstuck and started moving, as Johnson was sworn in.

It seems Johnson saw the entire world in terms of instruments of power that he could collect. This is the purpose of life as far as he’s concerned. It seems to have been this way since he was a toddler. Age three, when he can’t get attention, he hides inside a haystack and listens for a long time as his father’s workers search the hills and the creek. His mother stands a few feet away from him, crying; he doesn’t let her know; he seems to enjoy being able to control what other people feel and do.

As a teenager, when he meets his friends’s parents and grandparents, he flatters them endlessly, climbing into the knees of harsh old women to kiss them and call them grandma. When his friends want permission to do something they know their parents will not let them, they send Johnson instead, because the adults are so enamored by him that he can get whatever he wants. His flattery gives him power over the parents, which gives him power over the children.

Since he sees the world always in terms of tools that let him bend people to his will, Johnson becomes a true connoisseur of leverage. He notices potential sources of power in places where I’d never think there was any. For example, he seems to realize, sometime in his twenties, that knowing how to get someone else a job gives you purchase over them. So, while still working as a teacher, he begins collecting jobs. When he quits a position, he does it in such a way that he can pass the job on to one of his friends. And when they quit, he makes sure the job goes to another person he wants to control—often by orchestrating so that the person who has the job quits at the worst possible moment for the employer, and the person Johnson wants to get the job comes in the same day with their CV and explains how they can take over and solve the problem.

It would never occur to me to treat jobs this way. But done over and over again, collecting more and more jobs, these odd maneuvers become a source of genuine political power for Johnson. When he is 27 and sees a chance to get elected to Congress, he has about a dozen friends placed at various workplaces, and as soon as the signal comes, they throw themselves into their cars and drive to Austin to help Johnson get elected (with the understanding that this will lead to him being able to give them even better work). By collecting jobs, Johnson had created a political organization for himself, a cadre of men who would do his bidding no matter what he asked, a forceful instrument of power. This, then, allows him to get elected to Congress—which naturally leads him to acquire even more tools: money, contracts, mentors, favors, scores of jobs to distribute among his allies.

The more power he manages to collect, the greater his capacity to acquire more, in a rapidly escalating loop. Four years after spending his time coordinating his friends so they can keep various teaching and administrator jobs within his circle, Johnson has managed to compound that small deposit of power into near-free access to the back door of the Oval Office and the president’s ear.

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Let me linger on the oddness of seeing a source of power in manipulating the principal at a school to pass a job on to one’s friend. It’s striking that the best players, those Caro focuses on, almost always seek out such unexpected sources.

Robert Moses, the Planning Commissioner, Building Coordinator, and Parks Commissioner of New York, and the subject of Robert Caro’s first book, is a good example.

During the years between 1934 and 1968, when Robert Moses had almost free rein to shape New York as he pleased, the root of his power was so-called public authorities. (To explain what a public authority is: sometimes when you build, say, a bridge, politicians will decide that part of the cost should be covered by the bridge itself by taking out a loan and setting up toll booths to pay it off. The money collected then goes to a public authority that is created for that bridge, and when the loan for the bridge has been paid off, the public authority is dissolved or turned into a vehicle for maintenance.)

Before Moses, no one had understood that public authorities could be a way to power—until this point, public works had been small projects, and public authorities seemed boring and inconsequential. But what Moses realized was that he could use part of the revenues from a public authority for other projects, and in that way the original debt would never be paid off… which meant the public authority could exist indefinitely and generate a steady income stream that its chairman could control. Also, since no one had thought that public authorities could be used this way, no one noticed the implications of certain formulations Moses snuck in when he wrote a new state law regulating public authorities, formulations which in practice made it nearly impossible to fire Moses from the chairmanships he began securing for himself.

In this way, Moses, a public employee who never held an elected office, became something bordering on a dictator, with full control over public authorities generating $2 billion a year (inflation adjusted to 2026 dollars), an empire which he used to sculpt New York as if it were his private art project.

There’s an element of hacker mindset in interacting with the world this way.1 Both Johnson and Moses took seemingly irrelevant details of reality and leveraged them to get results that seem unbelievable (and/or appalling) to others. It is like when people do speed runs of video games: it feels like they are playing a completely different game. Speedrunners don’t think of the games the way normal players do—they don’t think in terms of “walls” and “doors” and “levels” and “weapons” and so on; they think in terms of the structure of the underlying software that is generating this, and the hardware that the code is running on. The game for them is about figuring out how to push the controller in such a way so as to cause the underlying code and hardware to behave in unintended ways, causing “bugs” that will let them jump through walls or travel straight to the last level, and so on. Speed runners are looking at reality at a different level of abstraction and can, because of this, do things that seem impossible at a more superficial level of abstraction.

When you treat power in the same way, as Johnson did, it has very strange and unpredictable consequences for the fabric of a society. It is like being in a game where someone else is speedrunning, pushing the game engine to glitch in ways suitable for them: you, as a normal person, will be going about your days, but there will be these odd, seemingly unconnected bugs happening—the world around you will be changing in strange ways—and then suddenly, someone has teleported to the last level and gained enormous power. And perhaps is using it in disturbing ways.

Here is one way to think about what is going on. Normal people care about a lot of things. We want to have a good time and fit in and be ethical and have status and so on—it is a very complex sort of value function. And since it contains many competing considerations, none of the dimensions we care about get particularly optimized. We have an ok time, but not a great one, and we’re decently ethical, but not as good as we’d like to be, and we have some power over our lives, but not as much as would be ideal.

But someone like Johnson only cared about power, so he is able to optimize that much harder. When Johnson looked at a job, which to us is a complex bundle of “a role in the community, a source of income, some status, something to do with our time, and, yes, some limited power”—Johnson saw only power. Therefore he treated the job only as a way to acquire leverage, which is very different from how a normal person would treat a job. And because he optimized so hard along this vector, he got to be very effective at it.

But it also had a lot of unintended and unpredictable effects for other people and the aspects of the world he didn’t care about.

To take a contemporary example: most people like it when others pay attention to what they do. But it is not, or at least wasn’t until recently, something that most people optimized for. Rather, attention was a part of a complex web of social values. We received attention in interactions with people we cared about and had a relationship with, and as much as we enjoyed when people gave us attention, it was weighed against all sorts of other considerations that were at play in the lifeworld where it occurred.

But then social media companies realized that fleeting acts of attention were something that could be isolated from this rich weave and fracked and pooled together into a source of considerable power and wealth. They did not care about the complex lifeworld where the attention was situated; they were willing to optimize for attention capture irrespective of how altering that dimension of social reality altered other dimensions. These companies: 1) got very, very good at it, 2) without the users fully realizing how their lived environment was getting restructured to frack more of their attention, and 3) in the process, endless, unpredictable changes occurred along the other dimensions that the companies weren’t optimizing for. The attempt to capture and control attention changed how communities form; it changed people’s dating lives; it spawned new ideologies; it undermined the trust that had held society together, and so on.

You see something similar with Johnson. He saw power where people had previously seen none (or where people had sensed a tiny, inconsequential sliver of influence mixed in with a hundred other things, like oil in sand), and then he optimized ruthlessly along that dimension. But since the power he extracted was bundled with and connected to all sorts of other things, his actions reshaped not only the distribution of power, but the very nature of our societies. Johnson vastly increased the level of spending on political campaigns in the US and established the pipelines that led East Texas oil money into DC, with everything that followed from that. He precipitated the collapse of trust in government. And so on.

It wasn’t like everything else, everything he didn’t care about, got worse. Sometimes, it got a lot better (as when Johnson pushed through rural electrification, with genuine eagerness, improving the lives of thousands of people, since it aligned with his amassing power). But when that alignment broke, Johnson, just as eagerly, destroyed the lives of people. Before he was forced out as a president, his exponential accumulation of power had led to the killing of more than a million people.2

The sanitized view of power and institutions that I was taught in school is misleading and provides a cover behind which political operators can hide. For similar reasons, conspiracy theories of evil elites are also problematic.

What is needed is an understanding of the real game of power, the kind that Caro provides. It makes us less naive about how things get done, and it gives us a better understanding of the value of democracy. The official story about the expression of the collective will and so on is largely a fiction, but the institutions and rules still matter a lot: as a check on the runaway loops of power grabbing that people like Moses and Johnson engage in.

This essay was written in conversation with Johanna Karlsson. The copy edits were done by Esha Rana.

A polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky

I had a discussion about writing with Johanna, my wife and collaborator. The context is that she is in the early stages of a new writing project—she knows the rough outline of the ideas she wants to cover, but the actual content of the essay is fuzzy. She asked me what I would do in this situation, to go from rough idea to first draft. Here are some bullet points from our discussion:

• I would be tempted to start writing the essay, but that would be a mistake. Everyone is different, but for me, writing essays is like shooting a documentary. I need to record the raw footage before I sit down and edit the film. And I want to have more footage than I will use, often a lot more.

• By raw footage, I mean actual prose—not outlines, not summaries—about the topic I want to write about. But I don’t mean essay-grade prose: that is too costly to write; it would be like making the actual film. I mean rough attempts written as fast as I can, as well as excerpts from my journal, transcriptions of conversations I’ve had about the topic, and quotes from books I’ve read, and my comments on the quotes. Very rough and pragmatic stuff.

