I heartily agree with Crawford’s emphasis on the importance of embodied experiences and his warning that virtual worlds can promote passivity, technology as magic, and false agency. However. I am also very enthusiastic about technological tools as real tools and virtual worlds as deeply enriching. Consider books for example. They are a virtual, symbolic world of their own and were object of moral panic in their own time. But I think most of us would consider them indispensable now. Books are fictions divorced from physicality, but is that inherently bad? I don’t think so.

I am several chapters in but already think Crawford’s argument needs work. His critique of “representations” and “abstractions” needs a lot more development in my opinion. I’d invoke him to reflect on his own life to rebalance his argument: he loves to ride motorcycles and fix them up, but he also loves to read books and write them. Surely he needs to make space for symbolic experiences alongside physical ones? I say this despite agreeing with his insight on the surprising hollowness of Choice as Freedom and the way resource-extractive corporations exploit this to harvest wealth from consumers.

All in all I think he makes some fantastic, nuanced points but builds a shaky overarching argument from it. I would love to him to take a second crack at it.

I originally wrote the above on Reddit after reading the first half the book.

As I’ve said elsewhere, I really appreciated that this book resisted taking the reactionary stance against technology as inherently insidious and unavoidably corruptive of our psychological wellbeing. In the epilogue, Crawford summarizes his alternative critique of technology’s role in leeching on our attention:

This perspective excites me not just because it rings truer but also because it prevents indiscriminate rejection of technology and instead makes possible a judicious trust that allows us to make good use of it.

Missing Japan, losing weight, experimenting with daily routines, & more.

We just got back from Japan. I would love to live there for a while someday, although I think it unlikely, even though they offer a six month Digital Nomad visa. Z’s work is not remote and she wants to develop her career, so teaching English or something of the sort is not particularly useful to her. Regardless, I am sure we will visit again.

I am twenty pounds lighter than I was a year and a half ago. I still want to lose another twenty. I am trying to eat very consciously and exercise everyday. I feel optimistic.

For the last few days I have woken up early and immediately gone out on a walk with my coffee. It’s a lovely way to warm up for the day and start by accomplishing my daily task of exercising. Walking is useful for me given that I am a homebody with a remote computer job and a reliance on soccer for exercise. After returning from my morning walks I’ve spent some time reading before getting on with my day. An aspiration I’ve set for myself is to do each of these everyday: exercise, read, write, work, enjoy, socialize, discuss, grow, & plan. I realize they might sound cheesy, but they are distillations of more specific intentions I have for 2025.

In December I received my expected promotion to Senior Software Engineer. It’s a milestone in my career. The pay bump was nice if modest for industry standards, but the biggest perk is the deference I am already getting as part of the increase in my responsibilities. I have strong opinions on how certain things should be done and I feel already a boost in persuasive power generated from my new title. To summarize, I feel like I have more agency, and I welcome it.

Matthew B. Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head has provoked in me a lot of reflection about what things consume my attention and how environments dictate that.

I recently read Molloy by Samuel Beckett and I intend to continue with the second book in the trilogy.

I also resumed reading and marveling at the prose in Blood Meridian. I think it appropriate to take my time with what Harold Bloom called “the major esthetic achievement of any living American writer.” Of course, McCarthy has since died and his legacy has begun morphing due to recent news of a very inappropriate relationship he had with a teenage girl named Augusta Britt.

Last year as soon as the weather started cooling and days darkening early I started watching movies. In the last few months I’ve watched The Substance, Woman of the Hour, We Live In Time, The Godfather and The Godfather Part 2, The Power of the Dog, Killers of the Flower Moon, Anora, A Real Pain, Perfect Days, Gladiator II, and Punch-Drunk Love. Reviews and ratings for these are or will be on my letterboxd account. Tomorrow I’m going to watch The Brutalist.

Following the English Premier League is so interesting because the competition is so fierce and sophisticated. It is so difficult for teams to win. It is so difficult for fans or pundits to predict what will happen. New players arrive, old ones fall away, young ones rise into prominence. It’s a lucrative business but it is also genuine, gripping drama.

