Month: September 2026
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Writing Anyway: Before the Niche (+ Spiders)
photo by Yogesh Gosavi on Unsplash At the core of the agony of multi-passionate niching is the fear of picking the wrong thing, an inauthentic path, that will lead us to hollow writing and another soulless livelihood. The solution, generally, after you read 10 thousand “finding your niche” essays, is to keep building anyway. Keep…
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42 Is the Answer, So What’s the Question?
photo by Di Chen via Unsplash “What is the meaning of life?” is a really bad question. It’s like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where superintelligent mice build a supercomputer to discover the meaning of life. It takes millions of years, and it finally gives the answer… 42! Turns out they never actually asked…
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When Writing Becomes a Self-Eating Snake
photo by Coppertitst Wu via Unsplash I keep wanting to write about writing. But then I think about Bob… My favorite job ever was tutoring English and philosophy in college. People would come into the tutoring center, and we could have long fascinating conversations about how they think, how to make something click for them,…
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Tribes Don’t Buy Your Flint-Knapping
photo by Phillip Graves via Unsplash They say the reason people stay in the military – face starvation, exhaustion, pain, terrible idiocy, being blown up, and potentially death – is not for a cause. They don’t stay to “serve their country” or “fight tyranny” or fulfill the contract or collect a paycheck. When things are…
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Meaning Is a Spiral, Not a Destination
photo by Sebastian Schuster via Unsplash One of the biggest, ongoing crises in my life has been a lack of meaning. If I parent, I journal, I make art (alone, at 2 am, without showing anyone)… I’m doing ostensibly meaningful stuff. But it feels like I’m not existing at all. I spent many years trying…