Fernando Gros's Blog, page 2

Adelaide

“Where are you from?” It’s a question I’ve often struggled to answer. Lately, I’ve not even been sure how to explain where I live.

When I left London in the middle of 2022, I was moving to Melbourne. Two months later, my mother passed away. For the rest of that year, I spent more time in Adelaide than I did in Melbourne. Sometimes I was only in Melbourne as a staging post for trips overseas. That pattern hasn’t changed.

The last few months have been typical. The first couple of weeks of December, I was in Adelaide. Back to Melbourne for three days, then off to Japan for a month. Return to Melbourne for a day and a half, then back here to Adelaide.

I spend as much time as I can in Japan. I miss living in Tokyo. I love my cabin in the Japanese Alps. When I’m not in Japan, I’m mostly back in Adelaide. Where my father lives alone. It doesn’t make sense to say I live in Melbourne.

Really, I live in Adelaide. And have done for some time.

Fifteen years ago, we bought a little beach house not far from where my parents settled. It’s small and simple. A place for holiday vacations and quiet creative moments. I’ve written hundreds of blogposts and posted many more photos online during my weeks spent there on vacation.

That’s also been my address for all sorts of official things. It’s where I registered to vote after moving back to Australia. In any kind of legal sense, it’s home.

My place in Melbourne is a rented apartment. It was meant to be a temporary home while we looked for a place to buy. But my wife’s job has changed and changed again since we decided to return to Australia. Her work is increasingly untethered from Australia. She is seldom in Melbourne.

I face the kind of problem many people have faced for thousands of years. How do I balance my family commitments?

The opportunity is there to leave Australia again. Maybe to add another country to the list of locations where I’ve lived. When I moved back, I had assumed it was only for a season.

But my heart feels compelled to stay. I accepted moving back largely because my parents were getting old. I got precious little time with my mother. I’ve had much more with my father. Many golden moments. So much resolved, or brought into the light and discussed, a calm between us that we’ve never had before. I want to help him face his future with love and peace.

And because of that, Adelaide quietly moved from being a place where I holidayed to the place where I live.

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Golden – Yearly Theme 2025

I’d love to say it came to me on the open road, somewhere in the outback. A dusty and remote spot that could be reached only after hours of patient travel.

But it came to me while seated at my desk. Looking at the calendar, to-do list, and notes about upcoming travel. “I’m going to have to do a lot of driving next year,” I thought to myself.

And then it hit me, my theme for 2025: Drive.

Except “drive” feels like such a clichéd productivity word. A LinkedIn word. A tech bro hack, a push-yourself-harder, hustle-and-grind word. The associations felt wrong. Even if the spirit was right.

This often happens. A word feels like the perfect fit for your yearly theme. Until it doesn’t.

A few weeks ago, I drove an EV from Melbourne to Adelaide. It was luxurious. A cocoon of stylish and futuristic design. I thought about words like “opulence” and “style”. I certainly want to elevate my life in 2025. I want to live better. But words that imply wealth and lavish spending aren’t right. You can be stylish without buying the most expensive things. I believe that to my core. And luxury is more about how you move through life than how closely your existence matches the idealised versions of reality we see online.

I found myself thinking about this while writing the conclusion of my 2024 review. I was reflecting on a paradox: there is so much to enjoy in the world, and yet so much of the world feels off-kilter. I needed a word to express the idea that life is still special, significant, or in some way surprisingly delightful.

I settled on golden.

On Being Golden

Golden was part of my youthful slang. It filled in for words like awesome, nice, and wonderful. Something was golden if it stood out, shone, seemed to ask for a moment of awe and appreciation. Sunsets could be golden. But so could guitars. Or your girlfriend’s smile.

In ordinary speech, we often use golden to describe something beautiful. Someone’s light-coloured hair might be golden. Or a pristine beach could be lined with golden sand. We might portray an advantageous situation as a golden opportunity. Photographers talk about the golden hour, that time just after sunrise or just before sunset, when the light is softer and warmer and makes anything you photograph look better. A very good period in history might be called a golden era. People look forward to a happy retirement as their golden years. Somebody who sings well might have a golden voice. And the best audio and mixing engineers are said to have golden ears.

We even have the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” which has appeared in some form in almost every major religion since the time of the Ancient Egyptians.

Golden is not just good. It’s virtuous, pleasing, delightful, and enhances everything around it. Golden has an aura.

Golden In 2025

As I look back on previous yearly themes, what emerges repeatedly is the idea of enjoying the things I already have and pleasant moments in life. For 2025, I want to embrace the habit of identifying and naming the golden experiences as they happen.

For a while now, I’ve been at that stage where enjoying what I have is more important than acquiring more things. It’s not that I wouldn’t like a new guitar or camera. I’m still guilty of coveting new stuff. But I’m a long way past where I was as a teenager, when I could only dream of owning a camera or a guitar that could stay in tune.

I’m also starting to enjoy the season of life where most people’s happiness levels start to go up. It’s well documented that happiness is a U-shaped curve. We are happiest in our youth. Through our twenties and thirties, happiness dwindles. Life just seems to get harder. Then, as we get into our fifties, happiness rises again.

Sometimes this is explained away as the “golden years of retirement”. But it comes sooner than that. Perhaps because we reach a point where our values and boundaries are clearer – a point where we find contentment in what we have and we prioritise what fills our lives with joy. We say no to things that suck the pleasure out of life. The people around us better reflect what we feel is good and healthy in life. And living makes a bit more sense.

That all sounds golden to me.

The Leaden Realities

We get the phrase “eureka moment” from a time when the Ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes was said to have leapt out of his bath and run naked through the streets yelling “Eureka!”, after his discovery of a solution for a problem given to him by his king.

The king wanted to know if his crown really was made of solid gold. While in the bath, Archimedes realised that if you put a gold crown in water, it would disperse a certain amount of water. The metals that would go into a fake crown would disperse less water.

But lead, like gold, is also heavy. That’s why ship’s anchors and diver’s weights are made of lead.

My priority for 2025 is to avoid the feeling that I’m sinking. I often felt overwhelmed in 2024. I wrote about the frequency with which I felt worried during the year. I’d prefer to bring less of that energy into 2025.

But the concerns that spurred on those worries can’t be willed away. Caring for my family, caring about my work, taking care of my health – these will feature just as prominently in the coming year. Not caring is not an option.

