Field Notes on Jeremy Bassetti

[Fieldnotes] A Higher Calling? Where Our Creative Impulse Comes From

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 07:00:00 -0400

Why was Socrates sentenced to death? Ask any reasonably educated person why Socrates drank the hemlock, and they might respond: “corrupting the youth.” In reality, corrupting the youth was one of a pair of charges and stemmed from the more seditious charge of impiety. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates defended himself against the allegation of godlessness by calling his work an “obligation” or a “duty” that had been “enjoined” or “imposed” on him by “god, by means of oracles and dreams, and in every other way that a divine manifestation has ever ordered a man to do anything.”¹ It was this very admission of divine guidance that upset the Athenian authorities in the first place, a notion that “caused him to be accused of introducing ‘new spiritual beings’ or divinities and of disbelieving in the gods of the state.”² Socrates said he was commanded by god to pursue philosophy, which suggests he felt a divine, mystical, or supernatural inspiration to pursue his life’s work. “God gave me a station,” Socrates said, “with orders to spend my life in philosophy.”³

Why do some people feel compelled to devote their lives to study or to art? When we say we feel a “higher calling,” what do we mean? As it turns out, humans have been trying to answer these questions for over two thousand years.

To be “inspired” originally meant to be “breathed into” by some divine influence, much like the word “enthusiasm” meant to be “possessed by a god.” For the Greeks, the supernatural-like force that inspired men was sometimes called daimon (δαίμων), the root of the modern word for another force that possesses us: demon. For the Romans, the guiding, protective force was called a genius. There is a longstanding mystical or spiritual element to this feeling, which helps us understand why the Greek daimon and the Latin genius are often translated into English as “spirit.”

This also helps us understand why, now, in the 21st century, those in intellectual and creative fields continue to describe the urge to do their work in similar, otherworldly terms. In his 2023 book The Creative Act, the legendary music producer Rick Rubin suggests the creative impulse comes from an external source emanating from the “universe.” He called the source of the impulse “the Source.” The Source is something we need to tune into using our “antennae,” a metaphor Rubin uses to refer to our receptive sensibilities and creative intuitions. “We are all translators,” Rubin writes, “for messages the universe is broadcasting.”⁴

Rick Rubin

But Rubin’s idea is a modern rendition of an old standard, whose echoes emanate from the songs of the Homeric age. His cosmic Source is the modern equivalent of the Muse who sings into his book’s target audience, the creative ancestor of the Greek bard.⁵

It is as if an artist is a kind of medium, prophet, or seer, less a maker than a receiver. Less a genius than possessed by one. Less a storm than a lightning rod. This is the take of Elizabeth Gilbert who, in her 2016 bestseller Big Magic, writes that ideas exist out there in the ether and it is our jobs as artists to acknowledge the idea’s call to express itself through us. “The universe,” Gilbert writes, “buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.”⁶ If we can’t find the jewel, the universe will find someone else who can.

Socrates was critical of this idea two thousand years ago, and especially of poets for their “inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say.”⁷ Socrates seems to be signalling a difference between those who feel commanded by a god to pursue a path and those who are are simply puppeteered by one. We need to be active agents in our calling.

In the first of several letters sent to a young, aspiring writer, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke advised him to stop searching for external validation and, instead, to consider if his urge to write came from a deeper, internal impulse.⁸ Rilke said:

Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.

As Socrates alluded to in his own life, Rilke recommends that the young poet surrender to the call, organizing his life around this pursuit. Unlike Socrates, Rilke’s impulse is an internal, human drive; it doesn’t come from god. Two theories, then, about the same feeling that come to the same conclusions. Yet where they locate the sources of their drives couldn’t be any more different.

Does the source of our creative impulse even matter? I’m not sure it does, for they all take us to the same place. We pursue our work at great personal sacrifice. We dedicate ourselves to our work with zeal. We recklessly pursue something that promises little, if anything at all, except for the nebulous suggestion that it makes life worth living.

Rainer Maria Rilke

As it turns out, modern psychology gives us insight into the power of our motivations and drives.

In 1971, the psychologist Edward Deci performed a series of experiments hoping to gain insight into the power of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.⁹ The experiment involved college students and Soma cubes, a puzzle where one assembles Tetris-like shapes into various three-dimensional forms. The students all noted that they liked solving puzzles and were split into two groups. Students in one group were paid if they successfully made forms from the Soma cubes. Students in the other group were not paid. When researchers left the room with a pre-established excuse, they watched on and found that students who were not paid to solve the puzzles continued playing with Soma cubes at a significantly higher rate than students who were paid. Deci concluded that external motivations can compromise, corrupt, or undermine the power of intrinsic motivations. Interestingly, he also found that the students who were not paid actually performed better at assembling forms with the Soma cubes. As Deci wrote in a paper co-authored with psychologist Richard Ryan, “intrinsic motivation [is] the prototypic manifestation of the human tendency towards learning and creativity.”¹⁰

But Deci and his colleagues also learned that intrinsic motivation is not just helpful in work. It is important in cultivating autonomy and a sense of meaning or purpose in life. They found that people whose motivation is authentic and self-authored exhibit stronger performance and creativity, as well as “heightened vitality, self-esteem, and general well-being.”¹¹ In short, those who feel driven to pursue their work do measurably better work and feel better for it. They are not, Deci and his colleagues write, “among the millions who, for hours a day, sit passively before their televisions, stare blankly from the back of their classrooms, or wait listlessly for the weekend as they go about their jobs.”¹²

This is what Socrates was circling around two thousand years before psychology caught up. Far from a sacrifice, surrendering to the work we feel driven to is one of the more reliable paths to a life that feels worth living.

Alysa Liu

The superiority of internal motivation makes sense. Work that we like to do without external pressure is often done with more enthusiasm and joy. Indeed, it is often work that we excel at.

At least this is what has been suggested in the recent discourse surrounding Alysa Liu, the American athlete who, after retiring from figure skating as a teenager, returned to win two gold medals at the 2026 Olympics barely into her twenties.¹³ Liu retried from the sport because of the external demands it placed on her. But, after freeing herself from these external pressures, rekindled her love with the sport. “Winning and losing don’t affect me anymore,” Liu said, adding, “I feel pretty indifferent about placements. Medaling doesn’t fulfill me. I skate because I like to skate.”¹⁴

As Liu might attest, work that we feel obligated or forced to do is often done begrudgingly. It is work that doesn’t “fulfill” us. It might put food on our tables, but that doesn’t nourish our souls. It is work that acts as a means to an end, work done to provide material comfort often at the expense of work that offers inner well-being or a sense of purpose.

To those who work begrudgingly, we hurl that old chestnut: “their heart is not in it.” If the spirit is a good metaphor for an external drive to create, the heart might be a good one for our inner drive because it locates the impulse in the organ that literally pulses. The heart is what keeps us alive, the metaphor suggests. Perhaps this is why Rilke asked the young poet if he felt his internal drive in his heart. The heart gives us courage and pushes us, “in the most silent hours of the night,” to endure. Meaningful work demands that we pour our hearts into it.

The heart is related to another term that describes this internal feeling: “passion.” To be passionate literally means “to suffer,” and to have compassion for someone suggests that you’re suffering alongside them. Suffering for one’s work is a good metaphor, for many who dedicate their lives to their passions, Socrates among them, a kind of suffering follows. Socrates claimed that he was in “vast poverty on account of my service to the god.”¹⁵

St. Augustin by Philippe de Champaigne, c. 1645

In his 1921 book The Intellectual Life, the French philosopher Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges called intellectual work a “vocation” and thought of it as a literal calling from god. He believed that being called by god to pursue the life of the mind is to be drafted into a spiritual selective service. “You are,” Sertillanges addressed the would-be intellectual, “consecrated by your vocation.”¹⁶ The thinking man is thus akin to an apostle chosen by god. Not unlike Matthew, whom Jesus lured away from the lucrative, if stigmatized life of a tax collector and into an uncertain, itinerant life, the intellectual is called on by god to surrender himself to a new lifestyle in His image and in pursuit of truth.

Yet Sertillanges seems to suggest the calling can come from within or from without. On the one hand, “it is written in our instincts, in our powers, in a sort of inner impulse of which reason must judge.” On the other hand, “a vocation is something that cannot be had for the asking. It comes from heaven and from our first nature. The whole point is to be docile to God and to oneself as soon as they have spoken."¹⁷ If the creative impulse comes from an internal or external source, Sertillanges asks us to surrender our lives to it.

The supernatural source of our creative impulse is an enchanting metaphor: a higher power calls upon an unsuspecting mortal to surrender their life in pursuit of the divine act of creation. While some of us might resist the supernatural framing of the creative impulse, I wonder if it is powerful because it offers a two-for-one deal, giving us both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. An external power orders us to work, but surrendering to this “higher calling” and believing it to be our “life’s mission” is intrinsically motivating.

Feeling driven or “called” gives our work energy and resonance, casting it into a higher orbit where it buzzes like a charged particle. This is why we can feel duty-bound to our work so strongly that it becomes our life’s mission. The call separates the good work from lower forms of work, propelling it into a loftier realm where it feels, if not sacred, then at least serious.

Whether it is of god, the universe, or human nature, the fact remains that some of us feel driven to pursue our work. Perhaps this feeling is not a supernatural feeling at all, but rather a deeply human one. Whatever the source of our impulse, we should feel a deep sense of kinship with those who feel one. There is something inspiring about those who dedicate their lives to pursue some vocation, to surrender themselves to some creative work and, if need be, to drink the hemlock for it.

Plato’s Apology. Translated by G. M. A. Grube. Paragraph 33c. ↩︎
Lamb, Walter Rangeley Maitland, and Bury, Robert Gregg. Plato: Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. United Kingdom: Heinemann, 1928. Page 66; See also Darrin McMahon. Divine Fury. Page 6. ↩︎
Ibid. Page 107. Paragraph 29. τοῦ δὲ θεοῦ τάττοντος, ὡς ἐγὼ ᾠήθην τε καὶ ὑπέλαβον, φιλοσοφοῦντά με δεῖν ζῆν καὶ ἐξετάζοντα ἐμαυτὸν καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους, ἐνταῦθα δὲ φοβηθεὶς ἢ θάνατον ἢ ἄλλο ὁτιοῦν πρᾶγμα λίποιμι τὴν τάξιν. ↩︎
Rick Rubin. The Creative Act. Page 7. ↩︎
See the opening lines of Homer’s the Iliad and the Odyssey. ↩︎
Elizabeth Gilbert. Big Magic. 2016. ↩︎
Lamb, Walter Rangeley Maitland, and Bury, Robert Gregg. Plato: Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. United Kingdom: Heinemann, 1928. ↩︎
Rainer Maria Rilke. Letters to a Young Poet. ↩︎
Edward L. Deci. Effects of Externally Mediated Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. April 1971. ↩︎
Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci. Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being. American Psychologist. January 2000. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Kelly Chen. Intrinsic Motivation Helped Alysa Liu Win Gold. Psychology Today. ↩︎
Lisa Costantini. Alysa Liu is Finally Staking on Her Own Terms. 2026. ↩︎
Lamb, Walter Rangeley Maitland, and Bury, Robert Gregg. Plato: Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. United Kingdom: Heinemann, 1928. Page 89. ↩︎
A. G. Sertillanges. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. Page 6. ↩︎
Ibid. 4. ↩︎

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[Fieldnotes] What I Learned About Growing a Newsletter, Content Marketing, and Email Magnets

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 01:00:00 -0500

My email list lost subscribers at a 3:1 ratio last year. For every new person who signed up for my newsletter, three people left. There were several factors at play. But the main one was that I stopped producing content regularly and removed my “email magnet,” a method that had been bringing in around 50 new subscribers a month. I want to talk about this method, my experience using it and abandoning it, and why it works. I hope you can learn from my mistakes and use the method to grow your own email list, which is essential for nonfiction authors, photographers, or any other kind of content creator looking to build a platform.

Every time I open a social media app, my feeds are filled with content from accounts I don’t follow. An algorithm decides what I see, not my preferences. If you’re a creator or a business hoping to leverage social media, this is problematic because there’s no guarantee your followers will actually see what you post. Now you’re competing against slop and cat videos. Of course, the opposite is also true; an algorithm ensures your content has the potential to reach non-followers. But let’s not forget that in the days before algorithmic media became all the rage, both good and bad content was shared and went viral. It is reasonable to declare the follower dead in terms of reach and discoverability on social media platforms.

Beyond that, building a platform on someone else’s property is risky. A social media site might go kaput, change its algorithm, get sold to a questionable buyer, or promote voices and ideas with which you disagree.

The benefits to having an email list should be obvious in this context. You get to directly communicate with those who wish to hear from you. The relationship is direct and unmediated by a third party. Moreover, having a strong platform can help your career. For example, agents and publishers take author platform into consideration when deciding on whether to accept clients and buy book rights (in extreme cases, platform is the deciding factor).

What I Did Right (And Then Stopped Doing)

From 2019 to 2023, I ran a podcast and website called Travel Writing World. I published a new episode every two weeks. Around 2021, I was consistently getting 50 new email subscribers on average every month. For a small niche like travel literature, this was a huge win.

My secret formula? Publishing regularly + an email magnet.

An email magnet is a free resource — a PDF, guidebook, worksheet, zine, ebook, or any type of digital download — that you give someone in exchange for their email address. Mine was a 40-page PDF document related to travel writing.

The value exchange was clear: I’ll give you a helpful resource if you join my monthly newsletter. It worked consistently, month after month.

The Mistake That Cost Me

I stepped away from the podcast to focus on my own writing and photography projects. I stopped publishing regular episodes, reduced my social media presence to almost nothing, and I took down the email magnet from my website.

The result? In 2025, my subscriber-to-unsubscriber ratio inverted and hit 1:3.

Were there other factors for the unsubscribes? Probably. Reduced engagement, fewer touchpoints with my audience, less consistent content. But the biggest factor was 1) not publishing content regularly and 2) removing the incentive for new people to join my list.

The Two-Step Method for Email List Growth

After analyzing what went wrong, the solution became clear. Growing an email list consistently requires two things:

Thing 1: Show up regularly and create content people want to engage with.

This could be YouTube videos, podcast episodes, blog posts, social media content, or whatever format works for your niche, goals, and audience. The key is quality, consistency, and value.

Thing 2: Direct people to your newsletter’s email magnet.

In every piece of content you create, include a call-to-action that leads people to a valuable freebie (an “email magnet”) in exchange for their email address. Many creators skip this step because email lists can take a while to set up and because creating a worthy “email magnet” can be difficult.

You can create content all day long, but without a clear call-to-action or incentive for people to give you their email address, your list won’t grow at the rate it could. And you’ll be subjected to the caprice of a social media site.

What Makes a Good Email Magnet?

I believe your email magnet should be relevant to your work and your audience’s interests. In other words, a travel literature podcast shouldn’t offer a PDF on growing tomatoes. The magnet will be irresistible if it is helpful, valuable, and interesting for your audience.

Examples of email magnets include: a checklist or worksheet, a how-to guide or tutorial, a template or framework, behind-the-scenes content, a mini-course or video series, a curated resource list, a sample chapter from your book, an entire PDF book, etc.

The format matters less than the alignment and value.

How I’m Rebuilding My Email List in 2026

I’m currently writing a book proposal, and the reality is that agents and publishers like to see authors with established platforms. So I’m rebuilding mine, and that means bringing back a regular content touchpoint and an email magnet.

For my regular content touchpoint, I’ve decided to double down on video this year. I’ll be doing a series of YouTube videos and, hopefully, convert them to short-form video for cross posting on social media. I don’t want to do regular podcast interviews anymore, unless they specifically relate to mountains — and even in this case, focusing on my own work and research is my priority.

For my email magnet, I’m considering two options. The easy route is to offer a book I wrote a few years ago as a free PDF or EPUB. The work is already done — I just need to set up the signup form. The harder (but potentially better) route is to create a new resource specifically tied to my mountains project — something like a guide, zine, or behind-the-scenes document that offers real value to people interested in my kind of work.

More soon!

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[Fieldnotes] 2025 End of Year Review

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 01:00:00 -0500

I’ve written end-of-year reviews for the past four years. In keeping with tradition, below are my reflections on 2025 and my plans for 2026.

2025 in Numbers

Website Posts: 38
Total Words Published: ~57,000
Creative Journey Podcast Interviews: 3
On Mountains Podcast Interviews: 2
YouTube Videos: 3
2025 Self-Assessment: 6.5/10

2025 Overview

Overall, 2025 felt exhausting. I am tired, drained, depleted. Without a doubt, wrangling a toddler had something to do with my exhaustion. But other factors are weighing down upon me, which I’ll briefly discuss below. I say briefly because, while I think it is beneficial to be open and honest, I don’t want to wallow in negativity.

This time last year, I said that 2025 would be a year of focus and simplicity. I wanted my work to come first, after family, and to focus my efforts on my main subject area instead of spreading my attention across too many areas. I held true to these principles. Mostly. I’ll continue these principles in 2026, but I’ll try to increase my output. More on this below.