• And importantly: this rough, raw material needs to be “at the same resolution” as the final essay. Again, imagine you are making a documentary—let’s say, you’re Werner Herzog, and you’re making Into the Abyss. The opening scene of that film is “Herzog interviewing a reverend who in 15 minutes will be accompanying a young man to his execution.” If that summary was all Herzog had, it would be impossible to know if the scene deserves to be in the film; it all comes down to the detail. The reason the scene belongs in the film, and in the opening of the film, is that the reverend ends up telling a story about a squirrel—and not only that, it belongs in the film because of the way his face looks before, during, and after he’s told the story. Herzog only knew these details of the scene until after the interview had been shot. So the decisions about what should be in the film couldn’t be made until after the raw footage had been collected. It is the same, for me, when it comes to essays. I can write all the outlines I want (and I do, because they are a tool that lets me remember ideas that I haven’t had time to unpack yet), but there’s little point in writing the outline until I’ve made full length sketches of all the ideas in it, and all the examples and anecdotes I could use and so on.

• But isn’t that the same thing as writing it? I guess it might be for some. But for me, if I think I’m writing the essay, I get all tense and start polishing the prose and put in way too much effort into ideas and stories that might not deserve to be in the essay. And when I do that, I get reluctant to cut the material, which means the essay gets bogged down with mediocre stuff. I need to write rough notes and so on, so that I can go really fast and try many ideas and see them in high resolution, before I edit together the essay and polish the prose. During the preproduction of an essay, I want to write 1,000 words an hour or more. I want to go fast enough that I can afford to try many more ideas than I will end up using.

• Johanna points out that I tend to create and collect raw material in a few different ways:

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When children learn to draw, they tend to make more and more interesting images for several years until around age five, when they learn to be boring. The multicolored hedgehogs with 47 legs give way to a series of established forms and colors, like stick figures, pastel green grass, and houses with triangular roofs. The wild diversity is gone. From now on, it’s crude, habitual symbolism. Most people never relearn how to draw anything interesting again.

This tends to happen in all domains of our lives. We figure out how to do things “well enough” and then get stuck.

One way to think about this is by analogy to what in machine learning is known as mode collapse. Mode collapse is when a generative model (most notoriously GANs) stops producing diverse outputs and instead obsessively reproduces a small subset of patterns that reliably fool the discriminator. We’ve seen this happen with language models. The early models, up until about 2020, were deranged but could write spectacularly surprising prose from time to time. Now the models are much smarter, but they all write in that uncanny AI voice. “And honestly? That isn’t just sad—it’s stylistic trauma.” The wide space of potential ways of thinking and writing has collapsed into a limited mode. I’ve gathered that Roon has been working at improving writing quality at OpenAI, but so far there hasn’t, in my opinion, been much progress on reintroducing novelty and diversity into the prose.

My probably partly false understanding of what’s going on here is that the models get rewarded when they output certain tokens, and once they get smart enough, they learn that they are more likely to get rewarded if they stay inside a small area of the space of potential ways of writing. Through millions of training cycles, they learn to associate going outside of mode with loss of reward.

I guess something similar happens with human drawings. Once you learn that grass is “supposed” to be green, it becomes almost embarrassing to make it blue (even though real grass often is blue, as good painters learn when they start to pay closer attention to reality). Once we’ve learned that grass “is” green, we often can’t even see that it actually looks blue in a certain light (and red in another), until someone points it out to us—

Unless we actively push against it, it seems like we will mode collapse like this in all domains. As Andrej Karpathy put it in a recent interview with Dwarkesh Patel, children “will say stuff that will shock you, because you can see where they are coming from, but it’s just not the thing you say. They’re not yet collapsed. But we are collapsed. We end up revisiting the same thoughts. We end up saying more and more of the same stuff, and the learning rates go down.” We get stuck at good enough and then ever-so-slowly backslide. I saw that with our 8-year-old last month. After making predictable drawings for a few years, she had a breakthrough and learned to pay attention to how horses actually look. Then, after she’d mastered a more accurate way of drawing horses, she stopped looking and began repeating the new form until it hardened into caricature.

As Nabeel Qureshi wrote about Karpathy’s remark, people who are able to remain interesting design “their lives to avoid [mode collapse] happening to them.” He suggests they do this by writing a lot and exposing themselves to information that contradicts them or is novel to them:

It seems that when you’re younger, weight updates happen kind of naturally. As you age you have to do this explicitly, which means:

1) reading and writing a lot, to make updates “clearer”

2) having conversations with people, esp people who disagree with you

And on the reading, at least some of the time you need to be sampling from places you wouldn’t normally look. Otherwise the natural tendency is just to read more of whatever reinforces your existing views.

This is good advice. But the hard thing is that this gets more painful the older you get. As you learn more and grow more skilled, there is more reward associated with staying within a limited mode; the opportunity cost of remaining uncollapsed increases.

When I was 20 and played around with writing, no one cared what I did, and so I lost no reputation or income by doing novel things. These days, I have found a mode of writing that is rewarded, and if I go beyond it—which I try to do consistently—I get a salary cut the same day. I’ve seen many writers I know end up losing their edge in this situation. The playful wildness that made them successful gets replaced by increasingly hollow repetition as they struggle to maintain the career they worked so hard to achieve.

I thought a lot about this as I was contemplating writing full-time in 2024. It just seems so depressing when “what you do to survive / kills the things you love” as Bruce Springsteen sings in “Devils and Dust.”

As I was weighing the pros and cons of quitting my day job, I read about and talked to people who have managed to stay interesting for several decades, to figure out what they did to avoid mode collapse. A lot of it is what Nabeel says: they keep learning and consuming novel information, and they write a lot. But it’s instructive to look at what a life like that is like, more concretely.

Take Brian Eno, who I, at least, find remarkably interesting 50 years into his career. When I listen to Secret Life, the album he did with his protégé Fred Again.. in 2023, it sounds to me like one of the most modern and novel sounds in recent years—just as the album Eno did with Roxy Music in 1972 sounded ahead of its time (and is still surprisingly strange and interesting). In between, he invented ambient music, was one of the midwives of the No Wave sound of late 70s New York, helped shape arena rock with U2, and so on. He also wrote interesting essays, made procedural art, invented oblique strategies, and co-founded the Long Now Foundation. Almost at any point in the last 50 years, it feels like Eno’s been doing interesting work!

As I was reading about Eno and others last year, I was sort of hoping to come across a clever trick you could do to keep going like this. But the truth is painful and simple. Eno is able to remain interesting because he’s willing to risk everything he’s achieved again and again.

It is an endless loop where:

1. Eno does something random that no one is interested in

2. then, every few years, one of his projects turns into a surprise hit, after which

3. people come running, asking him to do more of it, offering him large sums of money, which he

4. turns down, in order to work on something that no one cares about.

With Roxy Music, in the early ‘70s, Eno incorporated synths and electronic processing into rock music, which wasn’t a thing at the time. When that became a hit, Eno got offered large sums of money to tour and make more records like that. But instead he quit the band and started playing classical music with an orchestra consisting of only bad musicians, something that, naturally, exasperated his manager. Then, when his forays into strange noises led to ambient music, his albums with Talking Heads, and No Wave, and so on, people got excited again and wanted to pour money at him to do more of that. Eno decided to go to Thailand to work on light art.

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A reason it is hard to have both a creative career and remain interesting, then, is that it is a high-risk strategy. There is probably a lot of survivorship bias in the sample I studied (meaning: most people who were wild enough to blow up their first success never got around to a second success, and so there are no biographies written about them). Looking at Eno and concluding that blowing everything up again and again is the key to remaining interesting might be true. But it might also be true that it is more commonly the key to losing everything.

As someone who is well-positioned to blow up a good career, I don’t think we should read too much into the survivorship bias, though. If these risks are necessary for creative work, then not taking them means you automatically lose; and it is possible to take these risks in a somewhat controlled manner. It is clear to me that Eno did so. He might like to give the impression that he was simply following his curiosity, but it was at least partly calculated. Especially in the early years of his career, he did the obvious, rewarded thing more often than he did later. But he did so in order to position himself to do wilder things longterm.

It is sometimes necessary to play conservatively, to be able to pay the bills. But if you’re wired like me and care deeply about doing good, creative work, you must never lose sight of the hierarchy of values. If writing full-time makes you write fewer good essays—as has happened to some people I know—then writing full-time is the thing to sacrifice, not the essays. If you have a hit and can build up some savings, that is meant to fund bigger risks going forward, not keeping up with the Joneses.

I’m not saying this is how everyone should live. In fact, I think it is very, very important that some people optimize for money—it makes them do valuable work that I would never bother doing. And for the same reason, I think it is important that some people optimize for status or consensus or risk aversion.

But if you want to avoid mode collapse, it will require sacrificing other things. It will require saying no to lucrative projects in order to explore things no one cares about. It will require looking stupid. It will require feeling uncomfortable. And it will require, in many cases, living hand to mouth from time to time.

Life update

Johanna, the kids, and I spent two weeks in Sweden over Christmas and New Year’s.

The first part we spent near the border to Norway, where Johanna grew up. The kids played with their grandparents, and Johanna and I walked along the river, and went shopping for Swedish books. On Christmas Eve, Johanna’s mother and I took the elevator down into the basement and I got to put on the coveted Santa costume and do my routine. I was a very grumpy Santa who played piano whenever attention drifted away from me to the Christmas gifts. It felt good to not be writing—I haven’t had a proper pause in 4 years; I needed some time to step back and think about where I want to go in the year ahead.