Each of those cares can be viewed in multiple ways. And if 2024 taught me anything, it’s that even amidst the hardship, there will still be moments that stand out in the memory.

The Golden Frame

Looking after my father could be seen as a leaden obligation. Something that just fell on my shoulders. Or I could look at it as a golden opportunity to understand him better. To have conversations we might never have had before. Or might never have again. To reach more deeply into my own soul in the way that is possible only when we are vulnerable and available to others through service.

Trying to further my own work could be viewed as a Sisyphean chore that will only sink my hopes again. Or I could remind myself that every time I try to push my work into the world, regardless of whether I succeed or not, I meet amazing people and grow in my understanding of creativity and life.

Gold or lead. There’s a choice in how to frame these challenges in the coming year.

This doesn’t guarantee things will work out. It’s not an insurance plan against disappointment or sadness. But I remember even when my mother passed, there were golden moments. The beauty of the garden outside her window on her final days. Our last, brief conversation. The shifting clouds as I walked along the beach the evening after she passed. Her solemn immortal beauty as she lay in her coffin. The brilliant sunshine and crystalline waters as I spread her ashes. All these, golden.

I’m apprehensive about the coming year. There’s so much I can’t predict or control. So many crises shaping our world.

But when I climb down to the level where I live my life, there is still a lot of scope for golden moments, golden things – and, hopefully, a chance this might be a golden season as well.

Looking Back On Previous Themes

My yearly theme for 2024 was Frequency. I was hoping to live a more harmonious life by finding the right patterns and cadences for things I did in life. In an odd year this theme helped me be more aware of what I was doing and when I was worrying rather than moving forward with life.

You can learn more about choosing your own yearly theme or read below for the themes I’ve used since 2108.

2024 – Frequency
2023 – Savour
2022 – Tensegrity
2021 – Imagination
2020 – Momentum
2019 – Conviction
2018 – Simple

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State Of The Apps 2024

Looking back on past yearly reviews of the apps and tools I use, it’s clear how willing I’ve been to experiment with new products. This year has been different. Very little change. A lot of sticking with things that work.

Once again I haven’t had a studio or dedicated home office. The focus of my work and the rhythm of my days has been consistent. Writing has been my main creative output. There have been no big music or photography projects.

My CalNoteDo Stack

There are three core parts of any personal productivity stack: a calendar, a notes app, and a tool to manage tasks and to-dos.

I’ve been tempted to save a few dollars and go back to Apple’s Calendar app. Generally speaking, Apple’s native apps are great and massively under-rated. But I’ve stuck with Fantastical because of how it handles time zone differences (and Daylight Savings Time chaos). There hasn’t been a month in 2024 when I didn’t have to deal with the half-hour time difference between Adelaide and Melbourne. Or Zoom calls with the UK or USA.

Omnifocus continues to be my task management app. I’m not sure I’d automatically recommend it any more. Omnifocus is expensive, especially if you want to run it across Mac and iOS. It has features missing, such as Kanban boards. And it’s a bit intimidating to learn. But it’s a solid, reliable tool. Designed to work with GTD principles. And blazingly fast to use. Given how much time I’ve already invested in mastering Omnifocus, it makes sense to stay with it.

For notes, I use Apple Notes and Obsidian. Everything that could be considered “research” (notes from things I read, ideas for future writing, observations about life) goes into Obsidian. That is my “second brain” so to speak.

Apple Notes is for jottings about work in progress. It’s a glorified stack of post-its. Sometimes I tap out first drafts into Notes while waiting for a plane to take off. I make shopping lists in Notes. And agendas for meetings. Rather than fish around in e-mail for important information, during the day I will create a note and cut and paste the details I need. I frequently add a link to notes into either Fantastical or Omnifocus so I can have supporting information for an appointment or task.

My Creativity Stack

In 2024 I got back into music notation. I finally put down the money for a full copy of Dorico. I find the process of writing guitar studies soothing, and practising guitar studies meditative and relaxing. Among the languages I’m fluent in, music is the most comforting.

I quit Abode’s main Creative Cloud plan this year. It costs too much and they’re smuggling too much AI junk into it. Now I’m on the much cheaper Photographer Plan. I haven’t regretted cutting down my Adobe tools to only Photoshop and Lightroom. I still make digital sketches with Procreate.

Scrivener is still my writing tool of choice. I’ve gone back to paper for a lot of my reading but I use a Kindle while travelling. I wasn’t looking to upgrade but I got a Kindle Coloursoft for Christmas and it’s lovely. Reader by Readwise is my RSS and “read later” app. And I collect highlights and quotes using Readwise. My current streak for reviewing highlights stands at over 1,400 days.

I’ve felt no temptation to go back to Notion. Everything I did there, I now do somewhere else. Mostly in Numbers. For some reason I’d forgotten how solid, fast, and reliable spreadsheets can be.

Other Fun Things

JustWatch is a service that lets you see which films and TV shows are available to stream in your region, and the platform on which they are available. This saves time looking for how and where you can watch something. And if you travel frequently, JustWatch is great for tracking down a show that’s on one platform at home and on a different platform in another country.

Flighty didn’t have to work as hard this year for me as in previous years, but it still helped me track 31 flights and 80,307 km travelled.

Chargefox is a new app on my iPhone this year. I have an electric vehicle now. Maybe the car will be part of the State of The Apps 2025! Chargefox is the largest charging network in Australia. And the one that features the charging stations introduced as part of South Australia’s cross-state regional charging plan.

Finally, social media definitely isn’t fun any more. But I’m delighted the big exodus of people from X (formerly known as Twitter) in recent months has mostly landed at Bluesky. It’s far closer to the original spirit of Twitter (pre-2013) than any of the alternatives. You can find me there.

A General Trend

While it might look like I haven’t experimented much, there’s no need to try new apps in order to have new experiences. This year I’ve found myself exploring features, trying new settings, making small tweaks to how I use things.

In other words, making the tools, and my experience with them, my own.

Avoiding the presets and default settings might be the one idea that rings through my experience of apps and tools this year. It’s a way to get the most out of the things you’ve already bought and paid for. It could also be a helpful guide to life in general.

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2024 Review – The Year Of Frequency

Caught in an earthquake while hiking through snow in the Japanese Alps. Being one of 96,000 screaming fans at Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour stop on a perfect Melbourne summer night. Standing in awe under the Aurora Australis on the coast of Adelaide.

These were some of the highlights of my 2024.