Creatively, I feel like I am on the right track despite there not being many visible signs of progress or growth. That’s okay, if a bit frustrating. But I need to remind myself that I’m working on a new project (at least it is new in the sense that I’m sharing my work publicly). And at this stage, I am building a system of roots and rhizomes. Eventually they’ll bear vegetation and (hopefully) some fruit, but now it’s about establishing a solid foundation and some discipline.

After discussing some wins (On Mountains and a research trip to Bolivia), I’ll reflect on my book proposal, my day job and its impact on my work, alcohol and its impact on my work, and then on my public-facing work like podcasting, social media, newsletters, and YouTube. Finally, I’ll reflect on why I scored myself a 6.5/10 in my 2025 self assessment, and some goals for 2026.

On Mountains

In the second half of the year, I launched a new microsite on my website called On Mountains. The microsite houses my notes, research, and thoughts on my mountain-related work. It is where I am “working with the garage door open.” On Mountains also has a sporadic and intermittent podcast where I interview writers, historians, researchers, and creatives who think about mountains.

This was a major step for me, mostly because it acted like a formal declaration of intent — this is where my focus will be for the foreseeable future. I’ve been thinking about this mountain project for years, so publishing work in this area feels like progress.

I published 18 posts to On Mountains since May 2025. I expect to publish more than that in 2026.

Bolivia

I visited Bolivia again in August to do more mountain-book research. I visited the cities of Cochabamba and Quillacollo during the Festival of the Virgin of Urkupiña. I was able to get some more interviews and material for the chapter I’m working on. But, I haven’t written this material into the chapter yet. My notes and interviews remain in a raw state. Incorporating this new material into the chapter will be a goal for the first half of 2026.

I also recorded a lot of video, which I’m also sitting on. The idea was to create a YouTube video on the Festival of Urkupiña, but I haven’t been motivated. To be honest, the prospect of putting this video together seems daunting. There has too much friction.

Book Proposal

I can’t say that I made a lot of progress on the book proposal in 2025. Sure, I picked and pecked at it. But I didn’t make major progress. I think part of the reason why I didn’t make progress in this area is because I was too scattered with On Mountains. If you visit On Mountains, you’ll see that the posts jump around a bit in terms of space, time, and culture. I need to be more strategic about my work, publishing research and notes that relate directly to the book proposal area I’m currently working on. I think this will help keep me on track. For example, if I am working on a book proposal chapter about Bolivia and the Andes, my On Mountains work needs to relate to that. Bouncing around from idea to idea isn’t helpful.

Day Job Blues

I don’t want to harp on my day job too much, but it is relevant here because it impacts my creative pursuits. My day job continues to be a major time sink in my life. It also takes an emotional toll on me. There has been a massive shakeup at my institution. Everything has changed, from job descriptions to compensation to workloads and expectations to division structure to leadership teams to evaluations to contract terms… I’m teaching more classes in more formats, and I have more non-teaching responsibilities. There is just more work on my plate.

This is wearisome now. But there is a bight side. The trade-off for all of this work is that I’m out-of-office from May to mid-August in 2026. I’ll get this “break” every two years, with the entire month of May and half of August off in alternating years. We’re working more during the semesters, but we have more time off in the summers. This is the light at the end of this long, dark tunnel.

I need to treat my day job more like a means to an end, to treat it more like - as my wife likes to say - a job at McDonald’s: you clock in, do what you need to do with a smile, and clock out. My problem is that work raises my blood pressure. It never has anything to do with teaching. It always has to do with my “service to the college,” duties that all professors are required to do that comes with endless meetings and an unhealthy dose of despair. It regularly impacts my sleep and my relationships.

Alcohol

Perhaps this is related to my day job stress: after two years of avoiding alcohol, I started drinking again in 2025. It was a decision I almost immediately regretted. Two years of sobriety makes it easy to see its effects on my energy, my mental and physical health, my wallet, and my productivity — on pretty much everything.

A lot of people think new-year resolutions are ridiculous. Their point, which is fair, is: Why not resolve to make a change when you identify a problem? Why wait until the New Year? Why not act now? This makes sense if there is a major, immediate issue that needs to be resolved. For example, hitting rock bottom or, say, surviving a heart attack might force someone to make immediate changes. For less urgent changes, I find New Years resolutions to be powerful. The new year offers a clean break, a natural time to hit reset, a psychological transition to start something new or to leave behind something undesirable.

So, starting tomorrow, I will begin another year without drinking. But, tonight, I’m going to enjoy one last glass of Côtes du Rhône.

Podcasting

Podcasting wasn’t a major focus for me in 2025. In addition to the episodes published on the On Mountains podcast, I published a few interviews on Creative Journeys with Pico Iyer, Aatish Taseer, and Lance Richardson. I don’t foresee my relationship to podcasting changing in 2026.

Social media wasn’t a huge distraction for me in 2025. In fact, social media has received little attention from me in the past two years. I posted 5 photos on Instagram for the whole of 2024 and one — just one! — post in 2025. I don’t have any social media apps on my phone, with the exception of Bluesky.

While staying off social media has been great for my time, it hasn’t been so great for my platform. Without a means for people to “discover” your work, without a regular touch point where you “engage”, and without a streamlined, coherent vision, your platform will contract. At least, that’s what I’ve experienced. Because agents and publishers like to see authors with “platforms,” engaging on social media and “creating content” is critical for the modern creative. Having a strong “platform” helps sell book proposals and, ultimately, books. It happens all the time — celebrities and “influencers” getting book deals solely on the merit of their reach and popularity.

It pains me to say this, but publishing posts on your website is probably not enough on its own to “build an audience” in 2026 and beyond. This is especially true with the pressure AI has exerted onto search traffic. In my view, website publishing and blogging is still an important ingredient, but it seldom can make a complete meal on its own.

With this in mind, I will start engaging on social media (and other forms of media) more in 2026. Being strategic about building my platform and presence will help my goals. I am still working out my strategy for 2026, but I will likely employ the “post and ghost” method so I don’t get sucked into the various algorithms. I don’t want to be “everywhere,” but I think leveraging AI can help with social media grunt work. For example, asking AI to draft posts based on articles might be a good use of AI. As is asking AI software to extract “short form” video snippets from “long form” videos. More on this topic coming soon.

Newsletters

Because of my low engagement levels on social media (and other forms of media, like podcasting and YouTube), 2025 was the first year since 2019 that I saw negative newsletter growth. More people unsubscribed from my newsletters than joined. Despite more people visiting my website and reading my work compared to the previous year, I got a 3:1 ratio of unsubs to subs. The numbers are small, but for every one subscriber I got, three left.

Why did I experience negative newsletter growth? I can point to the following reasons.

Not showing up anywhere consistently. Not posting on social media, on YouTube, or podcast episodes on a regular basis. My “discoverability” is based on one touchpoint: website articles via search. I am not harnessing other platforms to share my ideas.
No “email magnet.” I deleted my old Travel Writing World email offer, a 40-page PDF that I gave to readers who signed up to my mailing list. “Email offers” entice people to subscribe.
Inconsistent topical interests and messaging made my work and its value proposition opaque. What do you stand for? What topics do you cover? What is your approach? Why should people join you on your journey?
Inconsistent and uninteresting emails.

YouTube

One of my principles for 2025 was to simplify and to narrow my topical focus. As a result, I ignored YouTube. I only posted three videos, two of which were nearly finished at the end of 2024 and got published in the first month of 2025. Most of my previous videos on YouTube were about photography and not about my main area of interest: mountains. It felt too scattered, inconsistent. So, I stopped posting to YouTube. As a result, I lost monetization. Which is fine. The space that quitting YouTube created helped me establish On Mountains.

But I intend to return to YouTube as part of my social media, platform-building strategy. I am bullish on YouTube. It is more engaging than other social media platforms. Plus, a video can find viewers well after its publication. Case in point: YouTube is the only platform I’m seeing subscriber growth based on old videos despite being virtually absent.

Anyway, I’m going to increase my video output in 2026. There will be a strategy, and it will be related to my main work.

Self Assessment

So why a 6.5 out of 10? The score reflects a year of mixed results. On the positive side, I launched On Mountains, which was a significant creative milestone. I stayed focused on my main subject area and didn’t scatter my attention across too many projects. I made it to Bolivia for research. I published consistently on my website. These are real accomplishments, and they kept me above the midpoint. But the score also accounts for what I didn’t do. I made minimal progress on my book proposal, which is the linchpin of my creative project. I lost newsletter subscribers for the first time in years. I abandoned YouTube and social media, which hurt my platform. And personally, I started drinking again after two years sober, a decision that drained my energy and productivity. The 6.5 reflects a year where I maintained forward momentum in some areas while losing ground in others. I didn’t fail, but I didn’t thrive either.

The assessment also captures how I feel about the year, not just what I accomplished. Exhaustion colors everything. When you’re drained, even your wins feel smaller. I built roots and laid groundwork, which is essential but invisible work. It’s hard to feel great about a year when the tangible results didn’t materialize. But I also recognize that not every year can be a 9 or 10. Sometimes you’re in a building phase, and the payoff comes later. The 6.5 acknowledges the reality of where I am: still in the game, still making progress, but far from where I want to be.

2026 Goals

Finish Book Proposal
- Pitch Section
- Introduction
- Sample Chapter on Bolivia
Query Agents Late Summer 2026
Early May Research Trip (Mexico? Egypt?)
Publish Video on the Festival of the Virgin of Urkupiña
Platform Building
- Create Newsletter Email “Magnet”
- Create and Execute Social Media Plan

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[Fieldnotes] Servitude as a Service: Reading Kant in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 11:30:04 -0400

Each semester, I ask my students to read Immanuel Kant’s 1784 essay, “What is Enlightenment?” We begin with the essay’s historical context: the Age of Enlightenment, the republic of letters, despotism. While that is important, I must admit that I — and most certainly the students — enjoy the class more when our discussion turns away from the past and towards our own moment.¹ One sentence in the essay’s third paragraph consistently catches the attention of my most discerning students: “Rules and formulas, those mechanical aids to the rational use, or rather misuse, of his natural gifts, are the shackles of a permanent immaturity.” We talk about ideology, dogma, and prescribed beliefs like the scourge that is partisan politics. When we talk about the tools that discourage independent thought, someone inevitably says: “Like ChatGPT?”

Yes. Exactly like ChatGPT.

Kant warned about “mechanical aids” that trap us in “permanent immaturity” — tools that seemingly help us think but actually prevent us from thinking. Two and a half centuries later, we subscribe to them monthly. Servitude as a service: that’s what AI platforms are selling us.

The Child and the Beast

Kant defines “enlightenment” as intellectual maturity. It is, in his words, “the ability to use one’s own understanding without guidance from another.” We might call this today “independent thinking.” It is the application of our natural intellectual faculties. It is thinking and reasoning for oneself, freely and critically.

His metaphors for those who cannot think independently are pointed. The unenlightened are childlike, “immature,” and in need of “supervision.” But they are also beastlike: “domestic livestock,” “docile creatures,” yoked and harnessed. At best, they are toddlers. At worst, they are sheep. Learning to think for oneself, Kant suggests, is like a child or a foal learning to walk. They figure it out eventually, but not before falling a few times and eventually developing the courage to continue alone.

Despite the deameaning tone, his metaphor is clear: to be immature and unenlightened is an intellectual dependence and servitude.

The Offloading of Thought

To write is to think. And when we offload our writing to a tool, we are doing less thinking. But reading, too, is thinking. As I argued elsewhere, those who even casually use artificial intelligence have no clue they are reading less. Those who deliberately abuse it, reading less is the whole point. But because the link between intelligence and reading is well-established, you can see how the collapse of reading might be a problem. A dependence on artificial intelligence is a crime against rationality.

Heavy AI users offload the heavy cognitive lifting to a “mechanical aid,” an act that will have a detrimental impact on measurable intelligence — that is unless we simply lower our standards of evaluation, which is already happening. Their brains aren’t getting the reps they need to stay fit, so to speak. They aren’t exercising those muscles.

Some applications of artificial intelligence will prove valuable, like those in health sciences, research, and specialized technical fields. Would I like AI to copyedit this essay and compile a list of tags? Yes, please! But the most pernicious uses of AI, in Kant’s framework, are the ones marketed as the most helpful: tools that let us offload cognitively demanding tasks like reading, writing, and thinking.

The Guardians and Their Livestock

If the unenlightened are children and animals, then naturally there are adults and masters in the room. Kant calls these supervisor-like figures “guardians.” He conjures up an image that students recognize as caricatures of the “deep state,” the man in the smoky room, the puppet-master controlling narratives for their own interests, the partisan media.

But in the era of artificial intelligence, the guardians who benefit from our ignorance are the Big Tech oligarchs.

There’s a direct financial relationship between users and AI services. Many AI services charge subscription fees. Soon, I suspect, they’ll be “free,” generating income instead through data collection and ads. Like social media platforms, AI services will sell your queries and data to third parties, marketers, and advertisers. Even AI platforms will become enshittified, if they haven’t already.

But the situation becomes increasingly dire the more we consider Big Tech’s cozy relationship with the political class.

The DeepSeek Example

To highlight the problem, consider DeepSeek, the Chinese AI platform that briefly made waves as a free ChatGPT alternative. Ask DeepSeek about Tiananmen Square, and it refuses to discuss the topic: “I am sorry, I cannot answer that question. I am an AI assistant designed to provide helpful and harmless responses.”

This is everything you need to know about how ruling-party ideology gets embedded in these supposedly “intelligent” systems where information that might undermine authority is deemed harmful.

AI tools are not apolitical. They’re not objective fountains of information. Their outputs are guided and manipulated, if not directly then by its training data. They have biases much like the Encyclopédie during the Enlightenment did, whose articles condemning slavery, attacking religion as superstition, and questioning the divine right of kings got its publication and authors in trouble with the ruling class. The King’s censors restricted the book for “destroying royal authority, fomenting a spirit of independence and revolt, and… laying the groundwork for error, for the corruption of morals, and for irreligion and atheism.”²

If AI outputs can be manipulated by political pressure in China, they can be manipulated in the United States. Though nominally more open, many see the U.S. sliding toward authoritarianism. And if that’s the case, the Trump administration’s cozy relationship with Big Tech should concern us.

AI outputs can be and are fine-tuned by their developers to align with their political leanings. Take Grok, Elon Musk’s AI service integrated into X. Musk, designed Grok to be an ideological counterweight to what he believed was a left-leaning and politically correct ChatGPT. Grok now consistently provides outputs that align with Musk’s own socio-political ideas — whatever they may be at the moment.

A Descent into Ignorance?

The general misunderstanding that artificial intelligence is an objective system, god-like in its omniscience, makes the problem worse. AI outputs cannot be trusted as objective truth.

AI tools are not our “guardians.” Overusing them, especially for higher-order thinking skills like reasoning, analysis, reading, and writing (to say nothing about creativity!), prevents users from exercising and cultivating their natural intellectual abilities. It leads to servitude and dependence. This is what Kant warned us about nearly 250 years ago.

If Kant remarked that he lived in an “age of enlightenment,” what would he say about our age? An age in which roughly half of US adults use AI at least once a day… and rising?³ An age in which AI is being embedded everywhere — email replies, search results, text message summaries, classrooms? Our ignorance is becoming inescapable.

This isn’t just about individual enlightenment. Kant was concerned with the larger public’s intellectual health — our collective ability to think and reason independently was necessary for a functioning society. He believed in intellectual progress, that humanity could emerge from its self-imposed immaturity. This required courage and effort.

But what happens when we’ve built systems that make immaturity easier than enlightenment? When thinking becomes optional, and the path of least resistance is one that leads us away from our natural ability to think and reason? When our servitude is offered to us as a service (SaaS)?

The Age of Information may be giving way to the Age of Ignorance. A dependency on artificial intelligence is a wonderful way to create natural stupidity. The irony would be almost funny if the stakes weren’t so damn high.

Historians and philosophers might balk at such an approach. But I’ve come to believe we should read philosophy not only as historical artifacts but as tools to help us improve and make sense of our lives. This has been an aim of philosophical inquiry since at least the 4th century BCE, when Zeno of Citium founded Stoicism. This approach has been lost on academic philosophy, with its self-referential, circlejerkular nature. ↩︎
Qtd. in Lough, John. The Encyclopédie. New York: McKay, 1971. Page 21. ↩︎
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/ai-in-americans-lives-awareness-experiences-and-attitudes/ ↩︎

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[Fieldnotes] ‘Vita Contemplativa’ by Byung-Chul Han

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 00:00:01 -0500

Having read several of Byung-Chul Han’s small philosophical books, I was eager to read his Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity (see on Amazon). For readers looking for practical guidance on implementing a contemplative practice or reading an intellectual history of contemplation, this book will surely disappoint. Instead, it gives us philosophical provocations rather than practical instruction, which aligns nicely with one of his book’s main points: culture and life become interesting and “radiant” when they rise above the demands of utility and production in contemporary society.

My third encounter with Han’s work, reading Vita Contemplativa has shown me that Han is consistent and covers arguments and themes he has already addressed in previous books. Reading his body of work is comforting because it is familiar, and it helps us understand his larger philosophical project. Reading many of his works is necessary in Byung-Chul Han’s case because he (frustratingly) doesn’t pin down some of his ideas. Yet, somehow, Han’s reluctance to define aligns nicely with what I understand to be the main argument of Vita Contemplativa.