Am I at risk of mode collapse? Am I repeating myself and becoming too conservative in what I allow myself to work on? Am I habitually doing what I had to do to get here, rather than looking clear-eyed at the possibilities that actually exist now?

In bed at night, I made a list of some alternatives, things I could work on. I always like to get a lot of options on the table so I can get a better sense of the possibility space and not get stuck on the first thing that comes up. I could:

1. Write a book. I have very mixed feelings about this. On the one hand it feels like a natural step—I’m at a point in my life where I could do it properly, with a good team of collaborators and a reasonable advance, so I could invest a few thousand hours into the project. But because it feels so natural, and many people urge me to do it, I am uncertain: I have such difficulty hearing what I feel when there are strong external reasons to do something.

2. Compile an essay collection.

3. Get back into programming. It feels like there are so many fun little art projects I could throw together by vibe coding. I have this old dream of making essays the size of cathedrals—making very ambitious essays with bespoke homepages for each, so I can leverage code to do things that haven’t been possible before. I think the cost of doing it has now dropped to the point where that vision becomes affordable for me. But I haven’t programmed for 6-7 years now, so I would need to set aside considerable time to bring that part of my brain back to life, so the ideas start flowing.

4. Do a book club. Maybe Proust.

5. Do meetups. Or make it easy for others to arrange meetups with readers from the blog.

6. Machine translate the full text of Grothendieck’s Récoltes et Semailles. It seems like the attempts to get it translated have stalled, and per my experiments lately, I think it is now possible to set up a pipeline to make a passable translation. Could publish it as an ebook + a homepage with the original text available if you click on a passage.

7. Do more small playful collaborations with others.

8. Gather a group of independent researchers, writers, and artists on the island, rent all the houses around our farm, and have a summer camp where we work, have seminars, and swim.

9. Do reportages and interviews. And by that, I don’t mean I should write in those genres, I mean I want to spend more time travelling and talking to people to collect material that can enrich my essayism. I’m thinking something along the lines of Werner Herzog’s documentaries. It would be fun to visit the production of Ruben Östlund’s new film (which he’s working on in Hungary right now). It would be fun to go to England with Johanna and look at gardens and interview Dan Pearson, Arne Maynard, and others. I notice this idea scares me—it is a different process than the one I’m used to, and I’m uncertain whether I have what it takes to write good essays in this way. I might end up plowing months into it, and come out on the other end with little to show for it. I’m afraid that I won’t be able to handle the complexity of the logistics and still produce the steady stream of essays necessary to pay our bills, and I’m afraid the work won’t interest others, so it ends up eroding the support I’ve built up over the years. This fear seems good!

I note that the last idea attracts me the most. I want to meet more people and write in a higher-resolution way. Of all of the ideas above, it is the one that will force me most outside of my comfort zone and into novel situations.

Having articulated the idea, the fear seems largely unfounded. There are some risks (there are always risks), but they can be mitigated. I can try things in small, low-cost ways. I can carve out part of the week to work on illegible projects and part of the week for doing work that keeps the food on the table, until the illegible can replace the legible. Once I start sketching out the ideas, talking them over with Johanna, I can see solutions and possibilities that I hadn’t considered.

I’m very glad I took the time to think this through. And now I’m glad to be back on the island, looking out at the snowy woods outside my office, listening to the kids through the wall. It feels good to be writing again.

Thank you Johanna for the conversations that led to this essay. The copy edits were done by Esha Rana.

The Driveway, Fairfield Porter, c. 1967

It was on November 20, 2024, that I handed in my keys at the art gallery where I had worked and began writing full time. It has now been a year. Let me reflect on how it’s been.

But first, since this is a sort of yearly review, here are the ten most read essays this year:

1. Sometimes the reason you can’t find people you resonate with is because you misread the ones you meet

2. On agency

3. Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself

4. Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

5. How I read

6. When facing a complicated problem, don’t try to solve it, try to understand it

7. The paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, I change

8. When is it better to think without words?

9. A list of books and essays that I love (this was paywalled when I published it, but I’ve unlocked it now)

10. On the pleasure of reading private notebooks

Also, for those who are new here, these are the ten most popular pre-2025 essays on Escaping Flatland:

1. Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process

2. Looking for Alice

3. Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born

4. Childhoods of exceptional people

5. Relationships are coevolutionary loops

6. How to think in writing

7. A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox

8. Almost everyone I’ve met would be well-served thinking more about what to focus on

9. Don’t sacrifice the wrong thing

10. On having more interesting ideas

The main thing I remember, looking back, is how tired I was for the first three months after I quit my job. All through December, January, and February, I felt wrung out, empty, and sad. This came as a bit of a surprise to me. I had expected to be filled with energy now that I had reached my goal and finally had plenty of time to work on my projects.

What I had failed to acknowledge to myself was just how hard Johanna and I had been working for the preceding five years, and how much rest I owed my body. It had been four years since we decided to leave Sweden and start a new life; we had had our second kid and renovated a farm house, while homeschooling, working, and writing this blog (often at 5 in the morning before work, or late at night while the kids slept). Johanna and I were committed to what we were doing. We wanted to provide a good childhood for our kids and we wanted to pursue projects we found worthwhile; we didn’t want to sacrifice the wrong thing. But this also meant we had so much to do, and so little time and money, that we couldn’t afford to waste time complaining. We couldn’t acknowledge how tired we were. We just had to brace ourselves and do the work.

I remember us discussing how we might be able to postpone the major repairs on the house until 2024, to save money so that I could afford to keep writing the blog a little longer. I remember we had a deadline when I would have to give up my writing if I couldn’t find a way to fund it properly. The only option under those circumstances was to be frugal, stoical, work hard, do all short-term renovations ourselves, and spend all my spare time writing. And when the deadline came we were “so close” to making it that we kept postponing until it ended up being … four years of working every day without a vacation. I managed to find time to see a grand total of three films in 1642 days.

“But was it really four years?” Johanna says. She runs the numbers. “I can’t believe we lived like that for four years.”

Then, once I could afford to quit my day job and the pressure let up, all of my suppressed tiredness and pain welled up. I remember sitting at the kitchen table in January, joking about the time when the house rained in and we had no money to fix it. How I would have to run out in the middle of the night and try to secure the tarpaulin that had been caught in the storm, waving violently, and how I would curse the wind. How we woke up one morning with the balcony door blown wide open and a tongue of water reaching into the room. Johanna told the kids the story about a day three years prior when I had an interview for a job that would pay enough that we might be able to pay for the repairs and hold on to the farm. Johanna and I spent all day practicing what I would say, and then, just before I had to leave for the interview, I stepped in a pot with the baby’s pee, spraying it all over me, ruining my only good pair of clothes. So much for that job! So much for us affording a new roof! As we laughed, the 8-year-old reached out and squeezed my hand. I stopped laughing and felt the tears well up in my eyes.

There was so much tiredness and frustration and pain that I had not allowed myself to feel and express, and I spent much of last winter having it ooze out of me.

Thinking back, a frustrating thing about living in an unconventional way was that we felt like we weren’t allowed to complain about our problems. Maybe this is a Swedish thing. But if you break the script and then run into problems, people (not all people, but many) take it as proof that you were wrong and they were right. My family and several of my friends, for instance, disagreed with our decision to homeschool our kids (homeschooling is frowned upon and illegal in Sweden, so we had to emigrate). Homeschooling in a country where you don’t have any family to rely on for support, and where you don’t speak the language, is, quite obviously, exhausting. But given how much they had disapproved, I didn’t feel comfortable showing this. Only once did I let my guard down and mentioned to a friend how tired I was and how strained our economic situation was. He suggested we put the kids in kindergarten. I just wanted someone to feel some sympathy; I didn’t need solutions—we had one already. I didn’t share our struggles again.

Another time, when my parents visited, I went up at 5 am to write and then fell asleep on the floor while we ate lunch. While I lay there, they told Johanna about one of their friends who had waited until the kids moved away from home before he indulged his writing hobby, as a piece of advice. Maybe we read too much into all such small things, but we didn’t feel we could be open with our challenges.

When people make unconventional decisions, it often feels like they are measured to another standard than those who follow the default script. If you do the normal thing and it fails you, then it isn’t your fault; it’s the system. But if you do an unconventional thing, even small, normal setbacks are read as proof of your foolishness. When a normal solution isn’t working, no one suggests you are wrongheaded for not trying an unconventional solution instead. But they will hold you accountable if you do something differently.

If I had been more confident and open with what I thought and felt, I suspect that I could have received more sympathy and support. But, as I said, the pressure was so high in 2021-24 that I simply couldn’t. I didn’t have the emotional reserves necessary. We had to get the work done. So I packed my frustration and sadness and pain deep into my bones and worked more or less every waking hour (when I wasn’t taking care of the kids) until we got out of the hole. As did Johanna.

I’m happy we held together and made the necessary sacrifices, because our plans were sound, and we love the life we’ve now made for our kids and ourselves. But in 2025, I didn’t want any more sacrifices. I wanted time to decompress. I wanted to read books, be with Johanna and the kids, and go for long runs, which I did.