My theme for 2024 was frequency. I was curious about patterns and repetition. How often I did all the things in my life. And what things I did too often.

But everything I cared about measuring was down compared to previous years. Number of flights, steps taken, hours slept, days spent writing, workouts done, photos taken, time spent reading or playing guitar, friends I met, even times I had sex.

The frequency of 2024 was too low.

Perhaps the only thing I did more frequently in 2024 was worry.

I worried about my family commitments. About the possibility of my artistic progress stalling. I worried about getting older and slower. About not understanding the cultural changes happening around me. Why I couldn’t keep my kitchen clean and my garden tidy. I worried about why I was worrying so much. And what all that worry was doing to me.

Which is not to say it was a bad year. It wasn’t. I wrote a lot of words. Had some of them published in places other than this blog, something I haven’t done in years. I made progress on my memoir. Celebrated the twentieth anniversary of this blog. Made some important decisions on where to focus my efforts for the next few years.

And as I alluded to in my opening sentences, it was a year of memorable moments. I took my first road trip in years, from Melbourne to Adelaide. In an electric vehicle, no less! Through countryside I had never seen before. Collecting locations I’d love to visit again to photograph.

In fact, if I did anything with relentless frequency this year it was cataloguing things I want to return to. My life has felt like it’s been on hold for some time. Since I left Japan in 2019, really. The whole of my time in London was a weird pandemic-enforced hibernation. Since coming back to Australia I’ve been faced with grief, and family and care responsibilities, and divided attention as no one place feels like home.

Frequently I end these yearly reviews with some lists of the best things I encountered during the year. But rather than tell you what my favourite art exhibits, albums, books, films and TV shows were, I’d rather simply say there is so much new and amazing creativity to explore. In almost any art form you can name, we are in the midst of a golden age.

That might be the paradox of 2024. There is so much to enjoy in the world. We just have to reach and discover what’s there for us. But much of the world also feels off kilter. It’s hard not to worry. Things are going wrong. But also, life is glorious.

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What Happened?

The first time I encountered the phrase “culture war” was back in the mid-’90s. I don’t remember the title of the book. I wish I still had it, but I lent it out years ago and never got it back. But I do remember why that collection of essays caught my eye. It brought together evangelical Christian thinkers with right-wing pundits. And the proposals they had for the future of politics were stunning.

Up to that point, elections had been contests over policy. The personality of the candidates mattered, but electors chose between competing ideas about specific policy issues. Candidates articulated broad and detailed plans. They demonstrated detailed knowledge of healthcare, foreign policy, education, social services, the environment. These policy proposals had to evolve from election to election as the economy and social conditions changed. And their inherent complexity often required expert explanations.

All that was hard work.

Elections were easier to win if detailed policy expositions were avoided. What if elections could be focused on emotionally potent topics instead?

Culture war was the alternative to policy conflict. Topics like racial equality, reproductive rights, acceptance of homosexuality, the role of the family, whether evolution should be taught in schools, and the importance of the church are issues everyone has an opinion about. They don’t need experts to unpack them. Most people are confident their opinion is right. And their opinion is unlikely to change over time.

There was already evidence this could work. The campaigns of Phyllis Schlafly, the electoral appeal of Pat Robertson, showed this path had popular appeal.

Having a smaller set of more clearly defined issues also made it easier for pollsters to study the electorate. Increasing computational power made identifying the specific parts of the country where elections could be won easier as well. Politics became more granular. Politicians presented themselves in broader brushstrokes. Sometimes little more than a pastiche of grievances.

The coverage of elections also changed.

In the mid-’90s, James Fallows wrote about the way political coverage was increasingly becoming like sports coverage. In place of the what of government policy, the positive role an administration plays in people’s lives, media focussed on the how of winning elections, dealing with conflicts and debates and crafting an electable image. This turned political discourse away from the role of civic duty and encouraged people to believe politics was nothing more than a cynical race to win elections.

“Step by step, mainstream journalism has fallen into the habit of portraying public life in America as a race to the bottom, in which one group of conniving, insincere politicians ceaselessly tries to outmanoeuvre another. The great problem for American democracy in the 1990s is that people barely trust elected leaders or the entire legislative system to accomplish anything of value. The politicians seem untrustworthy while they’re running, and they disappoint even their supporters soon after they take office. By the time they leave office they’re making excuses for what they couldn’t do.”

In this context, the role of political journalism was to create heat and conflict and ask gotcha questions. This only went into overdrive with the rise of late-night political satire.

Politics was now entertainment.

But the face of entertainment was also changing. Professional wrestling went from being a fringe carnival-like spectacle into mainstream entertainment. The thing about professional wrestling is the crowd knows it’s fake. “Kayfabe” is the word the world uses for the agreement between the crowd and the wrestling entertainers to pretend the fights are real. That the blows and injuries cause pain.

Then came UFC where fighters actually beat the crap out of each other instead of pretending to do so. This retained the spectacle of professional wrestling. And the showmanship. UFC has been one of the fastest growing sports in recent times, with a predominately young and male audience. There is no Joe Rogan without UFC, where he has been a longtime commentator.

Violence became central to cinema as well. While movies with violence were not new, they became unavoidable, thanks to the long fight sequences that became central. The man who solves problems with violence went through increasingly intense iterations, from James Bond to Jason Bourne to John Wick. Cars became stand-ins for hyper-masculinised violence in the Fast and Furious franchise. The era of comic book film adaptations had us watching a generation of actors transform into the same kind of bodies we saw wrestlers inhabit so as to dish out moralistic violence.

As much as I enjoyed seeing characters from my childhood become the heroes of blockbuster films, I have to admit there were several problems with the films. The first was, of course, that these were characters from my childhood. Captain America and Thor might have everything a young boy needs to be entertained for a few minutes while reading a comic. But they are hardly the stuff of adult conversations about good and evil. The apocalyptic morality of their storylines, much like those of The Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter, is not an analogy of how modern societies work.

We watched a generation of actors transform their bodies to emulate the wrestling aesthetic. Bodies built for pretend violence in front of green screens and CGI. Yet more kayfabe.

These fabulous bodies were for fighting and not fucking. As RS Benedict pointed out, this was a fantastically unhorny era. Perfect bodies. No desire. This culminated in Oppenheimer, which, for a film about a known philanderer, was so relentlessly asexual it managed to make a naked scene with two key protagonists feel as vapidly sexless as an online debate.

