The Problem with Society

“In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences.”

That is how Dr Brandon Hidaka ended the abstract of his 2013 paper, Depression as a Disease of Modernity. Hell of a sentence, right? It gets worse.

Last year I wrote about how the drastic effects sustained depression can have on the human body, effects that for the most part have been forgotten in recent years with the prevalence of Covid and other more dramatic diseases. 

While Covid may dominate the headlines, but depression has always been…. I’d argue that there isn’t a single person out there that hasn’t seen the effects of depression in someone close to them, whether they recognized it or not. The problem is that this disease is growing at an unprecedented rate, and worse, it is only a symptom of a much larger problem. This problem, according to Dr. Hidaka's paper; the way we have constructed our society. Let me explain.

There are two important ideas to understand here. One, we as humans are creatures of our environments. For the vast majority of our existence, over 85% of it, we were hunter-gatherers; collecting nuts and hunting woolly mammoths for food. This is the sort of lifestyle that our bodies spent the most time in, and therefore became the environment to which our bodies adapted the best.

Then someone decided to plant a field instead of collecting all those nuts. To round up some cows instead of hunting them when they were hungry. Tribes became towns, towns formed kingdoms and empires to protect themselves from other kingdoms and empires, and we created this thing called society. The next thing you know, the species that spent 50,000 years as hunter-gatherers is now getting their groceries delivered as the share their screen on teams from home in the suburbs, all in less than 3,000 years.

That's the second important thing to know; just how quick our environment has changed. We spent 50,000 years in one environment, and in less than 6% of that time… So quick, that our hunter-gatherer bodies have barely had the chance to adapt to this bizarre new environment. An environment that, as this paper argues, is not healthy for us.

This change in environment has led to all sorts of issues, but this paper explores this idea through how it has contributed to the rise of depression in recent years. In this exploration, the author identified six environmental changes that explicitly have contributed to the rise, them being a change in diet, the rise of obesity, a decrease in physical activity, exposure to sunlight, amount of time asleep, and finally an increase in the rate of isolation and loneliness. I expand on these changes below.

The change of diet and the rise of obesity are arguably the largest contributors to the rise of depression. The prevalence of obesity (defined as a person having a BMI of 30 or greater) has risen from 23% in 1994 to over 40% in 2019*, with now over 70% of the US population being overweight (BMI of 25 or more) (CDC, 2020). This is due to several factors, first in foremost being the food available to Americans. The American diet is primarily composed of the following, “1) glycemic load, 2) fatty acid composition, 3) macronutrient composition, 4) micronutrient density, 5) acid-base balance, 6) sodium-potassium ratio, and 7) fiber content” (Cordain et al., 2005)” foods that would be great to stock up on as hunter-gatherers who never know when the next famine will strike, but terrible to eat as routine. Unfortunately, the foods that are cheapest and most readily available in the United States are characteristic of this diet, and because of that, the obesity rate continues to rise.

On the same topic, our environment has led to a decrease in physical activity. It is estimated that the average hunter-gather expended over 3,000 calories each day. To put that in perspective, my apple watch told me that I burnt 106 calories of one mile run last week, meaning that to match a hunter-gatherer I would have to run 27 more miles at the same pace (assuming that the calorie expenditure remained at a constant rate and my watch wasn’t pulling my leg).

I wasn’t able to find any data on how many calories the average American burns per day, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that it's not even close to 3,000. The extent of exercise for most people I know is maybe the gym three times a week, and even that is rare. Otherwise, the only exercise they get is a walk every once in a while when the remote work gets too boring.

With Covid, people are spending more time at home, an environment that is not often associated with getting exercise. More time at home forms habits, and leads to less time leaving the house for a walk or going to shoot some hoops. It doesn’t help that gyms are the perfect places for Covid to spread with all that huffing and puffing occurring right next to each other. 

This is especially alarming considering that exercise is the most straightforward and healthiest medicine against depression. It may go without saying that it also prevents obesity, which we’ve seen to be a reliable trigger to the depression cycle. 

Continuing on the idea that people are spending more time indoors, the lack of sunlight exposure and decrease in sleep has been linked to increased depression rates. It follows logically that the more time you spend inside, the less sunlight that you are exposed to. Vitamin D comes from this sunlight, and several studies have shown a correlation between low Vitamin D Levels and depression onset. Irregular Vitamin D levels also contribute to insomnia and poor sleep habits, which is worrying because Americans are no longer getting enough of it. The average American adult slept about 8 hours in 1960 (Kripke et al., 1979), but now sleeps 6 hrs and 40 minutes on weekdays and 7 hrs and 7 minutes on weekends. A low amount of sleep has been linked to several mood disorders, and is also a critical trigger of depression. All of this is certainly not helped by screens we are constantly glued to.

I bet you’re starting to see a pattern of interdependence we have here with our environment that contributes to the cycle of depression and why it's so hard to extricate yourself from. If I’m obese, I’m going to be depressed, which is going to cause me to stress eat and become more obese and not work out and stay indoors which will depress me even more because now I am not getting any sunlight and my circadian rhythm is all screwed up causing me to sleep less which makes me more depressed so I eat even more…takes a breath…and the cycle continues. The problem is that I haven’t even gotten to the worst of it yet.

Remember earlier when I told you that humans are products of our environments, which for almost the entire time we’ve been in this anatomical state has been the environment of a hunter-gatherer. Well, a primary staple of that environment was the tribe, the community of hunter-gatherers that joined together to increase their odds at survival. What am I getting at here? I’m getting at the fact that we humans are deeply social creatures, creatures that for most of their existence relied on these strong bonds to others to survive. Now in the face of a society built in a way that creates an isolating disease that needs the help of others to overcome, these integral bonds are nowhere to be found.

This is the main point of one of my favorite books, Tribes by Sebastion Junger, and I’ll go more into this at a later date, but ever since the birth of society, humans have become more and more isolated from each other. Agriculture and then industry allowed people to accumulate property, which in turn allowed them to live more individualistic lifestyles. We didn’t need to depend on each other as much anymore to survive, and because of that we began to have fewer and fewer relationships.

In 1985, the General Social Survey found that the mean and mode for number of confidants, people with whom one can comfortably discuss important issues, were both 3 and 3. In 2004, a repeat of the survey revealed that the mean and mode had respectively dropped to 2 and 0 (McPherson et al., 2006). Integration of the global economies has led to greater competition in the workplace and higher education and with that a greater disparity in equity. Increased rates of relocation for jobs disrupt social networks and the rise of secularism has removed a key part of common ground. On an anecdotal level, I see this with my college friends. After graduation removed the binding factor that kept us in the same place, my friends moved all across the country and have struggled to find new friends in these Covid times. Loneliness is up in America due to these factors, and that’s not even mentioning the prevalence of social media and its effects.

Lonely people have no one to lean on when they are depressed, and because of that have less of a chance of extricating themselves from that cycle. This lack of human connections creates yet another trigger to the positive feed feedback loop that is depression. 

Look, I’m not here to say that all of society is bad, quite the contrary. I don’t know about you, but I love my bed and home and electricity and youtube account. I love the hospitals that kept me alive when I was younger and the vaccines that are now protecting me against Covid. Society and modernization are great things, just the ways they were constructed have a few defects that lead us down some unhealthy.

The good news about that is that this all can be fixed. We created this environment, so we can damn well fix it as well. But that will be the exploration of a future piece. For now, make sure to get your exercise, your sleep, and get outside you nerd.

Don't Blink

My senior year of high school, I took a class called History of the 60s as an elective. Great class, with a great teacher as well, but she always started class with a certain song, a song that no matter how hard I tried would always get stuck in my head.

I apologize for what I am about to do.

We didn’t start the fire.

It was always burning, since the world been turning. 

We didn’t start the fire.

No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it.

If you don’t know, that is the chorus of Billy Joe’s classic hit We Didn’t Start the Fire, and if you did know the song, I’m sorry for putting that into your head for the next couple of weeks. 

The song details all the major events from the beginning of Joel’s life in 1949 to when the song was written in the late 1980s. This includes the Civil Rights protests and the eventual passing of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, the counterculture movement and the Summer of Love, the first man on the moon, an assassination and then an impeachment of a president (no, not the same one), not to mention a couple of wars that were definitely not against Russia. Billy Joel had a lot to talk about.

