I started this blog at the end of July 2025, and this has by far been the most enjoyable format for me to write my thoughts in. As of writing this, my first 156 blog posts clock in at a total of 300k words, with most of them falling in the range of 1500 to 2500 words. I don't have any target for any single post besides 'finish at a satisfying point that addressed the main questions', and if a post is too long, I tend to divide it into several parts, though here again I don't have any hard rule, which is why some of the pieces have more than 4000 words.
I have tried for many, many years, to have a Zettelkasten-like system, something that would allow me to have atomic notes that can be joined with one another, on the premise that such a system is robust to keep track of all of your ideas without repeating them, and allows you to generate novel thoughts through their connection, so that you can build a 'body' of ideas over time.
My Obsidian 1 system clocks in at 1.15 million words, with 3800 notes and 7300 links, so I am well beyond the initial stage where everything can be held in my own memory, and where I have to instead rely on the system working for me. I haven't thought too much about all of the drawbacks of the Zettelkasten setup, simply because there is one aspect of it I have found unbearable over time, which is simply that it felt far more draining than rewarding to write in it after a while. In the beginning, you are excited to put down all of your ideas and connect them with one another, but over time it feels more like work than about exploring things.
I like starting from a relatively fresh 'canvas' for my essays, and then wrap the whole thing up with a bowtie, and then move on to another thing I am interested in. The blog has a nice rhythm of freshness and conclusion, opening and closure, with the occasional connection to other pieces, whereas the Zettelkasten gave me the impression that I was opening twelve to twenty new threads of potential inquiry after each session, none of which concluded in a satisfying manner, and I also felt the need to connect my notes to previously written notes, which over time I found draining. I need closure after I am done with something, and I suspect that the lack of closure in anything that we engage with in in the modern world is one of the subtle reasons why people feel so drained all the time. 2
I have also tried blogging on other platforms, my main attempt being Substack, which is still there for me to post things on, but which I don't like as much. I actually have nothing against Substack, but the public-facing nature of it made me feel that there was some standard of quality I had to abide to, which only proved detrimental to me learning to write, because at my stage of development, I need to put in the numbers before worrying about quality.
This is also why I haven't put in any effort in having nice thumbnails and images for my posts, because only the writing matters to me. I like the fact that this blog isn't read by anyone and has no comments on it 3, because it allows me to focus entirely on the important thing: writing out my thoughts, learning to organize and shape them, and give it some style if I can.
Visibility can be useful for some people, because having people engage with their output makes them feel like it's more worthwhile in a sense, but I am not primarily interested in being understood, I mainly want to understand society and myself so that I can live more consciously. Perhaps having enough of an audience would allow me down the line to not have to work at a dayjob, but that would have to be later down the road, when I am satisfied with my progress as a writer and as a person. 4 Only a scammer thinks about scaling revenue before having something worthwhile to give to people.
What are some of the main topics of this blog so far? My tagging system is, like most of them really, 5 not great, so I can't just point to it, but overall, the main topics I go back to, again and again, are:
All of these topics, and more that I haven't caught from my memory and cursory glance at my own titles, are downstream of Darren Allen's writing, most specifically his philosophy of everything called Self and Unself. I will have to write a piece dedicated to the man, because there's so much to say about his writing, but based on the fact that the majority of my pieces have some type of reference to him, or sometimes an explicit link to his writing, it's fair to say that my own writing is largely indebted to him, and the clarity that he brings through his fundamental dichotomy between the self and the conscious I, but I'm leaving the details of that for another piece.
Fundamentally my writing is about facing the end of our times, and the end of the self that we call 'death', in a conscious manner. Being loving in a loveless world. Being free in tyrannical times. Being honest in an age of pretense. Easier said than done of course, as Christ, and many other conscious people, have realized from their own life and their own death.
The coming decades of societal decline will not accommodate conscious people, all the contrary, they might very well be the first people to be targeted, exiled, and perhaps killed. But sooner or later, every man must choose between two ways of living life: doing what is easy now, or doing what is easy to live with.
Being a coward is easy in the short-term, but it certainly doesn't make it easy for you to respect yourself. Being truthful and honoring life on the other hand is very, very difficult in our times, but it leads to a peace and depth of life that nothing else can. It's also not something that you can dip your toes in.
If you are conscious in any shape or form of the alienation of our times, and the deep predicament that our society is in, then you cannot pretend that those things are not happening, and you also cannot pretend that you aren't feeling the deep suffering of humanity at large.
I do not believe that ignorance is bliss, this fantasy comes from people who misunderstand the nature of consciousness, thinking that it comes from intense self-reflection and engagement in thoughts, and is maintained by miserable people who have no access to the simple joy of life that comes from being conscious. No, ignorance is not bliss, though it can certainly be comfortable in the short term, in the same way that crawling back to digital wombs is comfortable for modern people.
Excessive comfort stifles passion and sensitivity, and whether we like it or not, much of our comfort and safety will be taken away from us in the coming decades. The system that provides all of those things will simply not be able to withstand the series of internal and external shocks that are currently happening, and which will only get worse over time.
So we better get used to pain, uncertainty, loss, and even the looming presence of death, because all of those will come knocking at our door. Not that those things are, by themselves, good, but because good is what a conscious person who doesn't resist Reality experiences. If we resist all of the pain that will come from societal collapse, then we will also be numb to the surprising beauty all around us, and the astounding mystery of plain existence that baffles the mind. If you want to remain miserable, keep pushing against what is.
1 Obsidian is the program I use for my note-taking system. Zettelkasten is the framework for how to write notes, and why and how to connect them with one another so as to have a knowledge system.
2 Think of how office work is one perpetual 9-5 grind, rather than being punctuated by the rhythm of the seasons, or something similar to it. To the extent that there are quarters, or real projects with a clear beginning and ending, it's not like you are rewarded with some type of break after they've ended, instead you immediately go to another project.
3 Not that I could have comments on even if I wanted to, because this website is a very basic html-based website where I manually push html files onto a private server. (I don't manually write the files in html though, I write them in markdown and use a script to convert them to html, because I find the html syntax to be incredibly obnoxious)
4 Though I doubt that many people would be interested in my writing, because my subject matter tends to be anti-modernity and anti-mass 'culture'.
5 Seriously, has any tagging system ever reached a satisfying point where the number of tags feels appropriate, and where each one contains all of the entries relevant to it? Seems like most of them become infested with way too many tags, which haven't been combined or discarded enough, making the whole thing quite useless in practice.
Go back to the list of blog posts
Update Writing Death Collapse Mentalclosure Audience Selfunself
2026-08-03