Han’s book begins with a diagnosis that will be familiar to readers of The Burnout Society: contemporary society has reduced human existence to work and performance. We have become animal laborans, mere beasts of burden who confuse living with survival. As such, we are unable to recognize anything other than activity as anything other than a problem. Han argues for a return to what he calls the vita contemplativa, which I understand to be a mode of being and living that embraces pause, rest, stillness, silence, and contemplation as essential human capacities (and, as we will see, directly related to human culture and flourishing).

Moreover, as he pointed out in The Burnout Society, what contemporary society dismisses as the passive “contemplative life” (vita contemplativa) is actually quite active, requiring sustained effort to resist the “crowding, intrusive stimuli” of modern life.

Han argues that the empire of work and productivity has colonized even our understanding of rest. He writes that “leisure time” remains “tied to the logic of work,” conceptually defined as absence rather than presence. This makes sense to me, as the word “vacation,” first used in English by Chaucer, was originally defined as time when someone was not working. In the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, Chaucer writes:

When he had leisure and vacation / From other worldly occupation / To read this book of wicked wives…

The etymology of the word “vacation” suggests that our understanding of rest and leisure has long been defined negatively: in the empty absence of work, action, and doing. Rest is defined by what it lacks rather than what it offers. A vacation is literally an “emptiness.” It becomes “down time,” time that we “kill,” rather than time that might fulfill, awaken, or enliven us.

Yet, for Han, down time, contemplation, leisure, and rest are important in a variety of ways: they are the wellspring of human flourishing and culture, they give our lives radiance/immanence, and they are sacred.

Drawing connections between cultural production and human flourishing, Han argues that culture itself springs from a kind of inactivity. He celebrates atelic activities (perhaps “activities” isn’t the right word), ones without ends or goals in mind, ones that are “useless and purposeless” like dancing, strolling, playing music, and creating art. We often think of these pursuits as the expressive essence of the human experience. They are, in short, what make us distinctly human.

Artistic, atelic practices like the ones mentioned above often involve flow states where “the will abdicates” and the practitioner “succumbs to what happens” rather than consciously acting upon an artistic medium. Yet I’m not sure I am convinced by Han’s argument that creative pursuits are not “active” because in them we surrender ourselves to some kind of transcendent inspiration or creative energy. Not all creativity involves our surrender to some creative force that is wholly outside ourselves.

But I get Han’s larger point, that what we consider to be important cultural expressions — thinking, art, culture, festivals, rituals — often stand in combative opposition to notions of active production.

In one interesting section, Han again draws a distinction between language as information and language as poetry. Useful and productive activity is different from creative activity in Han’s view: “information is the active form of language. Poetry, by contrast, suspends language as information. In poetry, language enters the mode of contemplation. It becomes inactive.” Information is language’s active equivalent; poetry is language’s contemplative equivalent.

I find this interesting, especially in light of a recent Robert Macfarlane interview. Macfarlane, he says, doesn’t want to write books that “capture” or “explain.” He doesn’t want to write dry books of facts. Instead, he wants to draw on poetic forms. And I think this is why we are drawn to Macfarlane’s writing. It is poetic and radiant. Han says, “when language is nothing but work and the production of information, it loses its radiance.”

Han focuses on inactivity because it gives life “radiance” or “immanence,” two terms that I understand to mean something like “meaning” or “fulfillment.” Frustratingly, Han doesn’t unpack what he means by the terms.

Yet if I feel anxious about Han’s ambiguous approach, his hesitation to explain, his propensity to skirt and flitter around ideas language without offering clear definitions, then perhaps I am missing one of Han’s points. That my wanting something carefully packaged and clear might be a symptom of the current age’s unease with lingering, ambiguity, and contemplation. Offering digestible “information” might betray his philosophy.

Thus the book’s value lies in its ability to force us into contemplation and ambiguity. Han’s vision of festivals, rituals, and contemplative practices as essential to human flourishing is also an interesting take, one with which I fully agree. Vita Contemplativa reveals something interesting about our contemporary predicament — that many of us have become beasts of burden and no longer are human beings. Survival is not the same thing as living. What we dismiss as “unproductive” — rest, contemplation, culture, play — may be exactly what we need to recover our humanity.

As Han observes, drawing from Cato:

Never is he more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself.

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[Fieldnotes] 2025 Mid-Year Review

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 00:01:01 -0500

For the past few years, I’ve written end-of-year reviews reflecting on my work and creative life. But this year, I want to start checking in mid-year as well.

I’ve found having a zoomed-out perspective of my output is helpful. Those end-of-year reviews are where I reflect on what I’ve accomplished and muse about the year ahead. But I’ve realized the feedback loop of a year is too long.

Having a six-month recap will help me reflect mid-year and make necessary pivots and changes before they potentially get out of hand. It is also a way to be accountable to those who support my work via Patreon. Thus it serves two purposes: it helps me reflect on my progress and adjust course mid-stride if needed, and it demonstrates to my Patreon supporters that we’re moving towards to the goal of making artifacts and producing work that matters.

2025 in Numbers, So Far

Posts published: 18
Total words published: 26,994, inclusive of podcast transcripts but not of this post or July’s Genius Loci
Podcast episodes published: 2
YouTube videos made: 2

Reflecting on the Last Six Months

How have we done so far? In December 2024’s recap, I wrote these principles for 2025:

Focus. Family and your work come first.
Simplify. You’re doing too much.
Synergy. Narrow your topical focus.
“Keep the main thing the main thing.”

With the first half of 2025 now in the books, I can report that I’ve held true to these principles.

I’ve focused more energy on my personal work, cut many unnecessary obligations from my life, and narrowed my topical focus (more on this shortly). I’ve also taken concrete steps to “keep the main thing the main thing.”

I’ve already published more words in the first half of this year than in all of 2024 combined. That low bar was set because my son was born last year, and time became fleeting. Now I’ve found my rhythm again.

And yet, I still feel somehow unproductive. My son had several bouts of illness, my mom visited for an extended period, and some last-minute day job work sucked the air out of my lungs. More than just a time suck, these setbacks were physically/mentally/emotionally draining and they didn’t create the conditions for doing good work.

The Main Thing - On Mountains

But I did put in significant work to keep the main thing the main thing. My mountain research — and all its related work like book proposals and posts — is the “main thing.”

It is early yet, but having a singular focus feels invigorating and clarifying. With a singular focus, it is easy to see what is (and what isn’t) worth doing. I’ve largely stopped podcasting and creating YouTube videos on photography.

Strangely, this focus also opens up a world of possibility. Rather than being constricting, it is liberating — freeing me from the tyranny of choice, the tyranny of and overactive mind.

To help keep myself on track, I’ve started a new podcast/blog called On Mountains where I’m publishing my notes and my mountain-related work. This is both an attempt to focus and to build an audience around this subject-area.

To advance this project, I needed to cut out the extraneous work from my life: the unrelated YouTube videos, the unrelated blogging, and the reading/thinking/writing on unrelated topics.

That’s not to say I’m on a strict mountain diet. I do need some reading and writing outside this world to draw new connections and dream up new ways of thinking about my material. But non-mountain work should always serve as a means to an end, as an exercise in thinking, and not as an end in itself.

This shift makes strategic sense too. A glance at my internet traffic shows too much attention lands on work unrelated to my main research. I need to offset that by building a body of work that attracts the audience I actually want to serve. For example, photography work, while I find it interesting and valuable, it doesn’t necessarily advance my writing or mountain work.

Looking Ahead to the Next Six Months

I have a lot more planned for On Mountains this year.

I’m heading back to Bolivia to do more fieldwork at the Hill of the Skull in Quillacollo. I discuss my objectives in July’s Genius Loci post. But this work is related to On Mountains and my book proposal.

I also plan to publish more research notes on the On Mountains blog and interviews on its podcast.

The company Elevenlabs has an interesting AI voice clone product that I’m looking into as a possible way to narrate some of my written research notes for the podcast. No promises. This may or may not work depending on the quality. But I’m considering how this tool might help me further disseminate my work without more demands on my already-limited time. I really don’t have the time to record or edit thousands of words on Biblical exegesis every month, but the AI tool might render the process of complimenting text with audio effortless.

I’m looking into the same service to narrate my book The Hill of the Skull. If the quality of the audiobook is good, I’ll make it available to Patreon supporters free of charge.

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[Fieldnotes] Some Writing Advice From Robert Macfarlane

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 00:00:01 -0500

I recently watched author Robert Macfarlane give an interview on the How I Write podcast. Macfarlane’s books — among them Is a River Alive?, Underland, and Mountains of the Mind — have redefined how we think about landscape writing. How I Write host David Perell asks his Macfarlane about his approach to writing. The entire interview is worth listening to, but below are some of points that resonated with me.

Begin Each Book with a “Portal Question”

Macfarlane begins each project with what he calls a “portal question” — seemingly simple questions like “Why do we climb mountains?” or “Is a river alive?” These questions, when combined with a child-like wonder and openness, can lead the writer through interesting, complicated, difficult terrain. These questions are the basis for a kind of intellectual exploration.

A version of this advice was recently given by another How I Write guest, Johann Hari. In his interview, Hari says, “There is always a problem that I want to solve or understand in my own life. And I start from that.” The “problem” is expressed as questions: “In every book I want to do, I write out a list of questions I want to answer.” Hari then thinks about whose story can best help him answer those questions.

“Capturing” and “Explaining” the World

Yet, unlike Hari, Macfarlane uses his question as an exploratory tool. Not an explanatory one. Early in his interview, Macfarlane says his use of language helps the reader say to themselves “I’m not dealing with a kind of fact book here.” Rather, the book is a text in which “other forms and forces are going to be active.”

Macfarlane notes that the form, the style, the lyricism of the book — from its opening line — signals to the reader that it won’t be a dry collection of facts. Because he aims not to explain but to evoke, his book aims to be something else, a “representation of perception rather than the thing itself.”

He aims to produce work that captures how it feels to encounter the natural world. He aims to “resist the impulse to explain” and to embrace the “unknowables,” the “feeling,” and the “phenomena” of the world.

Because “language will always be late for its subject,” writers should question their attempt to reproduce objective reality with words. As Macfarlane puts it: “We shouldn’t dream of capturing nature because then it becomes our captive and then it prowls restlessly backwards and forwards in its cage.” Instead, he advocates for “leaning into artifice” through metaphor and distortion.

Subjective Note-Taking

This relates to Macfarlane’s method of note-taking.

He carries small notebooks, like the Field Notes brand. The small size of the notebook doesn’t lend itself to lengthy discourse. Macfarlane jots down fragments—what he calls “qualia” or “mica-like shards.” These quaila are the subjective, qualitative experiences one feels.

The real work comes later when, in front of keyboard and screen, Macfarlane returns to these notes and does what Rilke called “the heart work”—finding patterns and deeper meanings in the collected images and fleeting sensations.

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[Fieldnotes] 'The Burnout Society' by Byung-Chul Han

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 00:00:01 -0500

After reading and enjoying Byung-Chul Han’s short book The Disappearance of Rituals, I picked up more of the author’s books including what might be his most famous work, The Burnout Society.

Han’s book is a philosophical/sociological investigation into contemporary mental health issues like burnout, anxiety, and depression. Despite the book’s title title, it isn’t a true sociological inquiry. And despite its invoking of Freud and his ideas, the book doesn’t aim to help the individual overcome these issues. But it does contain some interesting perspectives of contemporary culture.

Han argues that contemporary society is an “achievement society” driven by projects, initiatives, and endless motivation. It emerged from a “disciplinary society,” which operated through the logic of “no” and “should.” On the other hand, contemporary achievement society seduces us with the promise of “yes” and “can.”

Because achievement society is optimistic and positive, and because it offers humans promise and potential, it is difficult for us to find fault in it. However, achievement society doesn’t represent liberation from discipline. Instead, it is a more insidious form of control, one in which we have paradoxically become our own masters and slaves.

Rather than being forced into productivity by an external authority (the model of discipline), Han argues that we now drive ourselves toward exhaustion under the guise of self-optimization, productivity, and personal achievement. The result is what Han terms “burnout.” From what I can gather, Han defines “burnout” as an exhaustion that emerges from depression and endless self-fashioning in a world stripped of inherent meaning.

In this light, Han’s concept of the “achievement-subject” is interesting. He discusses this at length in the book’s final chapter. The “achievement-subject” is someone who “turns itself into a project” only to discover that “the project turns out to be a projectile that the achievement-subject is aiming at itself.” Our burnout is a self-inflicted wound.

In one of the book’s most interesting chapters, one called “Profound Boredom,” Han discusses modern society’s scattered attention and hyperactivity. He argues that our minds have become “broad but flat,” capable of multitasking but incapable of the deep contemplation necessary for genuine engagement with the world or in the creation of culture. This scattering of attention prevents what he calls “intensive bonding,” the ability to form meaningful connections with people, ideas, or experiences.

Han’s ideas of hyperactivity remind me of Linda Stone’s concept of “continuous partial attention,” of being constantly plugged into the system without paying complete attention to any one thing (think: dopamine stacking, the infinite scroll, notifications, distraction, smartphones, etc.).

Han then discusses hyperactivity in relation to contemplation. He argues that what the achievement-subject dismisses as the passive “contemplative life” (vita contemplativa) is actually quite active, requiring sustained effort to resist the “crowding, intrusive stimuli” of modern life. Conversely, our celebrated hyperactivity and hustle culture are actually kinds of passive engagements in which we surrender our attention to external impulses of doing, consuming, achieving, and producing.

Wellness culture, hustle culture, and productivity optimization have become multibillion-dollar industries, each one demanding that we be more, achieve more, optimize more. Yet meditation, deep reading, sustained reflection, boredom, daydreaming, solitude — activities our achievement-oriented culture generally regards as unproductive or as wastes of time — might actually be the antidote to the contemporary forces that exhaust us.

When discussing some of Han’s ideas about hyperactivity and contemplation in a private forum, someone¹ linked to an academic paper called “Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence of Digital Citizens” because the discussion of contemplation and meditation reminded him of “building the muscles required to resist getting ‘yanked around’ by the currents of the micromoment.” Developing the skills to resist certain kinds of digital content is essential in today’s environment.

While Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society is a book with interesting insights, it is not one that I would recommend to readers without a tolerance for and interest in contemporary philosophy. Despite — or because of — its brevity, The Burnout Society demands a close, focused reading. Something that, according to Han, many of us might be incapable of pulling off in today’s world.

Thanks, Robin! ↩︎

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[Fieldnotes] Will Artificial Intelligence Make Us Dumber?

Thu, 08 May 2025 11:30:04 -0400

Since ChatGPT¹ made a splash in 2022, the prevailing sentiment of artificial intelligence in higher ed. has been one of doom: the more students use A.I. to write, the worse their natural ability to write becomes. Articles like “ChatGPT’s Corrosion of the Classroom: AI denies student writers the chance to connect” and “What we lose when machines do the writing” question the impact of A.I. when used in educational settings.

As a college professor, I too shared the fear that using A.I. will compromise students’ natural ability to communicate. But now that we’re three years into the Age of A.I., and considering how prevalent the use of A.I. has become, my fear about A.I.’s negative impact has grown. My original concern was that college students would plagiarize their way through college and wouldn’t develop the necessary and fundamental writing skills any educated graduate should possess. My fear was that the “average student” — representative of the student population at the community college where I teach — would be using A.I. to the point that they’d graduate without the natural ability to write at the college level. This fear was shared by Professor Jeff Schatten in his 2022 article “Will Artificial Intelligence Kill College Writing?”.

Yet, I now believe the most important casualty of A.I. is not writing. It is reading and thinking.

In one of my courses, I assign Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein along with a paper about the novel’s Romantic sensibilities — a boilerplate assignment for the humanities at the 1000/2000 level. Last semester, I suspected that at least half of the submissions were written by A.I.² When I looked into my course analytics, I saw a surprising data point: about a third of the students in the class didn’t click on the link to read the book. One conclusion we could draw from the data is that students are reading the material elsewhere, not using the provided link. Another might be that students are going straight to A.I. software for the answers to assignments they haven’t bothered reading.

The probability of the second scenario being the correct one is high. In another assignment on seventeenth-century philosopher Pierre Bayle, a third of students discuss examples from the text that don’t actually appear in the supplied text. I suspect this sort of thing will decrease in the future. Not because students are cheating less, but because A.I. is getting “smarter” and students are getting better at using it. Generating an essay from a lengthy, complicated reading and a set of instructions is no harder than copying and pasting them into an A.I. prompt.

That students are using A.I. without bothering to read mirrors how the public interacts with AI. Take, for instance, Google’s recent “A.I. Overview” feature, which presents users with an A.I.-generated response to a search query. Instead of users browsing the web and potentially reading a variety of websites and resources, Google generates a summary. A.I. software itself is discouraging reading and thinking in the name of saving time and hassle. Google says “our custom Gemini model can take the legwork out of searching.” People who might not even know they’re using A.I. are being discouraged from researching, reading, and thinking. This is not just speculation. Bloggers, writers, and others who make a living publishing on the Internet have been complaining that website visits and search traffic has been negatively impacted by A.I. tools like “AI Overview.” This point has been all but confirmed by Big Tech. For many, analytic data measuring web traffic and ad revenue all but confirm the suspicion: people are visiting websites less (and thus reading less and earning less ad revenue for online publishers) in the Age of A.I.