The story goes that Billy Joel was inspired to write We Didn’t Start the Fire after meeting a 21-year-old friend of Sean Lennon well after all these events happened in 1989. They were commiserating about the politics of the day; talking about the revolutions in Eastern Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the impending invasion of the Persian Gulf in Operation Desert Shield when the 21-year-old remarked that it was “a terrible time to be 21.” Joel agreed that he had said something similar when he was in his early twenties to which the young man retorted “Yea yea but it’s different for you.” 

I think that every generation has had that thought. That its a really shitty time to be coming of age, more so than any other generation. Mine is joining the workforce in the midst of Covid, climate change, and a shitty economy, but the generation before mine was invading Iraq and Afghanistan in the midst of a real estate crash, and the one before that in whatever theatre the cold war was currently going on, and the ones before that in the world wars and the great depression.

Each generation thinks that they are unique in their thinking, that their time is the worst, and honestly, I think at the time, each person had a pretty valid argument (especially the people that had to go through WW1, that shit was brutal). But that's not the point of this article.

The point of this article, a point that I believe is perfectly illustrated by Billy Joel’s song and the reasoning behind it, is that the rate at which the world is changing is starting to increase at a rapid pace, and with that increase, there is going to be a lot of side effects.

Let’s back up and get some perspective. The first modern humans appeared around 60,000 BC. For the next 50,000 years, there was for the most part almost no change. They lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, painted pictures of saber-tooth tigers in caves, and generally did the same thing over and over again. This period takes up about 85% of human existence.

Credit to Tim Urban’s Wait but Why website.

Then someone had the bright idea of planting their food in one place instead of walking all over the place trying to find it. Farms were born, which grew into towns, which grew into civilizations with technology and trade and bureaucrats. Empires rose and fell, language was codified into these strange shapes called letters, but for the most part, the rate of change and innovation remained relatively stagnant from the bronze age to the beginning of the common era (1 AD). It’s happening, just slowly.

Then you had the Islamic Golden Age which is followed by the Renaissance. Then you had the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment. Small city-states united into alliances, and then into countries, and finally into empires.

Then we invented the computer. Then came the internet. Now technological innovation is happening at a pace never before seen in history, blowing periods like the renaissance and the Islamic Golden Age out of the water. 93% of the information generated by humans in their entire period of existence has happened since computers, which have only been around for the last 40 years. That means that 93% of all information generated by humans has occurred 0.0000645% of the time we have been on this planet.

What does this mean? Let’s look at how the computer changed the world. Think of all the jobs that were replaced/are being replaced due to the increased speed of computing. Think about the way our wars are now being fought, about how commerce has shifted to primarily online, how any person with a connection to the internet can buy and trade stocks, can write a shitty book and publish it, can compliment or bully a stranger from the comfort of anonymity, or even take down an electrical grid. Every major breakthrough we have affects us from the jobs we have to wars our country is waging, which in turn has major effects on our safety and quality of life. 

And these breakthroughs are going to come quicker and quicker. A.I. and crypto-based technology are just starting to go mainstream. In energy, scientists are very close to capturing fission technology, creating for all intents and purposes an unlimited supply of clean energy that would certainly replace basically every other source we have. And we just sent the furthest telescope ever into space. Who knows what we will find there.

It was just barely over 50 years ago when we first put a human on the moon. Now we have rovers on Mars and are sending satellites into the sun. The first personal computer was released in the mid-1970s, and now every person from your 6-year-old nephew to your 80-year-old grandmother has more computing power in their pockets than NASA had combined in the 1980s. Just three years ago, video calling was an afterthought, maybe used to keep in contact with relatives overseas. Now it is the primary form of communication while we work from home.

I say this when it took us 50,000 years to invent the wheel. Another 12,000 years to realize we revolve around the sun and not the other way around. Yet in the last 500 years, we have invented electricity, telephones, TVs, microwaves, nuclear technology, computing technology, gone into space and back again and made it through 10 seasons of Friends. Things are starting to move pretty fast around here.

Let’s see if we can keep up.

Everywhere All at Once

I’ve been conflicted recently. 

When I chose political science as my major back in my sophomore year of college, I did it not knowing what I wanted to do. Not as a placeholder, but as a way to keep my options open. The problem is that those options are still open, and I am no closer to closing them.

I have been studying for the LSAT since May, but I don’t know if I really want to become a lawyer. I take the GREs in December, still not ruling out grad school in another area like international relations. I start a course to get my EMT certificate in January with hopes of maybe pursuing a career as a firefighter and when I have been bored, I’ve been taking lessons in coding, entertaining ideas of working in software. Several routes and I have no clue which to pursue.

I will always be writing, but I see it more as a vocation than a career, something that I will always be doing regardless of whether I am able to make a living out of it. And I think to be a good writer, one needs to live a real life, one where you’re out in the world experiencing it, rather than isolated writing about it. Thus, my desire for another career. 

Let me explain my thinking process, or rather the one I borrowed from someone much smarter than me. Naval Ravikant is is an Indian-American entrepreneur, investor and thinker who has become popular online for his advice. As I have been struggling with a lack of conviction, one particular piece of wisdom stood out to me; play long-term games with long-term people. In one’s career, in their relationships, and in their knowledge.

Let’s unpack that. 

Playing long-term games unlocks the value of compound interest. If I get 1% at writing every day without any setbacks, I become 3678.3% better at the end of the first year. A the end of the second year, 142658.8%. Third-year, 5447756.6%. Anyone who works in the stock market will tell you that those are insane numbers.

Apply that towards relationships. If I put the same amount of effort towards let’s say a significant other, a business partner, or a friend, imagine how close we would be towards the end of the year. Over the course of our lives.

You don’t get the same value if you are constantly switching careers, or ending business partnerships, or flitting between relationships. Each change brings you back to zero. I hate going back to zero.

That’s part of the reason I like writing so much. It is something that I will always be doing. It creates assets, something that will pay me for my work rather than my time. As I get better at writing, those assets will become more valuable and scale. It is a long-term game that has exponential benefits (providing I actually work at it, get 1% better each day, and maybe get a little lucky.

That’s why I feel pressure to choose an alternative career and close on it. The sooner one starts compounding, the better. But at the same time I don’t want to. There is something freeing about having options, to be able to go where you want whenever you want, to have the skills to do whatever strikes your fancy that day. 

I also understand that sometimes the best option is to change. Even if you’ve invested years into something, it is never too late to try again if your heart is not in it. The only good thing I learned in economics class (and poker) is the fallacy of sunk cost. 

I’m taking this year to figure it out. Working hard so that I have those options, By August, we’ll see where I end up.

This Pandemic made me an Asshole

A few months ago I drove past a man waving for help at a freeway entrance. It looked like his car had broken down. I have every sort of tool imaginable in my truck for this exact sort of situation, yet I drove past. So did everyone else.

I walked into a Trader Joe’s in Seattle the other day. A man outside was just asking for food, not money that could be spent elsewhere. I pretended to be on my phone as I walked past him. On my way out, a lady nicer than me offered to be the better person.

Just before I moved, I was driving through the back roads of Martinez when a Prius driving on the opposite side waves me down. I cruise up to it and roll down my window to an elderly gentleman with a shaky voice.  He was trying to get to Berkeley, a city at least 45 minutes away and in the complete opposite direction that he was heading. I gave him directions, he wasn’t understanding, and then asked me if he could follow me to the freeway. I became nervous, and made an excuse about being needing to be somewhere and drove away.

Looking back on these events, I had no reason not to help. I had nowhere to be, I had all the tools and knowledge needed to help, and in the last case, the freeway was actually on my way home.

But I was afraid. So I didn’t help.

I like to think that I am a nice guy most of the time. I donate. I help my friends move. I’ve volunteered in a soup kitchen or two (but not more than that). But after spending so much time inside during a time where everyone could be a potential carrier of a deadly virus, I’m wary. Irrationally so in most situations I’ll admit, but still wary. 

Maybe I would have been just as wary without the pandemic. The world was still a dangerous place before Covid, but I like to think that I would have been more helpful. Maybe not. Maybe this is just my convenient excuse.

