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content/journal/dispatch-35-january-2026/index.md
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@@ -33,6 +33,34 @@ references:
url: https://macwright.com/2025/12/07/year-in-review
date: 2025-12-18T15:21:17Z
file: macwright-com-5fr93r.txt
- title: "My 2026 Q1 Planning and Moving to a New Planner – Writing at Large"
url: https://writingatlarge.com/2026/01/03/my-2026-q1-planning-and-moving-to-a-new-planner/
date: 2026-01-07T19:49:42Z
file: writingatlarge-com-3xaqup.txt
- title: "Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life"
url: https://www.joanwestenberg.com/thin-desires-are-eating-your-life/
date: 2026-01-07T19:49:47Z
file: www-joanwestenberg-com-4eftax.txt
- title: "Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life. “A thick desire is one th..."
url: https://kottke.org/25/12/0048079-thin-desires-are-eating-y
date: 2026-01-07T19:49:48Z
file: kottke-org-hwapp6.txt
- title: "A blog is a biography | Dries Buytaert"
url: https://dri.es/a-blog-is-a-biography
date: 2026-01-07T19:49:50Z
file: dri-es-enwpkq.txt
- title: "Lars-Christian Simonsen – Manu"
url: https://manuelmoreale.com/interview/lars-christian-simonsen
date: 2026-01-07T19:49:52Z
file: manuelmoreale-com-zl2mwc.txt
- title: "This life gives you nothing - Blackbird Spyplane"
url: https://www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/this-life-gives-you-nothing
date: 2026-01-07T19:49:58Z
file: www-blackbirdspyplane-com-52g1uj.txt
- title: "On reading Proust vs experiencing the world intermediated by..."
url: https://kottke.org/25/12/0048058-on-reading-proust-vs-expe
date: 2026-01-07T19:49:59Z
file: kottke-org-l0focf.txt
---
* Nev 4th birthday
@@ -130,10 +158,26 @@ references:
### Links
* [Title][19]
* [Title][20]
* [Title][21]
* [My 2026 Q1 Planning and Moving to a New Planner – Writing at Large][19]
[19]: https://example.com/
[20]: https://example.com/
[21]: https://example.com/
> That’s it. There are no stickers in my planner, no highlighters, illustrations and such. It’s a practical tool for me. I won’t photograph it for the blog or social media because it’s so personal, and that’s its job – to work for me, not to generate content or likes. It isn’t pretty, but boy is it functional. I reference it at least one or two time a day every day. From it stems my daily to-do list, my weekly review, my long and short term plans. It’s an investment that’s paid dividends over the years, and from what I can tell my new format promises to pay me back even more.
* [Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life][20] ([via][21])
> The business model of most consumer technology is to identify some thick desire, find the part of it that produces a neurological reward, and then deliver that reward without the rest of the package.
* [A blog is a biography | Dries Buytaert][22] ([via][23])
> If that idea feels compelling, this might be a good time to start a blog or a website. Not to build a large audience, but just to leave a trail. Future you may be grateful you began.
* [This life gives you nothing - Blackbird Spyplane][24] ([via][25])
> When we do this, we don’t just find ourselves with more time on our hands, but with more life on our hands, too. Because we set things back in motion. The world remains the same, but the way we see it changes.
[19]: https://writingatlarge.com/2026/01/03/my-2026-q1-planning-and-moving-to-a-new-planner/
[20]: https://www.joanwestenberg.com/thin-desires-are-eating-your-life/
[21]: https://kottke.org/25/12/0048079-thin-desires-are-eating-y
[22]: https://dri.es/a-blog-is-a-biography
[23]: https://manuelmoreale.com/interview/lars-christian-simonsen
[24]: https://www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/this-life-gives-you-nothing
[25]: https://kottke.org/25/12/0048058-on-reading-proust-vs-expe

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[1]
[2]Dries Buytaert
[3]Blog [4]Projects [5]Photos [6]About
[7]A blog is a biography
A mother in bed holds a newborn baby, surrounded by three formally dressed
adults in a hospital room. My mom as a newborn in her mother's arms, surrounded
by my grandparents and great-grandparents.
I never knew my great grandparents. They left no diary, no letters, only a
handful of photographs. Sometimes I look at those photos and wonder what they
cared about. What were their days like? What made them laugh? What problems
were they working through?
Then I realize it could be different for my descendants. A long-running blog
like mine is effectively an autobiography.
So far, it captures nearly twenty years of my life: my PhD work, the birth of
my children, and the years of learning how to lead Drupal and build a
community. It even captures the excitement of starting two companies, and the
lessons I learned along the way.
And in recent years, it captures the late night posts where I try to make sense
of what AI might change. They are a snapshot of a world in transition. One day,
it may be hard to remember AI was ever new.
In a way, a blog is a digital time capsule. It is the kind of record I wish my
great grandparents had left behind.
I did not start blogging with this in mind. I wrote to share ideas, to think
out loud, to guide the Drupal community, and to connect with others. The
personal archive was a side effect.
Now I see it differently. Somewhere in there is a version of me becoming a
father. A version trying to figure out how to build something that lasts. A
version wrestling, late at night, with technology changes happening in front of
me.
