2026 has already happened
a highly self-indulgent note on blog direction and creativity
The first year of the blog was 2023, when I posted 5 times. Followed this up with 2024 when I posted 8 times.
In 2025, I posted 25 times.
Can’t say I’m clear as to why this happened. I can’t even claim it was all that intentional. But certainly writing feels easier than it used to.
It’s a popular thing to say that one should write as often as possible. People I admire a lot openly advocate for this. Particularly the notion that one should post every day.
Which would mean that I remain classified as entirely unproductive. What to make of this?
On one side, I get it. When you look at yourself in a few years time you may rightfully ask what you have to show for yourself. The greater the output, the more of a life lived, the more you’ve impacted the world.
And also the greater the chance of success. Obviously that’s true in terms of raw numbers and growth, but you should think of it more in terms of getting your message out. If you’re writing, I assume you have one and let’s assume it’s true and useful. If you write that in 100 different ways, maybe one of them catches fire. That’s worth it. Fine.
The other half of the Always Be Blogging case is that the more you write, the better you get at it. I understand the logic of this and am happy for you/other people to believe in this, but I personally don’t. Largely due to the observation that out of the sample of people I’ve encountered who do produce work at such a rate, essentially zero of them produce anything I would recommend to you or a friend whose time I respect.
And that’s because good work takes time, man. Not just to write but to think, to feel, to actually develop something to say. To actually have your reader feel something and perhaps even have their worldview stretched an inch.
And if you spend all of your time writing and posting I don’t get how you’re spending enough time interacting with the world to work out what you think of it. Resulting in internet writers who veer from random topic to topic on a daily basis, lightly engaging. It ain’t for me.
Which brings me to my central tension.
Looking back over this blog over the last year, I think I accidentally became a little bit more like those people, and drifted slightly from what I think this blog is good at. This was unintentional, but I could have done more to resist the temptation.
I’m proud of most of the stuff I’ve put up here, but I’m going to make more of an active effort to stay away from: ‘takes’, unfinished thoughts, lazy cynical generalisation.
So, some things are going to change, and I thought it would be best to state it clearly here before we get down to it.
Before that, I want to explain a bit more about how the Molochian process described above seems to work in this ecosystem, so that it may help others who feel the same thing.
Individuality is endangered by exposure to groups. This is amplified when it comes to crafts or creative endeavours, so you need to tread carefully.
When it comes to writing, I think everyone is quite good naturally, so long as you have enough command of language to actually speak to people. What makes people bad at writing is they take the voice they naturally have, and start adding layers on top of it, which distorts what’s underneath in the same way an intercom buffers audio.
Two obvious buffers that get placed on your ability to write as you grow up are (1) explicit rules you are taught (2) fear of people reading your honest thoughts. Both increase the certainty that you are going to produce something people are willing to categorise as valid writing, but both decrease the chance that your soul will remain inside it. Making you pretty AI-replaceable.
The other buffer, that is far more dangerous, is the set of implicit rules you take from other people producing in your craft.
I’ve listened to a lot of Burial and Jai Paul over the last few years. Both produce highly original music that sticks with you in the unquantifiable way. What’s interesting is their sounds are at once simple, unique, and just a bit weird.
What’s relevant is that when you find a rare interview with either of them (rarity also relevant), and you hear about their process, it seems they barely engage with music culture at all. Both in input, only listening to select things, and output, not playing by modern incentives in the slightest.
This is the opposite equation to that which runs the cultural sameness which the majority of output now suffers from.
Which means if you want find a way to start chipping away at the buffers on your work and get back to the voice that already exists at the bottom of your creativity, you need to be careful about what you’re consuming.
I feel this in some of the work I’m least proud of.
By now, there is a very recognisable ‘substack voice’, which I think is largely caused by reading too many substacks, and unconsciously learning that there is a narrow interval for what an internet essay can be, leading to the majority of them sounding the same. At times, I think I fall into that.
Even more alarming is the temptation to fall into half-baked overly-confident take territory, which is easy as hell to produce but ultimately serves no one. Again, the thing to avoid is being in the ecosystem a bit too much.
So, here’s what’s changing.
Already Happened is sticking to longer form, more creative, more intense, more intellectually serious work. No fluff. To interpolate an inspiration, psychology blogging is in danger of growing stale, I’m taking it to straaaange new places.
I am moving shorter-form analyses and writing to a sister blog, where I’m going to do the Priced In series as a weekly thing. I will post the new link for that soon if you are that way inclined. I do find this work equally valuable and know some people probably even prefer it, it’s just cleaner for it to live somewhere else, and makes my process easier.
Less relevant to most of you, but I am also starting another two writing side-projects. One will be on the psychology of forecasting/probability/prediction markets. The other will be on the psychology of Magic: The Gathering (and other card games). These will be entirely separate to this and you won’t be exposed to them unless you so choose.
Strangely, in reaction to the general malaise regarding the internet writing landscape above, the one source of respite in what I’ve been reading this year has come from Wayback Machining through the lost archives of the golden age of Magic writing. It’s a game that reveals a lot about who you are and how you interact with the world, so it makes sense that at its best, Magic writing has a transcendental quality to it. So, I’m hoping to use that as a way of accessing the romance that this era of blogging seems to be lacking. Same for the forecasting stuff. They are essentially the same interest to be honest.
Both of those will be for fun and less of a priority.
The final thing I need to mention: I have opened paid subscriptions for the first time.
I’ve never done this before because this a small blog, and if I produce anything, it’s best off spreading as much as it can. And I just can’t justify charging people for whatever I’d be producing behind a paywall.
However, it’s become clear that some people don’t care, and would like to support anyway, which I am very grateful for.
The final hurdle was that Substack won’t allow me to charge a nominally low fee that I wouldn’t feel guilty about, but I have solved that by finding out you can permanently set very high discount rates on paid subs, which I am doing.
So, if you follow this link, you should able to support for 75% off
I say support because I am currently offering you nothing extra in return, bar the slightly increased percentage chance that this show keeps going. Which is already around 100%.
As a final piece of transparency, the algorithm has essentially stopped promoting work that is entirely free, and as much as I stand for the purity of the form, I’m not enshittification resistant.
Enough about me. Big year ahead. Let’s remind ourselves of what we are doing here.
It remains my view that the next few decades are likely to be strangest any set of humans have ever had to experience. In fact, the term ‘decade’ is going to become pretty useless. It will be exciting, transcendent, frightening, and violent. The more work we can do to understand it before it happens, or to observe processes that are already happening, the better. I think.
Technology and media changed what it meant to be a human in ways that mainstream psychology is still catching up with from over a hundred years ago. So I have essentially zero hope that it will react in time to help us navigate the storm that’s coming.
What must be true though, is that for the infinite ways in which the new era can amplify the trends that already exist (wireheading, narcicissm, depression), the avenues for personal transcendence multiply too. That would seem a valuable thing for all of us to be thinking about.
At the very least, I can’t see us running out things to talk about any time soon.
Here’s to a big year. Thanks to all of you that read. I will try my best to produce more stuff that is good, and I’m sorry for anything that wasn’t.
Solve et coagula. Solve et coagula. Solve et coagula.