What Am I Doing Here?

Year-end musings on a sense of purpose or lack thereof

As my wife can readily attest, I’ve not been in the greatest frame of mind lately. That’s partly due to my feelings about the state of this country, partly my baseline personality, and partly just due to middle age (I seem to be unable to ascend from the mid-life slump to the relative happiness that is supposed to attend the golden years). But a big part of it is that I’m one of those peculiar people who needs a sense of purpose, and these days my sense of that is very bound up with my writing, and more generally my creative endeavors. My son is grown, my family is provided for financially, and I am not performing some other essential function in society. What I’m doing with my life at this point is, well, this. So that’s my purpose. But what is the purpose of this?

I don’t only write this Substack, of course. I made a movie, which I am currently trying to sell. I’ve written other screenplays that I hope to make or see made. I still write essays for other publications, including a regular gig at Modern Age. I have a number of book projects, one of which (the novel) is going incredibly slowly, which is the proximate reason for my stressed and distressing mood lately. But this, right here, does take a bunch of time, and it’s worth asking myself periodically: what am I doing here?

For that reason, I was very interested to see one of the most successful Substack writers, Matt Yglesias, explain what he thinks he is doing in his two most recent posts.

“Nobody Will Read This Article” is a piece about why he wrote the piece he is writing, which is my kind of meta. It builds to an appreciation of Substack as a subscription-model business, Yglesias’s appreciation for his audience and how he thinks about making a subscription worth the money. But he gets to that point via a discussion of how the Internet changed patterns of people’s engagement with the kind of writing Yglesias does. Once upon a time, general-interest magazines were read in circumstances where there was nothing better to do—a way to fill dead time on planes and in waiting rooms and so forth—and, at other times (over breakfast, after dinner), out of some combination of civic obligation to be informed and a desire for entertainment and personal enrichment that was less-demanding or time-consuming than reading a book. Nowadays, some of those same magazines still exist in digital form, and they’ve been joined by new forms of writing (like Substack newsletters) that are magazine-like in certain ways. But they are read by most people most of the time at work, as a way of slacking off.

In other words, there is a sense in which Yglesias’s job is to distract people from what they are actually supposed to be doing, reducing their productivity and therefore increasing the number of hours they have to spend “working” as opposed to doing whatever else they might do with their time. He’s competing, of course, with far less nourishing forms of distraction; I’ll happily agree that reading Slow Boring is preferable to watching a YouTuber’s running commentary on someone else’s video game play. Nonetheless, he’s a participant in an attention-economy arms race, and while he can know when people are reading him, he can’t know whether, if they were unable to read him at work, they’d revert to pre-Internet norms and choose to read him when they had other plausible options.

All of that would depress me greatly if I were Yglesias—unless I was confident that what I was offering was not only more valuable than pure time-wasting (a low bar to clear) but was a positive addition to his readers’ lives, something they should be reading even if they can’t do so as a way of avoiding work. Fortunately for him, in his next post, “Give Yourself the Gift of Doing Things.” Yglesias demonstrates that confidence.

The post as a whole has two big points: that it isn’t good for your mental health to give in to feelings of helplessness and a passive relationship to your own life, and that when you “just do things” you should try to do things that actually do some good, rather than just things that make you feel like you are doing good. Yglesias feels that his fundraising drive for GiveWell was a good example of both: it was an action that he took on his own initiative that required organization and effort on his part to do well, and it achieved actual good in the world.

Yglesias has not devoted his life to what GiveWell does, though, nor is that the primary function of Slow Boring. So what about that primary function of punditry? After expressing bafflement about what many other pundits are up to with takes that are unlikely to change the world, even in a small way—that, as he sees it, are just adding to a pile of content that people might or might not enjoy but that doesn’t do them any good—he finally describes what he thinks he is doing:

I mostly want to persuade my audience on topics where I think their views might not be entirely settled. Or at a minimum, I want to address specific new arguments that have emerged and that people who I regard as like-minded may not yet be familiar with.

I want people in my community to think more clearly about the dilemmas that we face. A big one for me is trying to think about how Democrats should actually handle immigration if they win power. In 2020, Joe Biden had what was at the time a very compelling immigration message, but it fell apart in implementation. The Keir Starmer economic record also gives me pause about “affordability” as a political meme: Clearly this is what’s on voters’ minds, but a harder problem is devising workable ideas that can be successfully implemented.

