On choosing to be unimportant.

And the benefits thereof.

“Dance Steps for the Apocalypse” will always be free. But you can help in two ways. To appease the Algorithm Gods, a simple like (❤️ ) makes this post more visible. And for extra credit, re-stacking this post or sharing with friends would be a great kindness. Thank you for reading.

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“The spiritual life is not a process of addition but subtraction.”
— Meister Eckhart

I began writing on Substack about a year before my book, Honest to God, was published. It was a heady time. Book contract in hand, final edits nearly finished, the social media plan—which now included Substack—in place.

What could possibly go wrong?

That may have been the original intention, but over time, things morph, don’t they?

The world changed.

The Fall of 2023 seems as long ago, now, as the Fall of Rome. Every single day, there is yet another existential crisis. Every single day, the earth rolls to the edge of yet another precipice. Every single day, there is another act of cruelty so barbaric, so inhuman, so demonic that, if I believed in Christian mythology, I would imagine that archangels must descend and vanquish the masked perpetrators.

They don’t.

But words? A couple of years ago, there was a manageable stream of words on Substack. You could cup your hand in and drink. But then the stream became a river, the river overflowed its banks until it finally reached a cataract where the noise of billions of words, falling into our Inboxes, was thundering and relentless—drowning out the single voice.

Substack, for me at least, became a constant process of adding on:

Reading more people, spending more time writing posts, trying to interact with comments, doing social media posts to promote my work.

Why?

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure why. But I am entirely sure that it has to stop.

There are three reasons why this cannot continue.

(1) My eyeballs are about to fall out of my head. I just cannot read any more.

Back in the 80s, there was a trendy, bleeding-edge-cool restaurant on East 18th Street in New York called America. I somehow got roped into going there one night. It was enormous, high-ceilinged, and fire-code-breaking crowded. The din was so loud, it erased thought, flatlined consciousness. It was like being stuck inside a jet engine for two hours.

What that was to my ears, Substack is to my eyes now. Ever the good student, I have tried keeping up. I really have. I have printed out articles to read later. I have signed up for “Matter,” a read-later app (which, ironically, feeds me more stuff to read that I haven’t asked for) and saved pieces for later reading. I have tried triaging articles as they come in: Gmail folders with @urgent, @later, and @maybe.

Here is what my mind currently looks like:

Not my room. My brain.

Let me please—please—point out this is no reflection on the writing. I have found some stellar writers over the past few months. And they are going into my @keepers Gmail folder.

(2) It is a slow process of ingesting, if not poison, then something mid-level toxic.

I have been blessed with good blood pressure genes. I am generally in the ~115 over ~80 range.

Not after I finish reading! A significant number of the posts I read are the verbal equivalent of an air raid signal. If I were to count the number of times I read these words per day—

crisis, disaster, catastrophe, calamity, peril, unprecedented, tipping point, flashpoint, breakdown, unraveling, etc., etc., etc., oh and NOW, IMMEDIATELY, THIS INSTANT

—it would have to be in the hundreds.

May I remind us: Rats die from this level of anxiety.

After ten straight hours on Substack.

I can quite literally feel my body tensing, the need to move, my amygdala on the hair trigger of fight or flight, the blood pulsing behind my eyes.

(3) The cognitive dissonance of what appears in my feed.

Bless you folks who show pictures of flowers in your garden or announce that you have reached X number of followers. Good for you, I really mean that.

But here’s the thing: the way the feed works, your tulips and roses and subscriber numbers are squeezed between end-of-the-world scenarios, masked men beating up people who were unlucky enough not to be born in this country, or the latest fascist power-grab over decision making.

I know you want to brighten people’s day. I know the need for validation. And I don’t have a good answer for this. All I can say is: it seems, because of the feed, tone-deaf.

I am still going to write.

In fact, I have been using this space for serializing a book. If you look back on the posts for the past three months, you will see the skeletal outline of a book on Spirituality in the Age of Social Media.

But I’m not waking up every morning thinking I have to save the world. I am not that important.

Evelyn Underhill, who wrote one of the seminal work Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness (1911), and who had a profound influence on a hero on mine, William James, said:

We mostly spend our lives conjugating three verbs: to want, to have, and to do. Craving, clutching, and fussing... we are kept in perpetual unrest.

Perpetual unrest is no way to live.

And I’m fully embracing that advice.

Thanks for reading.

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For the next couple of months, I’ll be working on a series of pieces that track moments in a perfect summer day. (That is, assuming that a perfect summer day actually happens here. The weather has been weird.)

But anyway, most of these ideas come from early memories—probably all the way back to when I was a child. Because I certainly do not get up at 5:00 a.m. to catch the sun rising.

Here is “Dewlight”:

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