Reflections on 2023
Dream Season
It is dream season at Toby's Door—December—my favorite. In the cold and the still, everything becomes clearer and more perceptible. The blue hiss of methane gas heating up a pot of water. The muted roll of traffic over wet street. The impact of a printed word on my eye. The arrangement of scattered things: a jar of dried mushrooms, books left open on surfaces, a hanging or crumpled cloth. December is when the dreams of waking man are born. The better part of the cold months are spent with the "slumbering and liquid trees"—in the depths where the memories of our race dig and crawl, their unsightly hive the ancestor of our living architectures. All beasts sleep in the winter. Grown tired from a year's experiences, they dream themselves to become themselves, coiled tightly in their integument. I have dreamed every day of December. Winter is no barren season; dreams are its fruit.
To begin to dream, consider your dreams always. Before you begin to think your day—"in that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake, coming back to this life from the other more secret, moveable, and frighteningly honest world"—do not move—rest, and remember. Allow your mind to wander in its natural way. Let it find the path you were walking. And once you set foot in it, take care to notice your surroundings. Then write it down as best you can. Recall the main images which stood out in significance to you. The feelings. The littlest details of your concern. Write it down never changing your notebook or the note in your phone. Do nothing else; do not move from your bedrest until you have gotten it down. Later, if you can, recall it to a friend. In the act of retelling you will recall the details: tell it as a story with all the texture. In this way you will come to know your dreams, your dreaming mind, the immensity and vitality of that other world.
If you do not dream you must start by dreaming in life. The waking world is, no less than the resting one, full of absurdities, mysteries, frightening comedies and obscene send-ups. A woman seemed to catch my eye, smiling, on the subway. I smiled back instinctively and hers grew. We each looked away. Her hair was brown, thickly curled. I looked again and saw this woman could not be more than twenty. But in her face I had seen the smile of a friend, whose clear eyes and smile lines betray wisdom earned with years. The girl did not look back. Yet I am not so sure that she was not my friend. In two stops she left the subway without a second glance. What did she see when she looked at me? These thoughts passed idly through my head on the rest of the ride home. A dream in waking life.
What you notice, what surprises you, what bewilders you is a dream. It is the property of the kingdoms of inspiration, dreams and poetry. Pick up these minutes and turn them around like large jewels, letting the facets dazzle your eyes. This precious stone has depths you can only see so far into. Notice its weight, and wear it accordingly. Let the astonishments of waking life confuse you, tell them to friends as if recalling your sleepthoughts, return to these moments often and recall them throughout the day. If they came to you in sleep do the same. Do not ignore the reminiscences that seem to mutter in you in response. Do not ignore your own beauty or cowardice, your fear or shame, any touching qualities you see among the confusion. These are the source of a new and noble power. The dream gem belong in a crown that adorns you. You are of that world as you are of this one. Allow nobody to deny you your authority, allow no documents to annul your right to roam this dominion. Practice seeing dreams with your waking eye, and in sleep principalities will unfold themselves to you.
Reflections on 2023
Last year I began naming my seasons. The practice began when I declared it to be "Wife Guy Summer," a joking but real intention to manifest my life partner. It was a great comedy bit for the summer, but when I started dating someone seriously in September I thought that maybe I should name all my seasons. So I started Fundraising Fall and embarked on a several-month fundraising tour for Other Internet—a season quickly followed by Wake The Fuck Up Winter. We couldn't raise as much as we needed to continue running the organization with a full-time staff, so we slowly finished up our projects and have gone back to the "squad" model of organization of friends having fun online (now with a shiny new nonprofit entity). Sam and Laura and I continued work on our next essay, which is finally close to completion. I began a season-long spring cleaning, rearranged my apartment and redid my grout. Between regular qi gong practice and hours spent brushing dirt out of my kitchen floor, I started to recover my energy and got time to think slowly for the first time in a couple years. That was Home Improvement Spring. They don't all have to alliterate.
