Rediscovering personal connection through postcards

Wow, I just realized I haven't recorded one of these It Matters But It Doesn't voice notes in a really long time. I think part of it was just kind of readjusting life and trying to figure out where my creative pockets were and how I was going to manage everything. But I think I figured that out relatively quickly. Something about the scarcity of time inspired me to actually be more consistently productive. I haven't even been posting as much as I have been writing. I have actually a couple longer pieces just sitting in the bucket. Which is funny, after all these years of struggling to, I don't know, find whatever missing piece it was to sit down and actually do the longer writing to actually get these things done but then either forget or not find the time to actually post them. There's something humorous about that.

But I've also been finding it interesting how I'm rediscovering—I feel like I'm always rediscovering something—but I'm rediscovering the value of doing, of acting and how acting defines things in a way that sitting and planning and questioning things could never. So, for example, I finally get down to where I'm writing essays, something I've been wanting to do for a while, which I was just talking about. In the process of that, I realized, hey, you know what I really miss? I really miss sending more personal things. And then the more I started thinking about how I miss sending more personal things in the newsletter, I realized, oh, you know, sharing what books I've been reading—that's really something that goes with the more personal stuff.

And then as I thought about that more, like, yeah, you know, sometimes I might want to share an album or I want to share a television show or a movie or something that really got me. And I realized, oh, what I'm talking about is the kind of general curated newsletter type weekly update type thing that I originally did years ago that I originally started the Substack to do. So I think I'm going to bring that back. But I had to ask myself before I did that, okay, what broke before? What was it that made me drop off from doing it before or get bored with it or, you know, whatever happened?

And I think that's a really interesting question because it shows a shift in my mindset recently. Whereas before, I would have kind of just—I think I probably would have just blamed myself in some way that it failed because I'm lazy or failed because I can't do this or, you know, I would have found in some way for that to be a symptom of something that I was lacking. Whereas now I'm looking for what in the situation was not conducive to continuing it. And I think what I've come up with is length. I set a certain pressure on myself when I was doing those to write to a certain length. And I think the reason I'm able to notice that is because now that I'm writing other things that are longer and just more complex, I don't feel the pressure to do that with something more personal.

And then this word popped in my head: postcard. Honestly, I was just sitting and trying to figure out, like, if I create—excuse me—if I create two sections on the website, here's the one where I want to put the essays, what's this other one gonna be called? Letters, Dispatches, you know, these are both terms I've used in the past; neither of them felt right, which means that I hadn't nailed what I was doing down. And then I thought, postcard! Yeah, because the postcard's awesome. A postcard is like an image and then just something real short to let you know what's up.

So I don't think I would have figured that out if I hadn't been writing and doing the other thing because it was the contrast and the context and the understanding that came from doing that that made it possible for me to come to that conclusion. Now, I've yet to sit down and write one of these postcards because I'm probably putting a little pressure on myself for something that's not supposed to have any pressure on it, but not much. I think I'm not too worried. I think I'm letting the structure and the schedule and, you know, whatever all this stuff, you know, the people set for themselves before they start working—like, I'm gonna publish every Friday—I'm letting that stuff happen more organically.

I think I'm gonna let the doing start to dictate things instead of me dictating things and then trying to do it because then I feel like I'm always catching up. I'm always rushing to complete something, and I always end up in this situation where things begin to feel like a chore, which is the worst thing that you can do to something that you love, something creative, something you enjoy, something that you want other people to enjoy. It's just like grabbing it by the cojones and squeezing. It's not the right tactic.

What else do I have to say about all this? I don't know. I'm—I think the other reason that it's taken me a while to wrap my head around so many things is also because of artificial intelligence, which at this point people are probably sick of hearing about. But I think about it constantly. I think about it constantly because it's restructured or had me reimagine a lot of paradigms that I held to be true, and one of which involves note-taking. This idea of having notes and putting them into organized structures and creating workflows and systems—all of it seems kind of useless when you can just have a bunch of messy stuff thrown in one place and then you can talk to an AI and organize it in four seconds and find themes.

Most of the things that you have seen me writing lately prove this. I just kind of ramble. I bring in random notes and a bunch of things I'm collecting here, so I'm thinking about this topic, and here's all the weird shit I've been thinking about it. And then the AI will ask me questions, and we go through a long, long conversation. Usually, each sitting for a conversation for something like that is two to three hours. Sometimes I'll go back another day and have another couple hours at it. It's just long, intensive, and so enjoyable because instead of having the AI tell me things, I'm making it—I'm making it force me to articulate myself.

And then from that, I'm able to take this mess and make something, which makes all of the other stuff that I've been doing for all these other years—tagging and folders and queries and all the stuff—because it all seems stupid. Like, I wasted so many years. Now granted, I know the AI wasn't around then, but I could have been doing the same thing just a lot slower by myself, sitting and looking at a piece of paper and just thinking for long periods of time and asking myself questions. Because I think that's the paradigm that AI changes: AI is just a really powerful mirror if you use it right.