🌊 What was THAT⁉️

Please explain the subscription tsunami to me! Plus: The Making Of.

My post “The Piss Test” was wildly successful—in my Substack dashboard’s opinion—by increasing paid subscriptions 25% on the first day, and 50% in two weeks.

I’m very pleased and grateful—I think? I would like to know what it means, and hope you can tell me!

I write mainly to be useful to readers. Of the hundreds of things I might write, which can be most useful? Counts of restacks/retweets and Likes are one way to guess. Economists might say how willing people are to pay is the best measure of value. It can be misleading for many reasons, but it’s certainly a measure.

If the welcome tsunami of paid subscripts does reflect the value you received, I want to write more things like that. But did it? And “like” in what way?

I worry a bit that I created clickbait by mistake. Most of “The Piss Test” was paywalled, following what the industry calls a “teaser.” “Clickbait” means posts that have a compelling title or teaser, but the body does not deliver what they promised. That’s unethical, and I don’t want to do it. It seems to me that the rest of the post does deliver what the public introduction says, but maybe I’m mistaken? (I paywalled it mainly because I was concerned it would cause religious outrage.)

I didn’t expect people to like the post at all. The day before publishing it, I said in a comment thread that “My next Substack post will probably offend the few people who read it. Was that the best use of four days’ worth of writing effort?”

Well, was it?

• If you signed up with a new paid subscription (thank you!), why?

• How did you feel after reading it?

• If you want more like that—can you say in what way similar?

• If it was unsatisfactory—what were you hoping for that you didn’t get?

More personal and more concrete

I frequently ask readers, and poll twitter: which of my projects would you most like more of next? Answers are about evenly divided, so that’s not very helpful. (Although “we want more of everything” is gratifying to hear!)

I may have been thinking about this wrong. Readers have recently expressed a desire for posts that are more personal and more concrete. (Thank you for the feedback!) This is very helpful, and is making me rethink. It shaped the following post, “Steam engine, startup, podcast, leaf devil.”

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This is a “News and Notes” post; they’re about The Making Of, discussing my process. In the March one I said I’d do these monthly, but there was nothing much to say about April!

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“Steam engine” is about my self. Can’t get much more personal than that! And it’s in the form of an audio monologue, which may feel more personal than text. (Full text is also available; I usually prefer that myself.) And it’s peppered with examples from my life.

Listener/reader feedback has been enthusiastic. So, perhaps I was thinking about “what to write” wrong. Maybe it’s not what I write about that matters to you, but how I write about it?

That might be uncomfortable to me. Writing is my medium, but I don’t want to be “a writer.” What I care about is figuring out unusual things to get answers that make your life better. I try to be entertaining sometimes, but that’s just because my explanations may seem quite dry without some humor. For me, it’s about the content, not the writing.

There’s another uncomfortable possibility: that you may find me interesting as a person, and read what I write (or listen) partly to learn more about me and feel a sense of connection. As an autistic hermit, this seems quite frightening! 

And, as a Tantric Buddhist and amateur developmental psychologist, I want to lean into discomfort and be more open to personal connections. Both to expand my self and to be more effective in my work.

I intend to think harder about what I’m trying to accomplish overall, and how best to do that. I want to have a clearer understanding of “who am I working on behalf of?” and “what ways of communicating will be most effective for them?”

Podcasting: harder than it sounds

I’ve thought for a couple years that audio monologues could be the best way to communicate some figurings-out. I’ve made quite a few attempts, ten perhaps, all of which failed before “Steam engine.” I’ve found the technology surprisingly recalcitrant. I’ve also found it surprisingly difficult to sound coherent, and to avoid saying “um, you know, uh” every two seconds.

I’m getting slowly better, by doing it badly many times. “Steam engine” was the first recording I considered minimally acceptable. I will keep at it. I’ll aim for… one audio episode per month, maybe?

When problem solving isn't enough

I had a lot of fun yesterday making this video clip from an interview with my spouse

Charlie Awbery

. It’s about how they work with clients who are already highly competent, as STEM professionals or in management, but have reached the limits of the systematic mode of being.

A lot of my clients know themselves already to be good at solving problems. They're not flailing around in life not knowing how to fix problems. They already have a really good problem solving base. And what happens is that they get to a point where the problem solving isn't enough. Like, it feels like a problem, but a problem that has no solution.

Charlie is leading a relevant workshop in New York, September 14th and 15th: “Liberating Shadow: Discover a New Self-Possibility.”

Up next

History shows that my predictions of what I will write next are completely worthless.

However, I expect the next two posts to be:

• “Oblivious technical management rationalism”: the next section of the software architecting chapter of the meta-rationality book; how not to do it.

• “Unavailable dakini catalyst”: how falling in love with someone you can’t get may blow up your whole carefully-shielded system of life, forcing you out of developmental stage four and into the storm-tossed ocean between it and stage five.