Even so, the last few years of the pandemic definitely have changed people. There is no going back to “normal.” Not after we’ve spent so much time isolated, working, and studying from the same room we sleep in. We all have gotten a lot better at being alone.

But that shouldn’t be the reason we stop helping people, and it shouldn’t be my excuse.

On Dreams

I have a dream. I'm sitting on the couch, legs up, leaning back. Besides me is my wife, a girl way too good for me that for some reason stuck around. Surrounding us is the sound of children playing with their cousins, my Uncles talking to my friends while they make a drink, and the announcers of the big game. An apple crisp is baking in the oven. Damn, I love apple crisps.

Together we watch the sun set on Bodega Bay.

Bodega Bay has always been the place. A place where natural beauty, history, and great memories come together to form something special. A place that feels like home, even if you’ve never lived there. 

When my family immigrated from Italy, they used to work on the dairy farms in the area. When I was little, my extended family started the tradition of renting a house there for a week every other thanksgiving. A full week of playing with cousins, watching football, and great food. I looked forward to those weeks more than anything.

As we got older, we started going more often. My family spent New Year’s there. My cousin and I would take day trips there to hike along the beach or visit our favorite deli in town for a burger. Just recently two of my favorite people in the world got engaged on that beach. 

The dream is to build a home there. Not for me, but for the people that made that place so special. Somewhere where all the people I care about can come together, rest, have some fun, and not worry about finding a bed. A place with roots, that will last long after me. Something I can look back at in my final days, and know I did something for those that come after me, as my family has done for me. 

It’s a long shot. Right now it is only scribbles in my notebook, but maybe, maybe, if I make enough money and do enough work, I can buy the land. Maybe with more work and I can build the house. And then, maybe, I can put my feet up, and enjoy an apple crisp while the sun sets.

Here’s to dreams.

This post was inspired by a youtube video. I highly recommend the video and the filmmaker who made it. 

Seven Qualities that Make a Good Community

This note is to signify that while this article is at a spot where I feel ok posting, it is not at a spot where I would say it is finished. There are a few things that I would like to add, just haven’t found the correct wording yet. Come back later as I put on the finishing touches.

Yesterday I wrote about how my generation was facing a loneliness epidemic, one that had some very alarming mental and physical health concerns.

Obviously, that was not a fun thing to learn about, and it got me thinking about the times where I felt the opposite of alone. Where I felt wanted, like I was a part of something, and people genuinely liked having me around, and then how did those circumstances happen so I could create more. 

After thinking about it for a while, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two main ways of avoiding loneliness. One way is by creating individual connections with someone; finding a significant other, mentor in business, best friend from down the street. The easier way is by joining a good community.

Today I am going to talk about what makes a good community. I have been pretty lucky to be a part of some great ones, and I spent yesterday night coming up with all the qualities that they did best. What follows are the seven qualities I found that made a good community.

Shared Goals

A good community needs a goal. A goal that everyone shares, that they can work together towards and bond in their journey for. 

The goal of original communities, when humans finally got around to communicating with each other, was survival. I’ll watch your back while we hunt this tiger to feed our families. Now it is a little less extreme, but no less important to creating worthwhile connections. A sports team wants to win championships. A startup wants to reach 100,000 users on its platform. This provides a reason for the community to form and creates a shared basis on which friendship is created.

When a community has a shared goal that everyone wants enough to buy in, that’s when the rest of the characteristics fall in line. 

Skin in the Game

A good community requires its members to buy-in. That they sacrifice something personal, whether it be time, money, or capital for the good of the team. A step further is putting your skin in the game. 

Skin in the game is a term coined by the philosopher Nassim Taleb which refers to absolute responsibility being taken for one’s action. In a group setting, this means that one person is responsabile for the actions of the group, and vice versa. Nassim used the analogy of an architect sleeping under the bridge he designed and oversaw its construction-if it fails, he takes the ultimate responsibility for it, even if it wasn’t his own fault.

Again, less extreme, today this is seen in sports teams running for the mistake of an individual. My old lacrosse coach used to make us run a liner for every minute a person was late to practice, while the person who was late watched. While this felt unfair at first, it built a sense of shared responsibility in the team around reaching this standard. No one wanted to let the team down and be liable for their mistakes, so everyone made sure to get to practice early.

Responsibility/Sharing of Work

There are no freeloaders in a good community. Everyone is required to work; towards the shared goal, so that others don’t feel that you’re slacking off, and simply for your own benefit of getting better. 

There may be people injured on the sideline, or sick at home, but these people are either participating in the way they can (cheering during a big game, helping coach watch film) or have built a sense of trust through previous work where the community knows that they have paid their dues. 

The people who do try to freeload, to get the easy A without contributing, rarely last long in good communities. 

Standards

A good community will hold everyone to a high standard, both for the good of the community and out of respect for the individuals. A good basketball team is going to set the standard of hustling back on defense. A startup will make sure that everyone is putting their maximum effort towards hitting that deadline. If someone misses this standard, it is every other teammate’s responsibility to pull him back up to this standard, even if this means a little bit of yelling.

Enjoyment

I am a terrible climber. Despite this, one of the best communities I was ever in was a climbing team. The people there were supportive, worked hard at their craft, and brought everyone else up to a high standard. 

But one of the reasons I think the team was so special to me was that everyone enjoyed each other’s company. They were having fun, even during the 20-minute ab workouts and the conditioning and the hard days at competitions. 

Every community is going to face some difficulty. But if you have a culture of people who genuinely have fun together, those hard days are going to be a lot easier.

Obstacles/Shared Hardships

That being said, those hard days are instrumental to creating a close community. Sigmund Freud, like him or hate him, once said “One, day in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.” 

For me at least this has been true. Some of my favorite years were when I was being physically punished with the few sports teams I was on, or thrown into unfamiliar territory when I was abroad. These times were hard, but they netted some of my best friends and best memories.

Obstacles and shared hardships in overcoming them provide the fire that heats the iron. They force a team together, providing opportunities for everyone to prove their worth to each other and rely on each other. When that happens, unbreakable bonds are forged.

Trust

The most important part of a good community is absolute trust. It is a beautiful thing when it happens. When you send a pass without looking because you know your teammate is going to be there. When you don’t worry about not finishing an assignment because you know your team is going to get the work done.

It’s a beautiful thing, but without it, a community cannot exist. I am not going to buy into a community, share in the work, hold others to high standards, and go through difficult times if I cannot trust the people around me. That’s simply absurd.

The problem is that trust is the hardest quality to build in a community. It requires time, good people, and multiple times of it not working before a community can gain a trustworthy reputation. Unfotnantly, the only way to build trust is to keep an open mind. Be open to it for a while, put in the work, and see what happens. If people seem like they’re not willing to buy in three months in, maybe it’s time to find some new people. 

When I’ve looked back on my childhood, I’ve found that the communities I was lucky enough to be dropped in were some of the most influential parts of my life. But communities are changing. Kids are growing up in a world where a good portion of where communities are usually formed, school, is online. Gaming is becoming a trillion-dollar industry, and teams are being formed around it. That’s not to mention the development going on in crypto, which I might be going to cover in the future.

The point is, before I go off rambling too much, is that if the internet and social media are such a large cause of the loneliness pandemic, we need to find a way to build communities with the aforementioned qualities digitally to combat it. Otherwise, the technology that was built to connect everyone will end up being the one that drives us apart.

See you tomorrow.

The Hidden Epidemic

61% of my generation deals with a condition that is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. A condition that leads to an increased risk of heart disease and cancer, decreased resistance to infection, a decline in cognitive ability, and people with it are more likely to partake in substance abuse and domestic violence. That’s not to mention to anxiety and depression that accompany it

I’m talking about loneliness. The feeling of being unsatisfied with current relationships. The feeling of not feeling wanted in your community. Of not feeling needed, and not feeling that you can depend on someone. 

I knew our nation had a problem with it. I had seen the occasional headline on Twitter or the nightly news, but I had no idea how bad it was and how it affected us. Then I spent the weekend reading a few studies from Harvard, The Scientific American, and a health insurance company called Cignac. I almost wish I didn’t.

