Journal
This journal is a daily account of my creative work. It's intended to be accurate, not entertaining. If you decide to read it you'll see how I actually write and compose. It's also freewritten, quite unlike my other writing. The ideas I express here are thoughts going through my head rather than definitive views or even solid opinions. So don't take them too seriously. To prevent AI scraping, older entries require a (free) subscription.
Listen to my most recent piece here:
June 18, 2026
Has been a bit of a rough week, mainly because replacing my famous 20th-century Camry with an almost identical model that's ten years newer is easier said than done. At the moment I can't even remember what I'm doing, although I think I added a lot of detail to the meditation instructions in Optimalism earlier this week to the point that this is probably now the most detailed adaptation of the method of loci ever written, complete with a learning guide that took quite some time though whether it will ever be used is anyone's guess. A few tiny touchups to the parables.
I was starting to wonder whether I needed to change Camries to change gears, when today for possibly the first time in months I took a break in the afternoon to work on some architectural ideas for a few hours because I couldn't think of any other alterations that needed to be made. Hard to imagine. But then I began feeling as if my head were on fire, and the evening has been rather unpleasant. So, I don't really know what is happening now.... With luck I will have a better report by the end of the week.
June 12, 2026
I have not been much in the mood to post here lately, though not because I have been idle. This week to expand on the late addition of I.15, I added addendum A.20. And then after testing this with LLMs I encountered frequent misunderstandings and was obliged to expand it further with a detailed refutation of perennialism, an approach I have always considered cheap and which had nothing to do with my conception of Optimalism at any time. Throughout this text I have tried to minimize criticism of competing ideas as a harmful distraction, so I only wrote these paragraphs by necessity, and they are maximally compressed to the point that most people will need LLM assistance to follow the argument. But, LLMs can now expand it with consistent accuracy if given all the relevant passages, and that is enough to accomplish my goal of making my meaning intelligible to readers who want to understand it.
Beyond this I added six more parables to memorably illustrate the meanings of each chapter. These took more time than may be evident as they were written with great care and attention to detail in a literary form I have never used before and will never use again. I also added pedagogical scaffolding to the meditation instructions and corrected a few details I found to be ineffective in practice. Finally, I added a few more paintings to make reading more pleasant and evocative.
The main thing I have learned here is that I am incapable of knowing when a thing is done, the currently final version of Optimalism running to more than twice the length of the original despite retaining an identical skeleton - and as I mentioned previously, I.15 was the only essential joint added after the pre-writing conception. But all these additions do important work unfolding latent implications for the reader and increasing the accuracy of LLM exegeses. And I think where my upcoming novel is concerned that I will set it aside when it is "complete" before sending it off to publication and review it extensively "as if it were already published" because I am sure the "complete" version will have important missing elements that will not occur to me until I think of it as "complete except for this one thing...." On a more amusing note, over the past months I accumulated so many word-processor windows open with fifty or more various drafts and versions of Optimalism, and lost track of them to the point that closing the program seemed an unnecessary distraction, and eventually the word-processor began to malfunction and I switched to composing in MS Notepad, where all the parables were written. And now I am writing this journal entry in Notepad and saving everything as .txt files and wondering why I ever bothered with bloated word processors in the first place, let alone for so many years, when it can be this simple and easy.
My humorous thought for the week is that ponerology is incomplete and one instead should adopt an attitude of political gnosticism, such that one views the earthly political landscape itself as guaranteeing the victory of evil, and one only has to discover how it will win. Surely this has been the case since Salon Kitty and likely some time before, and up to the culmination of the blackmail era in the antics of Jeff and Ghissy, our modern Boris and Natasha. I believe I will share this insight with a friend whose pessimism about our fallen times, when good is bad and right is wrong, goes very far but still not far enough...
