After 2024: On the Cusp

Another year comes to an end. If you’re reading this you might know that I’m currently writing a book. After a few years writing 100+ essays on this blog, some of them achieving some modest success, I received a grant from the Mercatus Institute at George Mason University in the middle of 2022. They were impressed enough with my output so far to support me taking some time off work to write a book, partly based on existing essays.

I did and it went well. The early days consisted of reading source materials, reviewing my own back catalog to see what I could use and/or repurpose, and planning out the main narrative arc of the book. This was fun! Lot of excitement for the end result and I hadn’t had to start with the tough stuff yet: actually writing. I began to put together drafts of the first chapters by late 2022, and it was by early 2023 I really started to put in the serious work. I fondly remember going to the local chain café several times a week and sitting in a chair for 8 hours straight, tapping in a caffeine-fueled frenzy.

The first draft was “ready” by summer 2023. I put “ready” in scare quotes because I’d skipped ahead every time I’d run into difficulties just to get to the end. Thus, while part of me felt I was “almost” done, going back to fix the tricky spots took more time than expected — especially since the rising costs of living meant I had to start working more and had less time to write. Progress slowed but didn’t stop.

In the middle of it all I changed jobs in august 2023 and that meant going back to full time. I now only had the odd saturday or sunday here and there to get work done, plus the occasional half hour of break time at work. But it’s hard to do deep work during small time windows so progress again slowed. When my wife, in the beginning of 2024 started pursuing a teaching degree on the side, there was even less free time for the both of us.

What I’m saying here is that I feel I should have progressed further with the book, but there are reasons I haven’t.

At the same time, I’m so close now! By summer this year I had most of my chapters in good enough shape to be put into a nicely formatted Word document (a few problem children remained) so I could move on to some really enjoyable stuff like picking out fonts, formatting chapter headings, and whatnot. I made all the figures and illustrations, and picked out those nice literary quotes this genre always has at the start of each chapter. It made it feel like a real book instead of the mess of unprofessional-looking plaintext files it had always been.

Soon it’s all in there and I just need one final editing round before I’ll tentatively call it “done”. I still have a cover to design, and I’m looking into the admin around Amazon self-publishing. Still, a year ago I felt I should’ve finished by now, so obviously I feel behind schedule.

It’s funny. Looking at the near-finished product I get a strong sense that this is what I’m supposed to be doing. I don’t know if it comes from inside (partially, I’m sure) or is the result of adolescent imprinting. Back in The Political is Personal I said that I didn’t quite understand people who, as children, thought of figures in media as role models. I don’t remember ever looking up to anyone, in real life or in media, feeling I wanted to be like them. I didn’t remember wanting to be anyone but myself.

This year I realized I was wrong. I missed it because I didn’t primarily see them, but I did have role models. I did have people who exemplified what I wanted to be: the authors of popular science and philosophy books I devoured in my teens. I never pursued the academic career that’s the natural way of getting there, because the chance of success is low and I’m risk-averse by nature, and frankly lazy. I preferred the much higher economic-security-to-effort ratio that an engineering education could give me.

Still, the heart wants what it wants and here I am, inching towards it anyway. I’m cheating, sure, doing it without the academic bona fides that would give me authority (and some don’t like that). I guess my writing must stand on its own.

Of course, all this has meant no published blog posts this year, same as last year. Despite nothing new for two years, a few visitors keep stopping by, and a couple of thousand visits a month remains the standard. Total visits are even up 10% this year compared to last — the first YoY increase since 2017/2018 when I went 10x.

2018 is when I wrote some of my most important posts. It feels like a long time ago now, and in internet years it was another era. It does make me insecure wrt the book. Is its message getting old? In some ways popular erisology has improved significantly since then. There is far better understanding, especially in the wake of the recent US election, of how narratives are created and how personal biases and ideological echo chambers create and reinforce different and incompatible understandings of reality. That means there’s less novelty to what I write than there used to be, but on the flip side perhaps more people are “ready for it”.

For example, the “decoupling” concept has caught on, for better or worse. I now hear it used quite often around Twitter etc. I listen to The Studies Show with Tom Chivers and Stuart Richie sometimes, and it’s become part of their lexicon. Megan McArdle mentioned it on some other podcast (I forget which). It’s also a key aspect of the “River” subculture Nate Silver describes in his book On the Edge that I read this October. I’m ever so slightly disappointed that I didn’t get namechecked by him for popularizing it, but instead he quotes those I quoted when doing so, which is fair enough I guess.

I enjoyed On the Edge but it did leave me with some unease. I am without doubt part of the “River” in spirit, that quantitative, decoupling, pro-building, pro-tech, Silicon Valley-ish, politically liberal (in the traditional libertarian-leaning sense) culture — but I don’t live up to its ideals. To use some jargon: I’m a shape rotator who acts like a wordcel by writing a wordy, borderline humanities-ish book instead of f*cking building something. I’ve noticed that I’m self-conscious about that, and that there’s a risk that this book I’ve worked so hard on will amount to nothing at all since it doesn’t do anything. It’s just supposed to influence people’s minds in a a vague, non-measureable kind of way, and that’s both a hard thing to do and not typically what “Riverians” go for. In this as in my regular job, I yearn to perform and have impact in some measureable way.

Part of this worry also comes from my wife’s decision to get a teaching degree. She has similar “scientistic” views as me and she has not enjoyed having to take courses in pedagogical theory. My beloved molecular biology PhD rants and curses at the mushy verbiage they force her to read and regurgitate, the overwrought “theory” that’s more about itself than any concrete teaching practice, that completely lacks a healthy distinction between “is” and “ought”, that disdains factual knowledge and everything measurable, and that produces triangle after triangle “showing” how this, this and that abstract concept all nonspecifically relate to each other.

We bond by hating it together, complaining about how it’s all empty, unhelpful theoretization, as if autistic aliens tried to reason about what competent people just know how to do anyway. But… part of me fears that my writing has some of the same problem, that she, if making it all the way through my book, would react with a shrug, saying “yeah sure this is how it is, and? What value does all your conceptual architecture have?”. She is different from me though, she has inherently much less patience for philosophical-style thinking, and I have warned her that my book might bore her because she doesn’t care for grand theories without scientific-level rigor. I do try to avoid the trap of contentless abstraction by carpet-bombing my text with examples. I hope that’s enough to make it feel relevant and interesting but I have to accept that it’s not going to be for everyone. The ideal reader has the same delicate balance between hard-nosed disdain for sloppy thought and openness to not-so-rigorous abstractions as I do. In all honesty, it’s essentially written for myself about 20 years ago. (I guess that’s true for a lot of books though).

So, in the end, there’s not that much left. If I can release a little more time in the new year and get my shit together I should be able to wrap it up, although as always, admin and small tasks will take more time than I expect. I feel I should be more excited, as I’m almost at the finish line(!) but insecurity starts to mount when it’s time for that part I’m less good at and less enthusiastic about: marketing.

*shudder*

Whatever I manage to achieve, I should be happy. In a little more than a year it’s January 2026, the ten-year anniversary of my first post. When I started I didn’t expect much, certainly not that someone would give me a substantial sum of actual money to write a book 6 years later, but here I am. Regardless of exactly how far I’ve come on that anniversary, it’s further than I’d dared hope.

Happy new year, everyone!