I knew loneliness sucked. That led to depression and anxiety, serious problems that need to be addressed. But I didn’t know about the physical effects. That it can take 8-15 years off your life if it persists, especially if one lives a sedentary life. 

According to the Harvard study conducted in October of last year and released in February of this one, 34% of Americans say they suffer from persistent loneliness. However, the most alarming part of that 34% was the fact that in the younger generation, my generation, almost ⅔ said that they dealt with loneliness. That’s ⅔ of the people I know dealing with a disease that if it persists, can take a tenth of your life away. 

If I had to point any fingers at why my generation is so lonely, I think my biggest one would point towards social media.  The act of perceiving others having a good time with friends while you aren’t can bring about feelings of rejection, feelings that are only exasperated by not receiving likes on posts or being tagged by others in the comments. There is a reason social media has been linked to the increase in mental health disorders.

There is also the pandemic to think about. The institutions that we find and make friends like school, college, and sports have largely remained shuttered. Mass media has taught us to distrusts, strangers, due to the possibility of them being infected with covid. Once you spend so much time isolating yourself, it’s hard to return to society.

Society might be the biggest reason. This is a bold claim to make, and one that I might need a series of posts to explain. We humans are not built for the globalist society that we have created. We were built for small-scale communities that depended on each other for survival. This new age of the internet and nation-states and social media is incredibly overwhelming, and we don’t like it.  

Or as the Journal of Affective Disorders concluded in 2012. “In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences.”

I’ll talk about society’s impact more another time though.

I wanted to end this article with thoughts on how to prevent loneliness, but it got a little too long so I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave on a negative note. The second part of this article, on how to build community, will be available here tomorrow.

Links:

• https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/loneliness-in-america

• https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-young-americans-are-lonely/

• https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/loneliness-is-harmful-to-our-nations-health/

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3330161/

Four Lessons from my First Book

I wrote a book during the pandemic. I had no business writing one, but I did anyway, and now it is out in the world for you people to confirm this fact.

In writing this book (which is available here), I learned some things. A few things, actually. I probably could have learned a few more, but even so, I consider myself lucky to have captured these lessons that I have since written down. If you are so inclined, below you will find these four lessons that I learned writing my first book at 22.  

Write just for one person

Despite being an amazing writer (at least according to my grandmother), I have to understand that some people aren’t going to like my writing. Everyone has different opinions and preferences; it’s part of what makes us human. But some people still try to please everyone.

Hi, I’m some people. In the first drafts of the book, I found myself being torn in every direction, writing in an effort to appease anyone who came to mind. I kept thinking, Oh, Ezekiel wouldn’t like this sentence, or Tony would think this passage is too much. Sometimes I would find myself in impossible predicaments where I wrote passages that Jeff would like, but Tony wouldn’t, and changing it would only reverse the scenario.

Instead, I learned to write like only one specific person is going to read it. This isn’t a new concept. All the great authors had their muses. Hemmingway had his wives (he married and divorced several times). Fitzgerald was perhaps unhealthily obsessed with his wife Zelda. Jack Kerouac based many characters on his best friend Neal Cassady. These people provided inspiration while also forcing them to focus their writing to a single audience.

I started to write with one specific person in mind. Rather than feeling like I was writing with a crowd of people behind me, looking over my shoulder and giving me unwarranted suggestions, my writing became a single conversation with this individual. The crowd faded away, and I was free to focus my efforts.

Who do I write for? Wouldn’t you like to know, weather boy. Using a single person as my target audience helps to focus my writing and prevents me from worrying about what others might think. Now I only have to worry about what one person might think (still very exhuasting).

Write what you want to read

I used to read all the fancy journals that writers are supposed to read. The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, really any journal pretentious enough to put “the” in front of their name. I would read the stuffy pieces in these journals, attempt to replicate their stuffy writing, and would never quite succeed. I would give up halfway through.

One day I realized that I did not like reading these stuffy pieces. Life is short, and I already have spent way too much time reading things I did not like (I was a Political Science major). I started to write like my favorite authors, and I instantly found myself writing so much more. Friday in Florence is heavily based on Cannery Row by Jon Steinbeck and A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, two of my favorite books that were re-read several times during the process and inspired much of my writing.

Let it breathe

I finished the first draft of FiF in early August of 2020, after which I decided I deserved a break. The official reason for this was that I wanted to give myself a few weeks without thinking about the book, so I could come back and edit with a fresh eye, something I heard all the good writers do.

I struggled with this. For better or for worse, I hate it when I don’t finish something. I didn’t want to become another one of those people who never finished their book. Also, I was bored, and writing that draft had helped me kill many hours during California’s first lockdown.

But I stayed strong (by distracting myself with a little work and a lot of League of Legends), and the result paid off. Coming back from my three-week break, I noticed that the ending of my book (which I initially thought was Pulitzer level writing) was complete shit. I wouldn’t have noticed this if I had immediately gone into editing mode. So, take a break every once in a while. It’ll help you in the long run, and after all, you deserve it.

Get your ducks in a row before you dive into the pond

When I started writing FiF, I had zero idea of how it was going to turn out. I had a few vague characters, a setting, and not much else. This was a mistake.

 I’m still of the opinion that authors don’t need to, if they even should, flesh out exactly what happens in the plot before writing it (rather let it grow organically from page to page), but I definitely should have fleshed out my characters and setting before starting.

I wasted an incredible amount of time rewriting sections because this scene no longer made sense with how I viewed this character or looking up names of streets and other small details about Florence. The majority of the writing didn’t need these details but fixing them took up most of my time.

If I can stress anything in this article, it is this. Know your settings and characters before diving in. Even if you end up not using one or changing it later, this saves so much time (and exasperation) in the long run. This can also be summed up as “do the fucking research!”

Those are the lessons I’ve learned so far, and I’m sure there are more to come. I’ll be happy to recieve them, though, forthat means I’m still writing.

On Decisions

Out of all the schools I applied to, the only one I never eventually got into was the University of Washington in Seattle. Interestingly enough, I now live just over a block away from it.

A few days ago we got some good weather and I decided to take a stroll through the campus that had denied me so many years ago. As I was walking past the buildings that I hadn't seen since my senior year tour, I was struck by how different my life would be if I had been accepted there, or for that matter, had gone to any of the other schools I applied to originally or for transfer.

I once had my sights set on a small liberal arts school in the middle of Pennsylvania, where I would have almost certainly gone into investment banking. They had a big feeder program with some firms in New York, a program a girl I'd been crushing on had just been accepted into.

I also could have gone to the University of Oregon, or Washington State, huge schools with giant party scenes that I may have enjoyed too much.

For a while, I was committed to Carnegie Mellon for a five year architecture program.

That commitment didn’t last long. A few weeks after visiting some of my high school buddies and I were having a few brews. I was on bud light number four when I came to the conclusion that I didn’t want to move to the east coast. Instead, I did a complete 180 and accepted an offer from Gonzaga University, a school in a city I had never heard of in a state I'd been to only once prior and happened to be the rival of a college that was right down the street of my childhood home. To study politics. Yea I have questions, too.

I have zero regrets. Gonzaga was one of the best things to happen to me...or rather the people I met there were some of the best things, but it’s crazy to look back and think about how different your life would be if you had gone to a different college.

If I had gone to that Pennsylvania school, most of my friends would have been from the east coast, and I would probably be wearing a tie right now.

If I had gone to Carnegie Mellon, I would still be in school right now in Pittsburgh, probably locked in a studio behind on a draft.

And if I had gone to one of those big state schools, I'd probably be an alcoholic.

I kid, for the most part.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently as I’ve been settling into my new home in Seattle. The people I am living with are amazing people, but if you told me I would be living with them here a year ago, I would have called the cops on you. One decision led me to them and Seattle, just like one decision led me to the clubs and dorms where I found some of the best of friends and one decision led the college that completely changed my career path and ambitions.

That’s insane to me. That a single decision could have so much of an impact. Even a little bit scary now as I don’t have the limitations of school keeping me in one place. Since the primary form of me making money is online, I could be anywhere in the world doing anything with anyone. A single decision could take me anywhere.