This idea was explored in a recent New Yorker article, “Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?” The author, Princeton professor D. Graham Burnett, seems to agree with me. But he seems to shrug off the fact that students will be reading fewer rigorous texts. He also envisions a future wherein there isn’t even a need to write them. Burnett states:

I can construct the “book” I want in real time—responsive to my questions, customized to my focus, tuned to the spirit of my inquiry. And the astonishing part is this: the making of books such as those on my shelves, each the labor of years or decades, is quickly becoming a matter of well-designed prompts. The question is no longer whether we can write such books; they can be written endlessly, for us. The question is, do we want to read them? … Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will read them, and systems such as these will be able to generate them, endlessly, at the push of a button.

Like a game of hot-and-cold, Burnett gets close to the problem, but he never succeeds in grasping it. Forget about dense scholarly monographs and academic tracts; nobody reads those anyway. A.I.’s ability to ingest, analyze, and generate is a risk to reading in general.

Getting students to read is, like plagiarism, a longstanding problem. One pre-A.I. study found that 65% of students surveyed reported not buying textbooks (costs were reported as the predominant reason). Yet it seems that, even when the reading material is free as it is in my class, the use of A.I. is making the problem worse. This is on top of the decline in reading brought on by smartphones, the attention economy, and algorithmically mediated feeds.

In a recent article in the Financial Times, journalist John Burn-Murdoch charts a downward trend in reading among teenagers since the 1980s. Now, nearly 50% of teenagers report “hardly ever” reading and less than 15% report reading “almost every day.” The author correlates this data with a few other data sets, ones that chart a similar decline in reasoning, problem-solving, thinking/concentration, and learning. He concludes that “we appear to be looking less at the decline of reading per se, and more at a broader erosion in human capacity for mental focus and application.” This is a result of a “shift in our relationship with information.” What the author does not consider, however, is how the use of A.I. changes our relationship with information: it sifts through a vast library of information we would otherwise read and process before presenting to us a concise answer to the question we ask of it.

Cognitive Death Spiral

Georgetown Professor and author Cal Newport notes in a recent podcast episode that the ecosystem of smartphones, social media apps, algorithmically mediated feeds, and our new relationship with information have introduced a “cognitive death spiral.” He concludes that this ecosystem not only damages our ability to concentrate and sustain focus, but it keeps us from engaging in activities that make us smarter. Like reading. What results is a feedback loop of behaviors that are not conducive to markers of intelligence like concentration and critical thinking.

If my experience in the classroom is representative of a larger trend in society, that the use of A.I. is precipitating a decline in reading and thinking, then its use creates a similar “cognitive death spiral.” A.I. will chip away at our natural ability to communicate, and it will ensure we don’t enjoy the benefits commonly associated with reading like improving memory, creating new neural pathways, slowing cognitive decline, improving focus and concentration, developing empathy, and sharpening our critical thinking skills. If reliance on A.I. will increase, our cognitive decline will spiral out of control.

Complaints about the decline in reading and writing are as old as the written word. One of the translated Sumerian clay tablets recorded complaints about the declining writing ability among the youth of Mesopotamia.³ Yet it seems the complaints increased with the arrival of electronic culture. Sven Birkerts lamented the decline in reading culture in his (must read) 1994 book The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. The complaints have continued. In his 2024 article “The Loss of Things I Took for Granted,” professor Adam Kotsko reports that his students cannot read effectively, adding that “students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” More recently, one Ivy-League philosophy professor wrote on Substack that “most of our students are functionally illiterate.” Rose Horowitch reported in The Atlantic that students are having an increasingly difficult time reading books cover-to-cover even in Ivy League schools, a problem brought on by electronic devices and the lack of reading in middle and high schools. Horowitch writes: “In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.”

The recent data about the decline of reading and writing seems to support the anecdotal evidence — there is some merit behind the warnings of finger-wagging professors. Not only is the problem real, it is getting worse and will have a measurable social impact. As far as I am able to tell, A.I. will further chip away at reading and thus critical thinking. For if we believe reading makes us smarter, the use of A.I. stands to make us dumber.

In an article that was published in New York Magazine,⁴ journalist James Walsh discusses the cognitive impact of A.I. It is worth quoting at length:

Some early research shows that when students off-load cognitive duties onto chatbots, their capacity for memory, problem-solving, and creativity could suffer. Multiple studies published within the past year have linked AI usage with a deterioration in critical-thinking skills; one found the effect to be more pronounced in younger participants. In February, Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University published a study that found a person’s confidence in generative AI correlates with reduced critical-thinking effort.

The fear is not that we will devolve into a pre-Gutenberg world without widespread literacy. The fear is we will evolve into a post-literate society wherein our ability to read and concentrate on long-form, interesting, intellectually challenging, and nuanced writing will be compromised and supplanted by other information delivery systems (online media, A.I., etc.) that don’t stimulate the brain in cognitively beneficial ways.

Will A.I. kill books, reading, and the publishing industry? No. That’s not my argument. In the short- and mid-term, reading culture will suffer, as will the publishing industry and independent web publishers. In the long term, we eventually may see a revival of reading in the same way that digital music products (mp3s and streaming) has revitalized vinyl sales. Rather, my argument is that the use of A.I. discourages reading and the reading of books, and its societal implications are cause for serious concern.

This is not to say that there are no use-cases for A.I. Transcribing meetings and interviews, entering data, aiding healthcare professionals in diagnoses, and helping us conceive of new ways to solve problems are among the use-cases that offer utility without compromising reading and cognition. Yet using A.I. in ways that shoulder our cognitive burden — to ask it to do our reading, writing, and thinking for us — doesn’t bode well for the future of our society.

If A.I. impacts readers, it will impact writers, journalists, and those who are committed to good writing and the pursuit of truth. It will impact the publishing industry, from newspapers and magazines to books. This is not about production. It is about consumption. Unless we do more to resist smartphones, algorithmically mediated feeds, and artificial intelligence, we may see a readership, and all the indicators of an intelligent society that go with it, decline.

But A.I.’s impact might be felt among certain communities more than others.

In his famous essay “What is Enlightenment?” the philosopher Immanuel Kant remarks that laziness and cowardice are among the reasons why people don’t think for themselves. But I wonder if time — or the lack thereof — might also be a reason why people don’t think for themselves. Students often report not having the time to read and complete assignments. This is especially true for the population of students at my institution, many of which have jobs, children or other dependents to care for, unreliable transportation, or external pressures that reduce the amount of time they can spend on school. Students from affluent households have more time to read and complete their assignments because they don’t have the same external pressures as those from less-wealthy households. The fear is that students from impoverished households will rely more on A.I. tools than those from affluent households, further widening the education (and socioeconomic) gap in our society.

What can we do?

If you’ve made it this far, you’re likely not part of the problem. And you’re likely someone who is concerned with literacy, books, and with reading, writing, and thinking. For those of us who are concerned with artificial intelligence, we might do well to be more vocal about the consequences of using it: intellectual atrophy. We need to discourage the use of A.I. in the processing of information. We need to encourage people to read more high-quality, nuanced, and challenging work and less of the A.I. slop that seems to be proliferating online.

Educators might consider developing solutions and incentives that promote reading and ensure students cannot use A.I. on their assignments (like in-class assessments, low-tech classroom environments, close readings, etc.). This opinion is not new. Jeff Schatten in his 2022 article mentioned above speculated that A.I. technologies would get so good that, if we wanted to ensure our students are submitting original work, we would need to revert to assignments and tasks that don’t rely on technology. But let’s not confuse the educational enterprise with production. Public education is less about producing a paper, conducting research, and churning out “evidence of learning” than it is about asking questions and developing skills like critical thinking, a task made difficult — if not impossible — by the overuse of A.I.

The images herein were created with the help of Artificial Intelligence. ↩︎
I complained to my supervisors about the plagiarism and I was told to look the other way because the use of A.I. is “impossible to prove” and therefore any penalties against their suspected use would be unenforceable. One administrator even told me that the assessments and prompts are to blame for cheating students. Perhaps this is a fair point: uninspired assignments produce uninspired results. But this is like blaming a woman’s outfit for the catcalls, leering, and objectifying remarks she receives. ↩︎
See Steven Pinker, A Sense of Style, 5-6. And H.A. Daniels, Famous Last Words: The American Language Crisis Reconsidered. ↩︎
My essay, the one you’re reading, had already been finished for about a month by the time Walsh published his. ↩︎

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[Fieldnotes] Review: 'Core Curriculum' by Tod Papageorge

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 11:30:04 -0500

In an era when photography has been democratized to the point of it being so tightly woven into our everyday lives, we should revisit Tod Papageorge’s Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography (2011) to remind ourselves of the medium’s artistic heritage. Published by Aperture and drawing from Papageorge’s lectures at Yale University, where he has served as faculty in the school’s photography program, the collection of writings offers historical context and critical insight into some of photography’s most influential practitioners.

The book feels somewhat countercultural in today’s image-saturated landscape. Most people who snap photographs on their smartphone, and the millions more who scroll through the infinite timelines, don’t think much about the medium’s heritage. Papageorge’s book invites us to consider photography as a deliberate artistic practice with its own history, techniques, and philosophical underpinnings. His stated aim is not to chronicle photography’s evolution, but to highlight several photographers and examine how “the physical nature of their individual practices affected the look and meaning of their work.”

This fascination with photographic praxis is an affliction particular to photographers. Think of all the behind-the-scenes, process-driven “content” produced by and of contemporary photographers. Think of all the podcasts and the YouTube channels documenting photographers at work and covering their decision-making processes, their interactions with subjects, their technical choices, their gear. Papageorge is struck by the same affliction, albeit in a more scholarly context. And, yes — even he can’t resist discussing gear from time to time.

Core Curriculum focuses on a selection of photographers that Papageorge clearly considers foundational: Eugène Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassaï, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Josef Koudelka, and Robert Adams. The lineup represents a particular vision of photography’s canon, one that inevitably raises questions about exclusion. The absence of figures like Diane Arbus, Robert Doisneau, Robert Capa, Dorothea Lange, Elliott Erwitt, and Lee Miller (among many others) underscores the limitations of any work that positions itself as defining a “core curriculum.” This title implies who the important photographers are as much as, by way of exclusion, who isn’t. In following Papageorge’s predominantly male perspective on photographic history, one would assume that to be an essential artist/photographer, one needs to have outdoor plumbing.

Furthermore, one would expect a book of photographic history and criticism to contain more images than the 30-odd plates in the middle of the book.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Valencia 1933

Yet despite these obvious blind spots, Papageorge’s essays are interesting. His essay on Eugène Atget serves as a defense of the photographer-as-artist, directly challenging art historian Rosalind Krauss’s assertion that Atget should not be considered an artist. While including formal analyses of Atget’s compositions, Papageorge’s greater concern seems to be with photography’s place within the broader artistic canon — a theme that runs throughout the collection and begins to sound like an apologia. The writing lean towards the academic side without completely toppling over, but it might be leaning far enough to scare away some readers.

Core Curriculum consistently frames photographers as artists engaged in conceptual practice rather than being mere documentarians or photographers. For example, Papageorge’s comparison of Henri Cartier-Bresson to Arthur Rimbaud elevates the discussion from technical craft to poetic vision. His analysis of images like Cartier-Bresson’s “Valencia 1933” (image above) draws connections between visual composition and literary sensibility, arguing for photography’s place alongside other, more traditionally respected art forms.

How Papageorge distinguishes between artist and photographer is not entirely clear. But I have a hunch that he might agree with Charles Baudelaire who, in his famous essay A Painter of Modern Life, defines an artist as “a man attached to his palette as a serf is to the soil.” So, then, an artist is a kind of slave to one’s artistic vision, two one’s own work, to one’s passion. We see this vision (or version) of the artist in Papageorge’s essays, particularly the short one about Josef Koudelka.

Which reminds me of the time I interviewed Steve McCurry a few years ago. I forget the context of the question I asked him, but I asked him how he saw his himself and his work. He said he saw himself as a “poet.” I had been convinced he was taking the piss with me, but now I wonder…

Papageorge’s insistence on photography’s artistic legitimacy makes Core Curriculum an essential read for contemporary photographers, particularly for those whose understanding of the medium is shaped primarily by social media. At a time when technical proficiency is increasingly accessible and automated, Papageorge reminds us that what distinguishes meaningful photography is not merely skill and reach but vision and voice.

The book is not cheap. It is now out of print and sells for around $75 on the second-hand market. Its original list price was $29.95, which is a price you might be able to pay if you set and monitor an eBay alert, as I did.

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[Fieldnotes] Documentary and Post-Documentary Photography

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 11:00:00 -0500

“Post-documentary photography” has gained increasing prominence in recent years. As far as I’ve been able to determine, the term first emerged in the 1980s and now describes a photographic genre that merges artistic/conceptual approaches with the documentary tradition.¹

As its name suggests, post-documentary photography defines itself in relation to documentary photography. So, perhaps “documentary photography” is a good place to start.

What is Documentary Photography?

Documentary photography aims to record the world in an objective, realistic manner. Photo-journalism — a form of documentary photography — strives to offer an unbiased portrayal of “newsworthy” subjects and current events. Street photography likewise falls within the documentary tradition. While family photographs and travel snapshots could certainly qualify as “documentary photography,” what often distinguishes documentary work is the photographic intention/conceit of aiming to capture the world as documentary evidence, as an artifact, or as part of the historical record — I’m not sure family photography and travel snapshot have this intention at the time of their making. At its core, documentary photography gathers evidence and declares “this is how something was,” “this is truth,” or “this is what happened.”

Central to documentary photography is an implicit claim of truthfulness, objectivity, or factuality. Yet “truth” and objectivity have been problematic concepts throughout photography’s history. Consider photography’s well-documented instances of fabrication (through staging) and bias (through subject and framing).

Documentary photography can be artfully executed, but it fundamentally resists artifice.

The archival intent is important for documentary photographers despite occasional philosophical tensions — recall Robert Doisneau’s observation: “I don’t photograph life as it is, but life as I would like it to be.” Let’s not forget Doisneau himself faced criticism for staging his most renowned photograph: Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville.

Robert Doisneau

Robert Doisneau's Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville

What is Post-Documentary Photography?

Post-documentary photography is a practice that moves away from traditional documentary approaches.

One definition suggests that post-documentary photographers are “artists who acknowledge and work with the inherent problems of the photo-documentary tradition.”²

What are these “inherent problems”? Truth. Objectivity. Reality. Post-documentary photography acknowledges that total objectivity remains challenging, if not impossible, because the photographer’s perspective invariably influences the image.

How do post-documentary photographers acknowledge and work with these problems?

Traditional documentary photography seeks to capture objective reality — to document events, people, and places as they exist. Post-documentary photography embraces subjectivity and personal interpretation - it concerns itself less with documenting external realities and more with expressing internal states or exploring subjective perspectives.

In the definition quoted above, the word “artist” does a lot of work as post-documentary photographers align themselves more with the art world than with the world of photo-journalism.³

Their work exhibits more stylistic, artistic, or “poetic” qualities, and the images aren’t necessarily literal representations. Instead, they’re infused with personal meaning, emotions, ambiguities, or concepts that might not be immediately apparent to viewers.

One photography critic notes that post-documentary photography “now frequently refers to a poetic or ambiguous style whose meaning or message is not overdetermined.”⁴

Author, podcaster, and agent Sasha Wolf similarly defines post-documentary photography as

work that emerges from the photographer’s personal engagement with the real world with an emphasis on a subjective, lyrical approach to picture making and storytelling. The post-documentary approach maintains its connection to documentary photography, but is generally opposed to the literal and restrictive styles associated with traditional documentary, journalistic, or editorial photography, and favors individual artistic style.⁵

In his book Core Curriculum, which I reviewed here, Tod Papageorge discusses post-documentary photography without ever using the term. He writes:

… none of the photographers included in [John Szarkowski’s New Documents exhibition] - Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, and Lee Friedlander — nor any other photographers I knew at that time, would have used the word documentary to describe what they were doing in their work. If nothing else, Robert Frank’s The Americans had taken care of that by defining an aesthetic that depended on poetic transformation, rather than an (apparently) literal fealty to a series of facts. ¶ As for me, my initial introduction to serious photography occurred in 1962, when I discovered a couple of early pictures of Cartier-Bresson’s while taking a college course in basic photography. They convinced me, literally on the spot, to be a photographer—and not because I had an itch to document this or that aspect of the world. I saw these pictures as poetry, Cartier-Bresson as a prodigious poet, and photography as a way to possibly do something roughly in the same camp.⁶

It is worth noting that, in the quote above, Papageorge traces this new “poetic” aesthetic back to Cartier-Bresson’s work and Robert Frank’s 1958 book, The Americans.

The director of photography at MoMA, John Szarkowski’s 1967 group exhibition New Documents not only helped establish Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander as influential figures in the medium. It helped us articulate this new photographic approach, one that blends “documentary” photography with an artistic vision.⁷ It blurred the lines between documentary work and poetry, subjectivity, and art.

