June 2026: "To learn about the world"
Reflections on this month’s posts + what I’m reading/watching
Monthly post for paid subscribers. Experimenting with a shorter, combined reflection focusing less on process notes and more on high-level learnings to leave more time for writing.
This Month’s Writing
May’s post took everything out of me leaving June with scraps. I wouldn’t call it a vulnerability hangover per se, but I dove so deep into personal material for that one that it was extremely inward even for me. After that I wanted to do something different.
I viewed my lifelong preoccupation with reducing my own suffering as all one long prelude to get to a healthy and functional enough baseline such that I could actually begin to live my life, as if it were a chronic illness I had been encumbered by. I finally got that.
And what did I want to do with my newfound freedom? To learn about the world, which was before so uninteresting due to my vigilance and limited energy to engage with it—about history, about war, about stock market crashes and sociology. Did you know there was an Irish man named Ernest Shackleton who between the years 1914 and 1916 led an expedition to Antarctica and despite his ship being crushed by ice, brought his entire crew back to England alive? Or, say, the holiest Shinto shrine in Japan, Ise Jingu in Mie Prefecture, is entirely torn down and rebuilt every 20 years in a tradition stretching back 1,300 years?
There were two writers who deeply impressed me this month, and I mean that literally, as in their words and ways of perceiving the world pressed into my consciousness, altering it. One was Matt Alt, who wrote Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World. An object to him is never just an object, but rather a representation of something larger like post-war economic recovery or youth culture in Japan. My world feels larger and tinged with fascination when I read him.
The other was W. G. Sebald, who wrote Rings of Saturn. What makes his writing extraordinary, beyond the melancholic and introspective tone, the tasteful interweaving of black-and-white photographs with prose that straddles fiction and non-fiction, and the selection of fascinating facts (all of which I love), is its temporal depth. Walking around the world, he sees the history of a place overlaid on its current state. It is like the past and the present simultaneously exist for him, are glued together.
The nonfiction has been good for me, redirecting my focus away from my own interiority. I am working on a post about anime, which I wanted to put out in June but realized in order to do it well, I needed more time to read and let the ideas ferment. The two posts that did come out weren’t planned at all. I was pretty happy with the social anxiety one when I posted it, but in retrospect it was a bit abstract. I previously had a section about my own experience overcoming social anxiety but I cut it because I was tired of talking about myself after a streak of intensely autobiographical writing. I now realize that may have been one of the strongest parts. Oh well, lesson learned.
The second one was purely for fun. For about a year now, I’ve been trying to reconcile the difference between how I come off in my writing vs. socially. Apparently I am warm and funny in person, and this doesn’t come through in my writing online. For the most part I’m okay with this, but it’s also fun to show a different side. Format-wise, I’ve never seen a text compilation done this way, and it rhymed with my journals from last year. I had five friends text me they loved the post, which made me happy.
It was also good as some sort of pressure-reducer. Not every post has to go viral, or change someone’s life, or be particularly memorable. I think having my charisma essay go viral two years ago was a curse as much as it was a blessing, because it forced me to confront that I had real value I could offer the world through my writing. Ever since I decided to post regularly that pressure has only increased. But sometimes I just like shooting the shit with my friends, and keeping it fun is important for morale.
I am also realizing not everything I want to say is in the shape of an essay. When I started this three months ago, it seemed like the format that made the most sense for me. In some ways that is still true, and I am serious about refining my skills in that direction, but I am encountering several issues. One is having too many ideas and too little time to turn each into an essay. The second is that everything has a natural length. Some ideas don’t have much to them; they can be expressed as tweets or shorter posts. Forcing them to be longer feels unnatural and produces poor work because I start writing padding. I want to experiment with a mixture of more frequent, shorter posts and occasional longer essays that are thoughtful and well-researched.
It is funny. Every month I feel like I have done nothing and made no progress, but when I sit down to write this reflection I discover all the things I’ve already grown accustomed to. Of course I would read about the signing of the Plaza Accord which triggered the Japanese asset price bubble in the late 1980s, or the Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995, or how postmodernism made irony a dominant feature of Western media, all while researching the history of anime. Things are never just the things themselves, only trailheads to the same interconnected web of knowledge. But I didn’t think this a month ago. I can feel myself becoming a better thinker.