June 6, 2026
Today I woke up expecting to make some minor edits to the meditation instructions and declare the whole thing done, but then, reflecting on the whole, I decided that relationality to God was underexplored, and that I was still unsatisfied with the note in Chapter VII discussing deities as spiritual iconography/imagined presentations, which simply took up the line explored in my earlier Pragmatical essay's appendix on spiritual iconography and repeated it more concisely. After spending the rest of the day in thought I came up with proposition I.15, which is of tremendous significance despite its small size and status as a non-dependency for any other proposition, and inserted it into the main text of Optimalism. This new proposition enables one to reabsorb the gods in the Heideggerian sense into monotheistic theology proper as relational modes, to put it imprecisely. To say nothing of the gods more generally! That is simply tremendous, and I am still thinking through the implications, which clearly need to be discussed in an appendix. As my work for the last few weeks has been devoted to cleaning up loose ends and improving the presentation of ideas that already existed in my mind at the start of the year before I began writing the text of Optimalism, which is to say, it has been six months of almost entirely textual labor, I admit this late innovation surprises me greatly. That said, new ideas often prove wrong when inspected more carefully in the light of day for a longer period. Time will tell.
June 5, 2026
Still sick in multiple ways at the same time, but one of those ways has turned around and I am on the way out of this respiratory illness. Beyond that I don't really know where I stand at the moment. As I do not want to start a new project until I am more recovered I have continued to make minor improvements to Optimalism and perhaps I would have made them anyway as I think they have benefited the text. I added a "Parable of Mountains" to explain Chapter V more intuitively, and considering I was at the peak of the fever when writing it I think it came off quite well.
As yet there is near zero public reaction to Optimalism, and certainly less than to anything else I've published. I am increasingly confident in my view that it is the best work I have done and the most significant that I will do; and the impression that it was dropped into a black hole of total indifference confirms this based on the observed inverse correlation with quality.
I also took a moment to research the fertilizer and energy situation and at least glance at hard data rather than rumor. The food situation for the world next year looks increasingly disturbing, and the longer the Middle East stays closed for business the more likely significant food inflation in wealthy countries and scarcity in poor ones becomes. This does indeed appear to be an unconscionable geopolitical gambit by the people who actually run the USG to knock out China that will have huge repercussions on all of us even though, as yet, nothing has been felt. Now, I can't do anything about it and won't pretend this sort of thing is an area of expertise. And, maybe the unexpected will happen and the Strait will open imminently. But to stay out of trouble one has to keep eyes on the horizon, and caution costs very little beyond appearances.
I expect to be fully rid of this respiratory illness by the end of next week, but will hopefully feel well enough to be more active again by Monday.
May 29, 2026
Have been sick, unfortunately, in several new ways in addition to my usual problems, and it doesn't feel likely to improve until late next week. With multiple systems malfunctioning at the same time I'm not keen to start a new project because I don't want to get off on the wrong foot. So, I have done some more minor polishing for Optimalism and will maybe stare at the wall until I'm in a state to at least do some research.
Among this minor polishing was a small improvement to I.3-4 including a brief note. This material was presented in an addendum in an early draft but I later decided to cut it with the thought that adding the word "participate" to the beginning of I.3 would get the message across concisely. However, it has since occurred to me that this was underdetermined rather than concise and could easily be misinterpreted in a way that would obscure details of the theodicy. So, instead of restoring the draft addendum I have worked it into I.3-4 more thoroughly. I will have to decide later whether I have done this right as I have a bit of a fever at the moment.
May 24, 2026
Today I added addendum A.19. on the sacred to the end of Optimalism. However, my cold, or what might be a reaction to some kind of unusually strong seasonal bloom (I had no seasonal allergies at all for the past two years) has disturbed my system, and I am now feeling alternately very fuzzy and extraordinarily tense despite keeping strictly to my usual regimen. I need to lie down in a dark room until it passes. A disappointing weekend, as my famous 20th-century Camry is on its last legs and I was unable to go for my usual hike this weekend. Not feeling in a state to find its successor. Sometimes the best thing you can do is as little as possible.
May 23, 2026
Yesterday I did a final slow pass for line edits in Optimalism, finding only a few very small typos this time, mainly related to the referencing. This took the entire day as the text is quite long. Likely there are one or two wrong reference links somewhere but there are so many references they're very hard to find.