These decisions used to stress me out. Their gravity would keep me up at night with worry that I would make the wrong one. That I would be looking back as I am doing now with regret, saying I should have gone to this school or done this at this school or not even gone to school at all. I didn’t want to spend my life asking what if to the past.

This may be naïve for me to say as a 23-year-old, but I feel like I have made enough of these big decisions to know most of them work out in the end. And if they don’t well there is always another opportunity around the corner to change your mind.

So while they are still scary, these decisions don’t stress me out like they used to. I know there are many of them in my future and I am excited to see what forks in the road I choose. That being said, I am more than content with where I am now. I have some time before the next fork in my road appears, and I am going to enjoy it.

Six Writing Tips From John Steinbeck

Steinbeck has been my favorite author ever since I was forced to read Cannery Row freshman year of high school. Friday in Florence was heavily inspired by (sometimes dangerously close to) Steinbeck’s writing style, with me even borrowing a few characters from his books. I felt it fitting to end this little mini-series of the tips of my favorite authors with the one who inspired me to become one. Without further ado, below you will find the six major lessons on writing by John Steinbeck.

Accept Fear

It is not so very hard to judge a story after it is written, but, after many years, to start a story still scares me to death. I will go so far as to say that the writer who not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium.

Steinbeck won a National Book of the year award, a Pulitzer in Literature, and countless other awards for his writing. If anyone could be confident in their storytelling, it was him. Yet with every story, fear was always present. I can’t speak for Steinbeck in what caused this fear; maybe fear of not doing the story justice, or fear of how it will be received, but if one of the greatest writers of this country still felt that fear at the beginning of each story, then you will as well. Accept it, and keep going.

Don’t worry about finishing

Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

We start a project with grand ideas of how it will finish. How it will look, how it will be received and adored by the masses. We rarely achieve what we envision in our minds, and the frustration of this inevitably can paralyze the writer. Don’t worry about the end result. Worry about the page (or screen these days) in front of you. Or as a much smarter person once said, “just keep swimming.”

Write for One

Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.

When I first started Friday in Florence, I spread myself too thin. I kept trying to bend my writing so it would appease every face I thought might read it. In trying to please everyone, I wasn’t able to please even one.

I ended up choosing a certain person who had actually inspired some of my writing and writing like only they were going to read it. Rather than feeling like I was writing with a crowd of people behind me, looking over my shoulder and giving me unwarranted suggestions, my writing became a single conversation with this individual. The crowd faded away, and I was free to focus my efforts.

I wish that I had known this at the beginning.

Stay Disciplined

All sorts of things might happen in the course of this book but I must not be weak. This must be done. The failure of will even for one day has a devastating effect on the whole, far more important than just the loss of time and wordage. The whole physical basis of the novel is discipline of the writer, of his material, of the language. And sadly enough, if any of the discipline is gone, all of it suffers.

In writing, there is no boss. At most, you have an impatient publisher or a nagging agent, but for the most part, you are the boss. It’s up to you to have the discipline to clock in every day, to take responsibility for a bad day, and still show up the next. To be a professional. The greatest writers were not great because they were favored by constant inspiration or talent, but rather because they had the discipline to keep going when both evaded them. Stay the course.

There is no magic formula

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that make a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.”

Everyone hopes that there is a secret to writing. The fact that I have spent so much time researching my favorite authors’ methods rather than actually creating something myself is a testament to this hope. There are tips, better ways of doing things that save time and focus efforts, but there are no shortcuts. Find something worth expressing, and then try your best to convey it sincerely. 

Understand it never gets easier

I will end this article and mini-series with this. Steinbeck, after winning every award for writing possible, including a Nobel prize, had this to say about the craft.

 I remember one last piece of advice given me. It was during the exuberance of the rich and frantic '20s, and I was going out into that world to try and to be a writer.

      I was told, "It's going to take a long time, and you haven't got any money. Maybe it would be better if you could go to Europe."

      "Why?" I asked.

      "Because in Europe poverty is a misfortune, but in America it is shameful. I wonder whether or not you can stand the shame of being poor."

      It wasn't too long afterward that the depression came. Then everyone was poor and it was no shame anymore. And so I will never know whether or not I could have stood it. But surely my teacher was right about one thing. It took a long time - a very long time. And it is still going on, and it has never got easier.

      She told me it wouldn't.

Here’s to it never getting easier.

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Why I Write Part 2

A few days ago I wrote about the personal reasons why I write, also known as the why no matter what I end up doing in life, I will continue to publish dumb shit on the internet. But there are further reasons, one less intrinsic and geared more to the career ambitions that cause me to get up in the morning. These are those reasons.

To Network Myself

The web is always on and available to anyone. Anyone in the world with a computer and a connection can search my name and have this website come up regardless of their location or time difference. 

Because of this, this website becomes a 24-hour networker for me. Some examples:

This website is a concrete example of my work. Instead of saying I am a good communicator or writer on my resume, a recruiter can hop on my site and judge for himself. Instead of me saying I am good at SEO or copywriting, I can show metrics of how many monthly visitors I get or the number of people signed up for my weekly newsletter (which you should really sign up for).

It becomes an implicit example of what I can do. It shows that I can build, work on a project with consistency, hold myself to a certain standard while exposing myself to failure, and that I have a clear focus of where I want to go.

Finally, it becomes a medium of connection. People can see what I am working on, what I am thinking about, or arguing over with clarity from my writing.  If they are interested in connecting or working together, my inbox, Twitter or Instagram is a click away. Always on, accessible to anyone. 

To Leverage a Personal Brand

For better or for worse, we now live in the age of the personal brand. In such an age where everyone is connected, those able to carve out a following can easily make a living. People with 10,000 people on their email list can make six figures a year. If you can leverage your brand in even broader success on the internet, well, you are definitely a millionaire. 

I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, (I plan on going deeper into the creator economy in a future article) but what is fact is that there has never been another time on earth where people simply from leveraging their persona and skills on the internet can make such an impact. Simply look at the YouTubers, streamers, and Tik-Tokers making millions of dollars every month.

Now, I am no YouTuber, but there are still definite benefits to creating a following online as a writer. Publishers are a lot keener to sign deals with authors they know already have an established following, even if that person may be a lesser writer. Hell, you might not even be able to get your foot in the door with a publisher if you didn’t have these metrics to back you up. 

With how congested the internet is with content these days, creating a brand and developing a following ensures that you are heard above the noise, regardless of how good you are. 

To Build Something Long-Term

Both of those reasons above can be summed up in my wanting to build something long-term. I want to create things that are long-term; books and articles, maybe other avenues in the future that are long-lasting and that are constantly providing value for the world regardless if I am awake or not.

The goal is agency. To be paid not for my time, but for what I create and what I own. To work for myself, not someone else. This is something that is not going to happen overnight if it even happens at all, at least five or six years at the earliest, but it is something worth pursuing for me. This is only possible with the creation and ownership of assets that continue to provide value.

In short, I believe that if you are good at communicating your ideas or creating something of value, the internet and the access it provides will eventually reward you with opportunities and agency not available prior. Because of that, and the fact that I actually enjoy the process, I believe I will always be writing.

Thanks for coming along.

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Why I write Part 1

I haven’t been asked about this, but I feel the need to explain the reasons why I write. I don’t know why, maybe it is just me trying to understand it myself. Regardless I spent the last week thinking about it and I came up with several reasons that I split into two different categories, personal and career. This article explains the first of those categories.

To Find Understanding

The act of writing about a subject forces you to understand. To break down that complicated issue until it makes sense to you, then reconstruct that material into an argument that makes sense to both you and the reader; all in a way that is hopefully interesting and entertaining (or at least one of the two). It’s the same reason why teaching a subject helps reinforce concepts learned in school, or why coaching makes you better understand the sport.

Let me try by using that same principle in an example. I am currently writing an article about career politicians. The process started with me learning; researching, pulling together news articles and research papers, and a tracking down few book quotes that I had read previously. I took all this information and diagramed it, made connections, dispelled claims I believed false or weak, and tried to form a structure of something that logically follows. This required critical thinking, evaluating arguments on strength and logical reasoning, all while keeping how another perspective will perceive this in mind. Then I try to write it; thinking about flow, word choice, whether or not it’s interesting (is this sentence even interesting?) trying to craft a piece that is easily digestible. When you are this deep in the material, it becomes ingrained in your brain, and the act of writing, editing, re-writing, and then re-editing only reinforces this thinking even more. When the article is finished, I will come away with an understanding of the problem that will last for some time.