“…speaking of Christopher Nolan’s inexplicably sexless oeuvre—did anyone else think it odd how Inception enters the deepest level of a rich man’s subconscious and finds not a psychosexual Oedipal nightmare of staggering depravity, but… a ski patrol?”

Which brings us to pornography.

The internet fundamentally changed the place of pornography in society. While pornography has always existed the changes to scale and access were radically new. A generation ago you could grow up with little to no exposure to pornography. There were love scenes in films but they were clearly staged. So were more revealing scenes in magazines like Penthouse. Now you can access anything you could imagine and many things you probably didn’t.

I remember going to a talk by former advertising executive Cindy Gallup. She mentioned only dating younger men. Her provocation seemed fair. After all, male executives her age often chased younger women. She talked about her surprise when young suitors offered to ejaculate on her face – a practice commonplace in pornography but unknown to people of her generation.

Pornography is how young men learn about sex.

It’s also how they learn about relationships. Ubiquitous free pornography means you can find enough of any practice to legitimize it. This might include all sorts of violent and demeaning acts. There’s no context or framework to understand what might be OK, not OK, acceptable to some but not to others, harmful, or illegal. For example, recent research shows that consumption of pornography is influencing young men to believe that choking women during sex is universally pleasurable and does not require consent.

The ubiquity of pornography is one consequence of the pervasive growth of technology and its uncritically accepted influence. Our society has no centre anymore. Ideas that my generation cherished, like being well informed, or having your finger on the pulse of culture, don’t mean anything anymore.

There’s a whole universe of male bloggers airing all sorts of grievances and even taking over a once liberal city. But you might not be aware of any of it. In contrast, the 4B movement was all over parts of the internet in reaction to the recent election. And you’re forgiven for wondering if that has anything to do with a kind of pencil.

The spectacular rise of tech has fuelled spectacular fortunes, and these fortunes have found their political voice. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter is the most spectacular example, unprecedented in the history of capitalism. One individual’s purchase of a company that size – and the influence it gives him and those around him – exceeds that of any former baron or industrial magnate buying a newspaper.

And while tech has fuelled fanatical fortunes, most people are stuck living on much the same wage as their parents did. Every tech lifeline to wealth – crypto, NFTs, Web3, the creator economy – was an empty chimera, an illusion built on lies.

The social contract changed, but society never debated those changes. A generation ago, a working-class family could afford to buy a small suburban house and pay it off well before retirement. Now they would have to move to the middle of nowhere, or live in an apartment and still have debt when they retire. And while rises in the cost of living were often met with wage increases, that equation has been broken for decades.

The irony is that a big part of the higher cost of living today includes the higher cost of keeping up with the latest technology. Smartphones, laptops, internet connections, online subscriptions, streaming services… all of these are costs that didn’t exist in my childhood. But they are necessities today. They are line increases, not incremental increases, to the household budget.

What has worked is the steady pipeline from Tea Party to Alt-right to Christian nationalism. From Covid-denial to outrage over critical race theory. Search for any topic about culture on YouTube and there’s a good chance the suggested videos will start feeding you prejudice and some misinformed white guy in love with his own intelligence.

A whole ecosystem of intellectual grifters now inhabits the place where public intellectuals and subject experts once lived. What these guys, with their podcasts and YouTube channels have, isn’t subject matter mastery but rather an unshakeable belief in their own intelligence. They can work it out. Do their own research. Know more than the people who work in that field.

They don’t have discussions. They destroy their opponents. Crush them. Humiliate and demonstrate the weakness or moral failure of the people they disagree with. More kayfabe. More performative violence. They talk in thought-terminating clichés. Not arguments.

The belief they all seem to have coalesced around is not caring about the effects of their actions. Put together any set of topics they hate – say, mask-wearing, trans rights, the Black Lives Matter movement, climate change – what do these have in common? My choices can hurt others. Even if I think I’m a good person, my actions can cause pain. Sometimes very serious pain. To other people.

This is a disconcerting thing to realise. My failure to wear a mask could kill someone. My instinct that forms and documents should be a certain way could make someone’s life unbearable. My failure to force the police to change could mean the police failing to restrain their force on some members of society. My insistence on driving any kind of vehicle I want leads to places on earth becoming uninhabitable.

No surprise that so many are choosing to believe anything rather than face the personal cost of their actions. Or feeling like it matters far less than alleviating their economic situation. It’s more comforting to believe the world is divided between good and evil. That superheroes, great men, will swoop in to save the day. More kayfabe. More symbolic violence. More retreating from the messy and hard to understand details of reality.

None of these alone are explanations for what happened in the recent US election. Many of these are also not harmful in isolation. Or to a limited extent. But they are the context, the background web of layers, the amniotic fluid out of which grew a coarser public discourse, a distorted image of masculinity, and an inability to make long-term ethical choices.

This is the road we’ve been travelling for more than 30 years. There are no quick directional adjustments here. Look at almost any major democracy now and you see instability. Coalitions that don’t hold. Frequent changes of government. Slim margins. Discontent in the electorates. A feeling that the existing parties don’t represent the present reality.

And culture wars.

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The Future Of Blogging

OpenAI recently admitted that unless they steal vast amounts of online content they cannot run their business. In a submission to the UK House of Lords, OpenAI explained how copyright stands in the way of training their Large Language Models. Without that right to steal content their business isn’t viable.

Is the whole history of the internet a history of theft? Theft seems integral to the DNA of the internet.

As the internet first became popular, many people’s earliest experiences involved stealing music. Napster was one of the first hits of the World Wide Web. An early mantra of the digital age was that creativity had no inherent value. “Information wants to free” was a common refrain. The net’s first gurus proclaimed that curation and creation were equally valuable.

Today there are services that help you to take “high performing posts” from other people and paste them into your social media feed. If it gained engagement for someone else, then it will work for you. Or so the idea goes. Content isn’t self-expression. It’s fashion. Posts are like t-shirts. Buy the one that looked cool on someone else and you will look cool too.

The Newsletter Era Will Pass

A few years ago I predicted that blogging would make a comeback. A blognaissance. I thought the limitations of social media would fuel a hunger for longform writing. It would be the perfect place to find a more diverse range of voices.

I was kind of right.

We didn’t get a blogging renaissance. Instead, we got the newsletter era.

Sure, a Substack and a blog are kind of the same thing. But few people see it that way. Say you have a Substack and people will sign up. Mention your blog and the conversation just trails off.

