“We are all digital notebooks now,” Warren Ellis wrote. “Writing just for ourselves and whoever finds their way to our caves to look over our shoulders as we scribble thoughts down in public and daub pictures on the walls.”

I’ve stopped publishing notes and journal entries on my blog because I’ve mostly been writing in my notebooks now. I’ve been writing for at least an hour every day since the start of last year, a span of about 636 days. I’ve written hundreds and hundreds of pages in my notebooks, and when I couple that with the time spent trying to live my life as best as I can, I’ve simply stopped making time for this online space of mine. I feel kinda meh about it, honestly. The only reason I’m writing this entry is because I want to publish something at least once a month, keeping some trivial streak of mine alive.

Warren was writing about something he calls a “social media winter,” this idea that “social media doesn’t create ‘growth’ any more.” “If you use social [media] to keep up with your friends,” Warren wrote, “then get them to move to new channels with you and keep them close.” Facebook, Instagram, and especially Snapchat have been daily companions to me for the past year, and I have enjoyed myself tremendously on them because my friends are on there. Contrary to my past feelings on them, my time on social media this year has been nothing but positive. They’re not without their problems, but what doesn’t have problems nowadays? So again, couple this with my time spent in my notebooks and living my life, and I’ve frankly lost most of my motivation to tend to this little digital notebook of mine.

And yet…

I like having an online presence. I like having my own little digital garden with my name on it and my words and my photos and my everything on it. Even now, as I’m writing this, I’m feeling those old feelings of pleasure and contentment and even calmness that comes with writing something for myself and for the 2 people who have added this site to their RSS readers. I read Warren’s post on the day he published it, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. This idea was planted then and has been growing throughout the week, and sure, I probably could’ve explored it some more in my notebook, but he’s talking about the web, about blogging more specifically, and I feel like my response to it should be on the web, too.

I’ve gone through spurts of intense productivity and long stretches of silence, and I’m not sure where I fall on that spectrum now. I have ideas and desires and plans for this digital notebook of mine, but I don’t know what will come of it. Life has been incredibly fun and challenging this year, and I’ve enjoyed writing about it in my notebooks and talking about it with the people I care about the most, so I’m not quite sure how to fit this place into my life right now. This could be the start of something fun and cool, or it could simply be the ravings of a madman. Not sure yet.

I guess we’ll find out, right?

“The US’s first-ever trial in a constitutional climate lawsuit kicked off on Monday morning in a packed courtroom in Helena, Montana,” writes Dharna Noor in The Guardian.

I am so proud of these young people, and I am so proud this lawsuit is happening in Montana. I love Montana, even though I’ve had my issues with it over the years, and I actually did not know that

Montana’s state’s constitution has since 1972 guaranteed that the “state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations”.

That is incredible. I hope this lawsuit kicks off the proper energy and motivation for other states and countries to bring more lawsuits like this to the courts. A man can hope.

Bahala na, as taught to Jenny Odell by an artist born in the Philippines, is a Tagalog phrase that translates to “whatever happens, happens”:

That may sound resigned or passive, and indeed, an American psychologist argued in the 1960s that the attitude described by bahala na had similarities with American fatalism. But when the Filipino psychologist Alfredo Lagmay interviewed people around Manila about its usage, a more interesting picture emerged. What he found was a “positive, functional response to uncertainty,” something that meant meeting the present with everything you had at your disposal, a sharp-eyed sallying forth even when you didn’t feel totally prepared or in control. It was a form of acceptance that was actually the opposite of giving up because acceptance was the beginning of observation and response.

Jenny Odell, an author I love, continues to describe bahala na in a way that’s similar to what I’ve learned in my recent adventures with Zen and Stoicism:

Both declinism — the belief that the past was better and the future will be worse, and blind optimism — the belief that the past was worse and the future is inevitably better — absolve us of our responsibility to act now, in this gap between the past and future. In contrast, the improvisational spirit lives inside that gap, and it can be surprisingly full of ingenuity and joy even when the situation is dire. As something we share with our nonhuman brethren, the capacity to form new responses is how you know you’re alive, today, here. So when my mum says, “whatever happens, happens,” what I hear is not resignation but a mix of humility, trust, and curiosity. And I think it’s like this — through love of the present, and of ourselves in it — that we actually win the future.

All we have is now. The past and the future don’t exist, now. We live now. I don’t know how else to describe it. The present moment is the only moment that matters; life is made of the present moment. To live well, live now.

To continue the thought from my previous post, Robin Dunbar explains how friendships die:

Friendships die when we do not see the people concerned often enough to maintain the relationship at its former level of emotional intimacy—and especially so when neither side can quite muster the energy to do anything about it. So the tendency is for such relationships to fade quietly, almost by accident rather than design. The road to friendship is paved with good intentions to meet up again, and no doubt a good bit of guilt—we must get together sometime… but somehow sometime never comes because too many other priorities intervene.

There’s that energy I mentioned before. Friendships die when neither side can quite muster the energy to do anything about it. Don’t want friendships to die? Do something about it.