If my grandchildren ever want to know who I was, they will not have to guess.
They will be able to hear my voice.
If that idea feels compelling, this might be a good time to start a blog or a
website. Not to build a large audience, but just to leave a trail. Future you
may be grateful you began.
— Dries Buytaert
Join 5,000+ readers. Two decades building Drupal and Acquia. Thoughts on Open
Source, technology, and business.
[8][ ] Subscribe
[10]Subscribe via RSS · [11]Email me
December 12, 2025 1 min read time
• [12]Digital preservation
• [13]My site
• [14]Writing
[15] db
References:
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[10] https://dri.es/rss.xml
[11] mailto:dries@buytaert.net
[12] https://dri.es/tag/digital-preservation
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[14] https://dri.es/tag/writing
[15] https://dri.es/colophon

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posted Dec 29 @ 11:21 AM by [31]Jason Kottke  ·  gift link
[32]Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life. “A thick desire is one that changes you
in the process of pursuing it. A thin desire is one that doesn’t.”
[33]
[thumb-4807]
[34]
Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life · joanwestenberg.com
The defining experience of our age seems to be hunger.  We're hungry for more,
but we have more than we need.  We're hungry for less, while more accumulates
and multiplies. We're hungry and we don't have words to articulate why. We're
hungry, and we're lacking and we're wanting. We are
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Jason Kottke reposted 2025-12-29T17:12:34Z
[49]@adora.io[50]Bluesky
"The business model of most consumer technology is to identify some thick
desire, find the part of it that produces a neurological reward, and then
deliver that reward without the rest of the package."
Gonna be thinking about this one for a while.
[51]https://bsky.app/profile/kottke.org/post/3mb5atkftcw2w
"The business model of most consumer technology is to identify some thick
desire, find the part of it that produces a neurological reward, and then
deliver that reward without the rest of the package." Gonna be thinking about
this one for a while. https://bsky.app/profile/kottke.org/post/3mb5atkftcw2w
[52]Reply [53]Share
C
Chris Bredesen 2025-12-29T20:31:22Z
What a superb article. Thank you for sharing!
What a superb article. Thank you for sharing!
[54]Reply [55]Share
K
Kelsey P. 2026-01-05T04:16:04Z
I think I’ll be using this languaging for a while, thanks for pointing us to
it! It brings to mind that we’re most fulfilled when our desires meet our own
idiosyncrasies, not the fulfillment of others’ narratives or expectations. I
was reminded of this the hard way a couple months ago when we pivoted from our
usual family vacation style of low-dopamine, forest bathing/beach combing to
the wildly expensive (for us), social currency of Legoland. I’d say it was a
thin desire on my part to avoid depriving my kids of what culturally is
relevant; it takes commitment and the courage to live your values with thick
desires!
I think I’ll be using this languaging for a while, thanks for pointing us to
it! It brings to mind that we’re most fulfilled when our desires meet our own
idiosyncrasies, not the fulfillment of others’ narratives or expectations. I
was reminded of this the hard way a couple months ago when we pivoted from our
usual family vacation style of low-dopamine, forest bathing/beach combing to
the wildly expensive (for us), social currency of Legoland. I’d say it was a
thin desire on my part to avoid depriving my kids of what culturally is
relevant; it takes commitment and the courage to live your values with thick
desires!
[56]Reply [57]Share
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posted Dec 19 @ 05:39 PM by [31]Jason Kottke  ·  gift link
[32]On reading Proust vs experiencing the world intermediated by screens (even
when you’re not on one). “Your attention is, on a foundational level, all you
have. This is why it feels worse than bad to waste it. It feels annihilating.”
[33]
[thumb-4805]
[34]
This life gives you nothing · blackbirdspyplane.com
Your attention is all you have. Wasting it is annihilating. Blackbird Spyplane
saves literacy in a monumental Year-End Essay.
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R
Ramanan 2025-12-23T20:58:07Z
Felt called out reading the section on thinking in tweets. This was a good
read!
Felt called out reading the section on thinking in tweets. This was a good
read!
[49]Reply [50]Share
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[1]
[2]Writing at Large
A blog about writing, sketching, running and other things
Primary Menu
• [3]The Cancer Project
• [4]About
My 2026 Q1 Planning and Moving to a New Planner
For the third year in a row I’m using a Leuchtturm Bullet Journal as my
planner. This year it’s a dark green one. I don’t use the bullet journal system
at all, but I like the paper and format enough to customise this notebook for
my own purposes.
A new year means moving into a new planner. I take the chance while moving in
to review the pages in my planner that didn’t get used or that need be copied
into the new notebook, and decide which ones need to be copied and which ones
can stay behind or be migrated to my Obsidian app.
Planner Setup
I plan my year in four thirteen week quarters. You can read about it more [5]
here.
The Q1 plan starts at page 76 and ends at page 79. From page 80 to page 105 are
the first 13 weeks of double spreads – on the left side is for the week, where
I write down the 7 days of the week with their dates, and on the right side is
where my weekly plan and goals go.
I use the 7 days a week planner part to map out my exercise plan (I run, swim
and lift weights), note events that I need to take into account in my weekly
plan (travel, meetings with friends, things that take large blocks of time or
require preparation). I usually don’t fill the days here – I have a google
calendar for my day to day planning and reminders, both at work and at home –
but it is still useful for me to get an overview of the week ahead.
