📚Salon: Reading for Pleasure and Going Beyond Words: Events, Practices

"In the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch."

Feb 14, 2024

Hello friends,

It’s Sunday night and I’m at home, feeling a bit under the weather. It’s Super Bowl night, which I know mostly because it’s quiet on Twitter and all the memes are about Taylor Swift. I ponder how far my path has been diverging from mainstream life. I’ve long ago covered my TV with a white sheet and I’m spending the evening reading Alan Watts and trying one more time to finish a piece for the Substack. It’s not coming together.

Life has been intense and strange lately. In some ways I feel incredibly stuck, wrestling with the way forward. I have a pile of drafts that my mind refuses to work on. It’s like it’s telling me that, yes, there’s an important kernel here, but it’s not ready yet. Revisit this when you find the missing piece. It’s a strange kind of writer’s block.

My inner life on the other hand has been unfolding rapidly and in volatile ways. There’s been an exhaustive unraveling that has wrecked my sleep. Things spilled out of the intestines of my history that, after some rest, I will have to process through creative work. In other words, the ladder of my life is in desperate need of realignment.

Portrait de Dante Alighieri (Florence)... — Dante Alighieri by Attilio Roncaldier

Reading for Pleasure

I find comfort in reading, an increasingly rare experience.

For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation … Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. — professor Adam Kotsko

I get it. Our dopamine systems are fried. Video and social media have won. Everyone has ADD... But what a loss.

But as I was writing this post, it dawned on me that I have the rare freedom to read mostly for pleasure. I follow my curiosity, at my own pace. Lately, it’s been Dante’s Divine Comedy which I consume in small increments of a couple of cantos a day. That’s a joy that social media, addictive as it is, can’t compete with. The allure of a great book is overpowering when your mind wants to read.

What social media is destroying is our capacity to read when and what we should. This is why focus is a superpower and why I can’t imagine going back to a job and being told what to pay attention to. I’d rather adopt a cat and retreat to the mountains with my instruments and books.

Books are really the only thing I spend on without second thought. When I fall down a new rabbit hole, it looks like I’m overspending. I get so excited that I buy stacks of them, following the references made by my new favorite authors. It all looks inefficient and indulgent.

Inefficient because my process is a surrender to open exploration. Some books remain forever unread. Others I abandon after a few chapters. I simply trust that the right connections will appear, and that long-dead authors emerge and guide me. This requires a certain risk budget for attention. It’s indulgent because it would be cheaper to do this slowly at the library. There would be less friction if I read on the computer or Kindle, one book at a time. However, in the beginning, I have no clue which books will turn out to be the important ones. I don’t know which page will reveal the key to unlock the door to an entire universe.

When I find that kind of book, I have to be able to work with it. I need to parse it, highlight it, and let it work on me. Great books have ideas seeping out of them like thick honey. They transform you, page by page. They give you the eerie feeling that they were written for you, that they’ve been waiting patiently on some dusty shelf to become your teachers. They let you tap into an eternal conversation, you feel a subtle flow come alive and carry you.

To write that kind of book is a writer’s Ozymandias. It’s a chance to pick up the tapestry of human culture, woven by each successive generation, feel it strain against the sands of time, and add a piece of yourself to it. It’s your chance to return to stardust and add one note to our collective song. What else could you ask for?

Thank you for reading,

Frederik

My ‘reading corner’ (half of my living room, really).

Beyond Words: Practices and Events

In The Paradox of Happiness, I mused about the ‘shame of abundance’ — the notion that we must suffer quietly through the epidemics of our immensely rich society for any complaints could make us look like ungrateful luddites or communists. However, our saturated, distracted, and divided society struggles with quite a lot, including a lack of meaning, loneliness, the dating quagmire, and rampant addiction (not to mention the ‘real’ crises like climate, AI, cold wars, hot wars, and the war for your attention). Despite its physical comforts, the present has become profoundly discomforting and disorienting.

This leads to an obvious question: ‘now what’? What is there to be done beyond diagnosis, beyond more content? That’s a question I want to explore further this year.

The complement to content is action. Beyond the word is taking action through specific practices. Beyond the abstract world of the word lies the concrete impact of spaces that facilitate shared experience, exploration, and connection.

The first time this idea stuck with me was when I heard John Vervaeke talk about having an ‘ecology of practices’ — a collection of routines and exercises that help cultivate wisdom, connection, and meaning. For Vervaeke it has been Vipassana meditation, metta, and Tai Chi. To become an ecology, the practices need to “guard you against self-deceptive bullshit,” they need to complement each other and lead you to balance and wholeness

Vervaeke also mused that these practices are key to answering the meaning crisis, in particular if the practices and experiences are shared.

The solution to the meaning crisis and nihilism is not to brow people with argument or legislation. It’s to enable them to fall in love with the depths of reality within and without and between.

That’s why I am starting this new format in this ‘journal’ section. I will share reflections on my journey and keep you up to date on events and practices that I find helpful. I would also like to make it an open ‘space’ for you to share whatever is on your mind — questions, comments, anything you’ve been reading or pondering recently, anything that helped you escape the midwit trap and is worth sharing with other readers. Put it in the comments!