Last night I started coming down with some kind of cold or allergy issue and today I woke up fuzzy-headed and without enough mental sharpness to get very far. However, in reviewing the many-times "final" version I realized I'd left a couple propositions out. Given the number of moving parts it was almost inevitable that I miss something. So, I added these as propositions VI.17-18. These are valuable and if you have already finished reading the text you should go back and give them a look. That said, they don't change anything that was already there and nothing else is dependent on them.
In this context I will mention in passing something I believe I wrote in my initial reflection on Optimalism. Namely, that I worked out the most important elements of the system before writing it down but that it was held in my mind in some other format totally different from the geometrical format in which I ultimately presented it. Translating from one to the other was quite a task and that's why these two propositions were omitted/forgotten, not because they're actually a new addition from my perspective.
Due to my fuzzy mind today I can't verify that I wrote these propositions perfectly so I will have to give them one more look tomorrow before I really put it away. But, everything else looks very solid. I also added a list of core propositions to the very end of the page. If you are overwhelmed by the length and detail this should help you navigate.
May 21, 2026
I made a few more minor improvements to Optimalism today but there is clearly little left to improve. I previously entertained the idea of announcing it only in this journal, but in retrospect that was an absurd excess of pessimism. Consequently I have sent an announcement to subscribers and added it to the catalogue of my writing on social media. However, I don't expect much to come of it. At this point in my brilliant career I am so confident in the inverse correlation between quality and reception that I would almost be disappointed if the non-fiction work I regard as my best were read.
In other news, the first few fingers on my right hand are now twitching due to excessive time writing and editing over the last few months. Not sure what I am going to do about this.
May 20, 2026
Unsurprisingly (by this point) still making some small improvements to Optimalism but they are shrinking in size, hopefully/perhaps toward zero. Now having much smoother albeit not perfect results from LLM explanations in the majority of cases. This seems to be because I exorbitantly expanded V.19. and V.20. where LLMs frequently get stuck due to the novelty of the argument.
Nevertheless, in this entry I'd like to share a followup to what I wrote about the Iran War some weeks ago. Once again I don't want to spend time on geopolitics on this journal, but I consider this necessary as a qualification of those earlier remarks.
First, my initial view in the first week of the war seems to have been roughly correct. But I have since been convinced that a larger context is essential to understand the likely course of events going ahead. To be clear, what follows is speculation that I entertain with low confidence. Winning the local war, I speculate, no longer matters much to the rulers of the US because they are now turning the closure of Hormuz into a weapon against China. Specifically, they are trying to create a global recession/depression. The natural assumption is that they wouldn't do this because it hurts the US economy substantially. However, in this unusual case the rulers don't care. The idea is that it hurts everyone else more than America, so America comes out in a stronger geopolitical position overall. And this is particularly relevant with regard to China. China has a demand deficiency they have been aggressively exporting. On this point read Pettis. A global recession will create demand destruction that will hammer China much harder than the US. And in this very unusual case, it may actually help US reindustrialization. Because demand destruction will give the USG carte blanche to run a new WPA. I am talking about massive public capex, or at least dirigiste capex. Industrial policy. In the end the US will be reindustrialized and China will be slugged with a depression. Of course, the rest of the world will suffer terribly and the next five or ten years will be painful in the US as well. But blame can easily be placed on the current (controlled) president, and Iran as well, and the policy can be executed anyway.
To be clear, I don't support this plan because it is too destructive and these goals could be achieved in other ways that are not destructive. It is high-risk as well, because China is ahead in electrification. But, it seems to me the true rulers of the US are happy for you, me, and everyone else to be collateral damage if there's likely to be a sharper relative gain against China. Again, I may be wrong and these are low confidence views. Even if they are true, the future is hard to predict because random events are continually changing the picture. I thought these things through a month or so ago but haven't had time to write them here because I have been too busy. And no I did not think up the China angle myself, but yes I am extrapolating that idea to the reindustrialization / intentional-demand-destruction scenario. In any case, if the above is true you can safely ignore anything said on the news because no one would admit to such a plan. Instead there will be endless misdirection while it goes ahead.
Time will tell.
