As I said to Emily this morning, without the influence [of a certain content creator, I would’ve deleted my entire website and archived everything and spent the rest of my life as a total ghost. But because of [them], I rethought a lot of things, learned about Anna [Corinne], Sublime, and digital gardening. I think I can get back on Sublime now. After all, it’s their conversations with people that got me my new writing strategy. And it was Anna mentioning Henrik Karlsson that gave me the new “complex search query” to find interesting people to focus on for my writing. So wherever [they] went off to, [they] changed my life for the better. I wish I could’ve done the same… maybe my advice worked after all, though. 

Right away on sublime app, I found this: https://podcastmagic.app/podcast/45c53120-d73a-400b-8a46-4dad04c3f622

I’ll just copy the whole transcript segment here. It’s from Mark Manson’s SOLVED podcast.

“So the first myth is that there’s some level of wisdom or enlightenment or success that you stop comparing yourself to others. There is no evidence of that. In fact, I find it very amusing how much like pop spirituality and pop self-help, when you actually look at what they idealize, it’s basically just being a psychopath… They’re peddling this idea… Like it’s basically like I never care what anybody thinks. I only do what I want. I’m completely confident in myself at all times. And I’m a self-contained miracle of some sort… And it’s like there are no repercussions or trade-offs to any of my behaviors. It’s like… that actually what a psychopath believes and things don’t turn out well for them generally speaking.

“It’s funny too because I mean it this is something that you see you know if there is a form of enlightenment, I think what it is, is probably more of what like Sartre describes and being a nothingness, which is like, you’re aware of the comparison, you feel the comparison, but you don’t necessarily identify with comparison. You don’t, you don’t, you choose not to make it meaningful. I know like the Dalai Lama has said stuff around this before. Like, it’s funny because sometimes you’ll see the Dalai Lama get interviewed by a journalist and they’re like, are you ever sad? And he just like laughs at them. He’s like, yeah, of course I’m sad. Like all the time.

“You know, but he’s like, sadness is still beautiful in its own way. And I’m still like, just because you feel something doesn’t mean it’s true. It doesn’t mean it’s meaningful. It doesn’t mean it’s permanent. Like I think, you know, what the Dalai Lama exemplifies is that, yeah, he’s very human, but the thing that’s unique about him is his constant awareness of how transitory his humanness is… That’s the real wisdom,.. Like he feels sad, but he understands… oh, this isn’t going to last… Don’t buy into it too much.”

I cut some of the stumbles out with ellipses, but the general gist of this is very important. We’re letting pop spirituality and self-help turn us into psychopaths! And we need to find meaning in our sadness, something I have in great abundance. Definitely something I need to write about… but right now, I have potent quotables to revive.

But first, I have to take note of a podcast our boy Henrik Karlsson was on recently: http://podcastmagic.app/podcast/625bb998-fab7-4ec6-9a0d-56d2d0197364 

“…now that I’ve gotten to like a larger scale, I have like a professional army of people telling me when I’m stupid.”

I can definitely tell you he’s not stupid. His ideas about what a blog post should be revolutionized my entire writing process! Henrik goes on to talk about starting to feel “a certain joy in being wrong.” He asks, “how can I be wrong faster?” And “recode the shame of being wrong. Turn that into a dopamine loop.” There’s a lot to unpack there. My problem is, I don’t think I’m wrong nearly enough.

“Literature is built on tenderness toward any being other than ourselves.” – Olga Tokarczuk, from her Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Here’s another quote I need to explore again in the future: “Comparison is the thief of joy.” – Theodore Roosevelt.

We had a good time at Buffalo Wild Wings and I had enough to save for lunch. [Meeting Maddie was particularly awesome.] First good experience I’ve had going out to eat in a very long time. I was saying to Emily that going forward I’m going to focus on writing brand new stuff. I’m tired of just rewriting all my old stuff. [Yet, I’m STILL working on my archives in July 2026…although I HAVE written a lot of new stuff, fortunately.] That’s part of why I don’t log into the sublime app for so long; I didn’t want more to write about. But now, what else is there to do? 

One thing I want to do is really bring music more into my writing, as I like to think of song lyrics for my titles. I was saying to Emily that I really don’t write about music nearly as much as you’d think. My priorities have long been very screwed up. I don’t like music journalism generally, so my way of going about it is kind of odd. More reflective, gut feeling sort of writing. 

[Well, now we have the New Vibrations newsletter going.]