Happy New Year — And What to Do With Your Life in 2023

Some Advice For 2023 (If You Want It)

Our galaxy, as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope

Happy new year! I want to take a moment to…well, a lot of stuff. We’ll take it step by step. First, say thanks, and I mean it. For another year of writing and reading and discussing and thinking. I think that we’ve built something genuinely special here, and I mean that. I can’t say it enough, really. Take a look at the dire state of our public fora, such as they are. Twitter, invaded yet again by crackpots and Nazis, Instagram, where everyone pretends to be happy while 1 in 3 teens develops body image issues, Facebook, where everyone pretends to be happy while their minds are slowly warped by poison. We built something special here: a community that actually has civilized values — it’s peaceful, sane, humane, democratic, and most of all, thoughtful.

I cherish and treasure that, because you don’t have to look very hard at the world to see precisely how rare those values — and spaces built on them — are becoming. Thump, thump — here come the jackboots of the lunatics. Who are they after now? It doesn’t happen here — and we should all take a moment to applaud ourselves, and one another, for that.

Now. Over the last year, one of the things people ask me about most is…for advice. About not just writing…but creativity in general. Let me answer a few of the most common questions, and then we’ll get to the real advice.

— How do you write so much? My answer: how do you not? Take a hard look around, and tell me we all don’t have a great deal to say. So…speak your mind. The difference between us and the crackpots? We don’t do that enough, and so we’ve become a textbook silent majority.

— Why do you write so much? You know that ice cold feeling you have in the pit of your stomach most days? Go ahead, admit it. It’s just you you’re lying to, not even me. After you read the headlines, think about your future, what have you. That’s called moral injury. We’re going to discuss it more this week. We are the walking wounded, my friends, injured on a deep, fundamental, existential level. It hurts just to be alive — it always has — but it hurts doubly so when the world is going this wrong, this fast, in such basic ways. I hurt. That’s why I write. Where else does creativity ever come from? Where else is it going to go? How else is all that hurt — not mine, but ours, all of life’s — ever going to heal?