I should note here that the Magnum photographer Sergio Larrain also saw photography in poetic terms.

Post-Documentary “Storytelling”

The documentary photographer intends to document reality as it exists — capturing events, cultures, social issues, or everyday life with the aim of telling a factual story. These images tend to be literal and straightforward, presenting an unfiltered and unambiguous view of the subject matter. We might consider the documentary photographer as a visual journalist conveying information and narratives.

If documentary photography tells “stories,” then post-documentary photography creates “allegories.” Allegories are veiled or figurative narratives that ultimately address themes beyond their literal representations. Allegories can harbor multiple meanings and interpretations, but it typically falls to the viewer to discern them.

If documentary photography tells “stories,” then post-documentary photography creates “allegories.”

A Post-Modern Photography?

The term “post-documentary” may remind you of the term “post-modernism.” There may be a connection.

Photography emerged in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, around the same time the modernist art movement came into being. A century later, in the mid-to-late 20th century, artists began reacting against the “grand narratives” and certainties of modernity. Art historians and theorists call this wave of “incredulity” post-modernism.⁸

The term “post-documentary photography” emerged in the late 20th century, coinciding with this broader suspicion of narratives and truth. Post-documentary photography shares this skepticism toward established narratives, “schools of thought,” and similar frameworks. And, as Tod Papageorge noted above, photographers and curators began seeing photography in this new “post-documentary” way back in the 1950s and 60s.

In this light, post-documentary photography might be a part of the larger postmodern condition. It goes far beyond just recording and documenting our world. It questions how we see it, challenging us to recognize the subjectivity and poetry inherent in visual representation.

See “Post-Documentary Photography.” Friends of Photography. Carmel, CA. Photographic installation. Group exhibit. October-November, 1987. ↩︎
Platt, Ron and Julie Ault. Borne of Necessity. Exhibition Catalogue. Weatherspoon Art Museum, 2004. ↩︎
Many also have MFAs (“Masters of Fine Arts”). ↩︎
McKeon, Lucy. “The Post-Documentary Photographers Who Care about the World.” 30 April 2021. ↩︎
Wolf, Sasha. PhotoWork Foundation. ↩︎
Papageorge, Tod. Core Curriculum. Aperture. 132-133. ↩︎
See Hermanson Meister, Sarah. Arbus / Friedlander / Winogrand: New Documents, 1967. MoMA. 2017. ↩︎
See Jean-François Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. University Of Minnesota Press: 1984. ↩︎

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[Fieldnotes] 'The Disappearance of Rituals' by Byung-Chul Han

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:00:01 -0500

In The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present, philosopher Byung-Chul Han critiques contemporary society through the lens of ritualistic practice, or rather, its absence. This slim yet dense volume presents ritual as a mechanism for creating meaning and fostering community — what Han argues we are losing in our hyperconnected yet increasingly atomized world.

Han’s central thesis emerges from a paradox: while our era is marked by unprecedented communication, it suffers from a deficit of community. Early in the text, he articulates this as the difference between a “community without communication” (enabled by ritual) and our current state of “communication without community” (enabled by digital communications). This observation sets the stage for a broader examination of how neoliberalism, capitalism, and digital culture have eroded the symbolic frameworks that once gave life its texture and depth.

The philosopher’s analysis is particularly incisive when he examines how rituals function as “symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world.” In contrast to the frenetic pace of contemporary life, which Han characterizes as “serial perception” — a perpetual rushing from one sensation to the next — rituals create spaces of depth and intensity through repetition and focus. This argument parallels Sven Birkerts’s prescient warnings about the internet age, where “horizontal” networks threaten our capacity for “vertical,” deep engagement with the world.

Han’s critique extends beyond mere cultural commentary to implicate the very structures of modern selfhood. He argues that contemporary injunctions to “be authentic” and “true to oneself” represent not liberation but a form of captivity by what he terms the “neoliberal regime.” This performative individualism, far from fostering genuine self-expression, incorporates “the whole person into the production process.” The result is what Han memorably describes as “the neoliberal hell of the same” — a world transformed into a market where individuals endlessly and narcissistically exhibit themselves. The “neoliberal regime” exploits the moral weight of what Han calls narcissistic behavior, calling us to produce and perform the self.

The book’s examination of closure, rest, and silence in the context of rituals offers particularly rich insights. Han posits that ritual practices (rites of passage) create necessary boundaries and transitions in human experience, without which we risk remaining in a state of perpetual infantilization. His discussion of the Sabbath as a ritual of contemplation serves as a interesting counterpoint to the never-ending cycle of activity (infinite scrolls, play next, etc.) demanded by digital capitalism.

Perhaps most provocative is Han’s analysis of language and poetry in our utilitarian age. His argument that we have lost the capacity to appreciate poetry because it refuses to produce clear “meaning” or “information” speaks to a broader cultural crisis — one in which language itself has been stripped of its playful, ambiguous, and ritualistic dimensions in favor of pure functionality. Han argues that straightforward, functional information adopts a “pornographic form.”

The book’s weaknesses, such as they are, stem from Han’s brisk analysis; ideas and arguments flash brilliantly only to dissolve into the next observation, leaving the reader longing for deeper elaboration. There’s an irony here: in a work lamenting our culture’s inability to linger, Han’s own prose often mirrors the very acceleration he critiques. But his rapid movement might be understood less as a fault than as the fallout of an ambitious philosophical project. Additionally, Han’s concept of the “neoliberal regime” sometimes functions as an overly capacious catchall for various aspects of modernity, from capitalism, to globalization, to algorithmically mediated feeds, to digital communication. A more granular discussion of the “neoliberal regime” would have been nice. Though, in fairness, while the book is a work of philosophy and may prove challenging to casual readers, it isn’t too difficult to catch his drift.

Nevertheless, The Disappearance of Rituals offers an interesting diagnosis of our cultural moment. It exposes how the erosion of ritual practices has left us unmoored in a world of endless consumption, production, and performance. Han’s book leaves us with urgent questions about our cultural moment: How might we reconstruct meaning in a digital age? Can we create forms of community that resist the logic of modern narcissism? What would it mean to recover a capacity for deep attention and contemplation in a world of endless distraction? It asks us to reconsider how we might reconstruct forms of community and meaning-making that resist the logic of market relations, online culture, and digital acceleration.

Han’s text suggests that the recovery of ritual — understood not as mere ceremony but as a fundamental mode of world-making — might offer a path out of our current “hell of the same.” In a culture obsessed with progress, disruption, and innovation, Han’s conservative defense of ritual feels both radical and necessary. For anyone concerned with the spiritual and social dimensions of modern life, Byung-Chul Han’s The Disappearance of Rituals is worth reading.

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[Fieldnotes] 2024 End of Year Review

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 20:00:00 -0500

I’ve written end-of-year reviews of my creative work for the past three years. In keeping with tradition, below are my reflections on 2024 and my plans for 2025.

Overall, 2024 was a wonderful year. It brought me a beautiful baby boy, Luciano. Naturally, having a child also made the year challenging in terms of creativity. But if having a child is challenging, it’s also clarifying — the lack of time reveals what’s truly worth doing.

2025 will be a year of streamlining my efforts and focus.

Last Year in Numbers

Book-shaped things published: 0
Total words published: >29,000¹
Photographs taken: >1,800²
Podcast episodes published: 1
YouTube videos made: 7
Children hatched: 1

Last Year’s Wins

Birth of my son, Luciano.
Published a few photos in Lonely Planet and Condé Nast Traveller.
YouTube channel monetization.

Luciano

The biggest event of 2024 was the birth of my son, Luciano. The experience of seeing your child take his first breath is sublime — at once terrifying and transcendent. There’s nothing quite like it. Thanks to my employer’s flexibility, I had a good amount of paid paternity leave. My wife did not have any, however, so I was basically a stay-at-home father for many months.

While I still had time to think (a newborn sleeps most of the time, as I’ve learned), my podcasting work — one that beat at a steady rhythm for a number of years — fell silent. I was fine with that because even before Luciano’s birth, I felt frustrated by the amount of energy I was devoting to other people’s work rather than my own.

Parenthood brings an almost brutal clarity to the finite nature of time. When hours become scarce, you develop an instinct for distinguishing essential work from “busy work.” Every moment spent wasting time now carries the weight of opportunity cost — time that could have been invested in meaningful creative work. With both time and energy becoming scarce, I’ve realized something I should have known all along: the work that matters most must be my own. This isn’t about abandoning collaboration or community, but it is about growing up and doing the difficult work only I can cultivate.

Half-Frame Photography Journal

Early in the year, I started a documentary photography project partly to document my family and my son, and partly to stay creative during a time I knew would be short on free space. I devised a half-frame photography project, where I’d take at least two photos every day for the entire year. I ended up shooting a lot more than that, ultimately taking around 2,000 film photographs.

The project was enjoyable actually, and it gave me something I will treasure: a physical archive of photographic negatives from my son’s first year. Most of the photographs were Luciano and I on walks, hanging out at home. They’re fleeting moments of his infancy caught on film, ones that often fail to remember. This alone made the project worth doing. But because film is expensive, I’ll scale back the frequency of shooting.

As I wait for the remaining 5 rolls of film from 2024 to be developed and scanned, I am putting together the web-based diptych viewer that will accompany the project. The webpage will randomly pair two photos from 2024 and display them side-by-side as a diptych. I’ll document the process in YouTube video soon, so be sure to subscribe to my channel if you’re interested in updates.

Looking ahead to 2025, I’m considering producing a limited-edition zine to give the project a concrete, physical form. It is a way to punctuate the project and the year, to give it some closure.

YouTube

My YouTube output naturally slowed in 2024 — seven videos compared to the previous year’s ten, a decline do doubt due to becoming a new parent. Yet those seven videos proved consequential: my channel met monetization requirements during our year-end stay in France, crossing the benchmark of 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours.

While monetization marks a significant milestone for creators who typically share their work freely online, I’m clear-eyed about my relationship with the platform. I have no aspirations of becoming a professional YouTuber, whatever that means. The temptation of chasing views for ad revenue is real — it’s a siren song that has led many creators to compromise their vision, either by algorithmic pandering or creating content that betrays their interests.

Instead, I’m approaching YouTube as a way to document my creative journey and explore ideas that interest me. The revenue is welcome, but it shouldn’t be a compass for creative direction.

Published Images

Another highlight this year was seeing some of my photographs published in Lonely Planet and Condé Nast Traveller. Perhaps this isn’t a big deal to many of you, but getting these bylines is a step in the direction I want to move. I got these bylines thanks to Monisha Rajesh, whom I accompanied to Savannah in October 2023 as she worked on a few assignments. I took photos that ultimately ran in the articles she wrote.

Artifact International

I haven’t done much with Artifact International lately, mostly on account of caring for a newborn. However, I still believe its core mission is more necessary than ever: a community focused on long-term, thoughtful documentary-driven work that stands apart from the flood of ephemeral bullshit and AI flooding our feeds.

Writers and photographers desperately need a space where they can get guidance and feedback on substantive, long-form projects — work that prioritizes depth over algorithmic appeasement. While a few communities exist, they often lack both the focus on tangible, real artifacts and the genuine support structure creators need.

I’m still thinking about how to build this community in a way that feels authentic and helpful, one that leverages YouTube for outreach.

Creative Journeys Podcast

I launched my new podcast Creative Journeys in early 2024 and released just one episode. LOL. I haven’t done much with it since. I’m not that interested in interview-style podcasts these days, partly because of my own creative focus and partly due to the lack of time.

As I mentioned earlier, I have to choose between working on my own projects or spotlighting other people’s work now that I have a son. The choice for me is obvious right now.

I do have a few recorded episodes I’ll likely publish in the next few weeks, but I’m no longer actively seeking out guests. Producing a podcast is labor-intensive: emailing, reading, thinking, writing questions, recording, editing.

As it currently stands, I’m not continuing with an interview-based podcast — it pulls too much time and energy away from both my family and my own creative work.

Book Proposal

I’ve been working on a book proposal for several months now. The work has been slow-going, partly due to having a child and partly due to my lack of cohesive focus.

Though, I am making progress on the proposal. I have a sold draft of the proposal and one chapter. I am currently stuck on another sample chapter.

The sample chapters need to be top-notch. They need to demonstrate literary competence and entice a publisher to buy into the idea. I can’t drop the ball at this stage.

The part of the proposal that aren’t sample chapters is basically a marketing plan. It is a sales pitch, making a business case for the book.

Some days, my writing feels strong; other days, stale. It’s hard not to get discouraged. Even if This is a long-term project for me. Even if I don’t finish the proposal this year, I’ll continue the work. In fact, I’ve been doing research on this project for at least 5 years. I’ll get it done eventually. I’m in no rush to force it out.

Principles for 2025

Focus. Family and your work come first.
Simplify. You’re doing too much.
Synergy. Narrow your topical focus.
“Keep the main thing the main thing.”

That’s it for my 2024 recap. Here’s hoping the coming year brings more clarity, creative energy, and maybe even a bit more time. As always, thanks for reading and supporting my work!

Articles, essays, newsletters, etc. ↩︎
Of these photos, 100% were half-frame film photography shots for my 2024 photo journal project. The number is much higher, in the 2,000s, in I could duplicate shots and digital photography. ↩︎

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[Fieldnotes] 2023 End of Year Review

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 20:00:00 -0500

I’ve written end-of-year reviews of my creative work for the past three years. In keeping with tradition, below are my reflections on 2023 and my plans for 2024.

In sum, 2023 was a difficult year for me, creatively speaking. It taught me some valuable lessons, some of which I’ll break down below. As ever, things are changing around here. Read on to learn more.

Last year in numbers

Book-shaped things published: 1 (The Hill of the Skull)
Total words published: >37,000¹
Podcast episodes published: 12
Videos made: 10

Wins

Published The Hill of the Skull
A few Prix de la Photographie Paris honorable mentions for my photography
Published an essay on OffAssignment

The Hill of the Skull

A highlight of the year was finishing and publishing my new book The Hill of the Skull.

There aren’t too many books like it. A travel memoir and a photobook smushed into one. It isn’t perfect — no book is —, but I’m proud of it. Feedback from readers, writers, and critics has been positive, which fills me with joy because working on it was so difficult. It is inherently rewarding to see projects evolve and blossom into what they become.

A lowlight of the year was failing to crowdfund the book.

ICYMI: I tried to crowdfund a full-color, offset-printed, special-edition version of The Hill of the Skull on Kickstarter last October. At $12,000 USD, the funding goal was quite high. But that was the amount I needed to do it right using one of the major photobook printers in the EU.

Sixty-nine people helped push the campaign over $4,000 in a few days, which was amazing!

But the campaign stalled after that. This made me feel a bit foolish, as we would have met and exceeded the funding goal had I chosen to use one of the Chinese manufacturers I got quotes from. Several Chinese quotes were under $4,000, including freight to the USA.

I learned a hard business lesson here. I also gained some insight into my “audience.” I’ve unpacked these topics here.

Anyway, I decided to publish The Hill of the Skull in black-and-white using print-on-demand services. The vision I had for the book remains unrealized, but the at least book is published. The book is available now from my shop and, if you must, from Amazon here.

Square Prints

I’ve also decided to offer collectable, square prints on my shop.

I’m selling individual prints (and discounted sets) from The Hill of the Skull and from my travels in Italy.

They also look spectacular framed and on the wall.

I got the idea to sell square prints from Magnum’s annual square prints sale. My square prints are printed using the same archival materials as Magnum’s, and they’re the same size/dimensions.

They also designed to be affordable, because affordable art is good art. Whereas Magnum charges $110 a print, I am charging a reasonable $30.²

Artifact International members get an additional 40% off prints on top of that already-low price. Buying from creators directly is one of the best ways to support independent creators.

Artifact International

Next year will see the official launch of ARTIFACT INTERNATIONAL, my Patreon-like membership program. I have mentioned ARTIFACT INTERNATIONAL here and there, but I held off on formally announcing it because I had planned on doing a proper launch during The Hill of the Skull’s crowdfunding campaign. You all know what happened with that.

I’ve “soft launched” it already, which means I’ve written about it and the program is live, but I haven’t made a big fuss about it. I’ve plugged it on posts here and there. I haven’t really launched it because I’ve felt shameful, scared, and weird asking for direct support like this. Yet, despite this, people have found and joined. If you are one of the members — THANK YOU.

January 2024 will see the official launch of the thing. It will be visibly integrated into my public, online work. It will feel shameful and weird, but it may create a path forward.

I’m aiming for the unrealistic goal of 50 subscribers in 2024, or about 4 per month.

YouTube?

This year’s surprise was YouTube.

In May 2023, when I posted my first “real” video, I had less than 250 subscribers. These 250 subscribers came over the course of a few years of posting Travel Writing World episodes to the platform. I didn’t put too much time or energy into posting podcasts on YouTube, and I forgot to post many episodes because of the extra work.

Now at the end of 2023, after having posted a few YouTubey³ videos to my channel, I now have a little over 800 subscribers. The “subscriber count” doesn’t really matter; I’m pointing this out to illustrate the platform’s power and potential. Namely, YouTube videos have more “reach” potential than Instagram photographs/video.