Newsletters are popular because they give writers a direct connection with their audience. Every creator wants that. To see the faces of those who love their art.

But the money behind the newsletter era has no passion for any of that. Venture capital. Silicon Valley. They are disinterested and uninterested in what creators want and need. They need only the output. Grist for the mill. Attention-grabbing content that brings eyeballs. Feeds the algorithm. It doesn’t matter if context collapses. It just helps make it harder to differentiate ideas from ads, information from misinformation, people from bots.

This is the era of newsletters. But it won’t last. Nothing online does.

Two Pillars Have Fallen

Had you told me early in 2022 that I would be done with Twitter and WordPress by the end of 2024, I wouldn’t have believed it. Both were constants in my life; the core of how I interacted with the online world.

Recent weeks have seen WordPress mired in controversy. This site runs on WordPress. It lives on WPEngine, the web host that WordPress has gone to war with. And this site relies on the Advanced Custom Fields, the plug-in that WordPress controversially chose to co-opt. It set fire to the reputation of the technology that hosted most of the written content on the web.

Meanwhile, the new owner of Twitter bought it, broke it, renamed it, then wrecked it some more. What was once the internet’s intellectual ecosystem is now a digital propaganda machine.

I keep thinking about the sunk-cost fallacy. Was I committed to these things because of my past investment in them? Did I keep using Twitter because it had been so good once? It was a great place to meet people and find opportunities. Was I committed to WordPress because I had spent so much time and money building this site with it?

Would I recommend either today? No.

If in 2008 Twitter had been what it is now, I would never have joined. And WordPress’ problems are bigger than just the current conflicts.

WordPress Is No Longer Best In Class

When I started this blog, WordPress felt modern and fresh. A database system to manage content felt like the future. It was customisable and fast. But WordPress today feels slow, complicated and fragile.

And it failed to keep up with what creatives need. It isn’t easy to add a newsletter, or host a commerce option, or customise the appearance of the site. Yes, you can do a lot of things with plug-ins and site builders. But every layer you add makes things slower and less secure.

My site being hacked was a wake-up call.

During the past year of reflection I came to realise that I wasn’t sick of blogging. I was sick of WordPress. My 2,000 posts should feel like a lovely personal archive. A thing of value. Not some treasure locked in a basement without a key.

I spent a lot on the design and the building of this site. But every little change – updating the copyright date, changing the social icons, or updating plug-ins – risks breaking the site. The problem isn’t the blog. The tech is broken.

Blogging Was The Best Expression Of The Internet

Blogging is the the most natural and best expression of how the internet can be a force for good. Blogging is human-centric, earnest, oriented towards creativity. Blogging was born from marginalised voices; mommybloggers, ex-vangelicals, and identity advocates. Bloggers shared a passion to speak truth to power, or at least to speak their truth with power. Everyday life mattered, even if, or perhaps especially if, the blog was the only place where it could safely be given voice.

Of course, blogging has at times been little more than a capitalist carnival. In some ways it ate itself when it shifted its focus from human stories to selling adspace. Monetisation was the noise blogs made as they went to seed, died, and fermented in the musty soil of the online jungle.

One long-forgotten thing bloggers used to talk about was accountability. We told our stories in public as a way to be accountable for the kind of people we were becoming. To stick to the path. Achieve the goals. And not repeat the mistakes of those whose actions had hurt us in the past.

Blogging early on carried the etiquette of analogue writing. If you wrote an interesting blog post, someone would quote from it and reference your work, usually with a link. Acknowledgment was shared. So was traffic. Audiences grew together. Intermingled. A failure to float all boats was unethical, for the same reasons that plagiarism is problematic. It’s a form of theft.

My Blogging Future

The future for me involves saying goodbye to WordPress and revisiting the passion that fired the earliest days of this blog. It involves being more writerly. Also more artistic.

For those of you who are interested in the technical side of this, I will be going over to Jamstack and the world of Static Site Generators.

The irony is, that’s where I began. My first blogs were static sites I coded myself. I went to WordPress because people said those weren’t “real blogs.” Now the future of blogging take me back to where I was in 2004!

I am thrilled that 2025 will see me leaving WordPress, WPEngine managed hosting, WooCommerce, Google Analytics, and MailChimp. For a long time I thought I was sick of blogging. Truth is, I was sick of these companies. But the blogging, writing, and sharing ideas and experiences – I still love that!

Conclusion

Blogging is an artistic expression now. I can’t argue that you should do it for any kind of pragmatic reason. It has to be a choice that lives within a lot of other choices. About how to work. How to live. And how to be in the world.

The way forward remains unclear. I am sailing my little boat into strange new waters. Can we still find connection and community? Is it possible to be noticed? Is it just the tech that is broken, or are the techbros broken as well? What other technological sunk-costs am I blind to? Am I making a bold choice or a catastrophic mistake?

Twenty years on, I find myself wondering: where do I begin as a blogger?

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20 Years Of Blogging

I was accused of being a CIA agent. Told my experiences were not real. Criticised for writing too often about work and not often enough about work. Denounced for being too emotional and vulnerable and chastised for not revealing more about my feelings and personal experiences.

Blogging over the last 20 years has been quite a ride.

Blogging By The Numbers

Looking at just the numbers might suggest a story of decline. In the first three years, I posted about once a day. Then from 2008 to 2014, the flow slowed to two to three posts a week. From 2015 to 2021, it was about once a week. More recently, it’s been two to three times a month.

But those numbers reflect an evolving story. Over 20 years, the way I write has changed.

I started in the years before social media. This blog was my digital window to the world. The blog existed alongside a growing social media presence. It was the place for longer posts. Deeper exploration of ideas. More detail. Then I started to drop the idea of the blogpost as a specific form and understood myself more as an essayist writing longer and more crafted pieces. And lately, I’ve been trying to publish more of my words in other places. The blog has stopped being the default home for every essay I write.

This evolution is consistent with one of the few goals I had when I started this. While I had no strategy about the topics I focused on, I had one clear goal: to transform the way I wrote. I was unhappy with my academic voice. I wanted to jettison the postmodern posturing, the overly philosophical and jargon-laden way I explained things. And I wanted to drop the theological language as well. Churches have a dialect. A way of speaking that is simultaneously arcane and simplistic.

Blogging was a way to find my voice. This never stopped being true.

Evolving Interests In Blogging

In these 20 years, I’ve written about the topics that interest me. It’s that simple.

