Everyone's Wide Awake But Looks Incredibly Tired

Lots of reading recommendations about common suffering. Plus, quotes from Montaigne about death, a James Tate heartbreaker, brain stuff.

I spent an unsalvageable amount of time this week watching two Substack writers shit-fight on the Notes portion of this platform, which was a tidy metaphor for how my mental health was this week: distracted, regressive, and messy.

I didn’t bother to find what the two writers were agitated with each other about, but I did recognize the desperation pulsating through their dashed-off retorts. Both of them genuinely believed they were owed a retraction-filled public apology because they were both writers whose livelihoods were built upon this writing, and a scandal attached to their names—even a real ding-dong one–could potentially cost them subscribers, so they said. Orange checkmarks and integrity were on the line here, so tensions were sky-high. There were wild hypothetical bouts of paranoia. There were lots of exclamation marks!!! And CAPS.

Sigh. I felt nauseated by the pitiful display–I knew both of these writers would immediately regret their tantrums and then spend the next hours or weeks or forever wondering if the new subscriber to their newsletter was a genuine fan or a hate-reader waiting for the next bout of foolishness. It’s a total crazy-making place to be and sometimes takes years to overcome. I know these feelings intimately—sometimes I hate-read myself.

But this bit of wisdom was passed along to me by a recovering drunk person: the best way to escape is to accept that there is no escape. That’s what has helped me work through some moderate despair this week. So I will stay in the fight and you should, too.

Despite all the unsettling, annoying things that took place on Substack, I’ve decided to share three Substack essays that I thought were fantastic, none of which were written by robots or white supremacists.