The interesting part is the right side of every weekly spread, where I plan my
tasks for the week. They are divided into headings and groups for ease of
reference, plus room for free text planning.
Every week has a detailed fitness plan – but not too detailed so that I lose
too much flexibility. I just note that I want to get in 4-5 runs, 2 swims, 2
lifting sessions, 2 plyo sessions and however many stretching sessions.
I then note the “connections” I plan to invest time and effort into. This is
just a list of friends that I want to call, meet up in person or zoom with.
Texting doesn’t count. Yes, I have to set this as a goal or life just gets in
the way and it doesn’t happen. I neglected to do this in last year’s Q4 and I
really felt it. Everyone is busy and maintaining friendships requires planning,
time and effort – and it’s WORTH it. So if it’s worth it, I need to treat it
with the same seriousness as anything else that’s important to me.
Next comes the reading section, with my reading goals for the week. Again, if I
don’t set these, my reading tends to be neglected in favour of less nourishing
pastimes.
Then come “tickers” for quarter specific goals. I won’t get into these as they
are personal, but if you can’t measure it – even in the simplest of ways – then
it’s not really a goal and you won’t do it. “Yearly Themes” are for people who
stopped publishing on their YouTube channel and recording their podcasts. I
have learned again and again, especially during the latter part of 2025, that
if I don’t set measurable goals, I just let myself off the hook and the result
isn’t pretty.
One goal for Q1 that I am willing to share is getting off of social media
again, and focusing on finishing a challenging technical certification for
work. To get it done I need time, and cutting out Instagram, Facebook and
YouTube gives me 6 hours a week without too much effort.
Q1 2026 Plan
I had two wobbly quarters of planning in 2025. It was a rough year in general –
war, upheaval at work, more war, more upheaval at work, some personal stuff,
lots of travel – which meant that my routine and some of my habits took a
serious hit. I stopped reading for a while. I stopped journaling for a while
and then struggled to get back. By the end of the year I was back on track with
both habits, but still, 2025 was a wake up call that my quarterly plans need
some rethinking.
This year’s Q1 plan is a result of that thinking. It’s still divided into areas
of focus, but the areas have changed a bit and have become narrower. They are:
Health and Fitness, Professional Development, Reading, Conversations,
Sketching, Blogging, Sleep, Journaling, Planning/Productivity, Money,
Decluttering, Mental Health, Other.
Each one has a detailed, achievable set of goals that are broken down by week.
The idea is that I can reference these much more often, and it’s easier to copy
them into my weekly task plan when the time comes. It took me much longer to
make this plan, but as I’m closing week 1 of this quarter (I started on Sunday
the 28th of December) it’s already hugely paying off.
Setting goals is hard. It’s easier to not set them, or to be vague and then
give up – most of the time before you’ve even started. You want to read more?
Set a measurable goal, and if you’re worried you might have a hard time with
it, make it tiered. For example: one or two easy books a month if you haven’t
read for years. Stretch to one easy book and one more difficult book. Then
stretch for more – but track everything on daily or weekly basis. In case of my
reading for example, I aim for two chapters a day, or around 30-40 pages a day.
Some days I read more, some days I read less, but that’s the average. It comes
out to around 4 books a month.
The Rest of the Planner
What about pages 1-75? Well they’re for general lists, trackers, brainstorming
my quarterly plans, etc.
I have a list of “Unread Books on My Kindle” – currently containing 28 books.
The point is to get me reading the books that I buy, and not just buying them
(BTW – I use a Kindle but I’ve been buying books on Kobo for over a year).
“Mindful Consuming” is a list of movies and series that I want to watch –
things that are worth taking the time to view, instead of mindlessly grazing on
algorithmically recommended slop.
“Conversations, Not Connections” is a list of friends that I want to make sure
I actually touch base with, instead of just liking their posts or sending texts
every once in a while. The list is there to encourage intention and not because
I might forget a friend. Look at it as sort of a contract or formal commitment.
“List of Courses that I’ve Enrolled to” – if you’re like me, then you’ve
enrolled to more than one online course. The point is to track them all, and
make sure that I take the time to actually complete them. Until now I have had
a very low success rate, but the change in my plan for Q1 means that I’ve
started more rigorously to carve out time for my courses, which means that I’m
actually starting to make progress with this. The other goal of this list is to
make sure that I don’t enrol to another course, because I’ve got enough of
those right now.
“Punch List/Brain Dump” – is just a running list of things that I want to get
to. It gets formalised later into either my daily to do, my weekly or quarterly
plan, or it gets deleted.
“Things from Abroad” – a running list of shopping items that I’m waiting to
receive. Serves a dual purpose – to help me keep track of what I ordered, and
to stop me from ordering more stuff. With prices soaring lately, this has
become more important than ever.
“Q1 Prep” – three pages of just freeform planning and brainstorming before I
came up with the 2026 Q1 plan. I plan on creating similar pages for the rest of
the three quarters of the year.