In the early years, I was trying to make sense of my life. Shifting from academia to creative work. Studying online. Living in India. Then I was trying to make sense of being a stay-at-home dad, learning photography, diving into all the arts, music, and film festivals in Hong Kong. Then I started a creative business. Tried to make it work. Had to switch gears when I moved to Singapore and got more serious about writing. Along the way I developed interests in personal productivity, the nature of creativity, and how to foster mental well-being.

Each of these seasons reflect the different places I lived. Different stages in my working life. Different roles in parenting. Different people I met and the cultures I experienced. And a changing sense of who I was artistically.

I never chose a niche. I wasn’t a music or tech or travel blogger. I was blogging about my life. All the way through. Blogging as biography.

Blogging Through The Years

For this blog’s tenth anniversary, I listed 10 significant posts. A couple of those made it to this list. Most didn’t. Time has changed my feelings about which words and observations matter most.

I guess that happens with time. We reconsider our lives, our stories, and understand them afresh in the light of who we’ve become. Sometimes our victories seem less heroic. Our defeats less tragic. And the ordinary moments more full of omens for the future.

So here are 20 blogposts. One from each year. A sampling of the story so far.

2004 Another Sleepless Diwali – This little slice of life in India is only 138 words. So many early posts are like this. Brief little observations and notes on daily life. I wish I had made recordings of those noisy nights.

2005 Do We Really Want Authentic Food? – Another short post. This time written to feature a link. The essay mentioned doesn’t really exist online anymore. You won’t find it by Googling. But, it’s still one of the best things I’ve ever read about food and “ethnic” dining experiences.

2006 The New Gilded Age – It’s slightly odd to read my breezy tone while writing about this economic disaster in the making. Of course in the subsequent 18 years this problem has only got worse.

2007 Mise en Place: The Ready State for Cooking and also Creativity – The first mention of a theme that emerges again and again in my thinking about creativity: How preparation begets creative freedom of expression. Using Mise en Place as a metaphor to talk about this has become quite popular in recent years but it was a quite novel idea back then.

2008 What Do People Really Think Of Stay At Home Dads – Or Why Women Are Using The Playground To Kill Feminism – If I were ever to write a memoir about parenting and being a stay at home dad I would start with rewriting this essay. A few days after posting the link to this piece on Twitter I was contacted by an editor from the South China Morning post and I ended up writing for occasionally them for the next three years.

2009 What The Stoics Can Teach Us About Saying No – Here I am writing about stoicism long before it became trendy to do so. And the importance of saying no would become a recurring theme in my blogposts.

2010 Work and Love – Another recurring theme; using work and love as a heuristic for understanding how to live well. At this time I’m still trying to drop the academic and theological language from my writing. But, the voice is starting to come through.

2011 7 Kinds Of People You Need In Your Creative Universe – By this stage I’ve become deeply fascinated by the topic of creativity. Here I’m also diving into the crucial question of how we choose the people in our lives. This was for several years the most read post on the blog and one that was shared by some very well known creatives on social media.

2012 Solitude, Introversion And The Power Of Working Spaces – Some blogposts are acts of public thinking. They’re like Venn diagrams drawn with sentences. Here work and home, architecture and design, music and language all blend as I reflect on finishing yet another home studio in yet another home.

2013 Tokyo One Month In – Rereading this reminded me how much of a joyful adventure moving to Tokyo was in the early days. I can see my current writing voice starting to emerge here.

2014 Act Your Age – I’m a bit guilty of aping the listicle form here. But the topic of aging well is a recurring theme on the blog. And looking back on these words ten years later I’m surprised at how well the ideas still stand up.

2015 Ansel Adams On Choosing A Camera – For a few years I wrote extensively about photography. This is a typical example of how I approached the topic.

2016 I’m OK – It’s a sign of what life was like that an “OK day” felt like something worth writing about. Anxiety had messed up pretty badly and I was only just starting a long, slow, healing process. Mental health, and the way it impacts our creativity, became an important theme in my writing over the next few years.

2017 Lunchtime – This is possibly my favourite essay of all. A simple every day moment opens a window into the author’s own somewhat troubled soul.

2018 Why You Probably Shouldn’t Get Up At 5am – The world of self-improvement was overrun with unhelpful and extremist advice. It seemed to happen slowly at first. Then it felt overwhelming. Here I’m pushing back against an idea that should never have been offered as advice for everyone.

2019 Impermanence – Living in Japan changed me. And leaving Tokyo broke my heart. I haven’t really recovered.

2020 The Noguchi Filing System – I’ve written a lot of posts about personal productivity over the years. This is one of the simplest. But, as someone who has always struggled to stay organised it felt important to share one of the very few productivity hacks that ever really worked for me.

2021 This Week I Quit LinkedIn – Some might call it brave, others foolhardy, but using LinkedIn always made me feel unhappy. This wasn’t the first time I’d quit LinkedIn. But this time it stuck. Also this was one of the last posts in the This Week I Quit series, which was one of several personal experiments I wrote about on the blog.

2022 How To Think About New Technology
– As a child I got my first computer around the same time I got my first guitar. But in recent years we’ve had a barrage of false promises. Crypto, NFTs, Web3, and of course, AI. How do we approach new tech when it so often seems to not deliver on its promises anymore?

2023 Losing My Religion – I was losing my religion when this blog started. But, it took 19 years to understand the process and articulate it succinctly. This post feels like a signpost to the future of this blog.

2024 A Personal Statement About Generative AI – The potential economic cost of AI, and the existential threat to the creative industries is so great, I felt compelled to write a manifesto about the situation.

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How This Blog Started 20 Years Ago

The room turns dark. A loud thud signals the electricity cutting out and the UPS, the uninterruptible power supply, kicking in. The computer is now running on a big back-up battery, until either the blackout ends or the generator kicks in and the lights come back on. Often these disruptions also break the internet connection.

I walk over and pick up the phone, listening for the dial tone. Will there be nothing? A strange whooshing sound? Or the faint, dying echo of the dial tone disappearing into static? Today it’s the latter. The house lights come back on but nothing is coming through on e-mail or internet browser.

If I had written in 2004 the way I write today, then this blog would’ve been full of entries like that. I was living in Delhi, passing my days in a large farmhouse on the southern edge of the city. I took one of the rooms as a home studio. Light marble floors. While walls. A high, vaulted wooden ceiling. One whole side of the room full of wooden cupboards. A large window looking out over the backyard. Monkeys sometimes perched on the sill to look in.