May 16, 2026
Well, probably more surprising to me than anyone else, I spent the remainder of the week making minor additions to Optimalism, mostly in the form of further addenda or notes. However, I am confident all of these additions are strong. The "final" version is 50% longer than the original one despite maintaining the entire structure and concept of the original without alteration. Normally one would fear that extra length would be fat. But instead the additions fortify and extend the argument in meaningful ways that will be, I hope, appreciated by readers in whatever distant future this text finally finds its audience.
I could give more detail on this process but I have continued to work uninterrupted and broken many promises to take breaks and now I do not really have the energy for a long entry. Part of it was new insights from repeatedly examining the same passages in search of improvements; part of it was fortification in response to innumerable LLM tests with different prompts to see where models would object or stumble or just be unable to explain clearly. I now know the failure points for LLMs well, and the remaining such points would require too much wasteful verbiage to close. Whether revisions are done done or not I will find out in a few days. But, I hope. I have still not had my orange.
May 12, 2026
I've continued to make small tweaks to Optimalism over the last few days. These are improvements and it's now unusually well honed, but my brain is also stuck in revision mode, and at the same time I'm having a "bottom falling out" feeling now that such an overwhelming project is done. I mentioned earlier that a lifetime of thought had gone into this text; but the writing itself, when I look back, took four months, of which the first half was done while ill and foggy and the second half consisted of 80-hour weeks on coconut coffee. Now it is over and I am... disoriented and still not in an emotional place where I could take any enjoyment from a break. So, to try to shift my mental frame I am going to do some historical research relevant to my novel. And, I should probably write a short and easy piece of music to get my feet wet again.
While trying to change gears I sketched a few pages to add to GIMBY. I have been quite disappointed with the reception of this work because the pretty pictures and so forth have prevented people from registering the genuine economic insights buried in this article. However, in the end I decided not to use these pages because they went too quickly and roughly over complex ideas without taking time for a sufficiently complete explanation. My conclusion was that these pages would do more harm than good unless I expanded them so much that they would take up too much space and distract from the more valuable parts of the essay.
I've posted this rejected draft below in case readers are interested but it is not circumspect or revised, so do not quote me on any claims made there. (Which isn't to say they're not true....) I suppose my GIMBY essay will have to wait till someone ready to appreciate it discovers it in the future. Before the whole world looks like Tokyo and Seoul, I hope!
Rejected draft aside for GIMBY:
It's come to my attention that most YIMBYs aren't aware of even the most basic facts regarding real-estate investment, on account of which I feel obliged to insert a brief explanation that would be better left to more serious people, and which the reader is warmly invited to skip due to the distinct shortage of pretty pictures.
The fundamental YIMBY error is to assume real-estate behaves like widgets, so that high prices simply must be downstream of some artificial supply restriction. However, real-estate is not a widget and it does not follow the economics of widgets. It is an asset and part of the larger asset market. Saying "housing should be a place to live and not an asset" doesn't make it so (trust me, I've tried it). And therefore, investment in real-estate always competes with other possible investments. Real-estate investors will only build when doing so gives them a risk-adjusted return that matches the broader market return.
The idea that investors would compete each other down to a 0% return if we just ended density restrictions when treasuries are offering well above 0% and equities even more is pure fantasy with precisely 0% basis in reality. In fact, because the risks involved are quite high, real-estate investment requires an even higher return than the broader market. This return is normally not made through present rent levels alone, but through rent increases in the future as well (there are occasional exceptions to this rule in odd markets with very high cap rates). In this sense real-estate functions like a bond with a variable yield, somewhat analogous to TIPS, which yields less than nominal treasuries of similar duration for good reason.
Because real-estate investment has to be competitive with other capital investments to "pencil," and because the risk involved is in practice only competitive when rents will increase (note again rare exceptions such as residential REIT properties in Detroit with very high cap rates), real-estate investors will only build when they expect rent increases. Thus, even if YIMBY densification laws succeeded at substantially lowering rents (which they won't), building would "paradoxically" stop and investors would put their capital elsewhere. So zoning for higher density would be an ineffective strategy even if we ignored the fact (and we shouldn't) that after the first one or two stories building costs rise in direct proportion to height!