Fortunately, it wasn’t only pain that seeped up when the pressure was removed. 3-4 months after I quit my job, we also started to experience a happiness deeper than any we have experienced before. With more time, Johanna and I settled into a very lovely work rhythm where we spend several hours a day reading books together and talking. We’ve had so much fun writing the blog this year. It has felt less like “trying to write essays” and more like tending our conversation and harvesting thoughts. The process has been more open and playful than ever, like I’m putting fewer restrictions on what I feel I can write about. Because of this, the writing has felt more personal and strange than before, and we feel like we’ve been able to go deeper into the ideas.

Writing full time has also meant that there are fewer distractions, so the ideas are always churning in our heads. It’s like we’re living inside the essays now, instead of just visiting them.

Right now, as I’m typing this, Johanna is lying at the other end of the sofa with a pile of books on her belly, taking notes; the four-year-old is looking through Don Rosa’s Uncle Scrooge collections, and the eight-year-old is drawing horses.

Johanna waves her pencil at me, trying to get my attention, and seems to be bursting with things she wants to discuss. I tell her I’m just about to wrap this up so I can give it to her for comments, and then I’ll put the kids to sleep, so we can talk uninterrupted. “What time is it?” she says. “Oh. They should have been in bed 30 minutes ago.”

I’m very grateful to be alive in a time like this where it is possible to do something like this blog and support my family with it. Getting to this point was hard at times, yes. But five years ago, before Substack, these essays could not have been written at all. So thank you, thank you so much for being here, and in particular, thank you to everyone who has been generous enough to support the work.

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Here is last year’s retrospective:

Thank you, Esha, for your help copy editing the essays this year :)

I recently wrote a post about books and essays that have had a big impact on me. A few days after writing it, I read another essay that struck me at that level. The essay in question is “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts” by Iris Murdoch. I haven’t yet been able to figure out why it hit me with such force and the implications of its ideas, but…

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The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.
—Carl Rogers

On various hard drives and USB sticks stored in our barn, I keep the diaries from my university years, 2010–2014. Last week I reread them for the first time since I wrote them. It was interesting, but also uncomfortable, to see myself at such a distance. Many of the things that were important to me then are not visible from here (I only see blurry outlines of the situations I was in and what I thought), while other things, which I couldn’t see at all then, stand out clearly now. It’s like when you zoom in on a graph, you mostly see the small daily fluctuations, while when you zoom out, you see the trend.

I spend page after page interpreting the nuances of the situations I’m in, without seeing that the situations all resemble one another and follow each other with an almost mechanical logic.

For example, I often feel miserable. (This is partly an illusion created by the fact that I wrote more in my diary when I felt agitated, so it wasn’t quite as bad as it looks, but I really did feel down a lot back then.) I was worryingly often sick: there were five hospital visits in 2012 alone. I also had much more angst than I realized. The angst I was aware of and wrote about was only a small part, the most intense part. I don’t seem to have understood that many other things I experienced were also signs of anxiety—my ceaseless work, my desperate need to always be around people, my fatigue, my feelings of unreality, the moments I would wake in the middle of the night, realizing that I would die.

And every time I’m miserable in the diary, I know what will happen on the next page: I will throw myself into some activity that can distract me from myself. It is like clockwork. As soon as I feel bad, I get busy, I seek out social situations where I feel high status (the literary world), I go to parties, get drunk, and/or flirt with people. A wave of euphoria breaks over me, and the anxiety disappears—and then I overstep my own boundaries and do things that fill me with shame. I’m back where I started. The loop starts over.

I was almost completely trapped in this holding pattern, like a plane circling for years above the airport, waiting for clearance to land. I couldn’t acknowledge what was happening.

From September 11 to 13, 2012, I sleep at my friend’s place (ten minutes from my apartment), and when I leave on the 13th, it seems I can’t bear to go home, so after a lecture on macroeconomics I tag along to a party and don’t make it home until the 16th: this was a fairly typical week for me during this period. I was never alone, except when I was laid up with a fever. A recurring theme in the diary is long, Cărtărescu-inspired accounts of fever dreams filled with disturbing bodily textures. One of these reports is from February 2013, and it is clear that I was writing it in a bar where I read for class: I was still sick, but as soon as I could get out of bed, I had to look for something exciting that would distract me from my feelings.

It’s almost as if my need to be happy led me into misery. But that’s not really it.

Rather, it’s more like there are two kinds of happiness in the diary. I also felt very happy when I read, for instance, and there was nothing destructive about that happiness. Reading didn’t trap me in loops, it carried me forward and inward, toward myself. I really read a lot back then, fifty books a year on top of course literature (and the books were good, too: Pascal’s Pensées, Augustine’s Confessions, the collected works of Coetzee, Tranströmer, Sebald, Sem-Sandberg, Popper, to name a few), and I get a lovely feeling when I read my book notes. I also like the passages about my travels (I somehow managed to visit seventeen countries during my four years at university), and it amuses me to read about the creative projects I was working on. The happiness there feels entirely different, much softer. There is none of that jaggedness and intensity that characterize the joy I felt when I thought that people were attracted to me, or when I was on stage in a bar reciting poems, or when I drank. The joy of reading and travel was more like a cocoon. I hid and changed.

Such was the joy when I started to get to know Johanna, too, in the fall of 2011.

A few nights ago Johanna showed me an old TV broadcast about Mamma Andersson and Jockum Nordström (two Swedish artists who used to be married), and I suddenly remembered how I perceived Johanna before we became a couple. What struck me in the documentary was that there was nothing performative about Mamma and Jockum (unlike most artists I’ve worked with).

In the late 80s, while still in art school, they had kids together, and so have spent almost their entire adult lives inside the bubble that is their apartment and studios. They haven’t let themselves get polished by social life, which makes them seem odd in the way very young children seem odd when they think aloud. In 2005, Jockum is in NYC to open The Armory Show, where he’s the headliner, and he really doesn’t fit in among the other artists. He looks like a roe deer that has strayed into the gallery, sniffing at things. How they come across to others genuinely doesn’t seem to matter to Jockum and Mamma; they just want to crawl around on the floor of their studios, painting, working.

That’s how Johanna struck me, too, when I ran into her in the frozen section of the supermarket, at the bookstore, or in the street. She seemed her own in a way that I was not, and she seemed to be close to life. I remember seeing her outside of the pharmacy, where she sat eating at a small children’s table, throwing her head back in laughter as her friend read aloud from Sara Lidman’s The Tar Pit. I remember the intensity with which she listened and the unpredictability of her questions. I had talked to her for only ten minutes when I fell for her. It didn’t matter that she turned me down when I asked her if she wanted to do something someday—that a person like her could even exist was enough to make me feel that the world was a good place.

So I notice two kinds of happiness in the diary: a soft joy, which makes me ease up and feel more like myself, and a hard one that again and again leads me into shame.

There is another difference between these two kinds of happiness. The soft one is private—I struggle to share it with others—whereas the one that drives me into misery is social. For instance, at university I could never bring myself to ask librarians for help finding the books I was looking for—it was way too private for me to reveal that I liked to read Jean Rhys, or Imre Kertész. But in other situations I was totally shameless about telling people private stuff they probably didn’t want to know! There are several passages where “attractive people” are drawn to me (and when I write “attractive,” I mean people I assume other people are attracted to), and when that happens I get excited in a sharp-edged and feverish way. This happiness I have to share. I want to force it upon people. I’m ashamed but I can’t stop myself: the excitement, it seems, comes from being seen as the sort of person that this or that person desires. I don’t actually seem to like going home with them; that part makes me uncomfortable. But I get worked up by the thought of telling people about it.

Conversely, when Johanna after 18 months finally asks me out (and I feel that other kind of joy—the one that tells me that she is a path towards life), then I don’t want to talk about it. My friends ask about her, they are curious, but I avoid the subject. I get defensive. What Johanna and I have is too private. I’m afraid that they will misunderstand our relationship or reduce her to one of their stereotypes. So I hide myself from them.

All of this makes me very sad when I read the diaries. That I couldn’t show who I was, that I treated people in ways they didn’t deserve, that I lashed myself so hard about treating people in ways they didn’t deserve, that the self-flagellation drove me back into the loop...

If I jump forward two years in the diary, the pattern is gone. I have broken out of the loop and am moving forward. What changed? I’m not sure. It is hard to tease out these things: a life is a complex pattern.

But the main thing was, surely, Johanna. I remember the first time she invited herself to my apartment, how we sat on the balcony, and how I suddenly heard myself say things I had never been able to say before, not even to myself. I felt no shame when she listened. It was, among other things, because of her eyes. What made them light up was the complete and utter opposite of what made the eyes of others light up: if I talked about things that normally earned me admiration, she got bored, but when I spoke about what was private, odd, embarrassing, painful, or taboo, she became curious.

She was moved by reasons in a way that no one else I knew was. She seemed incapable of accepting as true anything she hadn’t deeply considered herself. Her default position was, “I don’t know.” But if she received information that contradicted her, she eagerly changed her mind. And she treated me as if I lived by that standard, too.

