Colin Wright's Blog, page 3

Envisioning

It’s impossible to know what a future version of ourselves will want, need, and prioritize. But we make assumptions about our future selves (and the world they occupy) all the time.

Unfortunately, many of these assumptions are knee-jerk and superficial, predicated on our sense of things, today, or based on an illusory, optimistic, not terribly realistic version of who we kinda’, sorta’ believe we could be at some point.

(There’s an underlying presumption baked into a lot of these predictio...

Simmer or Sear

Some creative work requires the application of quick, definitive force if you want to take what’s in your head, commit it to a distributable medium, and get it out the door in a shape that’s true to what you pictured in your mind.

Other creative works, though, necessitate the slow, consistent application of effort and energy over time if you want to avoid converting desirable matter into unpalatable char.

The distinction between these categories of work is partially down to the ingredients...

Some Final 2023 Thoughts

I decided at the last second to do away with my usual newsletter format for this final newsletter of 2023 (I’m taking next week off to work on my new book, avoid the news, and eat unhealthy volumes of green bean casserole), and to drop a few final thoughts on my way out the (calendar-year) door, instead.

I unintentionally stopped posting things on Instagram back in early October, and from there just kept forgetting that the network even existed. And I’d love to say it was a liberating, lovely...

Taking Time

The calendar provides us with all sorts of baked-in milestone moments, and though we don’t require such moments (holidays, birthdays, etc) to pause, assess, try new things, and make changes to how we live our lives (based on those assessments and experiments), it certainly doesn’t hurt to have these latent, potential-laden periods sprinkled throughout the year, ready to be leveraged for whatever purposes we choose.

I’m personally trying something new in these final, waning days of 2023: I’m t...

Informed Opinions

It’s okay to not have an opinion about things.

It can be awkward, though, and sometimes people will find it offensive if they share their opinion and you fail to confirm the rightness of their perspective, or if you decline to present your own doctrinal counter-belief that they can then push back against.

That awkwardness is partly the consequence of the desire many of us feel to categorize the world around us: if you don’t share your opinion about the talking point of the day, how will I ...

Deeper Goals

When you consume alcohol, there’s a good chance your prime goal is not to consume alcohol: you’re looking to socialize, you’re interested in feeling altered, you’re maybe just parched and want something to drink.

The same is true of many activities we engage in regularly; the act itself may be just one possible means of achieving an actual, deeper goal.

In such cases, there may be other, superior (for our purposes) means of accomplishing the same outcomes: you could pop around a party with...

Generosity of Ignorance

Years ago, I dated an Icelandic woman who—among many other accolades—was an enthusiastic linguist.

She spoke a handful of languages, and was always endeavoring to further her grasp of them. Which in the context of our relationship often meant her asking me about English words and meanings.

She already spoke English incredibly well, and when she asked about this subject she went beyond simple questions, tugging at the threads of a term or concept until she’d unspooled every last detail abou...

Discussing the News

The news can be stressful, anxiety-inducing, tribalism-reinforcing, and littered with misleading, misinformed, heavily biased takes.

There are things we can do to make our news-consumption habits more productive, including (for instance) avoiding most TV news, avoiding editorial/opinion content, and sticking with journalistic entities with the right economic incentives (and reputations for generally non-polemical coverage) like Reuters and The Associated Press.

Exposure to solid news cover...

Sharing and Preserving

There’s a tension between sharing enough of oneself to convey complete, round narratives, and sharing too much: stepping over the line into something uncomfortably open, unnecessarily detailed, or embellished till it’s more icing than cake.

It’s tempting to aim for extremes when we’re communicating personal details, whether that means chatting about ourselves with coworkers over lunch or broadcasting snippets of our lives to strangers from the internet.

There’s something straightforwardly ...

Time Spent

I don’t particularly enjoy the process of making a podcast: there are elements of it I find fulfilling and this process allows me to produce things I want to see in the world, while also contributing to my livelihood.

But if there were a button I could push that would allow me to convert all the things I want to convey, automagically, into a well-made podcast episode, I would push that button immediately—the outcome of investing that time and effort is what I’m after, not the spending of the ...