That’s it. There are no stickers in my planner, no highlighters, illustrations
and such. It’s a practical tool for me. I won’t photograph it for the blog or
social media because it’s so personal, and that’s its job – to work for me, not
to generate content or likes. It isn’t pretty, but boy is it functional. I
reference it at least one or two time a day every day. From it stems my daily
to-do list, my weekly review, my long and short term plans. It’s an investment
that’s paid dividends over the years, and from what I can tell my new format
promises to pay me back even more.
I hope this helps you set up a similar planning system of your own. I recommend
creating one that fits your needs, rather than taking one that someone else
built for their needs. There’s nothing more personal than a person’s planner
and a person’s journal. Make it your own.
Have a great planning year!
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[26]Happy New Year! 2026 Edition
3 thoughts on “My 2026 Q1 Planning and Moving to a New Planner”
1. Alice's avatar
[27]Alice
[28]January 3, 2026 at 3:59 pm
Add pictures?
[29]LikeLiked by [30]1 person
[31]Reply
1. writingatlarge's avatar
[32]writingatlarge
[33]January 3, 2026 at 5:06 pm
Not to this one. Too personal to share.
[34]LikeLike
[35]Reply
1. Alice's avatar
[36]Alice
[37]January 3, 2026 at 6:23 pm
Fair enough
[38]LikeLiked by [39]1 person
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[6] https://writingatlarge.com/2026/01/03/my-2026-q1-planning-and-moving-to-a-new-planner/?share=twitter
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[26] https://writingatlarge.com/2026/01/01/happy-new-year-2026-edition/
[27] https://malhammagna.com/
[28] https://writingatlarge.com/2026/01/03/my-2026-q1-planning-and-moving-to-a-new-planner/#comment-9284
[29] https://writingatlarge.com/2026/01/03/my-2026-q1-planning-and-moving-to-a-new-planner/?like_comment=9284&_wpnonce=612235c3f5
[30] https://writingatlarge.com/2026/01/03/my-2026-q1-planning-and-moving-to-a-new-planner/#
[31] https://writingatlarge.com/2026/01/03/my-2026-q1-planning-and-moving-to-a-new-planner/?replytocom=9284#respond
[32] https://writingatlarge.wordpress.com/
[33] https://writingatlarge.com/2026/01/03/my-2026-q1-planning-and-moving-to-a-new-planner/#comment-9289
[34] https://writingatlarge.com/2026/01/03/my-2026-q1-planning-and-moving-to-a-new-planner/?like_comment=9289&_wpnonce=a0a70ed1bf
[35] https://writingatlarge.com/2026/01/03/my-2026-q1-planning-and-moving-to-a-new-planner/?replytocom=9289#respond
[36] https://malhammagna.com/
[37] https://writingatlarge.com/2026/01/03/my-2026-q1-planning-and-moving-to-a-new-planner/#comment-9290
[38] https://writingatlarge.com/2026/01/03/my-2026-q1-planning-and-moving-to-a-new-planner/?like_comment=9290&_wpnonce=88b2008dc1
[39] https://writingatlarge.com/2026/01/03/my-2026-q1-planning-and-moving-to-a-new-planner/#
[40] https://writingatlarge.com/2026/01/03/my-2026-q1-planning-and-moving-to-a-new-planner/#respond
[50] https://writingatlarge.com/2026/01/03/my-2026-q1-planning-and-moving-to-a-new-planner/
[51] https://writingatlarge.com/2026/01/01/happy-new-year-2026-edition/
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[263] https://writingatlarge.com/category/ink/inkvent/
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[267] https://writingatlarge.com/category/knitting/
[268] https://writingatlarge.com/category/life/
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[270] https://writingatlarge.com/category/notebooks/
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[272] https://writingatlarge.com/category/drawing/one-week-100-people/
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[282] https://writingatlarge.com/category/running/
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[1]
Blackbird Spyplane
[2]Blackbird Spyplane
SubscribeSign in
This life gives you nothing
Your attention is all you have. Wasting it is annihilating. Blackbird Spyplane
saves literacy in a monumental Year-End Essay.
Dec 16, 2025
1,211
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Blackbird Spyplane exists thanks to our readers.
We don’t run any ads, we don’t use affiliate links on new clothes, we don’t do
any spon. You’re the only people we owe anything, so we keep some of our best
material for Classified Tier Subscribers.
Upgrade today if you haven’t yet, support greatness and enjoy a better life in
the inner sanctum — Jonah & Erin
[21][ ]
Subscribe
[23]
[https]
Blackbird Spyplane for the World’s Public Libraries
Our interviews with Nathan Fielder, Sarah Squirm, Cameron Winter and Geese,
Adam Sandler, Brendan from Turnstile, Patrick Radden Keefe, MJ Lenderman, Evan
Kinori, Maya Hawke, Bon Iver, André 3000, Sandy Liang, Matty Matheson, Laraaji,
Ryota Iwai from Auralee, Tyler, The Creator, John C. Reilly, Father John Misty,
Kate Berlant, Clairo, Steven Yeun, Conner O’Malley & more are [26]here.
Check out our monumental new list of the [27]50 Slappiest Shops across the
Spyplane Universe.
Our brand-new G.I.F.T.S. List is [28]here.
2025 was The Jacket’s Year — the 21 best are [29]here.
