Changes Ahead on The Living Philosophy

2024 has been rough

Hello there,

As many of you will be aware I have put a couple of videos up on YouTube the past couple of weeks about the challenges I've been experiencing this year and some changes that I've decided to make (including taking down my biggest video from there — more on that later). Those videos were done in a more off-the-cuff format than usual (an attempt to breakthrough to something new) so I'm sitting down now to put all this in a cleaner written form.

I guess the main thing to share is that it has been a challenging start to the year. Not necessarily bad challenging (he says having emerged from the hole he was in) but definitely challenging.

Out of this challenging moment have come some major decisions — changes in how I approach the work and greater clarity on The Living Philosophy is all about.

It took me a lot of time to muddle through the crisis and even more time to articulate what exactly it was (is?). I think the complete break from work over Christmas got things started but the real sucker punch was when I started working on a course for running in-person in Ireland but which I have since decided to run online (more on this in future instalments).

As part of this I re-read Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks and listened back through some of Brene Brown's work and they left me a bit dazed and confused. And then I made the mistake of watching through Contrapoints's videos from the start and that was the knockout punch. I was out for the count for January and February and only in March have I been putting the pieces back together (in a new and exciting way I might add).

The upshot is that I ended up questioning (just about) everything that I've been doing. I used to have these sorts of dips regularly back in the early days of the YouTube channel. These dips were great (when seen through the rear-view mirror); I'd question everything and out of that changes would be made; an evolution would occur. It's been a while since the last one (April 2022 I think) but without a doubt this has been the biggest one yet. With a little more distance I can finally say with certainty that a major evolution is underway. In the weeks since the start of March my long (long) struggles with the creative process finally seem to have resolved and I am writing more than I have ever written and I can't tell you how much of a joy (and relief) that is.

The Changes Part 1: Content

The first major change then is in content. One of the reflections I've been having a lot in this dip is that the content I've been making over the past year has felt a bit...sterile. A major realisation around this (thanks Contrapoints) is that I've been plagued by an academic impostor syndrome. I think this made the articles and videos a bit drier than I'd like them to be. As someone who is always laughing in my day-to-day life the content was always so serious (or at least that's my perception right now though there could be a recency and saliency bias warping this).

I've begun to feel like there's not enough of me in the content. Not that I want to start vlogging every time I make a cup of tea (there’s not enough airtime in the world). But this comes back to the dry/sterile point. I realise now that I've been feeling rushed — constantly focused on the next bit of content — and this has led to a particular type of content. I would study a topic, take my notes and try to present it in the most interesting and accurate way possible. For some reason (I think it has to do with personality typological structure but that's a whole black hole of its own) this led to content that hasn't had quite as much soul in it. Those who have read Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks or more recently Cal Newport's Slow Productivity will recognise the imprint of this movement in this mix.

Of course I should hasten to add that I love a bit of study and scholarly work and that's not going anywhere but what I've been missing is the heart in it. Back in 2022 I used to make these extra episodes on YouTube with the title: "Why it Matters" (only one of which made it to Substack due to the meandering extemporaneous nature of them). So for every video at that time: Foucault on Power, the Four Quadrants, Jordan Peterson's Shadow there'd be a "Why it Matters" video to go with it.

In those videos, I would play. I'd have my research done in the first video and in these Why it Matters ones I'd get to take the concept and say what I loved about it — why I was so drawn to that topic and what it connected to for me. It was like the original video was the piece of content and then this "Why it Matters" was me sharing it with a friend and telling them what I thought about it. They were more personal and passionate. (A friend of mine did actually say to me at the time that he wished the Why it Matters would come first because they inspired him to watch videos on a topic he would otherwise have skipped past; needless to say at the time I didn't think too deeply about this comment).

And there's something in that: a distinction between the content and the heart — the why behind it. I want to have more of that why in the content going forward.

Camino Camino

This train of thought took me back to last summer and hiking the length of the Camino Francés across the north of Spain. Between the French mountains and the Atlantic Ocean there was a week of hiking that was pure inspiration.

Reflecting on this time I've made a distinction between research-writing and Muse-writing. Most of the writing on The Living Philosophy is born from a piece of research that I'm doing right now. It's the presentation of those researches in the most concise way possible. But when walking the Camino there was a whole other type of writing that was emerging and that I call "Muse-writing" (any Germans out there who can come up with a suitable German neologism I'd love to see it in the comments) — it was the dots being connected in my mind — it was the why beneath the what. So while hiking my mind would take everything I'd been reading the past few months and start mulling it around and making connections between different thoughts. There were no new inputs just a slow cooking with the ingredients already in-house.