It was a strange mix of relief and discomfort to meet a person who loved me in the Erich Fromm sense (“I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me.”) A relief because it was like decompression to let go of all of the fear and insecurity that made me shape myself for approval, and to feel my own sense of curiosity and value unfold. But discomfort because it put me on a collision course with the life I had been living and many of the people I interacted with. When I understood my values, I had to confront the pain of looking stupid and having people get angry at me when they disagreed with my decisions; I had to let go of the safety of social status and the coping mechanisms I had relied on. I soon withdrew from oversocializing, stopped giving poetry readings and publishing in magazines, and instead turned toward what felt private and alive.

At this point the diary gradually shifts from being a place where I vent my feelings and make laconic jokes about my flaws to a place where I think about things that interest me or give me awe. To use Visa’s phrase, I began to focus on what I wanted to see more of. I moved toward the good, rather than away from the bad.

In the late winter of 2015, 18 months after Johanna and I started dating, we bought a house in the countryside near my grandparents. By this point we were 25. We barely used the internet from then on and spent our days reading and talking. We gleefully questioned everything we had learned and tried to figure out how it would make sense for us to live. On the weekends Johanna and I walked with my grandfather along the paths he’d made around the tarns, asking him about his life. He had always been my big role model as a kid because of his kindness and strength of character. It was fantastic to have a friend like that to share life with.

At our house and at my grandparents’s, the norms and expectations were completely different from what they had been in the city—everything felt richer and more human here. The thought of living transgressively, the way I had during my years at university, was now foreign to me.

I was no longer reacting to what happened in mechanical ways, but was moving forward, toward things that mattered to me. It felt like being set free.

Acknowledgements

As always, this essay is the result of many conversations with Johanna Karlsson. The writing was made possible by the generous support of the paying subscribers—thank you! Esha Rana did the copy edits.

The drawings and paintings used in the essay are, in order:

Tête d’homme, Alberto Giacometti, 1961

Dagen efter, Mamma Andersson, 2020

Vi bor på kontoret, Jockum Nordström, 1999

I thought it’d be fun to do a series where I answer questions, or write essays in reaction to prompts you give me. This essay is the first attempt.

If you want to submit a question or a prompt for a future essay, you can do so in the comments to this post, or in the Google Form I link at the end.

RJ: What books/authors have influenced you?

I’ll give you a list. But first some context.

When our oldest daughter, Maud, was a toddler, she used books with author portraits on them as her dolls. She had Crime and Punishment in a baby stroller, Joan Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking in a diaper, and on the sofa, Maud herself sat, breastfeeding Thomas Bernhard.

This amused me no end because I love seeing books brought down to that level: it’s where they belong. It always felt strange to me how some people put famous authors on pedestals. Authors are our friends! They are odd people who talk to us, sometimes from across the grave.

I haven’t always found it easy to relate to people in everyday life, so Tolstoy and Tranströmer and others I have read and reread since I was a teenager feel closer to me than most people I have met; they feel a bit like my high school friends. When Johanna and I talk, we’ll say Tomas and mean Tranströmer; he is one of our mutual friends, and we gossip lovingly about him. My journals are filled with thoughts I have had as I’ve read him and the rest—it feels like we’ve been talking for years, and in some ways, I know them better than my parents.

If I am to name a single literary event that has shaped me most as a writer, it is the publication of Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle, 2009–2011. I was living only a few blocks away from Knausgård, in Malmö, while he wrote the books—every street and store and park in book 6, which describes his life while working on the series, were streets and stores and parks that I was walking in. If you live in Paris or New York, I guess it is quite common to read well-written books that describe your everyday life, but living in the provinces of Sweden, it was a revelation: literature is not something that happens far away, or in the past; it might as well happen right here. You can write about what you feel, and what you see, and if you infuse it with enough care, it will become literature.

One of the things I’ve gotten from repeatedly rereading My Struggle and Knausgård’s essays is the permission to cease play-acting when I write; I don’t have to do the “literary” stuff; I am allowed to just type what I actually think. There is a passage in Inadvertent, where Knausgård describes one of the insights that unblocked his writing:

There are some fundamental rules of writing, for example that one shouldn’t psychologize when describing characters, or the related dictum “Show, don’t tell,” both of which spring from the realization that literature by its very nature always seeks complexity and ambiguity, and that monologic claims of truth about the world are antiliterary. [...] For many years I followed these rules of writing, that one shouldn’t psychologize and that one shouldn’t tell, but show. However, the texts I wrote ended up being neither complex nor ambiguous; on the contrary they were closed and unfree, as if the space they unfolded in was a prison, with locked doors and no windows. It wasn’t until I started breaking the rules, showing how something was and should be understood, very precisely and with no room for doubt, and describing people in psychological terms, that my writing came alive. This was so, I think, because even in the most meticulous and exhaustive explanation of a person’s character or actions, even in the most heavy-handed explication, there is always an outside.

This realization has influenced me a lot. If I think something, I don’t need to go through this big roundabout thing, where I “show” it and make it literary. I don’t need to make my writing ambiguous. If I just pay close enough attention to reality, the complexity of reality will seep into the writing and make it ambiguous and charged anyway. There is no need for me to be clever and artful and introduce mystery. Just “telling” it as I see it, if done with enough detail and care, is mysterious enough.

Another author who has greatly shaped my view of life and literature is Dostoevsky. In particular, Dostoevsky as seen by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bachtin. Bachtin’s core observation is that Dostoevsky, unlike most other authors, treats his characters as full individuals, as if they are too big to fit in his head: he isn’t using them as mouth pieces but is listening to them. His books are polyphonic: they are made up of a multitude of voices, each with their own inner logic and perspective, and there is no voice that stands above the others and knows the final truth. There are, of course, many books that have multiple voices in them, especially after Dostoevsky, but when I read these books, there is nearly always a subtle feeling that the characters are being used as dolls by the author, who is trying to get a view across; you can sense what the author thinks of everyone. But in Dostoevsky, each character is so strong and independent that they feel like authors in their own right.

I remember that this fundamental respect for the unknowability of others was a deep revelation to me when I read it, at 24. It completely changed how I viewed myself and others. It made me more curious about the inner lives of others, and the dialogue between us; I started to pay attention to how the words I was saying, even inside my head, were always in reaction to and in dialogue with things others had said or things I expected them to say in the future. This was immensely useful, and for Johanna and me, Dostoevsky and Bakhtin have been valuable touchstones as we have built our relationship and learned how to talk in a way that enables each other to grow.

Another thing I love about Dostoevsky is how he incorporates long essayistic segments in his novels, but he always makes sure to undermine the authority of the person expressing the ideas. You get these wonderful philosophical tracts about free will and the Russian church and utilitarianism and the nature of love, but you don’t know what to make of it, really, because the person saying it seems a bit deranged. This is closely connected to his deep respect for the individual: rhetorically convincing the reader of a perspective would undermine their autonomy. Compromising the characters forces the reader to stand alone, to borrow Kirkegaard’s phrase. Since there is no safe authority that you can submit to in Dostoevsky’s books, it is up to you to meet these hurting, strange voices with compassion, critical thinking, and curiosity; you have to evaluate if anything they say is valuable and true and applies to your life. As Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov says, there is nothing more painful to humans than our freedom, that we are responsible for everything we do, and so we long to submit to an authority. But Dostoevsky just won’t let us do that. He forces us to face our freedom.

With Knausgård and Dostoevsky, I found an ideal to orient toward. They wrote in a way that was driven by their minds and their curiosity; their writing was jagged and strange, since they ignored many of the “rules” that make a piece of writing “literary,” and they did so to be able to be more direct and honest. They also shared a deep respect for reality and its complexity, especially the reality and complexity of human beings. I haven’t been able to get anywhere close to writing in a way that approaches the ideals I found in them, but it has provided me with a direction that I’ve been following for more than a decade now.

There is a third author, too, whom I need to mention before I get to the list of books I have been inspired by, and this is the author who made my own writing snap into place.

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Portrait of a Man with Glasses I, Francis Bacon, 1963

This essay can be read as a complement to last year’s “How to think in writing.”

Thoughts die the moment they are embodied in words.
—Schopenhauer

1.

In the 1940s, when the French mathematician Jacques Hadamard asked good mathematicians how they came up with solutions to hard problems, they nearly universally answered that they didn’t think in words; neither did they think in images or equations. Rather, what passed through the mathematicians as they struggled with problems were such things as vibrations in their hands, nonsense words in their ears, or blurry shapes in their heads.1

Hadamard, who had the same types of experiences, wrote in The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field that this mode of thinking was distinct from daydreaming, and that most people, though they often think wordlessly, have never experienced the kind of processing that the mathematicians did.

When I read this, in December 2024, all sorts of questions arose in me. First of all, what does it even mean? Do they not think in words and equations at all? And secondly, how do I square this with my personal experience, which is that whenever I write what I think about a subject, it always turns out that my thoughts do not hold up on paper? No matter how confident I am in my thoughts, they reveal themselves on the page as little but logical holes, contradictions, and non sequiturs.

I recognize myself when Paul Graham writes:

The reason I’ve spent so long establishing [that writing helps you refine your thinking] is that it leads to another [point] that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn’t written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.

How come Hadamard’s colleagues are able to have productive thoughts, working in their heads, without words, sometimes, for days on end?

Tense subconscious processing

Hadamard’s book is most famous for its detailed discussion of what Henri Poincaré called the “sudden illumination”—the moment when the solution to a problem emerges “in the shower” unexpectedly after a long period of unconscious incubation.