To Create

The world has become too big and too complicated. We are constantly overwhelmed by the hours of content available to us, by the sensationalized 24-hour media and the always-on social media networks. One could easily spend their entire day simply consuming on the internet, watching YouTube videos, and scrolling through Tik-Tok until it’s dark again and time to go asleep. 

Creating takes back a little bit of our agency. Instead of looking back on a day of Tik-Tok dances or bullshitting my boss, I can say “hey, I made this. I built it by my own decisions, for my own sake, and I feel better because of it.”

During the beginning of the pandemic especially, when the world seemed more out of control than usual, writing provided me a sense of satisfaction and purpose not found when I was at school or the various bullshit jobs I’ve had. I think that one could say the same about any craft, from coding and carpentry to painting and paving. To look back on the day and see tangible evidence of something done well...well, that’s becoming an increasingly rare privilege.

Finally...To Express Myself

I feel like finding a way to truly express oneself is a problem that all people deal with in different degrees of intensity. It’s the feeling of walking away from a conversation disappointed and unsatisfied with yourself, never quite feeling that you conveyed what you wanted to convey. That your message was misconstrued, scrambled, lost, or worse, was so boring that the receiver could care less. 

I have known people who could express themselves with ease. The people who could tell a story that would leave you laughing with stitches, who could sell water to the ocean and leave the ocean thinking she got away with a good deal. These are the people I look up to. 

On the other end, I know people that, whether they know it or not, struggle with this. The people who hold back from the conversation because they can’t find the best way to contribute, or the poor people who say something with a hundred words that could have been said with ten. While I sympathize with these people, I am afraid to be one.

We humans are social creatures. We crave connection and relationships and community. We want to relate to these people, to hear their stories, and return the favor with our own. This is only possible by truly expressing ourselves, how we are feeling, what we are thinking, and in this modern age it’s one of the hardest things for our species to do sincerely. 

As I’ve hinted, I think I lean more towards those who struggle with this. I’ve always been a quieter kid, especially relative to my boisterous Italian family. I rarely participated in school, shared only when asked at the dinner table. I decided to choose quiet over being the person who overly chatted.

Writing is my way of improving that. Both by using another medium, one where I can clarify and edit my message before sharing, but also in the action of doing so, improve my speech thereafter. Neil deGrasse Tyson once said that hardly any sentence that comes out of his mouth does so unless he had written it down sometime before. Love him or not, Neil is known to be a great communicator, and I want to do the same. I want my conversation to begin to sound like the words and ideas I have spent so much time crafting and editing. If I do this enough, eventually they will seep into my consciousness, and hopefully when I talk after.

Part 2 of this two-part series will be released tomorrow. Want to get all my writing in one, easily ignored email every Sunday ? Want to help support the growth of this site. Consider joining the hundred-plus others that are subscribed to my newsletter below!

Five Tips F. Scott Fitzgerald used to become a Timeless Writer

If there was a Mount Rushmore for great American authors, I am sure that Fitzgerald’s face would be the first to be carved. His The Great Gatsby is widely regarded as one of the best books of all time and has been an unreachable standard for young writers everywhere.

In this continuation of my journey to become a better writer, I read several letters and articles by the Gatsby himself and distilled five main themes that drove his writing. They are listed below to be read at your pleasure.

Have a System

Invent a system Zolaesque…but buy a file. On the first page of the file put down an outline of a novel of your times enormous in scale (don’t worry, it will contract by itself) and work on the plan for two months. Take the central point of the file as your big climax and follow your plan backward and forward from that for another three months. Then draw up something as complicated as a continuity from what you have and set yourself a schedule.

When I first started writing, I believed that stories should grow organically. Start with a premise, setting, and some interesting characters, and see what happens. This wasted so much time. I kept having to go back and rewrite certain sections and chapters because they no longer fit where I wanted the book to go, an annoying task that caused me to procrastinate and lose valuable days of writing.

Spending time in the beginning to create the structure of your book not only safeguards against the worst of this time-wasting but also provides a framework for a schedule. Having something to measure how far you’ve come and keep you accountable to progress. If I had done even a few more weeks of outlining for Friday in Florence, it would have been released at least three months earlier.

Choose your word with care

You ought never to use an unfamiliar word unless you’ve had to search for it to express a delicate shade–where in effect you have recreated it. This is a damn good prose rule I think…. Exceptions: (a) need to avoid repetition (b) need of rhythm (c) etc.

Fitzgerald along with his friend and confidant Hemingway were known for using short, easily understood prose to describe profound and complicated subject matter. Their ability to create such complex stories that everyone from the average fourth-grader to an 80-year-old can understand is the mark of a master writer.

Also like Hemingway, Fitzgerald had a deep aversion to overusing adjectives in his stories.

About adjectives: all fine prose is based on the verbs carrying the sentences. They make sentences move. Probably the finest technical poem in English is Keats’ “Eve of Saint Agnes.” A line like “The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass,” is so alive that you race through it, scarcely noticing it, yet it has colored the whole poem with its movement–the limping, trembling and freezing is going on before your own eyes.

All of this goes to show that one does not need a thesaurus to be a good writer. Use words people know, and use action over adjectives.

Kill your darlings

In a 1993 Saturday Evening Post article, Fitzgerald touches upon one of the hardest parts of writing.

 “This is just bullheadedness. Better throw it away and start over.” The latter is one of the most difficult decisions that an author must make. To make it philosophically, before he has exhausted himself in a hundred-hour effort to resuscitate a corpse or disentangle innumerable wet snarls, is a test of whether or not he is really a professional.

Learning to cut what is not needed in your writing, however well written it is, is something with which all writers struggle. I especially should have cut out more than I did in FiF. This dilemma has been more famously described as “killing your darlings,” a quote attributed to American greats like Faulkner and Wilde. It is the people who know how to do this, according to Fitzgerald, that separate the professionals from the amateurs.

Who to write for

“My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

I’ll end this list with this. There is a lot of conflicting advice on how to direct your writing. Steinbeck says to write for one person. Publishers want you to write for a specific demographic, the one that will buy a lot of your books. Fitzgerald has a unique view that I haven’t seen in any other authors, one that I think is the reason that his books remain so timeless. Write for whomever you’d like, but understand that writing is a gift that can transcend lifetimes. Make sure that it lasts.

A Few Tips on Writing from Amor Towles

I’ve started a small series where I take a few of my favorite writers and compile their best tips for writing. This second issue is on my newest favorite writer, Amor Towles.

I picked up Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow the day before the first lockdown in California, a choice that became one of my best in 2020. Since then, I have re-read the book three times, and everything else he has put out since and before. It is safe to say that he has become one of my favorite authors. 

I spent the last week or so going through his various interviews and profiles and came up with four main principles that he follows when it comes to writing.

Study the greats.

Amor has spent much of his life studying his craft. Yes he studied at both Yale and Standord (which I heard are alright schools), but that perseverance has extended past his years in college. Amor and three other friends have a book club that has been going strong for the last 15 years, with them coming together every month without fail to discuss a new book. If you do the math, that  amounts to over 180 books. That’s 180 books that Amir has analyzed, critiqued, and learned from to influence his own writing, and it shows. There was a reason his first book was a NYT best seller.  

Plan it out.

By the time Amor begins to pen the first words of his novel, he has already been working for at least a year. The reason, Mr Towles is a ruthless outliner. 

And that takes me about a year to two years, where I just start thinking through every element: the settings, the scenes, the individuals, the events. And so by the time I write chapter one, I have most of the book sketched out.


Amor does not constrain himself to this outline, though. He remarks that he frequently discovers new things about his characters as he writes them. Instead, the outline serves as a foundation, a structure to fall back on when inspiration isn’t hitting like it should.

Inspiration comes to those who work.

There is a common belief in writing, or any creative work, that inspiration drives the action, and one needs to wait for it before work can be done. Amor would disagree.

