This is the 600th blog post I’ve written for my blog.
I was looking through my blog archive the other day and realized that I was only a couple of posts away from hitting 600. I started my site in 2015 when I started Praxis and over years of chipping away have written a lot of stuff.
My first post was in September of 2015. In the seven years since then I wrote 599 more blog posts:
- 2015: 38
- 2016: 108
- 2017: 62
- 2018: 311
- 2019: 2
- 2020: 3
- 2021: 1
- 2022: 75 (so far)
In October of 2015, I wrote two posts that did well on Medium and have been read by ~50,000 people each. The most popular I’ve written off Medium has a lot less, but still, it is remarkable to look back and see all the posts that have been read over time.
I went back to the start and scrolled through some of the older posts that still get views today. It is an odd experience to read yourself from 7 years ago. It truly does feel like a different person writing those words, but as I read I can tap into what I was like and the life I was living at the time.
It’s funny for me as well to look at 3 years where I barely wrote at all. That is the power of commitment vs. a “do it when I feel like it” attitude.
Here are a few of the older posts that resonated as I re-read them:
It doesn’t always feel like it, but the best part of life is the uncertainty. The moments of great change. The surprises that you didn’t see coming. The victories previously veiled in loss. Success born out of failure. The part of your story when you didn’t know the ending.
This moment, right here, right now.
Where your life could go any direction, where eventual success seems so elusive. This moment is the best moment to be alive.
Instead of just accepting that there would be situations when I was tired or would not be as aware of my ideals as I would like, I was playing a game, where I wanted good Ryan to win, and completely get rid of bad Ryan. But those two things only existed in contrast to each other. Good Ryan couldn’t win, because if good Ryan won there would no longer be a good Ryan, there would just be Ryan.
Henry Reardon is already a man of action. He concerns himself with the actions of others. He doesn’t care if you like him, he cares that you live up to your word and deliver.
Paul Larkin is a man of opinion. He concerns himself with the feelings of others, but more importantly, he believes that he is virtuous because he thinks the correct things.
He believes he is a good person because he feels bad about what happened to Reardon. But, in reality, he did nothing to stop the law (and actually contributed to the law passing.)
Larkin is a child who never learned the lesson from Fences. He is wrapped up worrying about the feelings of others, something he can never truly know, instead of focusing on the concrete reality of their actions.
He is pleading for Reardon to acknowledge his feelings because he wants to believe his feelings make him a good person.
His shaky sense of self-esteem is built on the idea that you can be a good person so long as you believe the “right” things.
We have to start somewhere though, in fast food, working for an artist you admire or doing data entry at a startup. When you are just starting your competitive advantage is a willingness and ability to work for less. That is destroyed by the minimum wage.
The logic behind “every job should pay a living wage” is the logic of a serf, stuck without options, and without hope of working in a way that provides something more than physical sustenance. We can and should expect so much more.
Telling your story doesn’t trap you in a book.
You can be Frodo today and Neo next year. Your story will change. And that’s okay because the fear of being humiliated by changing your story is not in line with reality.
We imagine everyone judging us whenever our ambitions switch but, in reality, spectators aren’t paying that much attention.
As spectators, we easily accept narrative changes. We have no problem watching as the Rock becomes Hollywoods highest paid actor, or as Ronald Regan turned himself into the politician and eventual president.
Just because our language is incomplete does not mean that our reality is subjective.
Because something is hard to describe, does not mean that it does not exist.
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