YouTube’s barriers to entry are far greater than other platforms. A competent video is more difficult to make than a podcast episode, a blog post, or some “content” for Instagram or TikTok. But that’s also its great virtue. Because it is more difficult, the competition is lower, engagement is stronger, and the potential for growth is bigger.

Travel Writing World, farewell?

Not to bury the lede too deeply, Travel Writing World is going on an indefinite hiatus. Nobody cares about the reasons why I’m pulling the plug, so what follows is for me and posterity.

My podcasting slowdown in 2023 was part of a trend that began the year before. In 2023, I published only 12 episodes of the podcast. Three of this year’s episodes were specifically related to my book The Hill of the Skull, which means nine were actual interviews. In each of the years before, that number was around 24. The current slowdown began in the last quarter of 2022, when I left on sabbatical and began focusing on my own work. When I came back from my sabbatical, I didn’t rush into to recording new episodes. Why? Partly because I was focusing on my own work; partly because I was beginning to feel like the podcast was pulling me into a direction I didn’t want to go.

I have always been clear with my intentions: I started the podcast to learn more about the genre and build a network. The only podcasters that were talking about travel writing back in 2019 were talking about travel blogging, or they were talking about travel journalism. While there is some overlap, my main interests were in books and literature. But as the podcast grew in popularity, it began to feel like a chore, as if I was an appendage of the marketing/influencer machine.

But the most important reason for putting Travel Writing World on hiatus is the time and mental energy associated with producing the podcast. It all takes too much time: episode prep (reading entire books, researching, scheduling), recording the interview (technical setup, reviewing notes), editing (cutting, splicing, mastering), getting the episode scheduled (writing show notes, uploading, prepping files, creating cover images), etc.

Working on the podcast means that I’m spending less time on my own work. It also means that I’m reading books that are unrelated to my main research interests. Maybe it isn’t a problem for you, but I find it near impossible to constantly switch from one frame of reference to another. It is an interrupter. And, for me, too much interruption is the death of creativity.

I suppose I could interview writers without having read their books (reading the books takes up most of the time), but I respect the listener too much. Podcast listeners have a glut of options. And it is an honor when someone gives their time and attention to my podcast instead of another podcast. For that reason, I couldn’t disrespect the listener by giving them poorly researched, half-assed episodes. It’s not that I think my show is anywhere near the top of well-researched, literary podcasts. But I didn’t build the show with winging it in mind; that’s not what listeners expect or deserve.

I also don’t consider myself a particularly good interviewer. I’m not a good conversationalist. I thought the podcast would help me improve that aspect of myself, but it hasn’t. I had toyed with the idea of bringing on a co-host, but who? How?

Anyway, I think it is time to pull the plug, to move on.

What will become of the website and the podcast?

The website will continue to exist, its episodes available for as long as I am alive and able to pay the bill. And, while I am pulling the plug, I may stick it back into the outlet from time to time to make sure everything still works. But no promises.

That being said, I’m not sure I’m done with audio.

A new podcast?

I am toying with the idea of a new podcast, one that hinges on my creative journey. As such, it will take a lot less time and energy. It will feel (and perhaps look) a lot different than Travel Writing World. It will be more personal, more self-indulgent. It will be a creative journal of sorts. I will probably chat with other people, and about other people’s work, but it will have a completely different vibe than Travel Writing World.

If I go through with it, it will be tied to a new category on my website called “Creator’s Log,” which is just a place where I write about my week’s creative efforts. Its not for anyone else, really. It is just a place where I work with the garage door open, so to speak. It is a record I am writing for myself, and for anyone else who may be going through a similar creative journey. Weirdos like me can subscribe to my Creative Log via RSS or email.

Newsletters

Speaking of email, let’s talk about my newsletters.

As you may know, I have a two main newsletters: Genius Loci and Drifting. Newsletter growth has been slow, but steady. But holy cow! There are around 1900 folks out there in the world who subscribe to one of my newsletters! I know this is small change for some, but this number humbles me.

Many of these sign-ups are driven by the free PDF I offer on the Travel Writing World website. Reader magnets, as these things are sometimes called,⁴ help increase email sign-ups. A newsletter itself can be an end product, but sign-ups multiply when you sweeten the pot with something readers cannot get elsewhere like a free ebook, PDF, or a thingamajig.

My newsletters continue to evolve, and their formats will change slightly in 2024.

Genius Loci will still include a round-up of interesting links from around the interwebs. But the links will be fewer in number, while the conversation around them will dive deeper.

Drifting will still have permission to be experimental (i.e.: whatever I want it to be, weird). But it will lean more heavily into “literal and literary wandering,” with deeper discussions of books and ideas.

If you’re reading to this and you’re not subscribed to them, check out Genius Loci and Drifting.

In one of his blog posts from January 2023, Rolf Potts discussed weening himself off social media and his desire to break the cycle of “continuous partial attention” (CPA). Linda Stone, who coined the phrase, noted that CPA is different from multitasking in that it is linked to “a desire to be a live node on the network.” Our continual checking-in — our social-media fomo; our scrolling, scanning, engaging — is an unproductive act that (in addition to its many other issues) kills creativity and our connection with our real lives.

With that being said, I’m following in Rolf’s footsteps. I’m removing all social media apps from my phone. I’ll still keep my accounts, and post on them from time to time through my computer. For example, my social media engagement on Threads may look something like: sharing URLs to my work, sharing and cross-promoting my friends’ work, and posting interesting quotes. But the apps are off my phone, once and for all. This is done with the intention of creating more of the work I want to create, and being more present the life I want to live.

An unhappy return

After a rewarding sabbatical in the autumn of 2022, I returned to full-time teaching in January. Exactly a year ago, just before I returned to the classroom, I wrote

(At my institution), in what is perhaps a tacit acknowledgment of how overworked we all are, sabbaticals are for “rest” and “rejuvenation." They are supposed to get professors excited to return to the classroom, but I fear it has had the opposite effect. I’ve realized how important and integral creative work, research, and writing is to me. I’ve realized that this is the life I want to live; this is the life I cannot live without.

My return to the classroom in January has reaffirmed this sentiment. I feel an urgency to focus on my own work. This urgency has been aggravated by an acute sense of diminishing time/energy that comes with… day jobs? life? aging?

As Karl Ove Knausgaard writes in the first book of My Struggle

Time is slipping away from me, running through my fingers like sand while I… do what?

The answer: anything but the work he craves and feels called to do.

My current situation — teaching at an increasingly bureaucratic community college — is not conducive to the life I crave to live, or with my creative goals. It is quite different than the life I thought I was creating for myself. It is not that I don’t like teaching. I like to help others achieve their dreams, but not at the expense of my own.

Teaching has never been my calling; it has never been my vocation. I always saw it as a means to an end, as a way to live a creative life. It puts food on my table, but it doesn’t nourish my soul. If teaching at a community college is a means to an end, it is a dead end: revolving committees, a deluge of pointless emails and meetings, middle managers justifying their jobs by inventing unnecessary busywork, no time to live your life. The actual teaching has bright spots, but they’re about as bright and as numerous as the stars over Times Square — you know there out there, somewhere, but you rarely see them.

Something has got to give.

This problem is one economic in nature. My current economic realities — a family, a mortgage — complicate my next move. Just ripping off the bandage? I’ve thought about it. But it isn’t sensible. In a word, I’m stuck.

How does one redesign a life? How does one jump out of a speeding car? How does one mitigate hell’s flames? How does one redefine our relationship with the inevitable event — death? These are the same questions. These are the questions I’ve been busy with this past year.

Artificial intelligence

In one of my classes last semester, at least half of my students used artificial intelligence to generate their term papers. I’ll save my rant on artificial intelligence in higher education for another time and place. But allow me to say some words on artificial intelligence’s potential impact on culture.

As I wrote in an unpublished essay that draws parallels between photography’s relationship to painting and AI’s relationship to writing:

Photography didn’t kill art. It helped revolutionize it. In other words, new technologies don’t necessarily destroy established industries. But that’s not to say that they don’t change them.

The rise of photography was an inflection point in the history of art, and it coincided with (caused?) the explosion of artistic abstraction and experimentation we now call modernism. The takeaway is that new technologies help birth new formal approaches to old, established modes of creativity.

How might artificial intelligence give rise to novel formal approaches?

It remains to be seen. But my hunch is that the creative class will take a tighter turn toward the human, the subjective, the personal, the experiential, the real, the flawed, the abstract, the interstitial, the obscure, the difficult, the slow, the poetic. The creative avant-garde will find and exploit new modes of expression as a means of resistance. With AI, what is objective will become fast and easy, what is fast and easy will become perfect, and what is perfect will become devalued and cheap. The coming creative renaissance might be anything but easy, perfect, and cheap.

Principles for 2024

Create a lot more, consume a lot less. Your own creative work should take precedence over that of others. If it comes at the cost of your own creativity, stop reviewing and consuming the work of others. Question and reconsider everything unnecessary that stands between you and your work.

Double down on project-based creativity and start working on projects… even if you don’t finish them. Create artifacts.

Create a little bit, every single day. A challenge: write at least 200 words, and make at least one photograph each day.

Only share occasional notes, external links to your work, and the work of others on social media. Otherwise, stay off social media.

When you share, share more of yourself, more of your personality, more of your humanity, more of your work. Perfection is not a virtue.

Books, articles, essays, newsletters, etc. ↩︎
I’m not a famous Magnum photographer. ↩︎
YouTube is a genre of videos as much a platform. ↩︎
Other terms include ethical bribes, freebies, lead magnets, and sign-up offers. ↩︎

Thank you for reading my work via RSS!

My Website | Support My Work | Bluesky

[Fieldnotes] An Unsuccessful Kickstarter Campaign

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 20:00:00 -0500

In October 2023, I ran a Kickstarter campaign for my book The Hill of the Skull. The campaign was unsuccessful. Below are some thoughts.

Some raw numbers

The funding goal: $12,000 USD
Campaign length: 32 days
Dates: 24 September - 26 October 2023
Number of backers: 69
Total amount pledged: $4,388
Percentage of goal funded: 36%
Number of project “followers” and conversion rate: 95 (26%)
Number (and percentage) of backers who didn’t “follow” the project: 44 (64%)

Context

I ran a Kickstarter campaign in October 2023 to fund a special edition of my book The Hill of the Skull. I call the book a “photobook memoir” for two reasons: firstly, because it has a 7,000-word memoir and around 50 photos; and secondly, because I didn’t know what else to call it. The book also has an afterword by author Pico Iyer and a transcribed dialogue I had with photographer Alys Tomlinson.

The book is not a “photobook” in the conventional sense of the term: an artist book driven by a “high concept” that challenges viewers to engage with ideas beyond the surface level aesthetics of the work. THOTS stands firmly and proudly in the land of the real, the literal, the documentary.

The vision

I wanted to produce a high-quality book, one wrapped in linen cloth and offset printed. It was going to have a screen-printed cover, beautiful endbands, and an uncoated art paper stock. I wanted the container to be as beautiful as the contents. I wanted to avoid print-on-demand services, which excel in delivering trade paperbacks but leave much to be desired when it comes to producing high-quality books.

My vision would come at a premium.

I contacted art book and photobook manufacturers around the globe. I got quotes and samples from some of the major manufacturers in the United States, Europe, and Asia (in ascending order of cost). American quotes were far too high to even entertain. European quotes came in at around $11,000 USD. Asian quotes — particularly the Chinese quotes — came in at under $4,000 USD. These quotes included delivery fees. Book import fees into the USA are zero.

Asian printers were eager for the business. They happily sent photos and samples. However, communication wasn’t as good as I hoped. Neither was their effort to help me find a paper stock I was happy with. I felt as if they were pushing a particular kind of paper stock on me, unwilling to even try to help me get what I wanted. The time delay (9 am in Florida was 10 pm in China) meant that communications were also slow.

European printers communicated better. They were also more accommodating. Some sent samples. A few didn’t need to; I actually own books that some of the manufacturers had produced. However, European printers were a lot more expensive. But it was the right choice. Despite their high price, the communications, quality guarantee, and some ethical considerations (labor, politics, etc.) made choosing a European printer the right choice.

Or so I thought.

The campaign

I ran the campaign in the fall, from 24 September to 26 October 2023. I wanted to start/end the campaign on these dates because some online Kickstarter guru had mentioned that these days of the week are the best days to start and end campaigns on. I wanted to stack the deck in my favor.

The rewards

I offered the following rewards at the following price points.

Audiobook - $10
Ebook and Audiobook - $15
Paperback Book - $25
Hardcover Book Plus Above - $50
Hardcover Book - $60
Hardcover Book + Print - $150
Collector’s Edition + Print - $350

The audiobook/ebook/paperback versions were late additions. I hadn’t thought about offering these, but Joanna Penn recommended that I add them to the campaign because more options/price-points are the better for customers. Besides, I already had done most of the work, and converting the hardcover into paperback and ebook versions wouldn’t be too difficult. Plus, recording the audiobook version would be worth it if the campaign was successful. I feared that these options would cannibalize support from the hardcover book, but Joanna assuaged my fears.

Shipping

One of Kickstarter’s flaws is that shipping costs are factored into campaign goals. If an item sells for $40 and shipping is $15, the pledge registers $55 towards the total campaign goal instead of just $40. This means that creators need to include shipping costs in their campaign goal and campaign math, or they may be out of pocket. Calculations gets more complicated when adding different physical products at different price-points and shipping rates (shipping doesn’t relate to digital products, obviously).

Worse still, shipping costs need to be inflated by ~10% because Kickstarter takes a ~10% cut off the top of the total pledged amount if a campaign is successful.

My solution to the shipping problem was to charge shipping after the campaign. I decided to do this because I didn’t want backers to pay inflated shipping costs, and the inclusion of shipping wouldn’t force me to increase my campaign goal even higher.

I tried to be forthcoming about potential shipping costs, offering some estimates at current rates. I received only one email from a confused backer complaining about the way I was doing shipping. One angry complaint from someone who didn’t even back the project suggests my comms weren’t unclear.

But I’ll admit that charging shipping after the fact is not ideal, and it is far less complicated to have just one transaction bound within Kickstarter.

Marketing

My marketing campaign involved leveraging

My podcast, Travel Writing World, for the initial announcements
My email lists
OPP (other people’s platforms) like podcasts, blogs, etc.
Social media outreach

I chose to target travel- and photography-related podcasts. I also pitched a few podcaster friends, most of whom came through. Most of the podcasters I emailed said that it was too short of a notice (four to six weeks in advance).

My marketing calendar during the campaign looked something like this:

Travel Writing World podcast announcement: 25 September 2023
The Creative Penn podcast interview: 25 September 2023
Take a Wander with Shebs YouTube interview: 25 September 2023
Personal Landscapes podcast interview: 26 September 2023
Mailing-list email announcements: 26 September 2023
Genius Loci email newsletter: 1 October 2023
YouTube livestream: 1 October 2023
Travel Writing World rebroadcast of the Personal Landscapes interview: 11 October 2023
2-weeks left email via Kickstarter: 12 October 2023

The results

The campaign failed.

Rewards

Based on the data, most people opted to get the main hardcover reward. The other rewards were nowhere near as popular.

Below is a graph, seemingly flicking me off, representing the reward distribution. The chart represents total number of backers for each reward option.

From left to right, the bars represent the following rewards and price points (and the total number of backers):

No Reward Backer - $28 average (6)
Audiobook - $10 (2)
Ebook and Audiobook - $15 (4)
Paperback Book - $25 (5)
Hardcover Book Plus Above - $50 (44)
Hardcover Book - $60 (4)
Hardcover Book + Print - $150 (3)
Collector’s Edition + Print - $350 (1)

The first column represents the number of backers who supported without a reward. The next two columns represent the audiobook and ebook rewards, respectively, with 6 backers combined and 2% of the total amount pledged. These first three columns amount to around 6% of the total pledge amount. Interestingly, more money was raised from the same number of people who didn’t want a reward (first column) than from those who chose the audio/ebook options.

The fourth column represents the number of backers who chose the black-and-white paperback version of the book with 5 backers and $125 total.

The tallest column, and the one immediately to its right, represent the hardcover book at different price points ($50 and $60, respectively). Combined, they account for 48 backers (70% of total number of backers) and nearly 60% of the total amount pledged ($2,520).

Surprisingly, the last two columns show that few people backed the print bundle and the collector’s edition (4 backers or 7% of the total), but the high price points made them a respectable percentage of the total pledged amount (15%).

The hardcover book was the star of the show. It was the reason I was raising funds. The overwhelming concentration of hardcover support suggests that my fears were wrong: backers were not distracted by the other, cheaper audiobook, ebook, and paperback options.

However, if we assume the proportion of backers would have remained the same across all rewards in a successful campaign, the audiobook/ebook/paperback options might have been distractions for me after the campaign. Why? Because I would have been beholden to producing these versions alongside the hardcover book for a relatively small number of backers and percentage of the total. The audiobook specifically would have been a high effort, low reward situation.

Why did the campaign fail?

An unwise decision choosing a bookmaker
Poor marketing efforts
An overestimation of my reach and “audience,” respective of the high funding goal

An unwise decision

I learned a valuable business lesson.

I got quotes from a variety of bookmakers around the world. In every instance, of course, Chinese bookmakers supplied production and shipping quotes 3 to 4x lower than the American or European bookmakers.