[30]
[https]
1 — All is full of Screen
A disconcerting question strikes me alarmingly often these days. I’ll be out in
the world, and I’ll see something … let’s call it picturesque. Say I’m walking
along a nature trail as a white wall of fog avalanches over a ridge, down a
canyon of pine and oak, toward the blue waters of the Bay. I will find myself
thinking, “My god, that is beautiful.” And then — even if I manage to keep my
phone in my pocket, resisting what’s become a powerful instinct to reach for it
— I will feel a strange tremor of uncertainty: “Am I looking at a screen right
now?” I wonder.
In the moment, this uncertainty is not fully articulated, nor, thankfully, does
it emerge from some extreme delusional state where I’ve lost my hold on
reality. It’s more of a pre-cognitive kind of category confusion. And at the
core of the confusion is this: As my life has come to consist so
overwhelmingly, and for so many years, of looking at images on screens — and of
looking at the world through a camera, which is also a phone, which is also a
screen — the distinction for me between the screen and the non-screen can
wobble.
I still know the difference intellectually. But I don’t always necessarily feel
it. That is the disconcerting part. I stare at the hillside, try to pick out
individual details and weave them into a living, breathing totality that also
includes the cool air on my skin and the birdsong in my ears. As I do this, I
tell myself, “This is a real place, this is not an image of a place,” and I
repeat that a few times, trying to will back the border dividing the two.
[33]
[https]
Here’s how I make sense of this wobble between world and image.
For a time, when I was much more active on Twitter than I am now, I’d find
myself, e.g., washing dishes and, without wanting to, thinking about various
mundane things in the form of tweets. Some nascent half-kernel of an idea would
come to me and, like a hack comedian for whom every banal thing is material, I
would immediately start working it over for any and all tweet-like potential.
Maybe there was a tiny bit of dish soap left at the bottom of the bottle, and I
considered diluting it with water to get it out more easily, and make the
bottle last longer. I wouldn’t simply think that. Thanks to Twitter, I’d think
something exponentially more inane and annoying, such as, “The masculine urge
to water down the dish soap…” or “The two genders [picture of brand-new dish
soap vs. picture of old diluted dish soap]…” or “Choose your fighter [same two
pictures again]…” or “Wake up babe, new diluted dish soap just dropped,” or
“Men will dilute the last millimeter of dish soap rather than go to therapy…”
or “No but the way I just diluted the dish soap…”
And so on. Just cycling through a procession of dumb, Twitter-borne
phraseologies as they ran through my head, like a radio on the fritz skipping
stations. It was a bit like I was idly playing a “brain teaser” puzzle, and a
bit like my brains were oozing out of my ears. I’d spent so many hours of so
many days reading tweets — encountering other people’s thoughts filtered
through the specific character limits and idiomatic conventions of that site —
that the seams between my own experiences, thoughts, and tweets began, on some
level, to delaminate.
I worry that something analogous has happened in my relationship to looking.
The same way that an idea would occur to me and I’d immediately reach for a
Stock Twitter Phrase to give it form, whenever I see anything that interests me
now, there’s a looming sense in which my phone is there with me, framing and
constituting the sight, even if I never post the picture, even if I never look
at it again and, weirdest of all, even if don’t take out my phone.
The same way I once conditioned myself to think in tweets, I’ve conditioned
myself to see in “posts,” in “grid pics,” in “stories,” in flicks texted to the
group chat, in .HEICs, and so on.
This is the underside of what people mean when they describe an extremely
“sticky” piece of technology: It can stick to you, like the facehugger from
Alien, even when you’re not using it.
[36]
[https]
How to get yourself unstuck?
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
2 — Your attention is all you have
One afternoon this fall I found myself “thinking in Instagram reels.”
I had an idea for a video I wanted to make for the Spyplane IG, which I hoped
people would find funny. The premise isn’t worth describing except to say it
involved me reading from some book broadly coded as “smart,” as a prop. I
scanned our shelves for something that fit the bill, until my eye landed on
Swann’s Way.
I don’t know how Erin and I came to own this copy, but we’ve had it for ages.
I’d never read it, nor had she. That didn’t matter: This was a perfect “smart
book” for the video I wanted to spend the next ~hour improvising, shooting and
editing. I pulled the novel down and started searching for a passage that
sounded appropriately “high-flown.”
And it was at this point that I enjoyed two unexpected, interconnected
revelations. The first was that the opening pages of Swann’s Way are beautiful
and captivatingly trippy. The second was that I did not want to die, whenever
that day comes, having made an IG reel with a throwaway punchline about Proust,
but not having actually read any Proust.
There’s a lot of talk these days about the death of literacy. No one reads,
video’s eating everything, we’ve grown stupid, and our alienation from written
language is only making us stupider.
For me, this isn’t distant, theoretical hand-wringing. I feel it firsthand, in
the erosion of my own ability to concentrate on a piece of writing of any
significant seriousness and length.
I am, of course, not alone in this. Our attention has been transformed into one
of the few remaining reliable “growth markets” by a parasite economy much
better suited to sucking and siphoning than it is to building new things. This
means that everything wants to get into our eyeballs, and it goes without
saying that there are far more effective technologies for getting in people’s
eyeballs — and turning a profit there — than books.
