Reflections on Writing, Grinding, and Money

I fell for an old loop but things aren't that bad, actually.

It was Sunday morning and I was writing. I didn’t want to, but there I was.

Part of me wanted to enjoy a big breakfast, go for a long walk, sit in a café, read, think, do nothing.

But that part was not in charge.

The part in charge was panicking. There’s no time to rest, idiot, it urged. We have to make progress. We have to get shit done.

So, I sat down at my desk to edit and finally publish the piece. I had to make the business grow again. I had to earn. I had to make the voice shut up.

Honestly, by then I was tired of the draft. It had a couple of interesting ideas which had grabbed me, but it was starting to feel stale. My curiosity was moving on and yet this thing was still on my desk. And it was growing in length. Some part of me believes my posts must be lengthy to be worthy of being published. Write more words to be a ‘real writer’.

It’s insane, I know. In a sense, the opposite is true.

“When I was a young writer,” Neil Gaiman reflected in View from the cheap seats, “I liked to imagine that I was paying someone for every word I wrote, rather than being paid for it; it was a fine way to discipline myself only to use those words I needed.”

That’s one to tattoo on my forearm.

But sunk cost fallacy is a real and vicious beast of the mind. I sat and watched myself spend a precious Sunday morning polishing words until my perfectionism had been satisfied.

The work was okay but not inspired. Worse, it no longer felt truly interesting and meaningful. Somewhere along the way, I’d dropped the ball. I’d lost the message.

I hit publish.

I felt no relief, no excitement. Instead, a heaviness came over me, something bordering on shame. I felt like I’d fallen for a compulsion, as if some bad habit had returned to my life. It felt like discovering a pack of cigarettes in my parents’ drawer or watching a neighbor dump a garbage bag with empty liquor bottles in the dead of night.

Suddenly, I wanted to be as far away from my desk as possible. I realized I’d stepped into an old trap. Grinding had chased curiosity, joy, and truth off my page.

A week later, I felt optimism returning in small steps — during long walks and deep conversations, on my meditation cushion, and at the gym. Music, books, and the song of birds carried it back into my life in tiny bits.

I knew I could do better. And I would.

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Sometimes you need to see your reflection to see how silly you’re acting. Like this meme from My Dinner With Andrew, which made my day.

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“While he lived he was America’s finest writer,” Gaiman writes about Edgar Allan Poe, “a poet and a craftsman whose work made him very little money, even as his poems were widely quoted, adored, parodied and reviled.” No, by comparison, I can’t complain.

“Writing for a living can be a frustrating experience,” I wrote in my reflection last year. Earlier this year, I wrestled with the shift in my curiosity and the changing nature of my work. I thought I’d made my peace with a declining subscriber count but the visceral experience of watching your income drop is different. It’s very uncomfortable.

Like I said, I fell into panic mode and started to grind harder. I began to work on a new project and simultaneously wanted to accelerate the regular writing.

Years ago, I read The Power of Full Engagement whose author Jim Loehr (recently on Farnam Street) argued that we must manage our energy rather than our time. He advises to alternate between being fully engaged and fully dis-engaged, between intense spurts and deep rest — real rest, not the low-burning engagement which leads to burning out.

I have a hard time with this. Even my not-doing is usually a kind of doing.

Rest for me is mostly activities like reading, walking, meditating, conversation, or working out — always with the subtle hope that it will spark ideas. Call it resting with an agenda. Short naps are the closest I get to being at peace with doing nothing — and even those are supposed to fuel my work.

It gets worse when things aren’t going well.

Once in panic mode, the grind feeds on itself. I let work bleed into evenings and weekends. My inner critical voice gets louder. No time to disengage. No time for other people. No time for joy.

Inevitably, this leads to a contraction in life, work, and in one’s heart. The world feels darker, more narrow, and more lonely. Work loses its spark. Every half-finished draft drains energy. Flow states become a distant memory.

You sit there, wondering why you’re doing it at all.

long walks through Central Park, a happy place

Years ago, I would have spent a lot of time in that space.

I didn’t have practices to carry me through. I used to give in to my tendency to isolate. And I didn’t grasp that this was not the world being unfair to me but a misery of my own creation.

The answer to contraction is expansion — reaching out, hanging out, working out, walking out, praying, chanting, even crying out loud.

Today, I feel very grateful that I can catch myself. I feel grateful for the people and practices in my life that help me push forward and through these moments of stuckness. I am grateful that I can see what happens as a phase, a passing experience, and not ultimate reality.

And I am grateful that despite all the AI hype, despite the infinite wall of content, despite the wasteland of dopamine culture, the internet allows us to create, share, and make a living.

I feel grateful that optimism is returning in small steps.

Before I forget: I occasionally revisit old pieces only to realize that I’ve forgotten much of what I’ve written. This is simultaneously amazing and horrifying. Well, it’s finally time to extract the key ideas and collect them in one pdf document (similar to 11 Things I Learned About Investing). I’m going to add the stack of unpublished ideas to this for a “version 1” with observations on the money game. I will publish these as I populate the document so expect a bunch of little emails with ‘money game’ in the subject.

I will also re-organize the sections/structure of the substack. But I will put that in a separate email. I’ve already used a lot of words today and now it’s time to go for a walk with a friend.

Have a blessed weekend,

Frederik