On Limited Time and Things to Do, Undo, and Re-Do

[No subtitle has been found for this essay]

Photo by Djim Loic on Unsplash, rendered black & white by me

I’ve got some planning to do. I’ve decided to “upgrade to paid” a bunch of substacks but I don’t know which ones yet. Ten to fifteen would be a good starting number. My aim at this point is two-pronged: 1) I want to read more of their content, and 2) I want to support the writers. And number two is often more important than number one. So I’ve got some thinking to do. My criteria are simple: I want to pick substacks that I’ve consistently liked, that make me think, and that are written by non-celebrities (Patti Smith is my sole exception). And I want to be a paid subscriber for a year. For each one, at the end of the year I’ll decide whether to continue or switch back to unpaid (and give the paid spot to a new one).

And I also have to get organized a little if my aim is to survive this flood of awesome stuff that Substack sends to my inbox every day. True, I’m subscribed to (too) many substacks. But they’re all so good. Some of them are awesome, most of them are great, some of them are (just) good. A perfect bell curve drawn on the positive side of the writing x axis. And I feel like I need them all. What if one day I need/want to read about talismans or black holes or tarots or silicon carbide chips or cooking in Abruzzo, or simply about some beautiful, intimate, personal stories? Everything is so damn interesting and moving and thought-provoking, and it’s comfortable to know it’s there, even though I can’t possibly read it all. 

Much like Taleb’s idea of the antilibrary, which refers to the collection of books that a person owns but has not yet read, I ended up with an antisubstack: by surrounding myself with unread pieces of writing, I’m constantly reminded that knowledge is vast and the universe of ideas ever-expanding and personal storytelling infinite, that true wisdom lies not in the accumulation of information but in the acknowledgment of what we do not yet know.

Now, I do regularly read many substacks, but the rest of them are necessarily left unopened to maintain a certain degree of mental sanity (it’s like having one thousand cable tv channels and wanting to watch them all), with the idea of returning to them later. And later sadly means never, unless I find a way to save the most interesting ones somewhere for future retrieval and exploration, when I can give the time and attention they deserve. But to ascertain interestingness I’d have to at least skim through them, getting into an unhealthy, dangerous, tragic loop. 

Then there’s the commenting I want to do below the pieces I like. And that takes time too. Cause I’m a slow reader, intentionally so. And a slow thinker. Also, intentionally. I always learn a lot from great writers: their way of structuring the flow and laying out ideas and their choice of words. And I have to go slow if I really want to capture it all. Plus, there’s the thinking that all that generates, and sometimes I want to transfer that thinking in a comment cause hey, that’s what reading is all about, right? Imagining and feeling and thinking. And connecting dots and creating universes. And letting the writer know that they had an impact, and sharing the experience with others. 

On top of all that, I’ve been neglecting books. And that’s bad. Prior to Substack, I used to be an avid book reader. I could simultaneously read five to seven books without losing momentum on any of them. I don’t know how I’d do that, but it came pretty natural. Now books lost their priority on my time in favor of substacks. And I have to do something about that. I need both. I need balance. I need more time.    

But unless someone finds a way to slow down Earth’s rotation and create more hours in a day, I’ll continue to have only twenty-four of them. Some know how to take advantage of every single minute, how to not waste time and be super-productive. I’m not like that. According to broad human standards and ways of looking at life, I waste a lot of time. The thing is, though, that to me that’s not wasting time. I just happen to employ my time differently. To me, idleness is necessary and staring into the void refreshing and energizing. Plus, overthinking is not a disease. 

As I’m writing these words, Seth Godin’s daily blog post hits my inbox. It’s titled “The seduction of compliance”. I love Seth’s immediately evident ideas. They make you go “Exactly!” as if you’ve been thinking about the same thing for ages and finally find someone who can put it into words precisely like you’d always wanted to (but you never knew how to). Also, his ability to be concise and effective and powerful is superlative. He writes “Compliance is seductive because it comes with short-term prizes. If you fit in all the way, it might feel a bit less frightening. The center of the herd may in fact be safer, but the view is terrible”. And it feels like he was listening to my thoughts and sent this to help me write what I have in mind. I don’t want to comply with any behavioral model, no matter how many books have been written on it, no matter how seductive and comfortable. I waste spend a lot of time doing things that make sense to me and don’t to many others. And that’s ok.   

The time has come, though, to try and give a little structure to my reading habits. And after thinking about complicated systems for assigning different degrees of priority to each piece of writing based on the level of procrastination I can allow myself to fall into, and designing an algorithm that could help me sift through and sort the substacks I’m subscribed to by automatically rating their goodness or interestingness, and spending a huge amount of time staring at a white wall, I’ve decided that I won’t do anything. Nothing particularly esoteric, that is. I guess all I need at this point is to stop reading substacks as soon as they hit my inbox (as much as I’d love to, especially for a bunch of them, or maybe more than a bunch), and set a fixed time in the day for that. I know, that's easy: you just untoggle the option to receive emails and do all the reading and other stuff in the app. 

But this won’t solve the problem of abundance: how to decide what to read, when that fixed time of the day comes? It can’t be a first come first serve kind of thing. One way to go around this would be to focus on that “more than a bunch” that I’d love to read right away. But then I’d never have the time to read the other stuff, and I might as well unsubscribe. And the whole idea of the antisubstack inevitably fades into non-existence. No, I don’t want that. Another way to solve this abundance thing would be to just spend that fixed time of the day reading substacks randomly, with no particular criterion. But then I’d probably never get to some of the ones that I like better, or maybe I’d get to them by chance. Who knows. 

Maybe the abundance issue cannot be solved without decreasing the number of subscriptions. Maybe the idea of having an antisubstack is just utopian. Neat, but utopian. Or maybe I just have to set a timeframe to read and let everything else as is. A limit on substack reading would give me the time to read books, for example. So, at least one thing I’d gain back.   

All this writing to get to the conclusion that the only actionable thing to do without seriously impairing my substack reading experience would be to set a timeframe to focus on it. Which is kind of obvious. As for the rest, back to square one.

I read somewhere, a while ago, that sometimes you have to travel the world, climb mountains, cross oceans, walk through deserts, only to find out that what you were looking for has always been in your backyard. This whole rant about being overwhelmed by so many awesome substacks to read resembles that idea: lots of hard thinking only to get back to square one and decide that the most natural thing to do is leave everything as is.

It reminds me of a little funny story. A young fellow is lying on a beach when an old man, all dressed up in a suit and tie, walks by. The old man stops and says to him “Shouldn’t you be at school at this time of day? What are you doing here?”. And the young fellow goes “Why should I go to school?”. “Well, because by going to school you get an education”. “And why should I get an education?”. “Because an education will eventually give you a good job”. “And why would I want to have a good job?”. “Because, if you work hard, with a good job you will make lots of money”. “And why would I want to make lots of money?”. “Because one day, when you have enough money, you can stop working, retire, and relax”. “Well, that’s what I’m doing right now”.

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