The hypothesis here is that if you work hard on a problem, you soak your subconscious with it. Wrestling with a problem helps you build a mental model of what you know and what you don’t—providing the subconscious with building blocks to work with. (You can’t have genuine intuition and inspiration in areas where you lack knowledge.) Then, once you drop the problem from conscious thought and go take care of the dishes or something, the subconscious begins a silent and parallelized search, trying many, many alternatives (in a somewhat random fashion), until something snaps in place. When this happens, the solution bubbles back up to the conscious mind, as if out of nowhere, making you freeze mid-motion with a stack of dirty plates in your hands.

This is a very useful thing to know about the mind, because it means you can steer your subconscious towards the particular problems you want it to work on. By priming yourself with important problems before doing the dishes or going for walks or sleeping, you make sure your mental resources are used on what matters for you, instead of, for example, the open loops in a Netflix series you watched before bed. It is free labor.

But—this is not what Hadamard is talking about when he describes the wordless thought of the mathematicians and researchers he has surveyed. Instead, what they seem to be doing is something similar to this subconscious, parallelized search, except they do it in a “tensely” focused way.

The impression I get is that Hadamard loads a question into his mind (either in a non-verbal way, or by reading a mathematical problem that has been written by himself or someone else), and then he holds the problem effortfully centered in his mind. Effortfully, but wordlessly, and without clear visualizations. Describing the mental image that filled his mind while working on a problem concerning infinite series for his thesis, Hadamard writes that his mind was occupied by an image of a ribbon which was thicker in certain places (corresponding to possibly important terms). He also saw something that looked like equations, but as if seen from a distance, without glasses on: he was unable to make out what they said.

I’m not sure what is going on here. But here’s a speculation. As I understand it, when one part of our brain is working, it often inhibits another—if you put words to distressing feelings, for example, the language-oriented parts of your brain inhibit the amygdala, which reduces the emotional distress. Similarly, when you are focused on a task at hand, the executive control network of your brain will tend to inhibit the default mode network which is responsible for mind wandering. (This might explain why illuminations tend to occur mainly in the shower, when the executive control networks downregulate and the mind is allowed to wander.)

Here’s my speculation: perhaps Hadamard and the other great mathematicians are able to enter into a modality of thought where they are able to keep both the default mode network and the executive control network on at the same time. Perhaps this allows them to do a sort of subconscious, in-the-shower-type processing, while still maintaining enough conscious focus to ensure the thoughts don’t drift away from the problem and its constraints.

When I look into this, I notice that there is research indicating that when doing certain types of creative work, the default mode network and the executive control network are, indeed, active at the same time, which they usually aren’t. Individuals who are experienced in a creative field seem to have the capacity to keep the default mode network turned on, allowing them to generate many permutations of ideas, while steering it with the executive control network, ensuring their parallelized mindwandering is constrained by the facts of the problem. I suspect we are all capable of this to some extent, but doing it to the extent Hadamard’s subjects did is akin to a ballerina spinning on her toes: a mental posture that requires serious practice to develop the necessary muscles and coordination.

I’m not well-versed in neuroscience enough to know if I’m interpreting this right; I’m just speculating.

But what we do know is that Hadamard, as he worked, would pace up and down his room with what “witnesses to [his] daily life and work” called his “inside” look. (Others, like Poincaré and Helmholtz, seem to have sat at their desks, staring into nowhere.) And this type of deep, consciously-blurry concentration could go on for a long time: Hadamard mentions that he only stopped walking if he needed to write down a proof (reluctantly). An acquaintance writes that a friend of his shared an office with one of the best now living physicists; this physicist’s work habit was to come into the office in the morning and then stare into the wall for 8 hours before going home. Imagine holding a productive thought for that long without writing any steps down and, presumably, without even compressing things into words inside your head!

The interplay between writing and non-linguistic thinking

Hadamard writes that he sometimes used algebraic signs when dealing with easy calculations, but adds that, “whenever the matter looks more difficult, they become too heavy a baggage for me.”

Why are words too heavy?

Reasoning from my experience, I suspect it is because words are laborious. When we put words to a thought, we have to compress something that is like a web in our mind, filled with connections and associations going in all directions, turning that web into a sequential string of words; we have to compress what is high-dimensional into something low-dimensional. This has all sorts of advantages, which I will return to, but the point I want to emphasize here is that compression is effortful. It takes intense concentration to find the right words (rather than the sloppy ones that first come to mind), and then to put them in the proper order. As James Joyce said to his friend when he was asked why he looked so gloomy, “I’ve only written seven words today…” “But why then are you in despair—seven words is a lot for you!” “I don’t know in which order to put them…”

If we can avoid the compression step, and do the manipulations directly in the high-dimensional, non-linguistic, conceptual space, we can move much faster.2

But this is a big if. Most people, myself included, have too weak mental models to do this kind of processing for complex problems, and so, our thoughts are riddled with contradictions and holes that we often don’t notice unless we try to write them down. We can move faster in wordless thought, but we’re moving at random. If, however, you have deep expertise in an area, like the mathematicians, it is possible to let go of the language compression and do a much faster search. M, who started his career as a physicist, tells me that when he was 13 and read that Einstein thought without words, he felt disappointed since his mind didn’t work like that; then, “a decade and many thousands of hours of mathematics and physics later,” he reread the passage and recognized himself almost completely. I guess this was because the labor of learning mathematics, done largely through reading and writing his way through complex ideas and problems, had given him deep enough mental models to make words somewhat superfluous.

But even then, as Hadamard notes, writing is a necessary step of the process. The insights arrived at wordlessly need to be submitted to the rigor of mathematical notation and logic, to test their validity. It is a sort of feedback mechanism: unless the intuition holds up on the page, it is a false intuition.

The written results also work as relay results. By writing something down and making sure it is solid, we can offload that thought from working memory and instead use it as a building block for the next step of the thought. Or, to use a metaphor by the mathematician William Hamilton, deep thinking is like building a tunnel through a sandbank:

In this operation, it is impossible to succeed unless every foot, nay, almost every inch in our progress be secured by an arch of masonry before we attempt the excavation of another. Now, language is to the mind precisely what the arch is to the tunnel. The power of thinking and the power of excavation are not dependent on the words in the one case, on the mason-work in the other; but without these subsidiaries, neither process could be carried on beyond its rudimentary commencement.

So writing—and reading, seriously, the writings of others—is a way to collect stepping stones: ideas that have been stabilized enough that they can carry us as we walk deeper into the thought space.

But this stabilization of meaning can go wrong, too, if we stabilize ideas that aren’t ready to be stabilized yet. When writing, there are all sorts of details that need to be specified for our paragraphs to make sense, and if we don’t know what should go into a sentence, it is all too easy to fill in the uncertain parts with guesses. At least my brain has the most miraculous autocomplete function and supplies me with credible endings to any sentence I start—often credible nonsense. But when the nonsense is there on the page, next to thoughts I’ve settled through hard work, it looks respectable! It often takes considerable work to realize I’ve fooled myself.

This was another reason Hadamard’s subjects gave for why they were reluctant to use words: they were afraid of the false precision writing forces onto thinking. They were afraid of premature precision and the confusion it breeds. By thinking in blurry images, or tensions of the hands, or sounds, they could keep their thoughts accurately vague in the areas where there was still uncertainty. They wrote down on paper, as settled, only mostly what was actually known. If you are disciplined, you can write in such a way that you avoid false precision.

To sum up: the relationship between verbal thinking and deep wordless concentration is complex.

• Non-verbal, blurry thinking is faster and can search in a broader way, but it is more error-prone than verbal thought.

• Good writing tends to come from an attempt to capture in words something you understand wordlessly, rather than moving ideas around on the page; but, paradoxically, a generative subconscious is usually one that has been trained by writing and deep reading, which provides the subconscious with relay results and other mental structures necessary for deep thought.

• Writing forces precision, which can fool us into locking in details we have no reason to lock in, but written notes (or drawings) are a necessary aid when thinking long chains of thoughts.

Over the last nine months, as I’ve been thinking about this topic, I’ve become more mindful about when words hinder and when they help. I notice that I spend more time in wordless thoughts than I used to. But I’m also more deliberate about using writing to structure my brain so it feeds me better thoughts.

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As always, a big thank you to the paying subscribers who fund the work on the public essays. I couldn’t do this without you! I also want to thank Johanna Karlsson and Michael Nielsen for discussion about the topic. Esha Rana helped me with the final edit.

I once gave my grandfather a compliment on a knitted sweater he was wearing, only to have my grandmother loosen a thread and unravel the whole thing. “He’s getting too thin for it,” she said. The next time I visited, she had knitted the thread into a sweater my size.

They had both grown up on small farms, in the days before electricity, and began working as children. They farmed, slaughtered, built houses and roads, sewed the clothes for their four children, wired the electricity. Their way of appropriating the world was fundamentally different from mine: everything around them was something they could take apart and put back together. If they didn’t like how the light fell in their living room, they moved the windows. If they needed a lathe, they disassembled a hammer drill and turned it into a lathe. Their world was filled with affordances that I didn’t see. Where I saw a sweater, she saw a thread temporarily shaped as one—it could just as well be a scarf, a pair of socks, a hat, or six gloves. She saw more degrees of freedom than I did, and acted on it.