But your attention is, on a foundational level, all you have. This is why it
feels worse than bad to waste it. It feels annihilating.
And so I decided not to make an IG reel, and instead, to finally read Swann’s
Way.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
3 — Magical mornings with the anti-phone
Every morning for ~6 weeks, from late September to early November, I got out of
bed early, put on some coffee, and sat with Proust for an hour or so in the
quiet of predawn.
I moved slowly. The sentences in Swann’s Way are long, at times comically so:
stuffed with asides, nested clauses, digressions, and spiraling detours into
metaphor. There might be all of three sentences on a given page, and it was not
uncommon for me to make it through just 10 pages in the course of that predawn
hour.
This was fine with me, because the point wasn’t to burn through the book at
1.5x speed. The point was to sink into it, to stretch out, and along the way,
to remind myself that I’m an adult and my attention is my own.
In that light, Proust was perfect for the job. Swann’s Way requires total
concentration. If your mind wanders 1/6th of the way through a sentence, you
will lose your bearings, and the sentence will spit you out. And yet the book
isn’t punishing or difficult in the way of Ulysses or Derrida. It just moves at
its own speed, and if you decelerate, and lock in, it’s a delight.
The story takes place in the 19th century, and unfolds at the speed of carriage
rides, long walks through the countryside, and letters dispatched across Paris.
There is no immediacy in it, or at least much less than we’re used to. There is
a plot, but the book is less about that than about trying to render the
experience of being alive in language as vividly, granularly, abundantly,
comprehensively and encompassingly as possible.
There’s an extravagance of words, devoted to capturing interior and external
life in detail, whether it’s the way a shaft of sunshine looks as it passes
through the windows of a provincial church and lands on a patch of stone, or
the foolish, contradictory behavior of a man who grows infatuated with a woman
he does not seem to love, and who does not seem to love him, either. (I read
[39]this translation.)
[40]
[https]
To actually read Swann’s Way, it was necessary that I start the day with it,
and that I didn’t look at my phone first under any circumstances. Getting in
some scrolling beforehand would have been like waking up before sunrise,
driving to the gym, and then saying, “I’ll just eat this box of donut holes
before I get on the treadmill.” Nothing doing. On the few days when I made this
mistake — thinking, against my better judgment, ‘I’ll just check the weather
real quick’ — the spell was broken, I was still on the phone 40 minutes later,
and my concentration was shot. I couldn’t get any traction when I tried to
switch over to the novel, if I managed to pick it up at all.
Despite the gym metaphor, I don’t want to instrumentalize reading into
something you should do for “gains.” You need absolutely no reason to immerse
yourself in a great book beyond the vast intrinsic pleasure of doing so.
But in my case I was reading Swann’s Way not only for that pleasure, but also
because phones have trained my brain to work in a way I don’t like, and I
wanted to re-train myself: To rebuild my capacity for sustained attention like
a muscle, to diminish the desire to scroll, to reclaim time spent within
myself, uncoerced, undistracted, imagining and creating, in the particular way
that only happens when you’re reading.
[43]
[https]
This hour of predawn Swann time became a ritual I depended on and eagerly
looked forward to. You can analogize it to runner’s high, you can analogize it
to core strength, but at the end of the hour, I came away with something more
than just my normal nagging feelings of dissatisfaction with the way the
internet organizes our thoughts. I’d done a set of Proust reps to failure —
something actively pleasing, and actively fortifying, that would be with me for
the rest of the day.
Blackbird Spyplane is a subscriber-powered, spon-free independent miracle.
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4 — The good in flicking up everything
Why do we pull out our phones at concerts instead of just watching the show?
Why do we pull them out at the beach instead of just watching the sunset?
I don’t think it’s because we’ve become automatons. I think the widespread
impulse to take a photo of everything is in fact, at root, a creative one. It
reflects a desire to not just receive life passively, but to intervene in it
creatively: To frame the shot, to find the most compelling angle, to draw out
the emotion, to honor the light… to participate.
The problem is that the cameraphone, connected as it is to our online lives,
doesn’t just serve the creative impulse and stop there. It risks cannibalizing
that impulse, co-opting it, colonizing it, and ultimately thwarting it. Because
the cameraphone allows us so readily to stop noticing the thing we’re
photographing, and instead to outsource our experience of experiencing to the
phone, much like we’ve outsourced our sense of direction to Google Maps.
What’s more, when you start shooting video at the concert, your experience of
watching [58]Spyfriend Cameron Winter perform in real time is captured and
subordinated by your desire to commemorate that experience for some vaguely
imagined Future You, and/or to post the footage for the benefit of some vaguely
imagined Impressed Other People.
This ultimately makes you more absent, and less present, to your life. And yet,
again, I suspect that trying to rack up faves on a pic stems from something
wonderful, which is our communal urge to share our experiences with other
people: Are you guys seeing this sunset??
Our appetite for life is so big that living just one life doesn’t always feel
like enough. We want to know what other people’s lives are like, and we want
other people to live some of our lives, too.
[59]
[https]
A book is, we know, an unrivaled technology for living more life.
