Chapter 3
I’ve been releasing essays for a little while now. Through that while (next month will be about 2 years), my approach has changed quite a bit. You can say these approaches mark ‘chapters’ in Immanent Essays’ history:
Chapter 0, the dialogical approach: Mr. Kaninchente. This essay was written as a dialogue, as I was deeply influenced by the dialogues I had read from Plato, Rényi, Hofstadter, Carroll, Lewis & Lewis. I had a grand vision for my new site, Dialogical Essays.
Chapter 0.5, the cheapskate approach: Mind as a Figment of Yours, Shuzan’s Shippé, Free and Unhappy, Happy and Unfree. I really wanted to get a bunch of writing out there and share my ideas. In preparation for chapter 1, I thought I should release some essays I wrote for school.
Chapter 1, the dedicated approach: How Might One Live, How to Think For Yourself, Metaphorical and phenomenological ramblings on libraries, creation, and Tōru Takemitsu, How to make sure you actually answer the questions you ask, Understanding the meaning of life by understanding meaning itself, Currents are at fault for everything that has ever happened and everything that ever will, An introduction to the Zettelkasten as a garden for growing knowledge, Some philosophical underpinnings of the Zettelkasten: Rhizomes, Maps, and Immanence, Growing Knowledge as Play, Becoming Unknown: Germination, What about purely conceptual art?, and Good jargon, bad jargon. This is Immanent Essays. I put in a great effort in crafting each word of each of these, but I got burnt out quickly. I did not want to spend my time writing essays and worrying about them.
Chapter 2, the slop approach: Philosophy sucks, but it’s too useful to give up, Why your productivity system keeps failing, How to build a productivity system around problems, How to decide what to work on today, What keeps you up at night, Why you keep forgetting what matters, What your bad habits are for, Going up from feeling down, What does the lemonade stand want?, Being vegan brought down my GPA. Conceptually, I am most proud of these essays. Each one builds on the rest, creating a guide to living well. Except for the very first one, Philosophy sucks, I don’t like these essays. Except for the first one, I make heavy use of AI to make my ideas the most presentable to the people I wanted to read my essays.
I want to open a new chapter for Immanent Essays, marked by an egotistical approach. I’ll write what I want to, when I want to. I will write for myself, for specific readers, or for nobody at all. But the one constant is that I will be the one writing.
I don’t make a profit writing essays. I do make a revenue from the few paid subscribers I have (why did I even enable that?), but the amount of time I invest Is worth more than that. A quick estimate, I make about ¢50 per hour put in. Back in chapter 1, that would have been ¢10 or less simply because of how much time I put in. But that approach was more worthwhile: each essay taught me something different. I haven’t seen that in the past few essays.
As much as I enjoy those essays, being that dedicated is not sustainable. Yet I cannot offload the act of writing. What to do? My answer is to focus on writing for myself.
With the exception of chapter 0.5, I wrote to transform my readers. What does switching to an egotistical approach mean for this? Unfortunately, those who have subscribed for my “How To” essays might be in for a reckoning. If you are looking for simple and digestible lessons, I am sorry.
I don’t exactly know what I’ll be writing about, but it might be anything from super technical to super experimental to completely bland to whatever. Knowing me, it won’t be straightforward.
Because of this great essay by Henrik Karlsson, I might alienate my readers. But at the same time, that might be the necessary move to make Immanent Essays truly work.
Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is. On Writing Well
That’s the other side of my egotistical approach. It’s an arrogant belief that being egotistical will be better for the readers. I’ll be writing for myself, for you, for myself.
If you want to get digestible lessons from me, just point an LLM to my website and ask it to talk to you. I genuinely think that would be a great thing to do (just don’t believe everything it says, just like you shouldn’t believe everything I say).
See you later!
