It started in my RSS reader (Feedbin). I tend to subscribe to people’s feeds pretty liberally–have one or two interesting posts in the last dozen and I’ll add you. But I don’t check my feed reader very often, usually about once or twice a week, so that means I’ll often see a post and not recognize the author. As was this morning when I cracked open anhvn.com/…/weeknotes-35 (always a sucker for weeknotes!), then immediately hit anhvn.com/about (eventually realizing I recognize latte from the occasional Mastodon post, although I’ve been on there less as of late). That in turn made me wonder what my about said about me. That in turn led me down a rabbit hole on this very blog.

I’m going to try going in chronological order instead of rabbit-hole order:

Nonlinear: Web Content Management (2001)

I was thinking in terms of a non-linear blog. A user could respond to any portion of content (which might be images, video, audio, quotes, articles) by selecting that portion of the content and then creating a blog from that section

About a year ago I had a “new idea” for a writing platform that is basically this. It was right before I started my current FT gig, however, so I did not return to it until recently. I’ve done some AI-assisted technical architecture planning and now just the tiniest bit of vibe coding. I had to stop because I’m also using this as an excuse to learn a new programming language and web framework, so I have to pause to learn what the robot has built already, even though it’s just boilerplate.

But as we know there are no new ideas in the world. Just a few posts before anh’s in my feed reader was Improved My Feedreader’s Writing to the Web:

The idea was that anybody who used the web would have a space where they could write and so the first browser was an editor, it was a writer as well as a reader. Every person who used the web had the ability to write something. It was very easy to make a new web page and comment on what somebody else had written, which is very much what blogging is about.

– Tim Berners Lee in a BBC interview in 2005

That’s not really my point today other than in a, “Ha ha it happened again,” way. On my way to that I had another look at SWIM Stock-take Part 1 (2017), the first of a three-part post that surveyed my various attempts/iterations at this thing over the 16 years prior. In there, I link to Why Don’t Americans Understand How Poor Their Lives Are? which in the spirit of this site starts with one topic and veers into another:

As I look back over that [list of projects] I see that almost all are inward-focused. There is some level of service in my work, my education initiatives and my close relationships, but for the most part my efforts are focused on forwarding my own career, finances and creative output.

This is a time of year for taking stock. I’m looking at my symptoms–mostly burnout, which I’m experienced enough to manage on a day-to-day basis, but also old enough to see when I’m just putting my finger in the dam–and wonder if they are a result of a fundamental priority problem.

…and I realized I’m experiencing the same thing right now. In other words, same shit, different day, except in these cases the shit is a product I’ve been pursuing passionately enough to write about publically for 24 years, and an existential crisis that has lasted at least eight.

Now I have to rabbit out of that hole and go back to yesterday’s. I spent the 2h22m watching Lindsay Ellis’ The Unforgivable Sin of Ms Rachel , which is time well spent as far as I’m concerned. The style is like mine, though, so I might be biased. That is: here are three or four giant info-dumps-slash-history-lessons, I have no bold conclusions or calls-to-action, sorry, it’s complicated…hope you can introspect at least a little.

I was led to that video essay by this one: The Right’s Religious Revival Won’t Work, which might work better as a follow-up to the Lindsay Ellis one.

This is all layered on top of a listen of The Tears of Things by Richard Rohr, which will take an actual read to properly process.

And all that on top of all the various thoughts, ideas, and notes around my Ambiguous Work that remain far from expressible here.

The point is, we typically want our lives, and by most of its measure, our work, to serve some meaningful narrative. And we want it now. When we’re young that is embodied by dreams of recognition and wealth based on talent or intellect. As we age, we might enter a period of righteous resentment, sometimes most constructively revealed as questioning, more often as angry knowing (and attempts at convincing). As Chuck Palahniuk so deftly spoke to my generation:

We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.

Many people never grow out of that phase, and they spend the rest of their lives arguing for one flavor of politics or religion, sometimes even dressing up as “a cross between the Cub Scouts and if Baz Luhrmann did Henry V,” as Tom Nicholas observed.

[insert Stryper photo here, next to a photo of “The King’s Army”, who are “Raising Soldiers”, whose website also features a prominent CTA to “Shop”, with the tagline “Evangelism Made Easy”]

Or they never grow out of that phase, but just don the fleese vest uniform and drive the SUV, living the cold comfort of their beliefs about how things should be, which are conveniently the way that brings them the most comfort and the fewest questions.

But I’m finding that the journey through, if there is one, involves sacrificing a personally meaningful narrative. Not exactly great for someone who titles their blog “seeking stories beauty meaning”.

All I know is I cried when, at the 2h20m mark, Lindsay said:

We must do it at home for our children, and we must do what we can for them, for their children. They are the same.