Five Essays That Challenged My Thinking This Year
This year was the year when I started reading lot of essays. An essay is somewhat neglected writing form - it’s basically thinking laid bare, with an attempt to figure something out. The word essay itself comes from the French essayer which means to try. Now unless you are a philosophy geek, that does not sound terribly interesting. But wait, good essay happens to have one more important feature – it comes up with something surprising. Consequently, it is a (relatively) short form that reveals new ways to understand the world around you. Being a short form, it not only means you don’t have to deal with a whole book (and there is lot of them that waste 300+ pages to get one page worth of a point across), but also that authors who do not write books still can get a shot at expressing their thoughts through essays.
I read some twenty to thirty essays wide range of topics. Bellow I present the five that either felt the most relatable or challenged my exiting mental models the most. Dealing with topics as diverse as economic inequality, impostor syndrome, and transformational festivals, chances are you will love reading them too. So, without further ado, here are the five essays, with a favorite quote from each:
5. Beyond Belief (Erik Davis, 2006)
I probably don’t have to remind you, we live in a consumerist society. That’s good and bad, but one aspect I became particularly frustrated about is that it puts us in a passive position where entertainment is being catered to us. Seems to not to be a problem, as our phones, computers, TVs and movie theaters are full with it, right? Well not quite, because I think it has important implications - disempowering most of us.
I am convinced that most of us would be much happier in society where everybody plays and active and recognizable role in entertaining the rest. This is something that probably worked quite naturally when communities consisted of 50 people seated around one campfire. Burning Man, a countercultural transformational festival held annually in Black Rock Desert (Nevada, US), is an attempt at more participatory society, and much more than that. Any attempt to describe it will probably fall short, but Erik Davis at least does it with extreme literally skill.
“At its best, Burning Man twists authenticity and irony into a Möbius strip that never lets you know what side you’re on but always keeps you going. […] The specifically religious elements of the Burn are important not in themselves, but in relation to one another and to the less ethereal aspects of the festival: the carnality, the trash, the desert dust. This wider field of relations is not holistic but multiple: a promiscuous carnival of souls, a metaphysical flea-market, a demolition derby of reality constructs colliding in a parched void.”
4. Learning the Elite Class (Aella, 2022)
Anyone who is ambitious will inevitably find themselves surrounded by smart people, more often than one would like this may end up in experiences of imposter syndrome. Written as a story of fetish-researcher at posh party Learning the Elite Class is probably its best description I read this year (and maybe thus far).
“The next person I talk to is a startup founder; she’s working on some company that aims to help crypto companies deal with the legal system. I don’t understand most of what she says, but it still feels familiar - I got into crypto early and was around the edges of the formation of the cryptosphere, and the basic culture isn’t arcane to me. I have vague background intuitions around what sorts of things are scams and aren’t, the ways crypto carries risk, the way the public views it. When she uses words like “community” in relation to crypto, it touches lightly into a web of other concepts, and I feel I understand the nuance and implications of it. She tells me she’s doing a fundraising round and it’s looking promising; her team is building an app that’s going into beta next week and she is flying to a conference tomorrow morning and she was in calls all day earlier fixing an emergency with bank payments not going through to one of her contractors. Her life seems intense to me, and I don’t understand how she’s here at this party looking lively.”
3. How to Do Great Work (Paul Graham, 2023)
Paul Graham is a computer scientist, entrepreneur, and investor. He is not only a coder who made seminal contributions to the programming language Lisp, but perhaps more notably, he is one of the four founders of Y Combinator. Y Combinator is probably the world most renown start up accelerator. It funded over 4’000 startups that now have combined valuation of 600 Billion USD. Companies that started through it include Airbnb, Codeacademy, Coinbase, Disqus, Dropbox, Reddit, Scribd, Stripe, and Twitch. In this essay, he distils advice on how to get great stuff done.
“Take as much risk as you can afford.”
2. Becoming a Magician (autotranslucence.com, 2018)
An essay on why going 10x improvements can be much better idea than 2x, at least where you really care. Illustrated on World Bodypainting Competition. Recommended for magicians, body-painters, and anyone who is less cerebral than Paul Graham (which is probably 99% of population).
“We don’t necessarily need to make nonlinear jumps in all aspects of our lives, particularly if (according to your values) making such a jump would require a sacrifice you don’t endorse. But for the things you care about most, or are causing you the most suffering, there is probably a nonlinear strategy that you will miss if you pay too close attention to the linear strategy you current have or that people recommend.”
1. In Praise of Idleness (Bertrand Russell, 1932)
Bertrand Russell was a British mathematician and philosopher. He made seminal contributions to the field of logic, influencing the development of programming languages and design of computer systems. That it is more than almost anyone would attempt before claiming their right for peaceful retirement, but Bertrand Russel did not stop there, by far. Out of many other achievements, he is also the awardee oof 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature “in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought”. This is what his essay “In Praise of Idleness” is about.
“In Praise of Idleness” is a literary gem - skillfully penned, it is an argument to stop glorifying work, and value leisure more. Reading it makes one wonder how did we make so little progress on it since he wrote it (and if he is self-reflecting, as his numerous achievements likely required that he tolled for most of his adult life, putting leisure into background).
“Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for the others.”
If you find essays an intriguing writing form, I would highly suggest to check out the readsomethingwonderful.com website. It does an amazing job in aggregating lot of great essay writing (but is somewhat computer science centric).
Have you read any of these essays? What have you thought about them? Or is there an essay you love and that is not on this list? Let me know in the comments!
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