Betts! How is the Sabbatical?

The answer is generally – great! I'm feeling more myself and really glad I've done this. But really?

I am reading. Just reading. At first I was writing too, but now – just reading and occasionally scratching out notes on my legal pad. Why the legal pad? Because my squirrel attuned brain cannot read more than 2 paragraphs (generously) without stopping to make some connection. So now I have a notepad where I can jot things down like "puritanism of work -> Man as inherently evil - self reflection - Andreeson - Developmental psych -> missing piece for people? Groos, Brouck"

It doesn't look like much, but in my head? I could talk for hours on that tiny list alone.

But it's a fight! Everyday is the push pull of "I'm still sitting on the couch, inhaling books like a starved child!" With that is the hidden 'should' of things like "I should be organizing my pantry. I should be cleaning out my closet. I should be sewing. I should be cooking. I should be prepping the garden." But I turned on an internal alert for the word 'should'. It's not banned, it just has a little alarm attached to it. It's a signal now to ask "why?" Why 'should' I be doing any of those things. Who says? What will those things do for me?

Obviously they are all good and helpful things. An organized, clean space with fresh-baked goods on the table is objectively a Very Nice Thing. But why do "I" have to do it? What value does it have over reading? Because for me, reading is something I've been starved of. I've read books I felt I needed to read for work. I've read some fiction as a means of escape. But this is different. I start having an idea. I pause and think "is this valid? Has anyone else gone down this path?" And then I turn to AI and ask. A recent voice note looked like this:  

I was thinking about the shift our society is undergoing. Vice signaling. Top-down authoritarianism. The prosperity gospel as ideological cover for robber barons. We think we're a free society, but there are taboo subjects — like what the power dynamic in the workplace really is, or that we don't live under capitalism anymore. We live under some weird financier-run wealth extraction system. And the newer generations — truly Gen Z is running with it — transparency as a higher value. I also think it's interesting that autism diagnosis rates are going up, and I wonder how much the autistic rejection of hierarchy is causing tension. There's the group asking for transparency, naming the problems, doing the hard work of saying yeah, America has been racist, it's been terrible to be a woman or BIPOC under this system. And then the old guard, who are comfortable under the system of opacity and authoritarianism, and when you challenge that worldview, the cognitive dissonance is painful and they fight back. So we have this group effectively defending the billionaires against the people who actually want to improve conditions. Is there language for this?

Claude understands where I'm going with this because I've used it for exactly this kind of thing dozens of times: here's an idea I'm pondering — where can I go to refine my thinking, and what work has already been done here?

The response named five or six distinct literatures I was unknowingly synthesizing: Laloux's org design work on hierarchy as existential identity; Devon Price on how autistic social epistemology functions as structural critique by accident; Bowler on prosperity gospel, Hofstadter on Social Darwinism, Sandel on meritocracy as moral laundering; Varoufakis on technofeudalism; Haidt and Jost's system justification theory on why people defend systems that harm them; Thomas Frank and Arlie Hochschild on the emotional logic of working-class conservative capture.

And then: "The synthesis you're reaching for — where neurodivergence, transparency culture, hierarchy rejection, and ideological capture of the working class all live in the same frame — I don't think that book has been written yet."

Which is great, because now I have a reading list. But more than that, I'm not getting "truth" from an AI — I'm getting a fast map of what work is already being done, where the holes are, and what might be missing. It's always fun to find out you've wandered somewhere original.

What I am choosing to believe this week is that this is valuable for me in some way. It's tiring, but in a different way than I've been tired recently. It's not performative. I write about maybe 0.003% of what is actually going on in my head – in part because it's just too much to write and I am moving too fast right now to make it legible for others. But it's also because I don't want to perform. I barely want to make food other people eat, even if it's something I want. This reading, skipping, jaunting through history, science, and philosophy is FUN. It's entirely for me. There is no right or wrong to it, and I think it's fine to keep doing it for awhile. I took a break to let my mind and body loose to find out what actually brings me joy. Who am I to crush joy the moment I find it?