This capacity to see through objects and notice how they can be reconfigured is closely related to agency. Having learned how to pick things apart and build them back together, my grandparents had a more granular view of the world. They could tinker with and adapt the world around them to better fit their needs. They were, in their circumscribed world, much freer than I was: no matter what they wanted to achieve, they could nearly always find a path.

Despite growing up in poverty, my grandparents and the people of their milieu could do grandiose things. A miner lived next door to my grandmother when she grew up. He was a silent, brooding man and spent his spare time locked up in his barn. This had been going on for 25 years when, one day, during the harvest, when my grandmother was seven, a bellowing sound arose from the barn. He had built a full-size church organ.1

In July, Johanna Karlsson and I wrote an essay about agency, which we defined as a combination of autonomy and efficacy—the capacity to form independent goals and manipulate the world around you dextrously enough to get it done. During that project, we ended up with nearly 20,000 words, of which 16,000 were cut in the final draft.

Hopefully, we’ll get around to finishing a few more essays on the topic, but in the meantime, I wanted to share some excerpts from the full draft.

At the end of today’s post, there is also a collection of links to essays and films I’ve been struck by recently. For previous fragment collections, see here, here, here, and here.

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From Mohn und Gedächtnis, Anselm Kiefer, 2019-2020

1. Sometimes, I read for the pleasure of entering a mental world I hadn’t anticipated; sometimes, I read to be transformed. This essay is about the latter kind of reading.

2. When I want to be transformed, I chase my reading, to use Robin Hanson’s phrase. “Hunting has two main modes: searching and chasing,” Hanson writes. “With searching you look for something to chase. With chasing, in contrast, you have a focus of attention that drives your actions.” Searching is when I’m reading without a clear aim and continue to read even if I’m unsure about what the author is trying to achieve. Chasing is when I have a question I’m pursuing.

3. Chasing makes you more active and critical of what you read. This helps you learn more. As Hanson writes, “search-readers often don’t have a good mental place to put each thing they learn. [...] Chasers, in contrast, always have specific mental places they are trying to fill with what they read, so they better integrate new things they learn with old things they know.” When you chase, you continually ask yourself whether what you are reading “is relevant for your quest, or whether the author actually has anything new or interesting to say.” This means you drop books that don’t advance your understanding about the questions that matter to you, so you can find the books that do answer them and transform your thinking.

4. Of the roughly 300 books I start each year, I finish about 50. I skim a lot. Books are not sacred. I have to be ruthless in saying no to most of them (as well as to many other things in life) so I can spend an appropriate amount of time on the books (etc.) that really do challenge me and push the edges of my thinking. I once spent more than 100 hours thinking about 40 pages from Imre Lakatos’s Proofs and Refutations (at the end of serious meditation like that, I often find myself with notes for an essay about the ideas).

5. A surprising amount of the value of reading comes from stopping to think about what I’m taking in. I say surprising because I often feel like I get things right away. But with good writing, this is an illusion: it keeps getting more and more interesting the deeper I process it. As I read, I often do such things as close my eyes to visualize what the author is saying, reflect on how it connects to other things I know, and come up with counterarguments. I write in the margin. I dog-ear and return to important passages multiple times. A few days after finishing a book, I capture my thoughts in my notetaking system, which is organized along these lines. I also save quotes from every good book I read, as in a hypomnēmata. To be changed by my reading, reliably, I need to process what I read in an active way like this. If I read at a constant speed, page after page, I only half-understand most of it and retain little more than a fuzzy feeling from the book six months later.1 (To retain more, I also make spaced repetition cards, which give you the option to remember something for the rest of your life for the price of ~5 min effort.)

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Finding books

6. Needless to say, most writing does not deserve this amount of attention—I actually struggle to find 50 books a year worth reading. Sourcing good books is often my bottleneck, and I have had to put a lot of work into getting better at it. Here are some things I do:

7. When I get curious about something, I ask myself, “What is the best thing that has ever been written about this? Who has the deepest insight?” I’ll typically ask this in several places: I’ll ask on Twitter, I’ll email people who I think know about this problem, I’ll ask a few different language models—I gather a list of promising books.2

8. Then I interview the candidate books. Authors I deep-read will change me to some degree; they will restructure my brain. This is a big responsibility to give someone, so I think of picking a book as a recruitment process, and I do my due diligence to make sure they are up for the job. In How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler gives a comprehensive overview of how to do this kind of evaluation before reading a book. What I do is some combination of (a) reading summaries (on Wikipedia, Goodreads, Stanford Philosophy Encyclopedia, etc.) to make sure the book is relevant; (b) checking what knowledgeable people have said about it, to evaluate if it is considered a high achievement in its field; (c) read the index of the book and the first few pages. That is, I spend 5–20 minutes gathering information that lets me evaluate if the book deserves to work on my brain. If I’m still excited, I order the book to my library and start reading it (without committing myself to finishing it if it turns out to be less useful than anticipated).

9. I often cluster my reading and read 5-10 books on the same topic to ensure I get a well-rounded perspective. When I read only one book, the topic seems easy to understand. The same is true if I read several books where the authors’s perspectives are closely correlated (sharing similar values, working in the same intellectual field, and so on). I get a false sense of clarity. But if I read multiple uncorrelated books about the same topic, I get a real sense of confusion. The authors contradict each other! They use different frameworks, so I don’t know if they are talking about the same thing! What is this!? The confusion hurts my head and forces me to wrestle with the material. I have to do such things as reconstruct the arguments and evaluate them. I have to translate between the different frameworks to understand if they are talking about the same things. In this process, I win my own understanding.

10. How do you ensure the books are uncorrelated? I tend to co-read books by authors from different disciplines. An economist, a philosopher, and a cultural anthropologist are going to reason about the flourishing of Ancient Greece in different ways, pulling on deep stacks of mental models and intellectual tools developed in their respective fields. I also prefer to read authors from different time periods. Jacob Burckhardt’s The Greeks and Greek Civilization (1898) has a very different view of Greek culture than H.D.F. Kitto’s The Greeks (1951), which has a different view than Robin Lane Fox’s The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian (2005). Modern authors have the advantage that they have access to more data. But I find their opinions easier to predict, so I often prefer older authors since they surprise me and therefore expand my worldview more.

11. Follow the citation trees. If I read something good, I always look at the index (or the links if it is a blog post) to see what they have been reading. Good writers and thinkers often have great taste. By moving along these intellectual graphs, you can find your way to some really interesting corners of our intellectual commons. As you map the connections, you tend to converge on the books, essays, and thinkers that are the highest peaks of their domain. I like to think of the first books that I surface when I get interested in an area as small streams that act as entry points to a river system. By tracing their influences, I can make my way upriver and into the mountains.

The habit of reading

12. Reading well is an endurance sport. I sometimes talk to people who want to become serious readers and so pick up Kafka’s The Trial or something like that—it is about as pleasant as running a marathon untrained. They often lose their enthusiasm for reading. You have to gradually ramp up your capacity to handle complex ideas and precise prose. I read a few hours a day, and I mostly read books that are comfortable for me to read, well within my range. It is more important to keep the reading experience easy enough that I keep going and going and going, than to always push myself to that edge. By reading within my comfort zone, I gradually build up my stamina and pick up more and more references, words, and patterns of thought, bringing more and more literature into my comfort zone. I remember reading Dostoevsky as a teenager, and I could do it, but it was a chore; these days his prose sounds like an email from a smart friend. It is thrilling when things that were beyond me become easy like that: the world cracks open. If you want to reach the deepest experiences literature provides, you have to put effort into building the stamina and conceptual understanding necessary for complex writing to become transparent to you.

13. I also do some reading where I actively try to push my limits: the type where I need to learn an entire new vocabulary and work hard to absorb new mental models. I find that this has gotten a lot easier since LLMs, large language models like ChatGPT, got good. These days if I read something that is outside my comfort zone, I often keep one or two language models open so I can ask questions as I read.3 I take pictures of paragraphs and upload them as context. If I’m confused, I ask the LLMs to explain what a paragraph says. This means I very rarely get stuck anymore. I can nearly always probe my way to an understanding that lets me keep reading if I spend a few minutes discussing it with an LLM.4 This has removed a lot of the emotional resistance I have had against reading very hard books, and has therefore expanded my range and made me a stronger reader.

14. The kind of reading I talk about requires plenty of time—I spend 10-30 hours a week reading. Where do you find that time? Well, we can work backwards from the fact that we’re awake some 112 hours a week. So the problem is rarely actual hours (though if you have kids, it sometimes actually is). But one of my blessings is that I never got into the habit of carrying a smartphone around; instead, I put a book in each jacket pocket and read if the kids are playing in the park or if I’m waiting for the ferry. I have a tendency to get stuck reading the internet if I have access. But if we switch off the router at home, as we aim5 to do if we are not doing something that requires internet access, I can carve out two hours at night after we’ve put the four-year-old to sleep. The late evenings alone are enough to read a book a week.

15. Why read with this intensity? Why turn it into so much work and make it another project to manage if you’re happy having it just as a hobby? I suspect this is partly a matter of taste. I value reading things for their own sake, too—without a goal in mind, for the pleasure of being present with a book. But when I treat books like something more than this, I get something deeper. By applying yourself slightly more—and if you are a reading person, what I’ve described in this essay is only slightly more work than normal reading—yes, by applying yourself slightly more, you can retain vastly more from those hours you already put in. Reading seriously changes your brain so that the world that comes at you grows more nuanced and interesting and filled with affordances that let you do things you didn’t know were possible. Serious reading compounds.