At first that room was pretty sparse. Two small desks. One with an iMac and a printer, the other covered in papers and books. Relics of the PhD programme I had quit. Against the back wall, some guitars and amplifiers, microphones, and a multitrack recorder. Hints at the direction my life was taking.

It was there that this blog began.

Why A Blog?

It wasn’t my first attempt at blogging. I’d encountered blogs and met people who had them back in the late 90s. One major inspiration was Greg Restall. He’s now Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of Philosophy at St Andrews University. But back then he was an up and coming academic using a blog to highlight his recent writing and work. Another was Hugh MacLeod, of GapingVoid fame, who was using his blog to share art and insights into culture.

I’d been building simple websites since 1996. Blogs, with their ability to be frequently and easily updated, felt like the natural next evolution. The perfect platform for authentic personal communication.

I loved the idea that anyone could have a presence online. You could put your thoughts and feelings out into the world with no need for publishers or music labels or gallery owners. I saw blogs in particular as a vehicle for creative freedom. Hugh MacLeod called it being a “global micro brand.”

More than that, blogging felt morally right. Behind all that gatekeeping we were trying to break free from were many stories of stifled creativity and outright abuse. There were so many voices that needed to be heard precisely because they had been silenced. So many people sitting comfortably in positions of power who ought to feel less sure of themselves. Blogs had the potential to change the power balance in many fields.

Why WordPress?

I tried Blogger, but I didn’t like how everyone’s blogs looked the same. Blogging needed a rebellious and individualistic edge. The self-expression had to extend beyond the words. I wanted to own the whole thing. The look. The feel. And most importantly, the url.

So I had a go at hand-coding my own blog-like sites. But people said those were not “real blogs” because a “real blog” used an automated system that added date stamps to posts. So building something from scratch was out of the question. The first compromise to my creative freedom.

If I was to use someone else’s tool then I first had to find it. It had to be something I could customise and control.

WordPress was new, having been around for a little over a year when I first downloaded it. It wasn’t easy to set up. There were no step-by-step YouTube videos to show you the way. You had to manually FTP files into place. Create a MySQL Database. Change code in several files. None of which worked the first time. Simple changes would mysteriously crash your site. Themes were unreliable. Technical explanations, if any, were written by people fluent in technical language and for other people who lived and breathed technicalese. It was hard.

But at that moment I needed a challenge.

Life in 2004, Part I

Starting this blog was an act of desperation. The problems had begun almost a year earlier when I quit my PhD. I had been doing research in Philosophy (The Hermeneutics of Postmodern Ethics) at the Centre for Theology, Religion, and Culture at King’s College London.

It all sounds so grand now. But I wasn’t a great student. I had good ideas. Read voluminously, three or four books a week. Produced reams of notes. But was chaotically disorganised. Unable to manage my calendar. Prone to debilitating bouts of self-doubt and anxiety, although I didn’t understand it at the time. This meant my progress in the ways that count – chapters and papers, reviews, research funding applications – was inconsistent.

To make matters worse, I took time off when my child was born to be a stay-at-home parent, then agreed to relocate as a family to India to support my wife’s career. While those were the right decisions at the time, they slowed my progress on the PhD even more.

I quit because I was running out of time. I wasn’t progressing. And I didn’t want to take more money out of the family’s finances for what felt like a failing project.

I thought making that hard decision would take a weight off my shoulders. I could focus on my family while figuring out what to do next. But life didn’t get easier.

Life In 2004, Part II

Sometimes I hear people say they wish they could just wake up and not have to work. It sounds idyllic. To be free of obligations. Able to choose what you want to do every day. Or do nothing at all.

For the first half of 2004 that’s what my life was like. And it was one of the worst periods of my life.

As a “trailing spouse” I couldn’t work once I had quit the PhD. The visa rules didn’t allow for that. Thankfully, my wife’s job came with generous terms that meant we could live well. I had mornings to myself once our kid started pre-school.

It looked like freedom. But I was lost.

I fell into a depression, although I didn’t understand it as such at the time. I started putting on weight. And feeling ashamed because of it. I begged friends and family to come and visit. Then shook with confused rage when they refused.

Finally my body gave up.

I don’t know what it was I ate, but I came down with hepatitis. There’s a period of about three months I don’t remember. I guess I got better. I would wake to take my daughter to preschool. Come home to sleep. Pick her up and play in the afternoons. And collapse in a tired heap in front the of TV at night to watch box sets of Buffy The Vampire Slayer or The Sopranos.

One day friends invited me to go play golf. I struggled my way around the course. That was a wake-up call. I started to exercise more. To walk and swim every day. I stopped having a second sleep in the morning. On the days I felt OK I would go into the studio room to make music. I started to imagine a future for myself and look for things to do with my time.

Why I Blogged The Way I Did

In between the power failures and internet outages I would work on setting up the site. It took a couple of weeks to get it working. The first post went out on 19 October 2004. I would add seven more posts that month. Now, twenty years later, this is the 2,261st post.

I had no hopes or expectations. The internet was different back then. There was no monetisation. No influencers or creator economy. Most people I knew in real life thought blogging was weird. Heck, they thought the internet was weird. A strange obsession that would soon fade into obscurity. Like CB radio. Or collecting Cabbage Patch dolls.

I would open up the WordPress editor window and type away. Sometimes only a few lines. Often the internet would crash and I’d lose everything I’d written that day.

Many of those early posts were so short. Sometimes they were little more than a link to a news story or another blog. I posted so often. Sometimes several times a day. There was no plan. No strategy. Just words going out in the hope someone would read them.

This is part one of a four-part series. For the rest of this month I will be reflecting on twenty years of blogging here at fernandogros.com

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Contextual Computing

Going online used to be a fluid experience. We called it “surfing the web”. We followed links from one page to another. Effortlessly skipping across borders. Through all sorts of sites, layouts, and designs. Being online was as much about the journey as any destination. The trip wasn’t shaped by algorithms. We navigated via our own choices.

Hyperlinks made this possible. A small bit of code that let you jump from one page to another. You could effortlessly dive deeper into a subject. Or find other similar pages. No searching. Or complex navigation decisions. Click, jump, read, jump again. From page to page.

Linking is the DNA of the digital age. If any kind of digital process can beat an analogue paper-based one, it will be because links are bringing things together. Building little electronic bridges. Making quick connections.