This reminds me of this New Yorker cartoon from this week’s issue:

In a chapter titled “Why friendships end” in his book Friends, Robin Dunbar writes about a study conducted by Michael Argyle and his collaborator Monika Henderson that examined the rules that underpin friendships. They identified six key rules which were essential for maintaining a stable relationship:

• Standing up for the friend in their absence
• Sharing important news with the friend
• Providing emotional support when it is needed
• Trusting and confiding in each other
• Volunteering help when it’s required
• Making an effort to make the other person happy

I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I’ve been working hard this year to improve my friendships and my social network as a whole, and I have found Friends by Robin Dunbar to be an invaluable resource to help me understand what makes friendships work and how I can be a better friend to those I care about.

I’ve lost too many friends over the years from the simple fact that neither side devoted enough energy in maintaining the relationship. All it takes is a bit of energy, and that has been where I’ve been trying to redirect my attention and focus onto this year. I can’t say that I’m the most popular person in the world now or anything, but I can say that it has been fun to make plans with my friends, to hang out with them, to confide in them, and to share some part of our lives together.

This has been really tough, though. Even though these people are my friends, I still feel that fear of rejection, of cancelled plans, of maybe mistaking where I think my friends lie in my friend circles and where I lie in theirs. Calibrating that has been interesting. Keeping friendships takes a lot of energy, and I think I’m ready to expend as much of it as possible on them.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been copying down the notes I took while reading Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind in my notebook. It’s been a marvelous journey but a journey that is not yet over.

While you are practicing zazen, you may hear the rain dropping from the roof in the dark. Later, the wonderful mist will be coming through the big trees, and still later when people start to work, they will see the beautiful mountains. But some people will be annoyed if they hear the rain when they are lying in their beds in the morning, because they do not know that later they will see the beautiful sun rising from the east. If our mind is concentrated on ourselves we will have this kind of worry. But if we accept ourselves as the embodiment of the truth, or Buddha nature, we will have no worry. We will think, “Now it is raining, but we don’t know what will happen in the next moment. By the time we go out it may be a beautiful day, or a stormy day. Since we don’t know, let’s appreciate the sound of the rain now.” This kind of attitude is the right attitude.

— Shunryu Suzuki

All that matters is right now. This moment is all we have. Let go of the past and the future and simply focus on this moment, on this breath, and appreciate this existence. Death is waiting for us; life isn’t. So, live.

Om Malik, in a post titled Why internet silos win, writes:

It doesn’t matter whether it is Twitter, Instagram, or Mastodon. Everyone is playing to an audience. The social Internet is a performance theater praying at the altar of attention. Journalists need attention to be relevant, and experts need to signal their expertise. And others want to be influencers. For now, Twitter, Instagram, and their ilk give the biggest bang for the blast. It is why those vocal and active about Mastodon are still posting away on Musk’s Twitter.

If we didn’t care for attention, we wouldn’t be doing anything at all. We wouldn’t broadcast. Instead, we would socialize privately in communication with friends and peers.

I’m using Om’s post as a jumping off point for something I’ve been holding onto and thinking about for a while. I’ve written my thoughts on social media before, and I see these current thoughts as an evolution on what I’ve written before. Mostly: I’m not an online community kind of guy, and I need to finally accept that.

When I jumped on the Mastodon bandwagon a few months ago, I wrote that I had mostly been enjoying myself. And that was true, I guess, but that feeling didn’t last very long. It wasn’t really who I followed, it was the whole idea of a timeline, or the feed. The feed, this box filled with 280 characters or 512 characters or an unlimited number of characters; this box filled with cat photos or moss photos or pretty sunsets; this box filled with people trying to sell me stuff, to influence my behavior in some way, to convince me that their views are right and their views are wrong; this box can go to hell.

I don’t need it, I don’t want it, and I need to get away from it.

Last month, Robin Sloan had this to say about Mastodon, words that have stuck with me ever since (I’m quoting all of it):

Don’t settle for Mastodon

I suppose this is an anti-avenue, because: Mastodon is not it.

When you tell me about Twitter vs. Mastodon, I hear that you got rid of the flesh-eating piranhas and replaced them with federated flesh-eating piranhas. No thanks, I’m still not swimming in that pool!

I’m not saying you shouldn’t create a Mastodon account, or that you can’t enjoy fun, percolating conversations on that platform. I’m just saying that it does not, to me, represent a sufficiently interesting experiment, because it accepts too much as settled.

The timeline isn’t settled.

The @-mention isn’t settled.

Nothing is settled. It’s 2003 again!

Nothing is settled. But what I don’t want to happen is probably what Robin wants to happen, and that’s for people to create something new to replace what’s already here. A new social network paradigm or something similar. What I’m thinking is: no, no we don’t. I don’t think all of humanity was meant to connect to each other in this way, something M.G. Siegler wrote (and I quoted and wrote about) back in October of 2021; mainly, that the problem is us, human beings.

