Exploration Phase

A Substack about loving and exploring (all) the details

Image by author, via Midjourney. Text by author.

It’s hard for me to believe that I have been a writer for three years, now. I started writing in 2021, publishing on Medium and supporting myself with jobs as an academic writer and a real-estate agent. The first three years were joyous—I was, for the first time in my life, expressing myself openly and confidently to others, and was growing rapidly as a writer.

I started with a throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach to writing. I committed to writing about whatever topic struck my fancy. It was a grand experiment; the plan was that, after writing one hundred articles about whatever I wanted, I would be able to review them and get a sense of what type of writer I was.

As it turns out, there were consistent themes in my writing. For one, I found that I loved writing about places, trying to capture the essence of a place for myself and for readers. Closely related to that, I found that I loved writing about nature. I found that I loved writing about technology, and (to some degree) current events. I also found that I loved writing introspective, psychological pieces, oriented toward therapy and self-knowledge, rooted in my struggles with depression and (likely) ADHD.

That last topic was well-rewarded on Medium. Early in 2022, on a lark, I decided to see if I could commit to a weekly writing schedule. So I started a series of what I considered “research-lite” pieces. The goal was to share my introspections in a short-form way, with pieces that were about 1500 words, or 6 minutes long, with minimal research in advance. I called them The Affirmations and they’re still going. My goal is to produce 52 affirmations, one for each week of the year, and then make some decisions about what I want to do with them once I’m done.

Meanwhile, I began to grow successful as a Medium writer. Under the new CEO, Tony Stubblebine, Medium began adding a human element to their curation and suddenly my therapeutic was being selected for regular boosts on the platform. Everything was going well; my writing was reaching more people, and I was getting paid a modest amount of money, with several articles bringing in enough money to pay for groceries.

It was far more than my initial goal of using my writing to fund my coffee habit. And it was a heady place to be. It was validating. But also after just a short while doing it I began to feel a certain itch—the itch to continue growing.

The whole purpose of my time on the Medium platform had been to grow myself as a writer, and at some point in 2023 I realized that I had grown about as much as I was going to within the confines of Medium. I needed to grow past it.

For those of you who read my work on Medium, this doesn’t mean that I intend to stop writing for the platform. Quite the opposite; I hope to write and post more frequently on Medium. But I am trying to grow professionally into a multi-platform writer, following the POSSE (Post Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere) model suggested by Cory Doctorow. This will take a lot of time; I am just now taking the first steps in the process.

Beyond that, however, I also realized that I had stopped growing thematically. The first hundred pieces that I wrote were supposed to be exploratory, telling me about who I am and what I like to write. But that was never meant to be the end; once I had a good idea of my natural “shape” as a writer, my intent was always to force myself to grow into something more. Instead, by the middle of 2023, I was writing The Affirmations almost exclusively. I loved it, but I wanted more.

And, as it turns out, there are a lot of places where I have clear room to grow. There are entire aspects of my personality—parts of me that I hold very dear—which only rarely make their way into my writing. They include:

• My love of music.

• Cultural commentary, and specifically on the deep political and social fractures introduced into America by the internet.

• Technology, and especially AI and its consequences for society (I have written some articles on this, but not nearly as many as I want to).

• Data analysis and the social sciences. This includes commentary on academia in general and also on the way that academic research is used (and abused) in the public discourse.

• Physical health and well-being—I am a diabetic, and have wanted to write about it for a very long time.

• Travel, and specifically the geopolitics of the countries that I visit, mixed liberally with an understanding of their history and vivid descriptions of the places themselves.

I even have a passing interest in economics and real-estate. Early in my graduate school career I discovered that the Multiple Listing Service used by most real-estate agents in America is a rich and almost completely untouched source of data (by social scientists, at least). I got greedy, and since I have family in the business, I got my license. One of my hobbies is writing analytic scripts to poke around housing data.

The big challenge for me has been figuring out how to write about those things in a way that unifies them into a bigger theme. It should be clear to you from a reading of the last two paragraphs that my interests are deeply fractured. I can’t picture any project that I can do which would narrow the field enough to provide consistency for a prospective audience.

And after a while I realized that maybe I’m not meant to do that. Maybe I’m just meant to be myself, and the people who have a natural affinity for the things I have to say will find their way to me. That’s supposed to be the magic of the internet, after all. It is the ultimate ocean, with subtle currents that somehow seem to deliver a billion lonely messages in a billion fragile bottles to the places that they need to go. It helps that great writers here on Substack have noted that there is an intrinsic value in being yourself on this platform. If you double down on your own insanity, it becomes a sort of signal that draws other people to you who share your diagnosis.

So, with all that in mind, I settled on this new project: Exploration Phase.

Exploration Phase does have a unifying theme, of sorts. Rather than zeroing in on any one aspect of the world, my hope in this blog is to promote a very specific way of engaging with the world.

Those of you who have followed my writings will likely know that I write often about the power of details and depth. And yet, in my own writing over the last two years I have felt a distinct lack of the two. The first few years of my writing was about exploring thematically and growing into the type of person who could produce quality, engaging writing on a regular basis. This next few will be about pushing myself to be more than just a writer. I want to be a dynamic researcher and bring that to my writing. The foundation has been laid. All that’s left is to build.

This newsletter, then, is about engaging with the world as a researcher. In part it is meant to showcase my own research as I try to force myself to become something more than just a writer. Beyond that, however, I also intend for it to serve as a sort of gateway for those who want to learn how to use numbers (quanta) and details (qualia) to engage more deeply with the world and with their own interests.

If this newsletter could be summed up in a single idea, then, it’s this:

The world is a rabbit hole and if you’re willing to go deep enough there’s an entire wonderland to discover on the way down. To get there, you just have to be willing to listen and to pay attention to the details. And don’t worry if you’re distracted by shiny things; that’s kind of the point.

That’s the unifying theme of this newsletter. The only other unifying features are the cartoons (which are currently produced using AI: I hope to start drawing my own as I go) and the use of AI to generate art and music.

For now, I will update weekly, on Fridays. On that note, here’s a song to close the day with.

Wonderland Here
lyrics by James Horton,
music generated via Suno.com

Verse

Hey little rabbit,
Yeah I see you runnin’,
See you runnin’ around,
Yeah, see you runnin’ around.

Hey little rabbit,
I know why you’re runnin’,
It’s a dangerous town,
There are foxes around.

But when you get a chance to breathe,
I hope you have a chance to see

Chorus

There’s a wonderland here,
There’s a wonderland here,
If you can stop and catch your breath,
There’s a wonderland here.

Verse

Hey little rabbit,
Yeah I see you stopped runnin’,
The town has grown calm,
All the foxes are gone.

Hey little rabbit,
Now the world has grown peaceful
There’s magic to see,
Take a moment to breathe.

It’s all quiet so here’s your chance,
You can take your time and dance, because…

Chorus

There’s a wonderland here,
There’s a wonderland here,
Yeah you can take some time to rest,
In this wonderland here,

Outro

Yeah you can take some time to breathe,
And you can take some time to see,
There’s a wonderland here

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