The year 2025 is a blank canvas. We don’t have any specific plans. Of course, it is predictable in some ways. But perhaps more so, it is open ended.

I begin the year with several intentions. Do big things at work. Get fitter. Lose twenty pounds. Have more discussions with friends. Read copiously. Keep writing for and developing this site. Nurture friendships. Heal and grow. Enjoy our DINK status. Ruminate on longterm plans.

I round the corner of another year with the intention to change my life. Change it not majorly, but minorly. I intend to live in the same place, work the same job, drink the same coffee. But I want to sharpen my focus. I intend to withhold my attention a bit more and marshall it with more discipline towards things that matter. That doesn’t mean I will scold myself if I waste time, or spend it on unimportant things. But I want to try everyday to dedicate more attention to things that matter, to things that will accumulate rather than disappear into the void like jewelry into the drain.

I will continue resisting idealistic aspirations towards abstract virtue, but will try to submit myself to disciplines that I trust will render concrete results. Spending more time reading. Waking earlier. Avoiding cheap distractions that undermine opportunities to spend time meaningfully. I’m not so interested in deeming time spent scrolling on instagram or passively consuming recommended YouTube videos as immoral. It is not bad to produce nothing or learn nothing for a few minutes on a random day, but it is costly to let it become a habit. Costly in time and in opportunity. I don’t believe I’m particularly special but I do think there is a version of me at eightysomething years old that looks back with some sastifaction at his life’s work. I want to do something meaningful and I know the steady progress of minutes hours and days can lead to things that irregular bouts of inspiration can imagine but never produce.

I anticipate confusion regarding the name of this site. How is it a book? Sure, it abides by the criteria of a socalled virtual book – multimedia, readerdriven, nonlinear, etc – but it’s still basically just a blog, isn’t it?

Granted, this is not a book. Not yet. But over time, it may become one. In fact I hope it will become multiple, overlapping books. I intend to accumulate relevant and complementary content without prescribing a single vision or intention for it so that it can take a shape of its own. Shapes of its own. At points in the future I may be able to collect multiple pieces into discrete, booklike forms.

It’s been two years since I began this project and already emerging are various potential booklike projects. An obvious one is compiling posts from a title series like how to revise a sentence, #2, #3, #4, and so on, into a single work. Naturally, other pieces tagged as #writing would make good candidates for inclusion in that work. The same for how to tell a story, #2, #3, and future entries. These titles are intentionally broad so they can hold a variety of perspectives on the topic that may later be combined to serve unforeseen ends. I expect that any such attempts will prompt me to write new material that fuses all the pieces together, thereby creating a seamless new whole.

But that’s only one way in which I want “books” to develop from this site. I also want them to sprout organically from the haphazard crosspollination of ideas that features like tagging and backlinking enable. I recently implemented another feature called revisions – which I talked about in my Sept 30th 2024 /now update – that adds yet another dimension through which a reader (including myself) can traverse the content on this site. Automation is a powerful way to highlight implicit relationships that already exist between pieces. They enable unplanned connections to grow across topics and time. The next feature I intend to automate is a simple and intuitive one: links between posts in a title series.

It’s fitting that this site itself is the fusion product of various heterogenous inspirations. As I’ve said before, the Zettelkasten method of knowledge management is one of them. The method, as noted by researcher Andy Matuschak on his own Zettelkasten-inspired website, enabled Germany sociologist Niklas Luhmann to publish more than 70 books. My writing ambitions are far more modest, but I am interested in adapting the method into a way of writing “books” directly, as opposed to its original purpose of amassing research into a network of information that may then be synthesized and captured in newly written prose. I want to start by writing prose in small chunks and see if the resulting pieces can themselves comprise a booklike thing.

And yet the point of this site is not to become a book, but to provide booklike experiences without subjecting itself to the traditional limits of a book. The point is not merely to create books through piecemeal writing, but also to offer pieces by themselves and as an assortment of nonlinear orderings, unlike the offering of the traditional book: single, linear, and monolithic. This site is not just a means but an end itself.

Finally, I want to say that, despite all this, I don’t look at books with contempt or ungratefulness. I love books. They have changed my life for the better and I’d like to return the favor.