Most of all, though, I want to get people to do things.

These are presented as a series of different purposes, but they all fall under the general heading of persuasion. Where Yglesias knows what he believes, he wants to convince those who might be convinced to change their views to align with his. He pays attention to who might be persuadable—he doesn’t waste rhetorical energy on people he doesn’t think he could reach—and he clearly has ethics around what constitutes a legitimate mode of persuasion (he is not going to threaten to kidnap your daughter, for example; more importantly, he isn’t going to lie knowingly), but his goal is to change people’s minds. “Addressing new arguments” is part of the same process of persuasion; he wants to help people who already agree with him understand those arguments better so that they can be assimilated into their argumentative armature or so that they can have a refutation ready, whichever is appropriate. Thinking about dilemmas is actually also about persuasion: Yglesias wants to persuade his readers to focus on particular problems that he thinks urgently require solutions, and that require attention and creative thinking in order to solve. Finally, returning to GiveWell, he wants to persuade people to think differently about their actual lives more broadly, to change their outlook and thereby their behavior—that’s what he means by saying that he wants to “get people to do things.”

I suppose it is obvious that the purpose of a publication devoted to opinion would be to persuade. But I’m not sure that I’ve ever clearly thought that was what I have been doing over the 20+ years that I have been doing writing of this sort. So what have I been doing here?

Much of the time, I write for the purpose of coming to a better understanding of something myself, and the writing is both part of that process and also my way of sharing that process with others. I hope that it is interesting to them, and I hope, I guess, that it will prompt them to engage in a similar process themselves—which I guess means I’m trying to be persuasive, but if I am it is by example rather than by argument or exhortation. Even when I write something that is explicitly framed as an effort at persuasion—this post, for example—I don’t imagine myself directly changing anyone’s mind so much as offering them an invitation to engage with my thinking. If they take an argument of mine seriously, perhaps they will be persuaded by it—but it might just as easily prompt them to formulate a convincing response that allows them to sustain their original position, or possibly to change to yet a third belief that lines up neither with what they thought before or what I attempted to persuade them of, and from my perspective all of those alternatives are presumptively positive developments. I’d only be upset if someone read me and either didn’t understand me or didn’t take me seriously; indeed, even if someone loves what I wrote, I can’t take much joy from that fact if I feel like they haven’t really understood me. But if the conversation advances then that’s a win, even if nobody is persuaded.

What does that say about me, that I’m more interested in seeking understanding and engaging in conversation for their own sake than for the sake of persuasion, for the sake of doing something? That yearning for conversation says that I’m a lonely person, which I already knew; the nature of that conversation says that I’m an intellectual person, which I also already knew. Inasmuch as I’m doing this as a way of avoiding work on more substantial projects (like my novel), it says that I’m an impatient person, and an insecure person, someone who needs gratification and validation quickly, both of which I also already knew. My lack of emphasis on changing anything or anybody probably also says that I’m realistic about the small scope of my readership, or that I lack the confidence or discipline to do what it would take to expand it aggressively.

But inasmuch as I am trying to write things that I would appreciate reading, which I most definitely am, I think it also says something about what I believe is a worthwhile way to spend one’s time. I’m hoping that what I write is sufficiently worth reading that it isn’t just something you read to pass the time or to avoid work, that, sometimes, you make time specifically to read it, that you even read it more than once on occasion, and that if you comment here it’s because you want to go deeper, or to push me to go deeper, and not because you want to engage in the ritual combat that takes up so much of our public discourse.

I hope you feel the same way. I hope more of you feel the same way over time—and tell me so by subscribing, by sharing, by upgrading to a paid subscription or by gifting a subscription to someone you think would appreciate it. On some level, if doing this is worthwhile, then it’s worthwhile whatever the size of the readership. But on another level, if doing this is worthwhile, then I should want more people to read it, and know about it, and show that they value it.

I don’t know if this will be my last post of the year or not, but it likely is, and so I wish you all a very happy New Year, and a healthy, joyous and fruitful 2026, one with lots of good conversation and at least a bit more understanding.