To resolve this question once and for all I will ask you, dear reader, if you would rather put your money into a broad market index and put your feet up poolside, or if you would instead rather use it to build higher apartment buildings for a lower risk-adjusted return.
Well? It's not so easy to be a YIMBY fantasy investor when your own money is on the line, is it? Fortunately, the very wealthy are known to build tall apartments at their own expense to charitably lower rents for the working class as long as you repeal so many density restrictions that they feel you've asked them nicely.
Apparent counterexamples to the logic above are the consequence of accidental malinvestment. In other words, investors expected an influx of higher-income population or rising salaries that never materialized. This investor error produces a housing oversupply that has no genuine connection to zoning or regulations but does in fact lower rents for a number of years. Similarly, overinvestment during the dotcom bubble gave the public cheaper internet sooner because of investor error, not because of regulatory success.
While there are indeed numerous dire housing regulations that impose high costs on society, such as garage requirements (which I am almost certainly much angrier about than any YIMBY) and overbearing environmental regulations that do not improve the environment anywhere near as much as other interventions of much lower cost (I'm talking to you, California), and may well be net negative after inputs are considered (and you, triple-pane-window manufacturers who captured the energy-regulation board), these unjustifiable costs tend to be capitalized into land values and otherwise shared out across society as economic waste, with relatively negligible effect on rents themselves. And given this (invert the process in your mind, please) it should be immediately obvious that the biggest beneficiaries of deregulation in general and upzoning in particular are wealthy urban landowners. So if you're not one of them I am now going to ask you to lay down the crack pipe of the YIMBY narrative and stop hurting yourself (and me) because it's hard to watch.
The number of our brightest professionals (compliments to soften the blow) who are addicted to the YIMBY narrative, compelling because it relies on a distortion of the first day of Economics 101 and gives you an easily hated enemy to blame, is quite shocking, and I would like to ask you all to collectively lay off the oh-so-tempting crack pipe and repeat after me that real-estate is not a widget but an asset that must give a risk-adjusted return competitive with the rest of the asset market and densification doesn't change this in the least.
As this note is already very long I will only mention in passing that the yield on real-estate is a function of incomes and interest rates, and that people bid competitively, and so if incomes in an area rise while density stays the same or rises then rents are going to rise too, full stop (well, not full stop technically but in practice, yes).
There are only two reliable ways out of price escalation. One is to have the government build regardless of the market return and crowd out private developers in the process, while the other is to spread CRE out so the jobs downstream of it never cross above the density where the elasticity of demand falls dramatically (most people would like a quarter-acre but very few care about a half acre and even less a full acre). Or, both. (Actually, there is also my crater-city proposal which should further lower land rents for other reasons described in GIMBY.) For a much better and more accurate explanation of the above points (excluding those proper to GIMBY itself), study the work of Cameron Murray.
This has been an investing lesson by a starving artist. You may now return to your regularly scheduled program.
End (rejected) draft.
May 8, 2026
So, my proposed orange break didn't happen. Because, the next morning I woke up and decided I needed to hammer harder at certain details, in this case for an uncustomary reason. My goal was to have Optimalism be comprehensible to both knowledgeable human readers and LLMs who could interpret it for the less knowledgeable. However, the LLMs were not performing well. The main reason for this, as I may have written a few weeks ago, is context-window limitations. Even when they let you paste the whole essay in, they can't understand it all at once because they run out of compute/tokens. I wanted to improve on this by clarifying the arguments so that LLMs could understand them better without much impairing their legibility to knowledgeable humans. Not because I care about LLMs, but because I expect LLMs to be interpreting this work for many people. With this in mind, I added a large number of tags and dependency chains that are somewhat distracting to humans, but very helpful to LLMs. These let the LLMs see the critical flow of logic with considerably less effort.
