I managed. I crossed the line. Writing became a habit. This matters a lot to a congenital procrastinator that I am. My resolution, when I moved to Substack was to publish at least once a week, no matter what happens. My second problem is focus, or rather the lack of it. My mind is all over the place, all the time.
I wake up with about half a dozen ideas for a new post every day. Posting once a week, you should see how this can be a problem. A considerable amount of my time is spent on reorganizing the hundreds of ideas I would like to work on.
About writing
I used to have this on my wall some thirty years ago:
I am not looking for answers
Everybody have answers
I am looking for the right questions
What drives my writing is the quest to find the questions that are not obvious. The ones that can shed a new light on what was assumed to be fully understood. Faith and dogma are static, but knowledge and understanding are iterative. The right questions are the drivers of better understanding. My writing is always a quest for better understanding.
Writing is not easy for me. I spend far more time than I should on confirming anything I say and ruminating over every sentence I write.
Telling stories is easy, expressing opinions is not. The first is about the world’s effect on me, the second is my effect on the world. I see both being truthful and being right as a responsibility.
What I strive for is flow. Everything I write starts as a brilliant idea that quickly turns into an unmanageable mess, a few days of research and a day of reorganization into a logical structure, until I get to a flowing argument.
I am not, and do not aim to be, a journalist. Even if I do comment on current affairs, the point is always to show how they expose, illustrate and represent enduring concepts; and how they fit into a larger picture.
What this also means is that with time I hope to build a larger narrative where each post is contributing a bit.
You should be the judge of how good my writing is, but more often than not, what I consider to be my best writing receives the least attention.
About my concerns this past year
I spent the last two days reviewing my posts that show clearly identifiable sets of concerns and interests.
My greatest concern, frustration and disappointment last year was about Artificial intelligence. It is my well-argued conviction that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is a conceptual impossibility.
I see nobody arguing against my points, nobody seems to be willing to engage them in any way. I would love to understand why. It is the greatest fear-porn exercise since the climate change baloney.
I am not afraid of AI, but I am petrified of the various interests seeking control over it. AI is just a tool, but it can do immense harm in the wrong hands. This possibility is what we need to talk about, not AI itself.
If you are reading this blog for a while, you may have noticed my preoccupation with the complexity of responsibility. Another subject that does not get the level of attention I think it needs. I have the feeling that that my talking about it makes people uncomfortable. Like my little sister, one of my more popular posts. I tend to arrive to the conclusion, that we all bear some responsibility for the world we are collectively creating.
My third major preoccupation is the political divide and the apparent difficulty of building bridges and having constructive dialogues. This is the subject that seems to resonate with the most of my readers, but without a clear suggestion on how we could possibly find a compromise. This concern also includes my problems with language, narratives and the many ways they are used to distort our understanding of the world.
The globalist efforts are an ongoing concern of mine and resulted in several posts this year, including the most popular I wrote so far. Even if nothing else, you want to read that one.
We had a tumultuous year with wars, elections and major geopolitical shifts. While I comment on them, I do not consider them a ‘concern’. They are what they are, and they are fascinating to witness and even speculate about. Nothing compares to them in my already long and eventful life.
About the next year
My plans tend to be ambitious and reaching far beyond what I can accomplish. Still, here they are:
I will have to, finally, fix all the problems created by the import process from Wordpress to Substack. Adding buttons, fixing links and even basic stuff like paragraph breaks.
As a second step of this process, I will have to properly tag and categorize the posts so that you can explore the larger arguments. That’s 429 posts in need of editing, categorization and synopses.
I want to turn on the paying feature and when I do, I want to start reading all my posts into audio files, including the old ones. That is an intimidating task, as I do not like either my voice, nor my accent; but I do believe that only authors should read their own work.
At the same time, a would also like to start a very special feature for Subscribers. (which I will describe when I turn it on.) It will need a lot of prep-work.
All of this while taking care of some heavy personal responsibilities. I am afraid that I am setting myself up for failure; we’ll see in a year.
Here are some of my favorites from last year:
I will stop with this few. Go and explore the rest. Almost every one of my posts have links to related posts of mine and others. You can also ask me anything. I may take a while to respond, but it will be a full size post with a serious consideration.
I am happy that you are with me so far and I hope I will keep earning your trust to stay for much longer.
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Thank you for us know ur efforts. I really appreaciate your enormous time and mental investment to keep us people informed.
You're doing a great job while the mass media is trying to keep us stupid, ignorant and down a false road. Writing is demanding a lot of energy, something i know from my own experience after writing a memory of my own experiences in this world of us over the past 20 odd years.
You spent nights thinking about themes, research during nights and sit at your computer during days.
No time for exercise, going to restaurants and parties but one thing you must do: Spend the early morning hour at your streetside cafe and simply watch people. There is a treasure trove passing right in front of your eyes. I bought a small camera just to capture these moments, afraid i would forget them.
AI ... yes, i spent time on that, too. If there ever was a truly AI like HAL 9000 in 2001 Space Odyssey Film in which no Human sits at the end and pulling the strings i would go for it. We have proven beyond any doubt that we're incapable to keep the Planet and all Life on it alive.
Your point: " I have the feeling that that my talking about it makes people uncomfortable." is well known to me, too. You mention any subject that makes people uncomfortable they will see you as disturbing them in their Comfort Zone which they want to avoid under any circumstances.
In the middle Ages the Messenger that brought bad News was often killed after delivering the Message.
You’ve done well Zork. The work and thought that you put into each post is quite evident. Your goals are lofty and worthy. Keep going.