A few weeks ago I went to my friend’s house and we played Uno, Old Maid, and Go Fish with her son and husband, and I had a blast—we all had a blast. We joked around and told stories and I lost my “crown” to my friend because he won the last game of Old Maid, and it was genuinely and simply a lot of fun. What I’m arguing for myself is that I want and need my “tribe,” my smaller community of good friends and family that I can see and hear regularly, and not these formless, shapeless outlines of people behind a screen. I know social networks provide something different—especially for marginalized communities—but this is what I prefer, a real life community.

Aren’t you being hypocritical? I hear someone asking. You have a blog, you’re still on Facebook and Instagram, you’re a Bookshop.org affiliate and are trying to sell me something, so why should I listen to you? You’re right and you shouldn’t. Nobody should listen to me. Like I said, my thoughts on all this are still evolving and will continue to evolve. But I am still going to try and figure out what’s best for me. On the last day of 2022, for example, I collected my login information for my Mastodon, Micro.blog, and other accounts, I saved them in a CSV file (two-factor codes and everything), I deleted my login information from my password manager, I deleted all my cookies and history from all my devices, and I tucked away that CSV file deep in my Documents folder. I am still thinking about maybe printing this information instead, but for now, this is what I’ve done. My intention is to never again login to these services, to never again contribute content to these services, and to simply let them rot until the end of time.

I guess what I’m yearning for is a more genuine human connection with those I already know and will meet in the future, and a way to pull away from these boxes the Internet or tech companies or modern culture as a whole wants to put me in. And to do that, I need to reclaim my attention, to focus on my hands and what I can build with them, and less on those things sucking away at my eyeballs and stimulating my reptile brain.

But what about your blog? Aren’t you writing for an audience or for the chance to build one? Yes and no, I guess. Again—I don’t know. I have an unending physical need to write. I have had it for decades now, and writing online forces me to write something different than when I write fiction or when I journal in my notebook. I don’t think I would have ever written any of these thoughts if I didn’t have my website. They would have been short notes here and there in my notebooks, and maybe a throwaway line a character says in one of my novels. And besides, I’m guessing most nobody reads my blog anyway? So like who cares? But yeah—I don’t know.

I’m still trying to figure my shit out. I have a long list of ideas in my drafts folder I’d still like to write and explore, and I still enjoy writing and publishing things on my own website—more for myself than for others, honestly—so I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. And that’s a good encapsulation of what being a human is like, I guess, and that’s what I want to be doing more of, being more human.

Last week, Ted Gioia wrote a good article about Barnes & Noble’s recent turnaround, and in it, he quotes James Daunt, the current CEO of Barnes & Noble:

Back when he was 26, Daunt had started out running a single bookstore in London—and it was a beautiful store. He had to borrow the money to do it, but he wanted a store that was a showplace for books. And he succeeded despite breaking all the rules.

For a start, he refused to discount his books, despite intense price competition in the market. If you asked him why, he had a simple answer: “I don’t think books are overpriced.”

I don’t think books are overpriced. Books, to me, have always been the one exception I’ve made when it came to my budget and how I spent money. If I really wanted a book but I really didn’t have the money, I bought it anyway. I understand how irresponsible this sounds, and it is… or was. I’m fortunate to be in a position where I can afford to do this now without amassing any form of consumer debt, and in fact, the one reason why I’m not buying books all the time is because I live in a small apartment and I don’t have the space to keep them all. So I have to be a bit judicious about it (says the guy who bought more books yesterday).

I don’t think books are overpriced. And they’re not. Most paperbacks cost somewhere around $10-15, and hardcovers are maybe $10 more than that. For what books offer, that’s relatively cheap. I like buying paper books because I like writing in them (see here), and I like holding them. I’m not opposed to eBooks—hell, at the end of 2020, I wrote about Standard eBooks, and just yesterday they released about half a dozen new books, some of which just entered the public domain, and I downloaded many of them. Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis sounds AMAZING. I simply prefer holding my books and writing in them. There’s a simple pleasure whenever I start a book for the first time and I bend the front cover behind the back of the book and I hold it in place as I read the page on the right, then as I get deeper into the book, I do the same but with the back cover—ahhh, I love doing that. Anyways.

I don’t think books are overpriced. Even though I only read 10 books last year, I spent $1,273.84 on books anyway. That’s a helluva lot more than I spent on music, I can tell you that much. I spent most of that money on Bookshop.org, and yeah, they charge more for books than a place like Amazon, but again, I don’t think books are overpriced. I’m happy Barnes & Noble is doing well. Whenever I make my way to Missoula, I usually try to stop at the local Barnes & Noble (after first checking out Shakespeare & Co., the best bookstore around), and I usually come away with something good (they had Spanish versions of Don Quixote and One Hundred Years of Solitude last time I was there, so I bought those).

I love books, and I love spending money on things I love… so yeah, that’s how I spent $1,273.84 on books last year. Fuck’s sake, that’s crazy, lol.