Season-naming-as-manifesting is one way of doing it, but naming-the-season-when-you-find-out-what-it's-about is another. Kara and I suddenly found ourselves jumping into the Ethereum Foundation's Summer of Protocols fellowship program. We spent the whole summer in company of friends and colleagues, some old some new, theorizing protocols and trying to figure out what they're about. In a plot twist, we ended up pivoting from protocols of authorship to a theme that was totally new territory to us: metascience and the protocols of scientific knowledge. Now that the Protocol Kit is finally getting released, we'll be allowed to share our work on that soon. Other Internet crew has been discussing protocols for years in the crypto context, but it was refreshing to find new angles on the topic. If you haven't checked it out yet, I recommend Venkat's latest essay in which he reviews his experience of the summer and the notion of protocol hardness.
Since the end of the summer I've mostly been taking time off. I spent the last 5 years building Other Internet toward the vision of a full-time research organization. After 18 months of full time operations, we had hit the limits and constraints of working that way. Our most influential work had been done outside the confines of the standard corporate structure. With the knowledge that full-time OI work was no longer in front of me, I've had to think for the first time about what my next career steps might be. Accordingly, I at first dubbed this autumn Figuring Things Out Fall. But as I slowly had to let the urges to spin up new client work come and go, I realized that Figuring Things Out was going to take longer and require more inaction than action. So halfway through the season I changed my mind and decided that this would be the Fall of Faith instead.
This theme helped make autumn a generative time. I had some of the most rewarding philosophical discussions in years, took an impromptu trip to Toronto, read a bunch of books and built a library page to digitally shelve them, reckoned with my relationship to Buddhist meditation and Christian ethics, met new people for coffee, began a longform email correspondence with a promising young writer, took lots of notes, decided to follow my partner to California—more on that in later updates—and tried to settle into a sense of seniority as I reflected on the Other Internet era. In general, I succeeded in not filling this space with client work and gave myself time that I haven't had in years to follow my hunches and curiosities. I was actually shocked how quickly my thoughts could develop given enough space. With the right mix of inputs, it can be very efficient to do nothing. Now that I've had a taste of this, I really want more of it. It's clearer than ever to me that I need to be doing the work of research and writing, not running an organization.
The hunches and curiosities I've been faithfully following have also helped me recognize the topic I want to focus on in the next part of my career: mental health, psychology, and wellness subcultures. In October I wrote a brief appetizer of a blog post called "Connecting the Dots on American Psychology." It speaks to some of my early ideas, but I have a lot more to share. I've spent nearly every day exploring this topic in some way, and I want to spend the next few years on these themes. In 2024, I'm launching a membership-supported newsletter project covering everything in mental health: essays and field reports on wellness communities and subcultural health trends, history of psychology, contemporary mental health policy, emerging neuroscience, and more. I'll send another newsletter in the first few weeks of January, explaining how this topic came to be important to me, formally announcing the project, and inviting you to join as a member.
Winter is upon us now, and I don't have a name for this season yet. But December and winter for me is always dream season, so perhaps I will call it that. Winter is for reflecting and clarifying, and dreams are for knowing and for inventing—for we know in part, and we prophesy in part. I have recommended to you the benefits of dreaming, and of naming your seasons. I hope that you join me in the great experiment.
Other
As promised, we've leapt from Tinyletter. Many of you encouraged me to check out Buttondown; I did and have been amazed by the quality of customer support by proprietor Mr. Justin Duke. If you want to sign up for it use my referral code.
Book Reviews, 2023 Edition
As is my tradition, I have written a miniature review of each book I finished this year. You can view that on my new Library page on my site, or on my Are.na channel that serves as its backend. Also, if you want to fork my library page, here's my code on GitHub.
This was a great year of reading, but my top 3 books were easily:
Reality Hunger by David Shields
The Sociology of Philosophies by Randall Collins
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Read my mini reviews of each at the links above.
Music
Tiger Dingsun has put together a wonderful project of all of his friends' 2023 playlists. I contributed mine; you can find mine there, at the low "F" key.