Practices

Don’t tell me what you believe, tell me what you practice. — John Vervaeke

This section was inspired by the Huberman Protocols account which extracts ideas and methods from the well-known podcast. I want to start collecting bits and pieces of practices that can be the bridge between content and action, between understanding and changing lives.

Tom Morgan just touched on this in his latest must-read piece on cultivating wisdom, finding flow, and balancing the brain hemispheres.

Wisdom may be the most important thing, and metis may be the essential quality that can cultivate it. The last people to understand this will be the first ones left behind over the next few years.

That cultivation requires an ecology of practices.

River Kenna framed these practices as an answer to issues arising from an imbalanced life, such as:

emotional detachment.
relational detachment.
loss of a sense of meaning.
a feeling that you're watching your life in the 3rd person, rather than living it in the 1st person.
… loss of spontaneity, aliveness, awe, wonder.

These are exactly the kinds of things I’ve been wrestling with over the past few years.

Long before I found my practices, I spent an entire year with one of my therapists repeatedly answering the question “how do you feel about that?” with “what are you talking about, I’m not feeling anything, let me tell you what I think.” That year was important because it showed me that I did, indeed, feel things. But it also led me to the limits of talk therapy. To re-connect you have to get out of the head.

I believe there are a lot more relevant practices (including acts of service/charity/teaching, time in nature, worship/prayer, and other embodied flow states such as dance, martial arts, singing/chanting). I suspect they’re key to answering the paradox of happiness, marshmallow mind, tapping into the creative unconscious, cultivating resilience and longevity, and even to the larger social crises ailing our secular and atomized world. I’ll share more in a dedicated post.

Breathing practices are one part of my ecology. The umbrella term is breathwork which I’m not fond of — who wants to do more work? It’s a deep and ancient rabbit hole with a variety of lineages and approaches and many wonderful teachers. I’ll be sharing a post covering one of my experiences soon. Until then, I recommend this short clip of Rick Rubin and Huberman practicing ‘coherence breathing’ (based on this guided video), the ‘ideal’ breathing pace of 5.5 second inhales followed by 5.5 second exhales using the nose. It’s an excellent way to calm yourself down, find stillness, or start a conversation by synchronizing breathing.

Events

As a reminder, I’ve offered premium subscribers a chance to grab a coffee here in NYC. So far, I’ve met with a few and we talked about life, writing, meditation, money, mentors, heartbreak, career changes, substack, and everything in between. If you’re interested, fill out the questionnaire. Please be patient — I had like a two-week personal crisis and illness and had to reschedule with a few people already.

I am also working on hosting a new series of in-person events. Some will consist of practices that have been instrumental in my journey, including sound, breath, meditation, journaling (ways to ‘go deep’ and connect with your body and unconscious source of intuition and creativity). Other events may be more focused on conversation/sharing or include guest teachers. I’m also interested in everything to do with the voice (talk about a powerful way to connect with yourself and develop presence).

I will mention upcoming events here on the substack but since they’re local I won’t be sending out extra reminders to the entire list.

If you live in New York and are interested specifically in attending local events, you can add your contact details to this separate list to get notified.

Reading

River Kenna on metis, The One Essential Quality, a “particular quality of intense alertness that can be effortlessly aware of everything at once” (Peter Kingsley).

The few places where some kind of metis is still encouraged, or at least where its development isn’t suspect, are in domains like the arts, sports, and spirituality. … For so many people, these are the only places in their lives where they can find that core human birthright: flow, metis, intuitive competence that shades into effortless mastery; like how a bird, in its moments of truest flight, must lose the feeling that it is riding the wind, and melt into the sense that he has joined the wind.

The “pursuit of metis,” he writes, “has to court risk.”

If you don’t have the ocean waiting to crush you, or a puma stalking you through the forest, you have to manufacture your own sense of stakes, of generative urgency. It’s a functional ingredient in the dynamic.

Sounds a lot like investing and entrepreneurship, doesn’t it?

Jared Dillian published a new book, No Worries, a fresh and entertaining take on personal finance. Jared pushes back against the ‘personal finance orthodoxy’ and its emphasis on extreme thrift. Instead, he focuses on life’s big financial decisions, including marriage, college, home buying, and career. He advocates for a middle way of financial responsibility and a healthy relationship with money. Recommended for anyone who needs to get their financial house in order, advising people on personal finance, or who raises/educates young adults who face major financial decisions.

Finally, for the passionate note-takers among you, check out Jillian Hess’s wonderful substack Noted. I loved this post about Eminem and his relationship to words, rhyme, meaning, and writing.

Eminem claims he has a “rhyming disease.” He explains, “In my head everything rhymes.” But he won’t remember his rhymes if he doesn’t write them down. And he’ll use any available surface to record them.
Eminem thinks of rap as a puzzle; all the rhymes he’s amassed in his notes are the pieces. He just has to fit them together.

What stuck out to you in the past few weeks? Share it in the comments!