The contemporary internet-abetted image, on the other hand, is a highly potent
yet f--ked-up technology for living more life. It comes with all kinds of
strings attached, and it has a way of leaving us feeling lonely, lacking,
unsatisfied, and jittery.
This is not thanks to creeping moral rot on our parts. Quite the contrary, it’s
because these feelings of loneliness and dissatisfaction serve the twisted
prerogatives of the people who design and make money from the technology
sucking up our attention.
And those are not the prerogatives of people who write great books.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
5 — The remedy
When I felt my thoughts morphing into tweets, the remedy was to spend less time
on Twitter. The remedy for seeing everything as a digital image of itself is,
similarly, to see less screen.
Avoiding screen is harder to do than avoiding a single app, but there are ways.
Early one morning in early November, I finished Swann’s Way. I sat there in its
afterglow for a while, looking out a window. I was at a house on the Sonoma
coast, where the sunrise was pushing through the fog, which itself pushed
through a stand of redwoods. I didn’t need to assure myself that this sight was
real and not a screen. The book had left me in a state similar to one I’ve
enjoyed on psychedelics: my attention felt focused, even as my mind was free to
wander.
It felt good to sit there and let thoughts blossom slowly, and instead of
taking a picture of the redwoods, the way I’d normally do, I wrote down what I
saw as I looked at them: the drops of water clustered in the boughs, the
particles that drifted past in dense enough concentration that they counted as
“fog” but were also perceptible as individual instances of moisture. Grains of
sand, and also the beach, at once.
Then I took a picture, which, when I consult it now, looks dramatically
different from what I saw, and from what I remember.
[62]
[https]
Every morning since then, I’ve continued the ritual of waking up early and
devoting an hour or so to reading before the day begins — and, very
importantly, before looking at any screens.
I moved on from Proust to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s famous My Struggle novels,
which I’ve been meaning to read for more than a decade, and which felt like a
good segue for a few reasons. Knausgaard is overwhelmingly concerned with
memory, and he applies an abundance of language to capturing quotidian
experience and expansive insights alike.
In the second book of the series, set in the mid-2000s, there’s a passage where
he writes about settling into the sofa with his wife to watch a DVD. His real
subject is attention:
…we wanted to be entertained. And it had to be with as little effort and
inconvenience as possible. It was the same with everything. I hardly read
books anymore; if there was a newspaper around I would prefer to read that.
And the threshold just kept rising. It was idiotic because this life gave
you nothing, it only made time pass. If we saw a good film it stirred us
and set things in motion, for that is how it is, the world is always the
same, it is the way we view it that changes.
Twenty years later, things are the same, but more so. The threshold just keeps
rising. And it is worse than idiotic, because not only does this life gives you
nothing, not only does it make time pass — it steals life from you.
In his books, Knausgaard often finds himself among other people, wishing he was
alone. Proust, for his part, was a severely asthmatic child, this left him
frail into adulthood, and by the time he wrote Swann’s Way he’d largely
withdrawn from society, sticking to his rooms and writing. This isolation may
have been maddening and painful — you need to spend time chopping it up with
the f--king homies to thrive. But it also cleared the field for his imagination
to flower, for him to dig into himself, open himself up and, in so doing, to
push outward. In other words, by writing, he broke confinement.
Today we are all of us lonelier, and more alone, than ever. But we’re never
alone, either, because our attention is hijacked, our time feels crunched, and
our cells travel with us everywhere we go, padded with layer upon layer of
endless, overlapping digital distractions. The Goon Cave is becoming life’s
organizing principle.
And yet I know we still have more time on our hands than we realize: our phones
take lots of it from us, yes, but there’s lots of time we surrender to our
phones, too. We’ve grown accustomed to filling our time with scrolling because
scrolling is diabolically easy. We can find ways to engineer away some of that
scrolling, however, and replace it with things that do not merely distract us
but speak far more resonantly to the questions we’re trying to ask when we
start scrolling in the first place.
When we do this, we don’t just find ourselves with more time on our hands, but
with more life on our hands, too. Because we set things back in motion. The
world remains the same, but the way we see it changes.
P🌅E🌅A🌅C🌅E until next time,
Jonah & Erin
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[85]
Marcy Thompson's avatar
[86]Marcy Thompson
[87]Dec 16
A couple of days ago, I sang Handel's Messiah with a local church choir. I'm
not religious, but I am a former chorus nerd; it had become part of my past,
and I missed it. So, for a few weeks I rehearsed with the choir, learned the
part, and refamiliarized myself with what it means to sing with a group. The
concert on Sunday was glorious: a room full of human beings singing, playing
gorgeous instruments, responding to each other synchronously in a collective
effort to bring to life something that was written almost 300 years ago. It was
a thrill. Later, I realized I hadn't taken a single photo of my time with the
choir, I had no recording of the event. And, although I was initially saddened
by that, I realized that -- instead -- I actually had the music I had sung at
the concert playing in my ears. A most beautiful kind of reminder.
Here's to having more life on our hands.
