Two Years of Superb Owl

A thank you

This is the annual meta post, for those of you who are curious about me and the state of the blog.

It’s hard to believe I’ve only been writing on the internet for two years. This blog and its extended universe have become a huge part of my life. I’ve made dozens of new friends, both online and out in the world. My life feels much richer.

This year brought me a fulfilling new job, the death of a close friend, a wonderful relationship, a subsequent breakup (date me!), and some big steps forward in my meditation practice.

I’m in a great place mentally, physically, and spiritually. And this community has a lot to do with that.

Outline

• Writing

• Essays

• Community

• Substack

• Looking Forward

Writing

I wrote far fewer essays this year than in my first year.

In year one, I wrote 40 essays—almost one per week, which was my stated goal.

This year I wrote only 16 essays, slightly better than one per month. I lost a few paid subscribers as a result.

Why the drop? Partly it was a matter of quality over quantity: I stopped doing monthly “links” posts, and I’ve stopped doing low-effort/low-impact posts, like The Psychosocial Beauty of r/AmITheAsshole and Contra Ozy Brennan on Ameliatarianism.

For the higher-effort stuff, each post takes me around 10-15 hours of researching, writing, and editing—sometimes more. This is maybe too much? I don’t know. But I also don’t know how to do it any faster.

Despite the drop in output, writing continues to be one of the healthiest habits in my life. It’s easy to become intoxicated by wild ideas, especially when exploring the fringes of science and spirituality. Having to actually articulate and justify those ideas to a discerning audience keeps me grounded in reality. So thanks for being here!

Essays

My most popular article this year was Phase Blindness. I’m both surprised and delighted—it’s a pretty wild take on a very technical topic. I spent years groping at connections between the Fourier transform and our experience of time before finally finding a way to articulate those ideas (you can see me circling around the same space in last year’s Time is a Wheel, Time is an Arrow). Finally getting that article out was deeply cathartic, and I’m so happy that it resonated.

I also published the most terrifyingly personal essay I’ve ever written: Navigating Manic Psychosis. Admitting not only to past mental health issues, but to grandiose delusions in particular, was hard. But what’s the point of writing pseudonymously if you can’t be honest? I’m glad I did it—it seemed to help others with similar experiences, and the confession exorcised a big chunk of my own residual shame.

The series-oriented posts have fallen off a bit. I did write four Exegesis posts for paid subscribers, including a freely-available essay on Hilma af Klint. But I wrote only a single Minus the Nonsense article (on energy healing), and precisely zero Church of Reality articles. I’m particularly sad about the latter: Church of Reality posts have been some of my most popular (particularly the one on Barbara McClintock). And spreading the spiritual views of highly credible scientists does more to further my agenda—bridging the gap between science and spirituality—than my own philosophical speculations ever will.

(By way of excuse, I got completely hung up trying to do an article on Alexander Grothendieck, a world-changing mathematician who wrote long, semi-psychotic diatribes about spirituality. I worked through most of his 1500 page manifesto, Reaping and Sowing, which is only available in French, a language I do not speak. Google Translate helped, but if anyone knows how the heck it arrived at the phrase “cake daddy” please let me know. It appears 14 times in my translation and appears to be somewhat important to his thesis.)

I promise to rectify this. I still haven’t done Bohm! Tesla! Einstein! There’s so much more to explore here.

Community

This space has been growing healthily. At the one-year mark, we had 1337 subscribers; that number nearly tripled in the second year.

Paid subscriptions have also been steadily rising. Still not enough for me to quit my job and write full-time! But I can dream. Many thanks to the 30-odd folks out there supporting my work.

For now, everything is still going to GiveDirectly. But I’ve also used this revenue as an excuse to send myself to conferences like Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. So your contributions are actually improving the quality of content here!

Substack

It’s been interesting to watch Substack evolve over the last two years. I’d previously written a few things on Medium, but never felt like I was building my own community—more that I was yet another voice within the walls of their platform. I was attracted to Substack because they seemed to be invested in the idea of helping writers build a direct relationship with their readers.

This is in contrast to most platforms, which seek to insert themselves between the creators and the audience. Most platforms want to own that relationship. They want leaving the platform to be painful, for creators (who lose their audience) and for the audience members (who lose access to content).

I’m afraid that Substack is slowly drifting down the typical platform path, one sesame seed at a time. While I can take my subscribers above with me if I leave, I now have an additional ~400 “followers” who would be left behind. I’ve managed (with considerable effort) to export my essays, but my “notes” are locked-in. It’s natural for Substack to build moats around its garden, but every day it feels a bit more like long-form Twitter. And no one wants that.

I’ll be sticking with Substack for the foreseeable future, and I’m still hopeful that they’ll manage to avoid or at least slow the natural process of enshittification. But as a reminder, all the content here is mirrored at blog.superb-owl.link.

Looking Forward

While I’m very happy at my full-time job, I consider this blog my primary calling. Writing, for me, sits at the top petal the ikigai flower: I love it, I’d like to think I’m reasonably good at it, and I’m certain the world needs it—the wound separating science and spirituality has festered for too long.

One day, with your help, maybe I can make a living doing it as well.