Why...
Substack said I should explain 'why' I want to set up a substack...good question.
Inquisitive Pig
It’s very hard to know where to begin. But I suppose a good place to start is with the truth. I, and I suspect you, don’t feel like anyone knows what’s going on anymore.
Our age of deconstruction has broken down and poked holes in ideas and institutions we once used to give our lives structure and meaning. Religion, the nation state, institutions and social norms have all had their veils lifted. We're starting to see what's underneath. This has been positive and liberating in many ways but has led (along with increasing technological disruption) to a state of wandering and aimlessness. Whilst we may recognise that what once gave us direction was flawed, what do we have to replace it?
Philosophy and creativity
Increasingly the social structures around us, from work to leisure (do you know any adults who can actually play anymore?) inhibit our abilities to a) think for ourselves critically, with nuance and balance and b) express the natural creativity we all have inside us.
So this will be a place to counteract those elements. I want to explore and ask questions from, I guess, a philosophical perspective whilst also having a place for stories. And because I can’t help it, I also want to analyse those two topics themselves, why we need stories and philosophy and when should you use one or the other to get a point across.
The creative process
I think we are all naturally creative. I certainly feel an ‘itch’ surfacing when I go too long without making something, anything. Even Marx wrote about this, a long time ago and it doesn’t seem to me to have got any better. We long for work that is tangible and meaningful. Yet so much of what we now work on is an abstraction from the end result, the chair leg rather than the whole chair.
My goal is to post something at least once a week. Because that will force me to adopt a ‘fuck it, it’s basically done’ attitude, accepting imperfection. Rather than what I currently do which is to write half baked ideas, never re-examine or edit them and then feel incredibly useless and lazy for just binging anything my eyes can get their rods and cones on. Maybe you do the same, if so let’s figure this shit out.
So expect some stuff that isn’t finished. I’m attempting to subscribe to the agile principle of creating fast and iterating constantly to improve (this is a technique used in software development). Rather than spend 2 months writing something, trying to be perfect only to discover that it is actually crap. Instead make stuff quickly and learn. Naval Ravikant described this as the ‘10,000 iterations not 10,000 hours’ rule. So hopefully within 10,000 iterations/ attempts at blogs, poems and stories I’ll have hit upon something creatively good and true.
Where you come in
I’m hoping that this reaches people who feel the same so this becomes a two way conversation. I want to understand this moment in time from different perspectives, so please share yours with me.
So this Substack is me just trying to figure stuff out. Asking questions and trying to scratch an answer out from underneath the surface. To wander through thoughts and ideas and see if anything useful comes out.
Oh and please subscribe because it gives my faux intellectual ego a big high and mighty boost that makes me very happy even if it is essentially the snooty equivalent of the ‘like’ or ‘heart’ dopamine teat we’ve all come to suckle desperately on…