The frustrating part of the failed campaign is knowing that had I chosen my preferred Chinese bookmaker, $4,388 would have been enough to fund the book. Choosing the European bookmaker was the primary reason the beautiful, hardcover book is not in the hands of backers.

A civilian friend of mine (someone who isn’t really interested in books, photobooks, etc.) came over and looked at one of the Chinese books. He looked at me as if I were crazy when I spoke about its paper stock, binding, etc. He couldn’t tell the different, and most people probably can’t (or don’t care to) either.

I’d like to believe that ethics and business can mix well, but I’m 0 for 1 in my track record when it comes to this.

The takeaway: unless you’re making your ethical considerations a core part of your project and your marketing campaign, making business decisions on ethical considerations is not always the smart move when your goals is to produce and sell a thing. Base business decisions on business matters. Reread Adam Smith.

Poor marketing

A Kickstarter campaign is nothing without marketing. Its success is determined by how successful its marketing campaign is. Marketing and outreach get your Kickstarter campaign in front of the eyes of backers. The success or failure of a Kickstarter campaign often has less to do with the product itself than it does with a host of indirect factors like marketing, promotion, audience size, etc.

The more time you have to market your Kickstarter campaign, the better. People say that marketing a campaign takes many months. I’m more comfortable saying that marketing a Kickstarter campaign from scratch could take at least a year, preferably more. The more time you have to build trust, the better.

I started reaching out to podcasters for coverage about a month and a half in advance. For most of the shows I contacted, this was not enough time. As a podcaster myself, I should have known better. I was floundering in insecurity during those months, scared to send emails out, feeling like an imposter or a fraud, feeling gross sending marketing emails out, etc. My loss.

I also should have cast a wider net. I should have reached out to different types of podcasts, even if the relation was tenuous. I should have pushed harder.

I also should have created a press release PDF and it out to media websites, bloggers, and press contacts.

More marketing should have gone into the “dead zone,” which you can clearly see in the image below.

All of these marketing/outreach emails should start at least 6 months before the launch date, with monthly follow-ups thereafter.

Lastly, I should have had more touch points on my own platforms in the months before a launch. I should have spoken more openly about the project on Travel Writing World, which may have drummed up more anticipation and interest.

Overestimated my reach and audience

Simply put, I overestimated my reach and my “audience.”

The Travel Writing World podcast has gotten nearly 100k downloads since its inception 4 years ago. I hoped this would translate into Kickstarter support, but something went wrong. Perhaps it was alchemical thinking to believe that download numbers could mean something else.

One of my blunders, I think, has been not talking more openly about myself and my projects on my podcast. It has always been about the guest, and rightly so. But I should have taken more liberties when the opportunity presented itself to speak about myself and my work. There are other tactics which I could have employed, such as doing more personal updates in episode introductions. I needed to lower my walls, let audiences get to know me and my work better.

Additional takeaways

Email marketing works

If you have an engaged audience, email might be the best way to move the needle. Ultimately, my audience was not big enough to support a $12,000 launch. But I felt the power of email marketing.

Two emails alone accounted for 40% of the total pledged amount. That’s real power. And an overwhelming majority of backers and pledges came directly from my own emails and marketing efforts, as tracked by tracking/referral URLs.

Kickstarter’s discovery algorithm

You should not depend on Kickstarter’s algorithm to give a significant boost to your campaign. I can account for 6 pledges totaling $300 coming from Kickstarter’s discovery engine. This was despite my project being recognized by Kickstarter as a “Project We Love.” The rest of the total came directly from my own marketing efforts (i.e.: social media posts, newsletters, emails) and actions. I am including here Kickstarter’s emails to those who requested to be notified of the project’s launch as “my own marketing efforts” because, though Kickstarter emailed those backers, I was the one who initiated those backers and (likely) sent them there in the first place.

Reframing failure

Creative acts or works of art cannot be failures. I’m not sure they can be successes either. They just are. But the expectations we attach to our creative output can be understood in terms of success and failure. In other words, works of art cannot be successes or failures in and of themselves; what can be failures or successes are the aspirations we attach to works of art.

Letting go of these artistic aspirations and emotions is key, I think, for artists.

It is tough to fail, especially in such a public way. Especially when you make a big deal about your own work. But those who don’t fail probably aren’t trying hard enough. That’s what I tell myself, at least.

All is not lost

Besides, there is no “loss” in creative work.

This is especially true when the creative work is already finished. I completed my book before the campaign launched. It is done. It exists with or without Kickstarter, and that is wonderful.

I originally didn’t want to go down the print-on-demand route, but I had no choice in the matter if I wanted to see the book published.

I’d rather have an imperfect version of the book out in the world than… what’s the alternative? Having nothing tangible to show for the project I’ve spent a year working on? No thanks.

The book is now available on my shop and all the online retailers.

Sure, the book isn’t as fancy as I wanted it to be. It isn’t as big, as colorful, or as premium as I had envisioned. But the book’s content exists independently of its container. The book’s story is independent of its style.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading.

And please consider supporting my work through my Patreon-clone ARTIFACT INTERNATIONAL.

Thank you for reading my work via RSS!

My Website | Support My Work | Bluesky

[Fieldnotes] Mastering Field Notes

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 16:00:00 -0400

I’m writing about field notes today: What are they? And why do we take them?

I will cover the tools of the trade, what to document in field notes, and my techniques on streamlining the note-taking process to capture tons of valuable information using my Apple Notes shortcut.

Here is a video of me discussing everything I’ve written below:

What are field notes?

Field notes are written or recorded observations collected by writers, researchers, or anyone else doing fieldwork like anthropologists, ecologists, geologists, ethnographers, and journalists. Think of them as data — qualitative data.

Field notes can be written descriptions, sketches, photographs, audio recordings, or anything else that helps us document and preserve information.

They are basically the raw data and information we collect to help us analyze, interpret, and write.

Tools and gear

Everyone is different. You don’t need all the tools and tech that I use. Your use case and situation might be different.

This is what I use:

A smartphone with a Notes App and a Voice Memo App
A small Field Notes Brand notebook for quick, on-the-fly notes
A Leuchtturm1917 notebook for longhand notes and unpacking ideas at the end of each day
An audio recorder or dictaphone (I use a dedicated recorder, but your smartphone could work)
A camera (again, I use a dedicated digital camera, but your smartphone might work)
And finally a pencil or pen that feel good in my hand

I can fit all of these things in my small messenger bag, with room to spare for other things like a powerbank and a water bottle.

What to document in a field note

What you document in a field note depends on what you’re working on, but here are some considerations.

Always capture specific location data and date/time information. Where are you exactly? What day and time is it? What is the weather like? Here is my free Apple Shortcut for the Notes App that will help you capture all of this with the press of a button.
Describe what you’re experiencing in a specific and factual way. What do you see? What do you hear? What do you smell? What’s around you. Try to be as objective, factual, specific, and detailed as possible.
Always be descriptive and specific. Describe specific information. Show, don’t tell. For example, don’t tell us that something is cozy, but show us it is cozy by describing specific details that contribute to coziness.
If your work involves people, describe what they are doing and saying in a specific and factual way. Take down names, verbatim quotes, and behavioral quirks. Try to document as objectively as possible.
Describe your feelings. What does it feel like to be in a place? Do you feel happiness? Fear? Anger? Peace? What are your reflections, impressions, speculations, and hunches? This is the subjective stuff. And it is important.
Record audio of ambient noise and interviews with permission.

When do I take field notes?

I’m always taking notes and journaling, but I’m not always taking field notes. Which is to say, I see a field note as a specific type of note, and an essential part of my project-based creative process.

Field notes are not part of my daily note-taking or journaling practice.

I usually get into “field-note mode” when I am working on major creative projects or assignments. When I’m working on research projects or when I’m off on my solo travels, I take field notes. About the things I’m experiencing, the things people say, and my reflections and impressions.

Why do I take field notes?

I see field notes as an essential part of my work. They help me work. They are the work. They’re a major part of the creative process.

The way that I take field notes gives me a massive body of information to work with. When I come home from working on a project, I have tens of thousands of words of notes. I have audio documents. I have photographic evidence. I have this massive body of data to work with and use.

Field notes are the unpolished gemstones, the raw material that will later get shaped into a final form.

I have a bad memory, and field notes also help me remember details. This helps me with accuracy — it helps me approach a level of truth and honesty in my work.

So, for me, my note-taking method is as much a productivity hack as it is a memory aid.

It is about creating a record of the world and an artifact of my experience in it.

For me, taking notes and staying present are synonymous. It is about observation, and acknowledging what I’m actually seeing and experiencing. And the way I do this is embedded in my process, which I’ll discuss now.

My field note method

This is my method of taking a metric shit ton of high-quality notes.

I take notes both digitally and on paper, but at different stages. Let me explain.

When I do fieldwork, I notice that I draw a lot of attention on myself when I take notes in my small notebook. People get curious and ask quesions like What are you writing? Are you a journalist? But thumbing or talking into a phone doesn’t draw any attention. And when I realized that I could take thousands of words of notes by talking my notes into my smartphone, I was sold on dictation.

So, I made a Shortcut — a kind of program for my iPhone.

When I tap on my Shortcut button on my iPhone, it automatically creates a new note, opens it up, and pastes specific gps location data into the note. Then, it places the cursor below the data, and I’m ready to either type my notes or — better yet — talk them.

Voice-to-text has been a game changer for me. I can speak faster than I can type. And speaking frees my hands and my eyes to do other things. I can look around and speak about what I’m observing. It even works with the microphones in earbuds and airpods — people just think you’re talking to someone on the phone.

Sometimes, I take a voice memo if there is some sound I want to preserve. And I have a shortcut for that too. When it tap it, It creates a new voice memo With the date, time, and location data in its title and begins recording.

Anyway, at night, I clean up my digital notes, unpack them, and reflect on them in my big notebook. Slowly in longhand, I discuss in narrative form the key stories and points from the day into my physical notebook.

This is critical. I make sure to do some longhand unpacking, reflecting, and commenting at the end of each and every day.

My Apple Shortcut

Here is the download link for my Apple Shortcut.

If you found this shortcut useful or valuable, please consider supporting my work through my membership program ARTIFACT INT’L or by purchasing a print or book from my shop.

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[Fieldnotes] Creative Projects as Systems

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 22:00:00 -0400

To be a successful creator, you don’t need to wait for inspiration to strike. You don’t need to wait for the muse or to wait for an original idea. You don’t need “hacks” or to follow the teachings of the latest productivity guru. To be the kind of writer, photographer, musician, artist, or creator who builds a body of work, you only need one thing: a creative project.

A creative project is an idea, a proposal to engage in some hypothetical and unrealized creative undertaking. It usually has the goal of creating some large thing or some product.

Creative projects are bigger than small creative units or singular works, but they don’t need to be lofty. Creative projects are not songs, but albums. They’re not paintings, but a series of them. They’re not a short story, but a collection. They’re not a photograph, but a photobook. A magical thing happens when you have a creative project like this: you build a body of work.

Creative projects are creative systems.

Creativity and systems

A system can be understood in several ways. A system might be an assemblage of things, like an engine, united and working towards some common goal. A system might also be a framework for getting things done. At the core of our understanding of systems (good ones, for there are bad systems too) is their creative potential. Systems help us get things done, and in doing that, they create the potential for us to do more things.

Good systems are inherently creative. Good systems create time by saving time. And they create the potential for us to do more work by saving us from having to do work.¹

But if good systems are inherently creative, creativity is not inherently systematic.

An artist’s ability to doodle something beautiful while chatting on the telephone is creative, but it is not by its nature systematic. While creative play (exploration, experimenting) and creative exercise (scales, sketching, studies, daily creative habits) are essential parts of the creative process, and can lead to serious creative output and aid in the development of creative skill, they are not necessarily done with a project in mind and therefore aren’t considered systems per se.

Creative projects as systems

Here’s how a creative project works as a creative system.

When we endeavor to work on some creative project — when we commit to working on one — it becomes a framework. The project, as a framework, guides us and helps us approach our work. It imposes its own set of limitations, and asks us to stay within bounds. It lays a foundation and asks us to build upon that foundation. The idea here is that constraints can breed creativity.

“The enemy of art,” Orson Welles is purported to have said, “is the absence of limitation.” Or, as Bernard Mandeville wrote in his 1729 The Fable of the Bees, constraints can be fruitful:

Do we not owe the Growth of Wine
To the dry shabby crooked Vine?
Which, while its Shoots neglected stood,
Chok’d other Plants, and ran to Wood;
But blest us with its noble Fruit,
As soon as it was ty’d and cut:
So Vice is beneficial found,
When it’s by Justice lopt and bound.

Projects aren’t meant to smother creativity with rigid regulations and firm restrictions. Good projects help give creativity a sense of focus in the same way a well-fashioned writing prompt is often better than the blank page.

Creative projects help with productivity and output.

They help us complete individual creative works. If your aim is to write a song, you might write one song. But if your aim is to write an album, you might write many more. Having a creative project forces us to think big and create more.

If projects create frameworks, they might also create a sense of purpose, motivation, and drive.

Creative projects are natural, organic creative systems. They need no “optimization.” They cannot be “leveraged,” as they are their own fulcrums. They cannot be “hacked,” as there isn’t just one operating system but an infinitude of them.

Project-based creativity is an approach rooted in research.

Researchers have remarked on the benefits of project-based learning. They’ve found that we learn better and faster when we actively work on a project. Sitting passively, waiting to be inspired by the sage on the stage, taking notes, and memorizing facts is not an effective way to learn. Instead, actively working towards the completion of some project is a better way. Learning happens best through active and creative projects.

The magic is in the project.

The takeaway: creative projects are productivity systems. Instead of completing singular creative works, you can complete bodies of work with the help of creative projects.

Footnotes

“Systems create freedom” I heard someone once say. I’m not sure that’s true. In giving us more time and work potential, a system can create freedom, but it is not a foregone conclusion. For what we do with our newfound time and energy can liberate or enslave us. ↩︎

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[Fieldnotes] Starting a Creator’s Log: Some Thoughts

Sun, 10 Sep 2023 23:00:00 -0400

I am starting to “work with the garage door open.”

Robin Sloan coined the phrase in an article discussing/dreaming up new ways of working, networking, publishing, creating, and connecting online. These “new ways of relating” are less reliant on the social networks we’ve become accustomed to over the last decade or two.

About working with the garage door open, Sloan wrote:

This isn’t a time for “products”, or product launches. It’s not a time to toil in secret for a year and then reveal what you’d made with a shiny landing page.

Rather, I believe it’s a time to explain as you go. Our “work”, in an important sense, is to get into each other’s heads; to blast out cosmic rays that might give rise, in other minds, to new ideas.

The central idea here is nothing new. In fact, it might be one of the most important amendments added to the constitution of OnlineMarketingLand in the last decade. This idea is especially prevalent in conversations about audience building and social media networks.

For example, Pat Flynn talks about “opening the factory doors” in his book Superfans. He writes:

If possible, try to open your doors related to something trackable each month! This will keep your audience hooked and excited to see how things progress over time. Perhaps it’s miles ran, or carbon emissions avoided, or how much debt paid off. These types of numbers, especially when related to your business, are inspiring and definitely make people feel special for knowing insider info

This is, of course, the central idea in Austin Kleon’s book Show Your Work. Kleon encourages creatives to be open about the creative process. He wants us to document our creative journeys, showing all the stages from ideation to delivery. He wants us to show what’s behind the scenes. He wants us to open the garage door.

But Robin Sloan’s approach isn’t necessarily about building audiences per se, but about the exchange of ideas, networking, and creativity. And it comes at time when we’re growing more disillusioned with social media (and with the media more generally).

The social media landscape in 2023 is a bit like a war zone. It is fragmented, cluttered, and in disarray. And now social media refugees are finding asylum in what was once considered enemy territory. All the more reason to think about new ways of relating that are less reliant on pre-established social media networks.

Enter THE CREATOR’S LOG.

The creator’s log, defined

A creator’s log is not unlike a captain’s log. It is a journal used by artists, writers, programmers, or anyone else involved in the creation of things to document and track their creative journeys.

A creator’s log is a dedicated space for us to record our creative process, projects, and experiences.

In our creator’s logs, we can (and should) document our

Creative Progress: Let’s track our daily, weekly, or project-specific progress. Let’s include details like the number of words written, hours spent on a project, or the completion of specific creative tasks.
Ideas and Inspiration: Let’s jot down ideas, inspirations, and insights that come to us. These can be related to ongoing projects or new concepts, outlines, and sketches for future work.
Project Updates: Let’s provide updates on ongoing creative projects and project-based work. These can describe what has been accomplished, any challenges faced, and plans for the next steps.
Reflection and Assessment: Let’s use our logs to reflect on our work openly, to discuss what worked well and what didn’t.
A Creative Commonplace Book: Let’s write down quotes, references, or resources that inspire us and/or inform our work.
Creative Goals: Let’s discuss our short-term and long-term creative goals and track our progress towards achieving them.
Personal Insights: Let’s use this space to share thoughts, feelings, and personal insights related to our creative journeys.
Creative To-Do Lists: Let’s list and tick-off our creative to-dos.