I almost never start with inspiration. If you start to write a scene or an idea, if you can stick at that for 20 minutes, eventually you can get lost in the process and the creative function takes over. The imagination suddenly kicks in. You almost have to dive in and start to work, and eventually, if you get in the groove, you can flourish.

Don’t use waiting for inspiration as an excuse for not getting to work. Dive in first, stick with it, and eventually you’ll start swimming. 

Follow your fascination.

Amor would be the first to admit that he is no expert on the subjects that he chooses to be the setting or theme of his books but would say that they are areas that he has been interested in for some time.

Rather than pursuing research driven projects, I like to write from areas of existing fascination. Even as young man, I was a fan of the 1920s and 1930s, eagerly reading the novels, watching the movies, and listening to the music of the era. I used this deep-seated familiarity as the foundation for inventing my version of 1938 New York in Rules of Civility. Similarly, I chose to write A Gentleman in Moscow because of my longstanding fascination with Russian literature, culture, and history.

Hemingway had a similar view, where one should write what they know. Having a longstanding curiosity of a subject allows one to draw from past experiences and knowledge rather than going out and researching, as well as adds a personal touch. And at the risk of stating the obvious, it is much easier to write about a subject you enjoy rather than one you don’t but think the reader would.

Liked this? Hated it? Somehow found a typo (it’s rare, but crazier things have happened). Let me know.

A Case for Quantity over Quality

You’ve heard the classic advice. Probably from your mother or a friend, probably unasked for.

Quality over quantity. One good song is worth more than a mediocre album. One well-made house over several of lesser construction. A few good friends worth more than 20 colleagues. 

For the most part, I consider this to be true. Especially during the pandemic, I discovered which activities and which people brought the most joy into my life.

But on this site, I am trying to learn. Trying to grow from nothing into something, and in those two areas, the opposite may be true. The quantity of work becomes more important than the quality of it.

Let me explain by borrowing an example. In the book Art and Fear, authors David Bayles and Ted Orland tell the story of a test conducted by a certain ceramics teacher.

The ceramics teacher announced that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”.

Well, grading time came and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity!

It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat around theorising about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

I’ve come to understand that learning requires action. One could spend years watching videos, reading articles and how-to’s, but could never swing a hammer as well as someone who has done so for years.

There is a separation between the real world and our hypothetical. Between the people who design the house and the people who build it. The math is never completely accurate. The end result is never like the projections. There is always a snag in the plan, a screw in the way, a hidden trick only known to those with the experience of having done it thousands of times.

Action is not easy. It requires you to get up in the morning. To put yourself out there and be judged.

It will come with failure. Your old work will flop, make you cringe, and pray nobody was around to see it.

The failure will keep you humble, though.  It will remind you that you still have a lot to learn. But you will improve. Those who put out work a hundred times compared to ten get ten times more opportunities to critique, practice, get advice, and reiterate. So the next one is better. 

I’m writing about this because you are probably going to see some shitty writing here in the near future. I’m going to be pumping out articles, experimenting, testing, some may end up alright, some may end up...less than alright. Maybe you already have seen some less than alright writing and thought it nice to keep it to yourself. I appreciate that, but I also appreciate feedback. 

If you like something on this site, dislike it, or just find it uninteresting, let me know. I can live with shitty articles. I can handle negative feedback. Only as long as my next article is less shitty than the previous.

It’s going to take time. I fully expect to look back on my past posts (even this one, maybe especially this one) and cringe. But that’s ok. Because that means that I am getting better. Because that means I am still writing. Still doing, and still learning. (Edited in 2024 to confirm that I do in fact, find this cringe).

Hemingway's Six Tips for Writing Well.

I’ve started a small series where I take a few of my favorite writers and compile their best tips for writing. The first issue is about the old man himself, Hemingway.

Hemingway was a darn good writer. Few people would argue against that.

As typical of someone who is darn good at something, their methods and thinking are usually studied by people who wish to achieve that level. I’m not a darn good writer, so I looked to Hemingway for advice on writing.

Most of the best advice that Hemingway left behind was aggregated in the book, Hemingway on Writing, edited by Larry W. Phillips. These include letters between Hemingway and his contemporaries (such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound) as well as the writings of prospective writers who sought out his advice.

From this, I observed six main themes that drove Hemingway’s writing.

Always be observing, then empathizing.

“When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen.”

Hemingway was obsessed with writing “true sentences.” Sentences that were accurate as possible to the meaning or scene they were trying to express. Whether that was how a certain setting looked or how a character reacts.  

To achieve this, he focused on his powers of observation. Find the words that perfectly matched what he saw, heard, smelt, and felt. Most importantly, listening. 

“Watch what happens today.” Hemingway once told a young prospective writer who had joined him on a fishing expedition. “If we get into a fish see exact it is that everyone does. If you get a kick out of it while he is jumping remember back until you see exactly what the action was that gave you that emotion. Whether it was the rising of the line from the water and the way it tightened like a fiddle string until drops started from it, or the way he smashed and threw water when he jumped.”

“Then write it down making it clear so the reader will see it too and have the same feeling you had.”

This reaches a whole another dimension when it comes to humans.

“The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn…”

To write a “true character” Hemingway tried to be as empathetic as possible. An interesting thought, since Hemingway was known to be a surly character. He had strong opinions, and lord have mercy for whoever told him otherwise. 

He was a different person when writing.

“As a man things are as they should or shouldn’t be. As a man you know who is right and who is wrong. You have to make decisions and enforce them. As a writer you should not judge. You should understand.”

To create true sentences, one must learn to observe and listen, then empathize. 

Keep the momentum.

Like all writers, Hemingway struggled with resistance and writer’s block. But like all great writers, he found ways to stay on track.

The first way was to end the day when you’re on a roll.

“Always [best] to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.”

The second way was to at the beginning of the next day, re-read your story up to the point you left off in order to keep the same flow.

“The best way is to read it all every day from the start, correcting as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can’t do this every day read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That’s how you make it all of one piece. And remember to stop while you are still going good. That keeps it moving instead of having it die whenever you go on and write yourself out. When you do that you find that the next day you are pooped and can’t go on.”

Keep it simple.

“It is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.”

Hemingway is known for his short, direct prose, one honed from years as a journalist. This simple prose allowed him to take complicated and profound subject matter and express it in a way that all people understood (The average reading level of his books hover around the fifth and sixth grade).

He achieved this with a ruthless focus on all aspects of his writing. Words were chosen with care, and adjectives were often omitted (he had a lifelong suspicion of them). Most sentences were short and to the point, with long sentences reserved for ones of importance. Even his punctuation was consciously simple.

My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.

*This article has some really interesting statistics on how Hemingway constructed his work compared to other writers of his time. Well worth checking out.

Always be improving.

Hemingway was competitive. In all forms of life, but especially in writing. While writing was something he did simply for the sake of, it was also something he did to be better than others. Not better than his contemporaries, though, but chasing the greats before him.

“[A writer] should have read everything so that he knows what he has to beat… The only people for a serious writer to compete with are the dead that he knows are good. It is like a miler running against the clock rather than simply trying to beat whoever is in the race with him. Unless he runs against time he will never know what he is capable of attaining.”

Hemingway wrote down a list of all the authors young writers should read and learn to emulate, which can be found here. 

Understand that you’ll never be as good as you can.

Despite his insistence on improving, Hemingway understood that his writing would never reach the level he believed it could.

…writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done—”

Writing is an activity of constant struggle. A struggle to find interesting topics and stories, and to write those stories in ways that are true, entertaining, and interesting. In trying to better yourself, it becomes even more difficult. It’s a grueling climb up a mountain that never ends.

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

Stay the course.

Despite this, Hemingway advises staying the course. When the young prospective writer from earlier asked Hemingway if he could be a good writer, Hemingway told him in his usual abrupt fashion.

“If you work at it five years and you find you’re no good you can just as well shoot yourself then as now.”

When you say it like that, might as well give it a shot. 

For Hemingway, writing was a brutal, difficult experience that took everything out of him. (He used to describe it as “sitting down at my typewriter and bleeding”). But it was also a freeing experience for him, and he was never more satisfied than whenever he wrote a sentence he deemed true. 