However, these chains aren't the only thing I've added. In fact I've been working feverishly for the last few days to hone the presentation in chapters five and seven to be as perfect as possible. This didn't involve any substantive changes to the ideas, but in chapter five the presentation was clarified significantly and in chapter seven it was expanded. So, if you've already finished the essay you may want to have another look at those two chapters. Other chapters are largely untouched. The reason those two chapters needed so much fine detailing is that they are the hardest and least conventional, and chapter five in particular happens to fall very close to the middle of the text. LLMs understand things in the middle of the context window worse than what's at the beginning of the end. And, unfortunately, the most complicated and unconventional part of chapter five, which is the keystone of the entire text, happens to be right in the middle. Because of that location, even if you prompt an LLM with only that chapter it is sometimes a struggle. Despite many improvements, I often still find I have to manually walk the LLM through the v8-v13 stretch. And yes, I have tested this many times, prompting the LLM in different ways.
Regarding that, I will mention that you can convince an LLM to give you any review you want depending on how you nudge it. I have run the same text by LLMs tens of times to see the consequences of different prompt introductions. You can get it to say a text is the most amazing thing ever, or total garbage. The same text. You can get it to positively review a paragraph in one session and then negatively review the same paragraph in the next section. Thus, nobody should be relying on LLMs for that sort of task. Regardless, when you simply ask it to explain and give it a section of modest length, it is usually genuinely helpful if you're struggling to follow.
I am extremely exhausted now and I hope I wake up tomorrow as confident as I am now that there's no more room for improvement in Optimalism. And yes, I still believe it's my definitive non-fiction work. In any case, I've had quite a run of very high productivity despite still feeling like a zombie. I guess I am a caffeinated zombie now...
May 4, 2026
My new religion essay is finished. It's called Optimalism, and you can read it here. This piece is much different from anything I've previously published and the rollout is going to be different as well. First, there is not going to be any announcement. If you didn't hear about it in this journal or find it by accident you are not going to hear about it from me. Second, it is not written to be maximally user friendly, as all of my previously published essays were. This is not to say that it's intentionally obscure. Far from it. The writing is clear and transparent. There is just no hand-holding.
If you cannot follow Optimalism I advise you to paste confusing passages into an LLM and ask it to explain and provide the necessary philosophical background. I have tested this and, with a few caveats, it seems to work. The most important caveat is that current free LLMs cannot hold the entire essay in their context window at once. I am told this limitation will be gone in a few years, but at present it is problematic for understanding later parts of the essay that are based on earlier parts. If you use these as prompts in isolation, some context will be missing and the LLM will hallucinate that context wrongly. Most of the time the writing is clear enough that this is not an issue. But occasionally the LLM will refer to claims that do not exist anywhere in the essay. Because of this you should only use it as a crutch for building up your understanding. Ultimately you need to exercise your own mind to make sure you understand the reasoning fully and accurately.
With this reading guide out of the way, I am going to record some reflections on the nature of the work and its composition below.
Reflections on the composition of Optimalism.
Optimalism will be my final non-fiction essay and I view it as my best and culminating work. I do not expect anyone else to see it this way, and I do not expect it to be widely read or influential for decades, or likely longer. Instead it will be ignored and dismissed even more than my previous writing, and ridiculed even more than my previous writing by those few who don't dismiss it from the start. However, I am past the point of caring and it was time to say what I had to say.
Optimalism is the culmination of a lifetime of thought and was preceded by several earlier essays that laid the groundwork for it. These were A Pragmatical Analysis of Religious Beliefs, Critique of the Mind-Body Problem, and The Computer-Simulation Theory Is Silly. Pragmatical was written around 2021 and then rewritten in a new presentation a year or so later. The concept for that essay was obviously influenced by earlier attempts at pragmatic thinking about religion in Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Pascal, and James. The original idea that came to me was that these earlier thinkers had not been thorough. They had only taken one step up a magic mountain and then stopped there. They tried to rationalize existing beliefs instead of grasping the implication of the rationalization itself.
Initially the full significance of this idea was not apparent to me either. Because it is not obvious the basic premise that one should adopt pragmatical beliefs can provide enough specificity to generate a system. And, the initial presentation in the Pragmatical essay was filled with aporias. The analysis of each chapter ended on them. Over the course of the intervening five years I mulled over these aporias and the potential solutions when I had time to spare. The gaps between my reflections were beneficial, because they allowed me to evaluate each problem in a new light after having set it aside for some time. It was a process couldn't be rushed.