This is what I want to strive for. I'm not going to stop reading and researching and go hiking all day every day (though it's very tempting). But I want to speak more to the passion and strike more of a balance — to share the insights of some of our greatest thinkers but also to share why I find these insights so relevant and compelling and why you should too.

I'm still trying to figure out what this looks like. Should I cook an episode longer so that this element of inspiration and what I find so compelling emerges? Or do I make separate Muse-writing episodes? Or do I make Muse episodes and make super long deep dives into bigger topics (Marxism and Fascism being two big ones I've been studying this past year)? This latter case is quite appealing since I've been wanting to bite off bigger chunks but the need to produce the next bit of content has kind of put a spanner in the works of that up to now.

Having watched a lot of Contrapoints there's also just a level of quality I want to strive for. Part of this is aesthetical and visual but it's also the sheer depth of her content — the perspective taking and meticulous writing (and of course — the humour). There's just gold in there — I get that painful feeling of possibility that Virginia Woolf talks about when reading Proust:

“My great adventure is really Proust. Well—what remains to be written after that?… How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped—and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp.”

I’ve had this feeling with Nietzsche before — that pain of reading art so good and so close to us that it feels possible and yet so unattainable. Still, something to strive for.

Anyway, it's still not clear where we'll be a year from now but there's a lot of new energy to experiment with the process and to try to make something more living here. For now, my immediate goal is connecting to the Muse a bit more; beyond that we can see about the rest.

The Changes Part 2: The Wall and Video Removal

Another major change I've made in this 2024 dip is removing (what had just become) my biggest video on YouTube in January. This was the one about the petition Sartre, de Beauvoir and many of the Postmodernists signed in the 1970s seeking to abolish the age of consent in France.

It was a controversial topic I wanted to handle in good faith; I was hungry to get into their worldview and understand their perspective. I didn't do a perfect job (though I also must add I didn’t do a bad job). But 1.2 million views later the comments were filled with hate, racism and antisemitism.

With the distance from things that my minor existential crisis brought, I spent a lot of time ruminating over this. There are questions of free speech of course that my time in the Intellectual Dark Web echo chamber had imbued me with. And then of course I could always say that my intention was pure and the content itself was far from hateful. But in the end I realised that it's not always about intention and we have to attend to our impact as well and if we can adjust that impact then we should. This isn't a black and white question and I think there's always judgement involved but with this video the answer became clear and so I decided that it was time to take it down. And with that came a few major lessons about life on the internet.

While I was never tempted to take it, I could see the path to lucre in that video that the likes of Jordan Peterson and Russell Brand seem rather tragically to have been consumed by. It seems that with anger and outrage and controversial topics you can make a good living. But that makes my soul heave and so was never a viable option.

But it has got me thinking about what I'm doing here. I hadn't really thought about it but up to now my business plan was really just about growing a following and making money from ads or people who chose to go above and beyond and support on Patreon and here on Substack.

But after this incident and this year's dip I've decided that the open internet isn't the best way to make one's bread and butter. It's still an important part of the equation but I just don't think it should be one's staple. Hence: changes.

The plan is to create a wall. Outside that wall is the usual open internet content that I share on here and YouTube. Let's be fancy and call that the exoteric side of things (always nice to couch one's work in mystical terminology). But just as there was a difference between Plato's exoteric dialogues written for the public and the esoteric teachings for those in his Academy so I would like to follow Plato's plough a little bit here.

So stay tuned for how this is going to unfold in the coming weeks and months. With the changes to the content the paid subscribers to The Living Philosophy on here and on Patreon are going to be my bread and butter from now on so your support is deeply appreciated.

---

In conclusion: 2024 got off to a rough start and that has led to some pivoting in the Work but this has me excited for the long-term which I hope will be a bit more secure and less controversial and also a bit more playful and passionate.

There's a lot more I could ramble on about waxing poetic about Contrapoints and sharing some thoughts on my philosophy of Free Speech that has developed out of the removal of that pomo video but I'll leave those for future instalments. Thanks for reading and thank you for the support. Those who read and watch the content and comment and support have given this whole thing meaning. I couldn't be living it up in this theme park of learning and thinking if it weren't for you and I couldn't be more grateful for this.