Summer 2021

If you are new here, three or four times a year I post a reflection piece, usually after a semester of college or at the end of the year. Now that I have graduated, I’m expecting to do these around four times a year. This (somewhat shorter) post covers from the beginning of May to the end of August 2021.

This summer was a brief respite of normalcy. I got to go on a few trips to my friend’s cabin with the best people. I worked a normal job as a busser and interacted with normal people without a mask. I worked out in a normal gym and went to normal bars to drink beers.  I started studying for the LSAT... and found out that I had forgotten how to study. (That part isn’t new, I never knew how to study).

It was short-lived. Whispers of people getting Covid started to circulate again. People close to us, all fully vaccinated, started to come down with it. The masks came back. Twitter once again began to fill up with horror stories from emergency rooms and tales of Lambdas and Deltas. August found me shut back up at home, seeing only a few select people.

I have mixed feelings about this new resurgence. I’m frustrated for sure. The United States knows how to beat this; get vaccinated, and then send the extra vaccines to those in need across the world so they can be protected as well as prevent these mutations. Yet we refuse to take action. It’s like we were handed a copy of the math test by the teachers, and are refusing to copy it because Uncle Roy thinks he knows algebra better than the people who created it. 

My hypochondriac ass is tired of staying indoors. If I’m tired of staying indoors, I can bet that most of America is tired of it as well. That makes me worried about the coming months. 

There are exciting things to come through. I’m moving to Seattle with six other awesome kids. I am going to start full-time writing. Lots of exciting plans are on the horizon. 

These are big changes, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous. I won’t have the same support that I had in college from the institution and my parents. But all the best parts of my life were from the decisions that scared me.

And I can’t wait to start all of it. 

Best from Seattle,

Matthew

Spring 2021

If you are new here, three or four times a year I post a reflection piece, usually after a semester of college or at the end of the year. These posts seek to look back at the last three or four months, reminisce, see what I did well or where I failed, and then look towards the future with goals for the next trimester of the year. This post reviews the beginning of 2021 to my graduation from Gonzaga University in May.

 May 18, 2021

I’ve been writing these reflections now for just about two years now, ever since the summer of 2019, and I have to say that these last few months were some of the crazier ones. Not because of what I did, but rather the transition that took place. I went from an intense quarantine to traveling all over the pacific northwest, from college student to college graduate, and even released a book. Definitely different than last year, that’s for sure.

Let’s start with college. I’ll be honest, zoom university was a joke. I don’t think I did more than 40 hours of work the entire semester, and not hard work at that. I spent most of my time either on my extra-curriculars, such as my time as VP of Member engagement for my Business Fraternity and as President of the Net Impact club on campus and hanging with friends. That being said, I am still proud to say I graduated Cum Laude with a Political Science Degree as well as minors in Italian Studies and Hogan Entrepreneurship.

I got to travel again, which was crazy. Due to covid, people stopped taking big trips and opted for more safe visits to cabins and Airbnb’s with people within their bubble, which was more than ok with me. I like that vibe so much more than the party scene, though I do still miss traveling across country and internationally. Hopefully, this summer things become safe enough. Regardless, I was able to take several trips this semester with some awesome people, including trips to Glacier National Park, Idaho (I forget the name of the town, it was like 11 people), and Mazama, Washington.

When I wasn’t with friends or doing schoolwork, I was putting the finishing touches on my first full-length novel, Friday in Florence. I’ve never been prouder of myself than I was when I released FiF, and I swear I walked around with the biggest smile on my face due to the reaction my friends and family gave me. I had people I had maybe said five sentences to all of college coming up to me in the bar or messaging me on Instagram complimenting me on the accomplishment, and each one made my week. It just passed a month since its release, and I am still on cloud nine. Thanks everyone, really, it has meant the world.

Now, however, I have to face the real world. No more house parties or late nights with the roommate. No more frantically finishing papers before the deadline or running into friends at the bar. I took my last walk through campus a few days ago (it was raining of course) and then left. I don’t know when or even if I will ever be back.

Yes, it’s sad. My allergies were definitely acting up those last few weeks, but as I look back I think I came out of college with everything I could have hoped for. I found an incredible group of people I know I will be proud to call my friends for the rest of my life. I took classes that challenged me, got to travel the world, and ultimately grew into a person that Freshman me would be proud of. While it could have been so much more; potential squandered by the global pandemic, I feel blessed to come out of it with the lessons and people that I did.

Now, for the first time in my life, I don’t have a concrete plan. There have always been another four years of school on the horizon, now I am not so sure. Yes, I have a direction in that I am hoping to go to law school after a gap year, but if we have learned anything from Covid it’s that a lot can change in a year. The rest of my life, however it may change, is completely up to me.  

This sentence scares the shit out of me. But it is also incredibly freeing. I have nothing else to wait for, no obligations needed to finish. My life is completely my own, for better or for worse, and I can make it what I am able to. I am excited to see what I do.

See you in a couple of months,

Matthew

Thank You

A few days ago, Friday in Florence turned 1 month old, and the fact that I am writing that is a big deal in the sense that it means that I haven’t taken it down in embarrassment…yet.

It’s also a big deal because I get my first royalty check in the mail today. Or rather, it gets sent today, which means I get it in three months (It’s ok, USPS, I know you’re doing your best).

Anyways, I’ve been in a reflective mood the last couple of weeks. This is mostly due to my college experience ending and me moving home, but I’ve also been putting down a few thoughts on the experience of writing and releasing FiF. Some of those thoughts will be released as full-length articles in the coming days, but as FiF turns one month old, I wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you to everyone that supported me in this launch.

I was absolutely terrified to release this book. I thought I wasn’t going to release it, and if I did, under a different name. The only people I told that I was writing a book before the release were my two sisters and mother (also a Pepperdine girl when I was plastered in Florence, but I don’t count that), and up until two weeks, before I announced the project, I was still unsure. That project had been my life for over a year, and I didn’t know if I was ready to share that part of me with the world. Pressing submit on the announcement post required a fair amount of liquid courage.

The response to me pressing that button, however, was incredible. Support and well wishes poured in from everywhere, from my closest friends and family to people I haven’t spoken to in years. It was an elucidatory moment, one that caused me to realize once again how lucky I am to have the friends I do and belong to the communities that I am a part of. I had tears in my eyes.

Honestly, I have been on cloud nine for the last few weeks. Everywhere I’ve gone in my last few weeks of college, someone has complimented me on my book, and it was all I could do not to give them all a huge hug. All I can say is that every note, dm, text, passing mention in conversation, it has meant the world to me and made my week.

So, in short, thank you all for supporting this dream. Know that I am already hard at work on a couple more projects, some of which you will hear about fairly soon. If you would like to stay updated on all my work, I would greatly appreciate you signing up for my newsletter below, which I will be restarting in the coming weeks. It really helps me out. Regardless, thank you to everyone who helped me or supported me in this endeavor. On to the next one!

Introducing Friday in Florence, coming this April

Today I announce a project that I have been working on pretty much every day for the last year.  From when I had the idea on a train in Florence, to the multi-month long quarantine in the pandemic, to zoom classes, a month and a half long Christmas break, to my final semester of college, I have spent at least a part of every day working on this project. And I’ve never been prouder to release it. 

Let’s be honest. I have no business writing a book. Yes, I’ve been writing amateurly since high school and did a little freelance during the summers, but a book is a different beast. Writing a book supposes you have a halfway decent mastery of the craft (I don’t) or something really important to say (ehh, that’s for you to decide if I do this with this book).

But if I’ve learned anything from this pandemic, nobody knows shit. Nobody knows what’s going to happen tomorrow, if tomorrow is even going to happen, so fuck it, I went and wrote a book.  

With that said, it is my pleasure to announce my first book, Friday in Florence, in (digital) bookstores everywhere April 18th.

There is a good chance that I read this book in three weeks (if I am brave enough, that is) and recoil with how bad it is. There’s a good chance that you are going to do the same. But right now, I am about as proud of this book as I could be with anything, and that has made it all worth it.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. If you end up liking the book, let me know. If you don’t, well, keep it to yourself.

Take it easy,

Matthew

*Cover art by the amazing Sydne Barard