The HyperHistory of Contextual Computing

HyperCard was released by Apple in 1987. It allowed links to be placed with a document to speed up navigation. A similar idea was implemented by Microsoft for the help files that came with Windows 3.0.

The use of hyper- as a prefix here dates back to Theodore Nelson’s 1965 paper, Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate. In it, Nelson describes links as a way to make and connect content.

“Let me introduce the word ‘hypertext’ – to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper. It may contain summaries, or maps of its contents and their interrelations; it may contain annotations, additions and footnotes from scholars who have examined it.”

What’s fascinating about Nelson’s idea was that he saw a difference between the kind of organisational systems required for creative thought and those that were being built for conventional business needs.

“The kinds of file structures required if we are to use the computer for personal files and as an adjunct to creativity are wholly different in character from those customary in business and scientific data processing. They need to provide the capacity for intricate and idiosyncratic arrangements, total modifiability, undecided alternatives, and thorough internal documentation.”

These hyperlinks were, from their inception through to the early years of the World Wide Web, handcrafted artefacts. They were the product of human curation rather than machine-based algorithms.

Thinking and Linking

Obsidian is a notes application that uses this linking idea. On any note you make, you can add a link to any other note in your notes library. Apple Notes allows for the same kind of linking. Same with Notion. This is baked into these kinds of apps.

If you think of your notes as discrete thoughts, then your notes library can become a tool for networked thinking. It’s like a personal width web.

Let’s call it contextual thinking. When you look at a note, your mind is focused on a thought. The links are a way of expressing the relationships you might want to explore alongside that thought.

In my Obsidian library, notes are connected to other notes and also to notes that pull together categories and the work of thinkers I keep referring back to. Revisiting a note invites the possibility of seeing other ideas related to that subject.

I can surf the history of my own thinking.

Links Everywhere

Ubiquitous linking is a way to think about what this looks like if we build it out across a whole system. Imagine if we’re not just talking about links between one website and another, or one note in an app like Obsidian with other Obsidian notes, but between anything and anything else on your computer. Or across the whole nexus of information you access and apps you use on all your devices.

There’s even a Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking which calls on software developers to incorporate linking into all apps that use information. As the manifesto says,

“…humans work best in psychological flow. Switching contexts, even to search for information, interferes with flow while consuming precious mental capacity, brain energy and time. Activating an aptly-placed link to information is easier and faster than searching for the information — and more protective of flow.”

Although many apps in the Apple ecosystem support it, linking isn’t available everywhere. However, you can add links in many of the contexts that are important for personal productivity. It’s worth taking a moment to look through your stack of digital tools to find which ones can use links and where in your workflow you can use them.

Tasks Need Links

“Contextual computing” is a phrase David Sparks uses often to refer to the ability to jump directly from a task in one application to something in another application without having to go through your computer’s navigation menus or do any searches.

For example, click a link in your calendar app to directly open a meeting in Zoom. Or use a link to navigate straight from your task manager (Omnifocus) to a note with detailed information about the task (Obsidian, Notion, Notes).

Instantaneously switch contexts while staying in the flow of whatever you are doing by using links. This isn’t just some nice-to-have productivity hack. It’s essential to maximising our creative focus.

What contextual computing avoids is the stress that comes from searching, navigating, and trying to pull together information when you need it. No scouring through past emails or scrambling through old folders.

As David Sparks puts it, “Tasks need links.”

Principles of Productivity

Contextual computing relies on two broad principles we can apply to all sorts of situations where we want to be more creative, efficient, and productive.

The first is that it’s worth spending a little time thinking about how we want to do something before we do it. We don’t always need a detailed plan. But it helps to have a starting point. In her excellent little book 2k to 10k, Rachel Aaron says,

“If you want to write faster, the first step is to know what you’re writing before you write it.”

The second principle is that having your tools to hand, having what you need available, enables you to work at your best. This is also exemplified by ideas like Mise en Place and Knolling.

We’ve thrown a few different phrases around here. Contextual computing. Contextual thinking. Ubiquitous linking. Perhaps what’s most surprising is that we don’t have a mutually understood language for something that feels so useful and, in many ways, so available.

Tools in Service of Creativity

I’m not interested in productivity for any kind of hustle, do as much work as possible, crank widgets-for-the-sake-of-it reasons. I’m into thinking about productivity because it’s a way to be more creative. Or to make sure I have the space, time, and mental bandwidth to be creative. Another way to think about it is to imagine the idea of frictionless creativity – an approach to creative tasks that isn’t bogged down in competing priorities, unclear choices, unfinished commitments, and general ennui about which goals to pursue.

Contextual computing is one step in that direction – a way of aligning our digital tools to work better together in the service of freeing us up to be more creative.

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New Writing In Keepsake

I’m hesitant to call my attempts at journalling a habit or practice. I’ve tried to keep a journal, or a diary as we used to call it, since childhood. But so many attempts only lasted a few days. So many empty pages in so many notebooks over so many years.

But in recent years my journalling practice has solidified. The pressure comes from three directions. First, as I get older the feeling increases that life is quickly passing. Journalling is a way to document; to hold onto the moment. Second, as part of maintaining mental health, journalling helps slow my mind enough to reflect on experiences. To express gratitude. And put things in context. Finally, as a literary exercise, journalling is a chance to practice writing. To explore my voice. To express feelings, emotions, and observations in a safe way.

I’ve written about journalling a few times recently. Once in a piece simply called Journaling. Another in the personal essay The Bridge Of Resentment.

When Craig Atkinson issued a call on Instagram for submissions to a new zine about journalling, I felt inclined to submit work. Craig is in Tokyo and has been active on the zine scene for several years. He reviews zines from all over the world on Instagram and YouTube, as well as creating his own zines. So I had a feeling the project would flourish.

Keepsake is very much an artisanal independent publication. Craig has collected art and words from nineteen contributors for this first issue. If you’re a fan of raw and honest work, hand lettering, artwork in the marginalia, then this is for you.

My own piece, The Habit, reflects on the role journalling has for me today and how my habit evolved to include elements of my spirituality, academic past, artistic present, and hopes to live well in the future. The artwork is taken from doodles in my past journals. And the whole thing was hand lettered.

If you’d like to order a copy you can contact Craig via Instagram.

The Habit is the fourth essay I’ve had published in the past year. This is part of my continuing project to publish more literary work, beyond what I post on this blog. You can find the other essays at Across The Margin, Writerly, and Wilde Magazine.

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