“Wait a minute,” you might say. “This sounds awfully like a blog.”

Indeed. A blog is one medium through which we can record and document our creative process. But with a blog, anything goes. I want a form that is specific for creatives. I want a messier, scrappier place whose focus is not the individual blogger but the creative work and the creative process itself. I want a place where unfinished symphonies live and dried paint happily clings to floors and clothes. A messy garage? A meticulous one? Whatever you want. This is what a creator’s log is all about.

The creator’s log is a self-referential construct; it is a creative space that acknowledges the power of creative spaces. It is creativity that acknowledges itself.

My creative log

For me, “working with the garage door open” means documenting the creative process in such a way that anyone can walk by and glance at my work. Boosting the signal on social media is fine, so long as the “garage” that you principally work in is your own.

To this end, I’m starting a new area on my website called Creator’s Log. My clog (😬) will chronicle my creative journey. Its purpose is to document my progress, observations, ideas and inspirations, reflections, and insights that occur along the way. You’re welcome to stop by and see what I’m working on.

Sometimes I’ll be tinkering, sometimes I’ll be doing project-based work, and sometimes I’ll be spinning my wheels. Sometimes there will be a flurry of activity, and sometimes periods of silence. But in all instances, you’re invited to look over my shoulder, ask questions, advise me on a better way of doing things, or just snoop around.

I’ll be the first to admit that few people might find this type of artifact interesting. There are certainly better ways to build audiences. But this is not about building audiences. It is about building networks and bodies of work.

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[Fieldnotes] Sequencing a Photobook or a Photo Zine

Wed, 03 May 2023 07:00:00 -0400

Have you ever thought about what goes into sequencing a photobook or a zine?

As some of you know, I’m in the process of making my own photobook The Hill of the Skull.

I’m no expert on photo book sequencing, but I have been thinking about it for the last several months and I would like to share with you some points that I’ve learned along the way.

I hope it will help make the process for you easier than it was for me.

In this post, you will learn five, important tips or approaches to sequencing your own photo book.

This is not an exhaustive or a definitive list, just some points to consider as you embark on your journey.

I’ve recorded this post as a video, feel free to watch it below.

What is sequencing? And why is it important?

Sequencing is the art of arranging a number of photographs in a particular order.

Photo sequencing is essential in photobooks and photo zines, which lend themselves to longform content.

When you’re dealing with many photographs for a book or a zine, arranging them in an interesting way is a creative act.

And when we deal with a number of images, we can no longer expect just one image to hold our interest. Now we have to contend with twenty, forty, eighty images to grab and hold our attention.

In my opinion, some thought needs to go into sequencing images. A haphazard arrangement risks your readers losing interest.

But a good sequence can creative a narrative, build tension, or present interesting juxtopositions and contrasts.

I will assume that you’ve already selected your images, that you’ve already selected your shortlist, which is another problem altogether.

Think about the why

I wanted to start with the most important consideration.

And this is to think about your “why.” The why rules the roost. This is the big picture question. This is your north star.

You’ll want to ask yourself: What is the point of this book or zine? What is it trying to communicate? What do I want this book or zine to achieve? What message or story do I want it to tell? What do you want your readers to get from your images? How do you want them to feel?

Think about it. Write it down. Articulate it.

If you have a clear sense of the why, it will be your north star, illuminating your path and guiding you to where you need to be.

Having a clear sense of purpose helps you present and sequence your photos.

Think about narrative

But thinking about the “why” is conceptual. And I want to give you a few practical approaches.

One such approach involves narrative. This is storytelling.

Can you arrange your images in such a way that a narrative, or a story gets told? It can be a simple, chronological narrative like a photo essay, or a photo story. This happens, then that.

This is a fine way to arrange images, in terms of documentation and conveying information. But narrative doesn’t need to be straightforward or chronological, right? There are many ways to tell a story.

Are there groups of images that are an emotional climax? Are there images that build up to that point? Are there images that create conflict? Tension? Resolution?

Think about form

Another approach involves form.

Narrative and storytelling, as I just alluded to, often involve content - the plot - the action - the subject. Here, you let what is being represented in your images (the content, the subject) guide the narrative.

But in an approach that involves form, you let how something is represented guide the sequence.

In other words, how can the formal characteristics of your photos help you arrange them?

Are there important colors or patterns that can help you group and string your images together? Are there striking formal similarities or contrasts that pair or string together nicely? Any similar or contrasting shapes or lines? What about tonality, light, perspective, composition?

Sequencing a photobook or a zine with formal qualities in mind can be an interesting approach.

Make work prints

Making work prints will help you sequence and arrange your photos.

Once you’ve selected your shortlist of images, I recommend that you print them out. They need not be big. They can be the size of an index card. Or bigger, like standard 4x6 photo prints.

The point is to have cheap physical prints that you can tape to your wall or arrange them out on the floor.

This helps you move the photos around into groups according to form or subject, and easily rearrange their order. This also helps you get away from the computer and see relationships between the images, as a continuous whole.

In The Hill of the Skull — the book I’m finishing now - I used a putty to affix the work prints to my wall. I looked at them every day, studied them, rearranged them. It was helpful for me.

Some people put their work prints on tables and on floors, and others like them on walls. But if you can’t print them out, you can use programs like Figma to rearrange your images on a virtual whiteboard.

Consult the living

Once you have a working draft of your sequence, it is important to consult the living. What I mean is, ask other people for advice.

You can ask friends, people who aren’t experts, and ask them their opinions about the set. Sometimes this yields valuable information — are they confused? do they immediately get it? Maybe they’re not your audience, but sometimes this perspective is helpful.

You can also ask photographers and experts, people who regularly look closely at images. This information is valuable.

Ask for constructive feedback. Don’t take it personally. It is sometimes difficult to hear feedback and our work, but it is an important process in growth.

Consult the dead

The second point here is to consult the dead. What I mean is, take a close look at other photo books and zines.

Of course, the photographers of the books don’t need to be dead.

The point is to study other photography books.

Study them for not what is being represented, but how everything is represented. Study them for how the images string along, how the images are grouped together.

In most cases, a lot of time and thought goes into the sequencing of images. More often than not, photographs aren’t just randomly thrown together.

Use other people’s work as sources of inspiration. Consult them as if they’re professors teaching you how things are done. They’re you’re archetypes.

Don’t rush the process

Lastly, and this is a bonus tip here, don’t rush the process.

Sequencing and arranging is not a quick process. Take your time.

Sometimes it takes a while to see connections. Sometimes it takes a while to see patterns and relationships. Sometimes it takes a while for everything to come into focus.

Give yourself some time and space to treat your images thoughtfully and sincerely, and good things will happen. Trust me.

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[Fieldnotes] The Best Fujifilm Cameras for Travel [2023]

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 01:00:00 -0500

Fujifilm make some of the best mirrorless cameras for travel. The Fujifilm X-Series cameras have a cult-like following and have earned their reputation among traveling photographers for being compact, lightweight, and fun-to-use alternatives to the other brands.

That said, Fujifilm’s X-Series lineup can be a bit confusing for the new photographer. That is why I wanted to write this guide, to help travelers who are new to photography (or looking to buy a new camera) decide which Fujifilm X-Series camera is right for them.

I am assuming that you’re here because you’re considering buying a Fujifilm camera and need some validation, or that you’ve already decided on buying a Fujifilm camera and you need some help making a final decision.

If you’re the type of photographer/traveler who wants an excellent camera that can produce beautiful images straight-out-of-camera without having to sit in front of a laptop editing images all day, this article is for you.

I should add here that while most of these cameras do record 4k video, this article focuses on still photography and won’t consider video capability in its recommendations.

Bottom line up front - my recommendation (early 2023)

Any of the Fujifilm cameras listed in the comparison tables at the bottom of this post will be great to take with you on your next adventure. Though, I recommend that you purchase a Fujifilm X-T4 as it is the best balance of price, handling, image quality, and size.

The X-T4 offers IBIS (in-body image stabilization) and weather sealing. And though it is “medium bodied,” it is still quite small and light when compared to DSLR cameras, especially when using the smaller of the X-Mount lenses.

To be sure, there is a newer model (the Fujifilm X-T5). But that means the X-T4 can be purchased at a great discount. Unless you really need 40 megapixels of the X-T5 or don’t mind the expense, the X-T4 will be your best bet.

Check Fujifilm X-T4 Price

Why choose Fujifilm for travel over other brands?

The reason why I recommend Fujifilm X-Series cameras to travelers over other brands is because they offer the perfect balance of size, handling, image quality, and cost.

Size

Having a light camera kit is just as important to the traveler as image quality. Because Fujifilm X-Series cameras use APS-C sensors, they are generally smaller and lighter than their full-frame competitors. And smaller sensors means smaller lenses (read: not as much heavy glass to lug around).

You will need to factor in lenses when determining your travel kit, as some lenses can be quite large and heavy even for APS-C cameras. But Fujifilm makes compact, weather-sealed lenses that are well-built and discreet.

Design & handling

Fujifilm cameras are also known for their vintage-inspired designs. This is not a gimmick. Having vintage controls, like those on the X-T4, means quick and easy access to all the critical features you need, which means less time wasted scrolling through menus and fiddling with buttons.

And, Fujifilm cameras are simply fun to use.

Many a Fujifilm user prefers the handfeel of their camera, the way it feels in the hand and the way it works. Sergio Larrain spoke about the importance of getting a camera that feels good in the hand in a letter he wrote to his nephew, which is excellent advice.

A camera that doesn’t feel right is one that isn’t used.

Fujifilm film simulations for travel

Because the company has a long, storied history in producing photographic films, Fujifilm has been able to use its years of film and color science and research in its digital cameras.

Enter film simulations.

Every Fujifilm camera comes with “film simulations,” which are basically color profiles or—as the young kids say these days—“filters” or “looks.” They are digital recreations of the classic film “look.” They are subtle, but a little goes a long way.

Users select which “film simulation” they want to shoot with, and the camera will bake the color profile onto the image. So, when you transfer images to your computer or mobile device, they already look great. You might spend less time editing images in post-processing software like Photoshop, Lightroom, or Capture One.

If you shoot in the jpeg file format, the film simulations will be permanently baked into the image when you capture an image. If you shoot in the raw file format, you can apply whichever film simulation you prefer after the image is taken using your camera and Fujifilm’s X Raw Studio program.

There are many advantages to shooting in raw, including the ability to capture more information and to recover highlights/shadows in over/under-exposed images. But most of the benefits are enjoyed when using post-processing software like Lightroom and Capture One. The downsides to shooting in raw include larger file sizes and more time spent processing images on cameras and computers.

Personally, when I use my Fujifilm cameras, I shoot raw + jpeg with a modified film simulation. Why both raw + jpeg? I like keeping the raw files in my digital archive and having the jpegs for easy social sharing.

You can also edit or make your own film simulation in the camera.

What about sensor size?

The Fujifilm X-Series cameras have APS-C sensors. The sensor is the part of the camera that is light-sensitive and captures the image. APS-C sensors are much bigger than the sensors on your smartphones and, because of that, they create better images.

That being said, APS-C sensors are smaller than the “full frame” and “medium format” sensors you’ll find in other, more expensive cameras. There definitely is a difference, but unless you’re a professional photographer shooting for major advertising and media campaigns, chances are you won’t be able to tell anyway.

Images taken on Fujifilm cameras, and other cameras that use APS-C sensors, regularly appear on magazine covers, in articles for major digital publications, and on the walls of galleries. They win major photography awards. They’re all over social media. Don’t let anyone tell you that the sensors are not “professional” or good enough.

Just get a camera that you enjoy using and go make pictures. Don’t worry about it.

How to pick a Fujifilm camera for travel

Photographers who travel extensively have special needs. Here are some considerations to keep in mind when picking a camera for travel, whether it be a Fujifilm camera or one of any other brand.

Handfeel: This is the single most important point for any camera you buy. You want to buy a camera that feels good in your hand, one that you like to use, or it will stay in your hotel room. Forget what everyone else shoots with. Get a camera that you like to use.
Size & weight: Who wants to be burdened with heavy and bulky camera equipment? Keeping the size and weight of your camera kit down is imperative in travel situations. If the camera is too bulky or cumbersome, you’ll be less likely to schlep it around. Plus, being discreet is often nice.
Weather resistance & durability: Weather is unpredictable. You don’t want your gear to get ruined while on the road. And, your camera might take a beating while traveling; it is critical not to buy a fragile thing.
Expandability: Because travel presents us with different environments and situations, having a camera that can use different lenses is not unimportant to some shooters.
Straight-out-of-camera images: Who wants to waste time editing pictures in a hotel room when you could be exploring the world? Getting good-looking images straight out of the camera is great for wasting less time in front of a computer and on-the-go social sharing.
Video: If you’re the type of person who also likes to shoot videos, then pay attention to the camera’s video specifications and look for a body like the X-T4 that has IBIS (in-body image stabilization).

Mid-size Fujifilm comparison table

	Fujifilm X-T5	*Fujifilm X-T4*	Fujifilm X-Pro3
*Pros*	40 MP sensor. IBIS. Weather resistant. 4k video. Brand new (as of late 2022).	26 MP sensor. IBIS. Weather resistant. Fully-Articulating screen. Great for vlogging. 4k video.	26 MP sensor. Weather resistant. Beautiful design. 100 grams lighter than the X-T4. 4k video.
*Cons*	Larger file size. Expensive. Resolution may be overkill for hobbyists and casual photographers.	Newer generation camera available.	No IBIS. Not ideal for handheld video/vlogging.
*Notes*	Amazing ultra-high-resolution interchangeable lens Fujifilm camera for travel.	Best bang-for-buck, high-resolution interchangeable lens Fujifilm camera.	Great for street photography. Hidden LCD screen forces you to focus on the photography and the experience.
*Weight w/o Lens*	557 g.	607 g.	497 g.
*Price*	Check Price	Check Price	Check Price

Compact Fujifilm comparison table

	Fujifilm X-T30II	Fujifilm X100V	Fujifilm X-E4
*Pros*	26 MP sensor. Interchangeable lenses. Built-in flash. 4k video.	26 MP sensor. Weather sealed. Built-in flash. 4k video.	26 MP sensor. Interchangeable lenses. 4k video.
*Cons*	No IBIS. No weather sealing.	No IBIS. Fixed 35mm (equivalent) lens.	No IBIS. No weather sealing. No flash.
*Notes*	Compelling compact interchangeable lens Fujifilm camera.	Best grab-and-go, fixed-lens camera.	Compelling compact interchangeable lens Fujifilm rangefinder-style camera
*Weight w/o Lens*	383 g.	478 g. (lens incl.)	364 g.
*Price*	Check Price	Check Price	Check Price

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Field Notes on Jeremy Bassetti

[Fieldnotes] A Higher Calling? Where Our Creative Impulse Comes From

[Fieldnotes] What I Learned About Growing a Newsletter, Content Marketing, and Email Magnets

Email Lists vs. Social Media: Why I Bet on Email

What I Did Right (And Then Stopped Doing)

The Mistake That Cost Me

The Two-Step Method for Email List Growth

What Makes a Good Email Magnet?

How I’m Rebuilding My Email List in 2026

[Fieldnotes] 2025 End of Year Review

2025 in Numbers

2025 Overview

On Mountains

Bolivia

Book Proposal

Day Job Blues

Alcohol

Podcasting

Social Media

Newsletters

YouTube

Self Assessment

2026 Goals

[Fieldnotes] Servitude as a Service: Reading Kant in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

The Child and the Beast

The Offloading of Thought

The Guardians and Their Livestock

The DeepSeek Example

A Descent into Ignorance?

[Fieldnotes] ‘Vita Contemplativa’ by Byung-Chul Han

[Fieldnotes] 2025 Mid-Year Review

2025 in Numbers, So Far

Reflecting on the Last Six Months

The Main Thing - On Mountains

Looking Ahead to the Next Six Months

[Fieldnotes] Some Writing Advice From Robert Macfarlane

Begin Each Book with a “Portal Question”

“Capturing” and “Explaining” the World

Subjective Note-Taking

[Fieldnotes] 'The Burnout Society' by Byung-Chul Han

[Fieldnotes] Will Artificial Intelligence Make Us Dumber?

Cognitive Death Spiral

[Fieldnotes] Review: 'Core Curriculum' by Tod Papageorge

[Fieldnotes] Documentary and Post-Documentary Photography

What is Documentary Photography?

What is Post-Documentary Photography?

Post-Documentary “Storytelling”

A Post-Modern Photography?

[Fieldnotes] 'The Disappearance of Rituals' by Byung-Chul Han

[Fieldnotes] 2024 End of Year Review

Last Year in Numbers

Last Year’s Wins

Luciano

Half-Frame Photography Journal

YouTube

Published Images

Artifact International

Creative Journeys Podcast

Book Proposal

Principles for 2025

[Fieldnotes] 2023 End of Year Review

Last year in numbers

Wins

The Hill of the Skull

Square Prints

Artifact International

YouTube?

Travel Writing World, farewell?

A new podcast?

Newsletters

Ditching social media

An unhappy return

Artificial intelligence

Principles for 2024

[Fieldnotes] An Unsuccessful Kickstarter Campaign

Some raw numbers

Context

The vision

The campaign

The rewards