When I was researching background material for my upcoming novel late last year, these reflections began to come together somewhat unexpectedly in a way that overcame all the aporias. I realized that instead of ending at aporias, the initial premises of my investigation led deductively to a single, non-arbitrary system. Even more remarkably, this system was in full agreement with widely recognized religious intuitions.
Around this time my actual life was not going very well. Works of high quality I had slaved over at great length had repeatedly failed to find an audience. Anyone who has followed this journal will know that story so I won't repeat it. In addition to a decade of such failures, my health was in a poor state. It had faltered now and then over the previous few years, but late in 2025 it took a decisive downward turn. While I cannot be completely certain what happened, it appears that a bout of food poisoning, ironically brought on by the very Turkish dates that had featured in my Memoirs of an Evil Vizier, triggered an auto-immune reaction that caused physical damage to the nerves in my migrating-motor complex. This left me in a state where I could not even consume white rice without hours of brain-fog and mood disturbances, and my productivity plummeted. As these issues dragged on over a period of months my mood flatlined. My daily experience became one of regular alternation between fuzziness, anhedonia, and unpleasant mental tension. The ceiling on my experience had fallen to zero, but the floor remained well below zero. Many entries over this time are in an angry and embittered tone. As you can see, that is because seemingly everything was going wrong at once.
Nevertheless, I am not one for lying inactive. The belief system I had worked out over years was ripe. The main obstacle to writing it down was the certainty of an indifferent or negative reaction from the public and even my own readers. But the fairly vile and repeated attacks on my person and previous writing had now put me in a state of total indifference to public opinion and absolute cynicism regarding the likely reception of any work I would consider high in value. So, I was past caring, and I started writing Optimalism regardless.
I expected this to take a few weeks. However, in the end it took a few months. Everything always takes longer than one thinks. The system I had worked out was clearly structured in my mind, but the structure in which I resolved to present it was much different from the structure in which my mind held it. Translating from one to the other was no easy task. And then, presenting an idea clearly often brings about improvements to the idea, as all tacit elements have to be thoroughly worked out, and in doing so one uncovers hidden flaws that must be resolved. Beyond the conceptual details, my health limited the hours I could work intelligently to only a few per day. The reason the essay was finished at all is that I eventually discovered and adopted an extremely strict diet, which consisted of sipping coconut oil throughout the day and then consuming one small meal of only meat, syrup, and vitamins at the end. I would not call this sustainable or nourishing and it did not lift the anhedonia but it did allow me to function at my usual level again with only a few hiccups. Instead of feeling like an invalid I felt like a drone or robot, albeit a drone or robot who was writing something worthwhile. Thus, over the last weeks I worked in a concentrated way with high productivity and long hours, and as a result the writing was completed.
From my standpoint Optimalism is a rare and special work of philosophy and a major achievement. However, when one is at the end of the writing process one can easily be wrong about such things, because the necessary closeness to the work distorts perspective, such that one can only fairly evaluate it a number of years later. This happened, for instance, with my first symphonic novel Archipelago. While I was writing it I was terribly afraid that my orchestration would fall short, as I had never written something so substantial for such a big orchestra. When I listened back a few years later I thought my orchestral colors were fantastic but my command of structure was flawed, and the latter made a work with many excellent passages useless as a whole. I had been too close to the individual passages and too intent on the wrong thing, and so at the time I finished it I was not able to see that its strengths were being cancelled out by weaknesses I was overlooking. Unfortunate, because I still believe this flawed work has genuine merits and a particularly excellent conclusion.
In short, an author's perspective on a work just completed is unreliable. One can only make one's best guess. Public reaction is, based on my experience, even more unreliable. So for now I will maintain that Optimalism is a major work of philosophy and a worthy culmination to my life in thought. Whether this is true or false is for time to say. In either case, I am done. Its future is in the hands of the few who will read it to the end.
Having worked so hard for the last weeks I am now exhausted and in desperate need of a break. Tomorrow I think I will collapse. And then I will be back at work on my novel, and, hopefully, remember how to write music again. If I still can. And I also have the great ambition to eat an orange. Bold, I know.
Best wishes to all.
J.S.