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[89]1 reply by Blackbird Spyplane
[90]
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[91]shonni
[92]Dec 16
Hey Jonah, thanks for this truly great piece. I’m the chair of the English
Department at Fordham and a longtime BBSP subscriber (and have actually taught
BBSP pieces to students for a few years now in a course on fashion and
literature). We actually just revised our vision for our department to center
“the arts of attention: reading, writing, conversation.” Would it be possible
for me to share this piece with our English majors? Appreciate the
consideration.
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[94]1 reply by Blackbird Spyplane
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[26] https://www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/the-blackbird-spyplane-interview
[27] https://www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/the-35-slappiest-clothing-shops
[28] https://www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/2025-blackbird-spyplane-gifts-list-gratitude-edition
[29] https://www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/the-year-jackets-rocked-again
[30] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!3pkc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F99573365-8f85-498c-85f5-fd3d3a689296_1208x493.png
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[39] https://bookshop.org/a/32497/9780375751547
[40] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2hex!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fec4f87df-ed2c-4e01-bced-198cd44b595f_2000x2596.png
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15 Dec 2025 4 min read
Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life
Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life
Photo by [15]Alexis Fauvet / [16]Unsplash
The defining experience of our age seems to be hunger.
We're hungry for more, but we have more than we need.
We're hungry for less, while more accumulates and multiplies.
We're hungry and we don't have words to articulate why.
We're hungry, and we're lacking and we're wanting.
We are living with a near-universal thin desire: wanting something that cannot
actually be gotten, that we can't define, from a source that has no interest in
providing it.
The distinction between thick and thin desires isn't original to me.
Philosophers have been circling this territory for decades, from Charles
Taylor's work on frameworks of meaning to Agnes Callard's more recent writing
on aspiration.
But the version I find most useful is simple:
A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it.
A thin desire is one that doesn't.
The desire to understand calculus versus the desire to check your notifications
are both real desires, and both produce (to a degree) real feelings of
satisfaction when fulfilled.
But the person who spends a year learning calculus becomes someone different,
someone who can see patterns in the world that were previously invisible, who
has expanded the range of things they're capable of caring about, who has Been
Through It.
The person who checks their notifications is, afterward, exactly the same
person who wanted to check their notifications five minutes ago.
The thin desire reproduces itself without remainder.
The thick desire transforms its host.
I want to be careful here because this is a claim that can easily slide into
unfalsifiable grumpiness about Kids These Days.
But there's a version of it that I think is both true and important.
The business model of most consumer technology is to identify some thick
desire, find the part of it that produces a neurological reward, and then
deliver that reward without the rest of the package.
Social media gives you the feeling of social connection without the obligations
of actual friendship.
Pornography gives you sexual satisfaction without the vulnerability of
partnership.
Productivity apps give you the feeling of accomplishment without anything being
accomplished.
In each case, the thin version is easier to deliver at scale, easier to
monetize, and easier to make addictive.
The result is a diet of pure sensation.
And none of it seems to be making anyone happier.
The surveys all point the same direction: rising anxiety, rising depression,
rising rates of loneliness even as we've never been more connected.
How could this be, when we've gotten so good at giving people what they want?
Maybe because we've gotten good at giving people what they want in a way that
prevents them from wanting anything worth having.
Thick desires are inconvenient.
They take years to cultivate and can't be satisfied on demand.
The desire to master a craft, to read slowly, to be embedded in a genuine
community, to understand your place in some tradition larger than yourself:
these desires are effortful to acquire and impossible to fully gratify.
They embed you in webs of obligation and reciprocity.
They make you dependent on specific people and places.
From the perspective of a frictionless global marketplace, all of this is pure
inefficiency.
And so the infrastructure for thick desires has been gradually dismantled.
The workshops closed, the congregations thinned, the apprenticeships
disappeared, the front porches gave way to backyard decks and studio apartments
and the coveted Micro Homes where you could be alone with your devices.
Meanwhile the infrastructure for thin desires became essentially inescapable.
It's in your pocket right now.
Grand programs to Rebuild Community or Restore Meaning seem to founder on the
same logic they're trying to escape.
The thick life doesn't scale.
That's the whole point.
So: bake bread.
The yeast doesn't care about your schedule.
The dough will rise when it rises, indifferent to your optimization.
You'll spend an afternoon doing something that cannot be made faster, producing
something that you could have bought for four dollars, and in the process
you'll recover some capacity for patience that the attention economy has been
methodically stripping away.
Write a letter, by hand, on paper.
Send it through the mail.
The letter will take days to arrive and you won't be able to unsend it or edit
it or track whether it was opened.
You're creating a communication that exists outside the logic of engagement
metrics, a small artifact that refuses to be optimized.
Code a tool for exactly one person.
Solve your friend's specific problem with their specific workflow.
Build something that will never scale, never be monetized, never attract users.
The entire economy of software assumes that code should serve millions to
justify its existence.
Making something for an audience of one is a beautiful heresy.
None of this will reverse the great thinning.
But I've started to suspect that the thick life might be worth pursuing anyway,
on its own terms, without needing to become a movement.
The person who bakes bread isn't trying to fix the world. They're not making
any attempt to either dent or undent the universe.
They're trying to spend a Sunday afternoon in a way that doesn't leave them
feeling emptied out.
They're remembering, one loaf at a time, what it feels like to want something
that's actually worth wanting.
[17]
Published by:
[18] JA Westenberg
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