writing myself out of the picture

A quick update on the status of my written work. From roughly 2006-2026 I published several non-fiction books and dozens of articles dealing with the outer limits of electronic music, the boundaries of human perception and other subjects that interested me. For the past 4 years or so, I used Substack as the medium of dissemination for newer work, and attempted to update that at least monthly. For a number of reasons, I'm ceasing such operations entirely so as to focus on other things.

I've come along too far with my current book-in-progress ("Authenticentrism") to totally abandon it, but once that is published, I need to take a break from all of this until certain issues, both on a personal level and a ‘macro’ level, resolve themselves - at the point that the dust settles, I can re-assess whether or not there’s a demand for the particular public service I offered. If I am personally *invited* to contribute my thoughts somewhere, then that re-assessment process will certainly speed up. But for additional self-initiated projects, I can wait.

I thought it would be a little too ironic to compose a lengthy essay rationalizing why I no longer make lengthy essays public. So here is a different and more perverse form of irony, a “list-icle” with a few reasons I decided to de-emphasize my writing project (“#15 will SHOCK you”….ok, not really). Enjoy!

“Wherefore the writing hiatus"?

1. The demands of a "real job". My first two books were written during periods of either unemployment, or under-employment (meaning, the kind where there is so little work to do that you can spend hours a day on research without being reprimanded). The “calculus has changed around this situation,” as people now like to say. In other words, I have a full-time job that makes serious demands on my time and psychic energy.

2. Lack of public interest. The whole point in making work PUBLIC is that a public actually exists for this. On the occasions where I plucked up the courage to look at metrics on subscribers to my Substack pages, etc., the reports sent me hurtling into an abyss of despair. I have had more eyes upon certain corporate emails that I’ve sent out, than I have had upon work that I felt sincerely proud of and wanted to share as a public service. This is partially my own fault, given my pathological loathing of social media and self-promotion, but I feel the general level off public curiosity had dropped off regardless of my own incompetency.

3. Lack of PERSONAL interest. Unlike composing music, which I have always enjoyed creating regardless of others’ interest in my work, non-fiction writing is only something I enjoy when it is actually finished, and when I can interact with people based upon their reactions to it (see reason 2 above). I greatly enjoy reading, on the other hand, and that process is significantly more enjoyable when the reading is not oriented towards a specific short-term goal (i.e. “how can I add this information to my book-in-progress”).

4. Changing beliefs. The more my attitudes re: politics, aesthetics, spirituality, sexuality etc. change, the more my semi-regular writing functions as a documentation of those changes rather than as a conveyor of new perspectives. A lot of my recent writing had this air of "back-pedaling" to it, which over time becomes incompatible with a program of positive change.

Along these lines, a growing sense of epistemic humility has made me more cautious about making “absolutist” statements, and has also alienated me from socio-political projects which require a good-vs-evil framing of complex issues. My hope was to eventually have enough authoritative weight behind my writing that I'd be able to help defend against the increasingly partisan, "culture war" insanity now rotting public discourse. But, again, I don't make the rules here, and the rule is that people aren't going to respect suggestions for changes to social trends from writers with little social approval.

5. Changing alliances. My writing has put me in touch with some of the most interesting and unique people that exist in our present age, for which I'm grateful. It also has introduced me to some people who I am better off without.

Such as? People who contact you when they need help promoting or selling something, but can't be bothered to respond when it's your turn to ask for a favor. People who use "progressive" politics, particularly a love of humans in the abstract, as a moral crutch to excuse their miserable treatment of individual human beings. People who portray themselves as dispassionate critics of "the extreme" via a myriad of art forms, but who are in fact practicioners of certain "extreme" behaviors that bring about real-world harm. Again, the Substack columns were getting dangerously close to just becoming regular denunciations of such people - I don't think a journalistic account of my having a clear conscience will be meaningful to many readers.

6. “Physician, heal thyself” - Having issues of my own to work through, I felt an increasing sense of dishonesty in trying to act as a trained diagnostician of societal ills. Music is a much better forum for “asking new questions” and focusing on experiments rather than on proving why such-and-such established certainty is correct - so I will put more emphasis on that, and other non-textual art forms (collage, etc), in the future.

And the rest, they say, is history….