16. Good books are compressed thoughts. They are like seeds: when you plant them in your mind, they explode from their casings and shoot up from the ground—growing much vaster than it feels reasonable a little seed like that could possibly grow. In seven hours, I can read a book of thoughts that someone spent two years thinking. There are few ways of spending seven hours that can compete with that.

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Acknowledgments

Johanna Karlsson read and commented on drafts of this essay. Esha Rana did the copy edits. I made the mistakes.

And, as always, a big thank you to the subscribers who fund the production of the free essays.

A drawing of the iron mines where my grandfather grew up, as they looked some 60 years before his birth

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Brioches and Knife, Eliot Hodgkin, 08/1961

1.

When people talk about the value of paying attention and slowing down, they often make it sound prudish and monk-like. Attention is something we “have to protect.” We have to “pay”1 attention—like a tribute. But we shouldn’t forget how interesting and overpoweringly pleasurable sustained attention can be. Slowing down makes reality vivid, strange, and hot.

Let me start with the most obvious example. As anyone who has had good sex knows, sustained attention and delayed satisfaction are a big part of it. When you resist the urge to go ahead and get what you want and instead stay in the moment, you open up a space for seduction and fantasy. Desire begins to loop on itself and intensify.

I’m not sure what is going on here, but my rough understanding is that the expectation of pleasure activates the dopaminergic system in the brain. Dopamine is often portrayed as a pleasure chemical, but it isn’t really about pleasure so much as the expectation that pleasure will occur soon. So when we are being seduced and sense that something pleasurable is coming—but it keeps being delayed, and delayed skillfully—the phasic bursts of dopamine ramp up the levels higher and higher, pulling more receptors to the surface of the cells, making us more and more sensitized to the surely-soon-to-come pleasure. We become hyperattuned to the sensations in our genitals, lips, and skin.

And it is not only dopamine ramping up that makes seduction warp our attentional field, infusing reality with intensity and strangeness. There are a myriad of systems that come together to shape our feeling of the present: there are glands and hormones and multiple areas of the brain involved. These are complex physical processes: hormones need to be secreted and absorbed; working memory needs to be cleared and reloaded, and so on. The reason deep attention can’t happen the moment you notice something is that these things take time.

What’s more, each of these subsystems update what they are reacting to at a different rate. Your visual cortex can cohere in less than half a second. A stress hormone like cortisol, on the other hand, has a half-life of 60–90 minutes and so can take up to 6 hours to fully clear out after the onset of an acute stressor. This means that if we switch what we focus on more often than, say, every 30 minutes, our system will be more or less decohered—different parts will be “attending to” different aspects of reality.2 There will be “attention residue” floating around in our system—leftovers from earlier things we paid attention to (thoughts looping, feelings circling below consciousness, etc.), which crowd out the thing we have in front of us right now, making it less vivid.

Inversely, the longer we are able to sustain the attention without resolving it and without losing interest, the more time the different systems of the body have to synchronize with each other, and the deeper the experience gets.

Locked in on the same thing, the subsystems begin to reinforce each other: the dopamine makes us aware of our skin, and sensations on the skin ramp up dopamine release, making us even more aware of our skin. A finger touches our belly, and we start to fantasize about where that finger might be going; and so now our fantasies are locked in, too, releasing even more dopamine and making us even more aware of our skin. The more the subsystems lock in, the more intense the feedback loops get, and after twenty minutes, our sense of self has evaporated, and we’re in a realm where we do, feel, and think things that would seem surreal in other contexts.

2.

Similar things happen when we are able to sustain our attention to things other than sex, too. The exact mechanics differ, I presume, but the basic pattern is that when we linger on something, our bodily systems synchronize and feed each other stimuli in an escalatory loop that restructures our attentional field.

Almost anything that we are able to direct sustained attention at will begin to loop on itself and bloom.

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To take a dark example, if you focus on your anxiety, the anxiety can begin to loop until you hyperventilate and get tunnel vision and become filled with nightmarish thoughts and feelings—a panic attack.

And you do the same thing with joy. If you learn to pay sustained attention to your happiness, the pleasant sensation will loop on itself until it explodes and pulls you into a series of almost hallucinogenic states, ending in cessation, where your consciousness lets go and you disappear for a while. This takes practice. The practice is called jhanas, and it is sometimes described as the inverse of a panic attack. I have only ever entered the first jhana, once while spending an hour putting our four-year-old to sleep and meditating on how wonderful it is to lie there next to her. It was really weird and beautiful. If you want to know more about these sorts of mental states, I recommend José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente’s recent write-up of his experiences, Nadia Asparouhova on her experiences, and her how-to guide.

Here is José, whose blog is normally detailed reflections on cell biology and longevity and metascience, describing the second evening of a jhana retreat:

So I went down to the beach. “Kinda nice”, I thought. The sky had a particularly vibrant blue color, the waves had ‘the right size’, their roar was pleasant. I started to walk around trying to continue meditating. I focused my awareness on an arising sensation of open heartedness and then I noticed my eyes tearing up (“Huh? I thought”). I looked again at the ocean and then I saw it. It was fucking amazing. So much color and detail: waves within waves, the fractal structure of the foamy crests as they disintegrate back into the ocean. The feeling of the sun on my skin. I felt overwhelmed. As tears ran down my face and lowkey insane grin settled on my face I found myself mumbling “It’s... always been like this!!!!” “What the fuck??!” followed by “This is too much!! Too much!!!”. The experience seemed to be demanding from me to feel more joy and awe than I was born to feel or something like that. In that precise moment I felt what “painfully beautiful” means for the first time in my life.

The fact that we can enter fundamentally different, and often exhilarating, states of mind by learning how to sustain our attention is fascinating. It makes you wonder what other states are waiting out there. What will happen if you properly pay attention to an octopus?3 What about your sense of loneliness?4 A mathematical idea?5 The weights of a neural net?6 The footnotes here take you to examples of people who have done that. There are so many things that we can let bloom inside of us.

One of my favorite things to sustain attention toward is art.

3.

There was a period in my twenties when I didn’t get art. I thought artists were trying to say something, but I felt superior because I thought there had to be better ways of getting their ideas across (and also, better ideas). But then I realized that good art—at least the art I am spontaneously drawn to—has little to do with communication. Instead, it is about crafting patterns of information that, if you feed them sustained attention, will begin to structure your consciousness in interesting ways. Art is guided meditation. The point isn’t the words, but what happens to your mind when you attend to those words (or images, or sounds). There is nothing there to understand; it is just something to experience, like sex. But the experiences can be very deep and, sometimes, transformative.

In 2019, for example, I saw a performance of Jean Sibelius’s 5th Symphony at the University Hall in Uppsala.

Before the concert began, I spent a few minutes with my eyes closed, doing a body scan, to be fully present when the music began. As the horns at the opening of the piece called out, I decided to keep my eyes closed, so I wouldn’t be distracted by looking at the hands of the musicians. Then… a sort of daydream started up. The mood suggested to me the image of a cottage overlooking a sloping meadow and a thick wood of pines, a few hours from Helsinki. It was a pretty obvious image, since I knew that Sibelius wrote the piece at Aniola, which is 38 km north of Helsinki. But then I saw an old man walking up the meadow and into the house. The camera cut. Through an open door, I saw the man, alone, working at a desk. I saw it as clearly as if it had been projected on a screen before me: the camera moved slowly toward the back of the man.

Through the window above his desk, I could see a light in the distance. Perhaps it was Helsinki? No, it felt alive, like a being—something alive and growing, something that was headed here. But then again, if you were to see a city from space, watching it sped up by 100,000x, it would look like a being moving through the landscape, spreading, getting closer. The old man sat there for a hundred years, watching the light. There was a sinking feeling in my body.

One spring, birds fell dead from the sky. They littered the fields, whole droves of them filled the ditches—blue birds, red birds, and black. The man carried them into his woodshed and placed them in waist-high piles.

The film kept going, and the emotional intensity and complexity gradually ramped up. For the thirty minutes that it took the orchestra to play the three movements of the symphony, I experienced what felt like two or three feature films, all interconnected by some strange emotional logic. In the third movement, a group of hunter-gatherers was living in a cave that reminded me of the entrance to a nuclear waste facility. A girl hiding behind a tree saw men with cars arrive…

The structure of the music was such that it gave me enough predictability and enough surprise to allow my attention to deeply cohere. The melody lines and harmonies dredged up memories and images from my subconscious, weaving them into a rich cinematic web of stories. Guided by the music, my mind could tunnel into an attentional state where I was able to see things I had never seen before and where I could work through some deep emotional pain that seemed to resolve itself through the images.

When the music stopped, I barely knew where I was.

I opened my eyes and remembered that my brother was sitting next to me.

“What did you think?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I felt kind of restless.”

Like always, the research for this essay was funded by the contributions of paying subscribers. Thank you! We wouldn’t have been able to do this without you. If you enjoy the essays and want to support Escaping Flatland, we are not yet fully funded:

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A special thanks to Johanna Karlsson, Nadia Asparouhova, Packy McCormick, and Esha Rana, who all read and commented on drafts of this essay. The image of the University Hall is by Ann-Sofi Cullhed.

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