For all the progress updates:

Book Progress Update: End of June 2026

I’m down to the last 100 audiobooks to process (review and transcribe my clippings from my first listen). I’ve been hating this part of the process. I dread going into it every morning. Jumping into a different audiobook every day and listening to it in pieces with no context or connecting narrative is exhausting.

Even so, I’ve been mostly consistent, only missing a day here and there. I should be done in about four months. Doesn’t sound like too long, but I’m already tired, so I don’t know how long I can keep up this pace.

I also have some travel coming up, and I tend to shift my focus away from working on the book and toward living the book (going on adventures, socializing, discovering places, learning new skills, etc.). That’s likely going to slow my progress, too.

On a different note, I started putting together a vision for the book. I’ve written thousands of words about what I want the book to be, but I had never taken the time to organize them into something coherent until now. I can’t publicly share the whole thing yet, but here’s a sample to give you an idea of what I’m trying to do.

Book Vision

The Concept

The book is about learning to say yes to the whole of life—including and especially the parts that hurt—so that if you were told you’d have to live this exact life again, forever, you could say “I’ve never heard anything so divine.”

It is a book that explores what is ‘a life well lived’ and the part that struggle and suffering play in creating a meaningful life.

The Reader

The reader is not a demographic; it’s a state: a crisis of meaning. The book is for someone going through an existential reckoning. It speaks most directly to the introspective, melancholic mind that wants life to feel more meaningful but can’t find direction. Someone living some version of these questions:

What’s the point of this life? Is this all there is? Is it really worth living? How am I supposed to live? How can I overcome my suffering? What gives my life meaning? How do I find happiness? What’s worth spending my life on?

The reader is not offered answers, but a companion through the dark as they find their own.

The redemptive journey

Nihilism and existential dread → life affirmation and Amor Fati (love of fate).

The Layers

• Philosophy—What is thought to be a life well lived

• Psychology and psychotherapy—What we know improves life quality

• Third-person accounts—What others experience (or experienced) as a life worth living

• Autobiographical and self-reflective narrative—The specific, phenomenological perspective that shows how all the concepts flow through one person’s life (the author’s).

The Promise

A life-affirming book that goes through all the shades of the human experience without concealing the bad. A book that says YES to everything—not despite life’s hardships, but loving them as part of the whole. A call to live boldly, because suffering won’t spare us by living timidly. So it should find us engaging with life, not hiding from it.

That’s all for now.

Nick

For the current bibliography:

What if the gods could watch us like a reality series? How close would they be to the edge of their seats, biting their nails as they watched us fragile humans trying to live, knowing we will die? That all our carefully crafted plans and beautiful visions of the future could be crushed in an instant, and everything great or small in our lives, all we’ve built, all our relationships, hopes, dreams, and in time, even our memories, destined to vanish.

Lives destroyed, others derailed, fortunes turning, crippling diseases, body-breaking accidents, and no matter who we are or what we’ve done, all of us at the mercy of indiscriminate slaughter. Kings and peasants living by the same rule: all must die.

No repeats. No do-overs. No second chances.

Yet, we strive forward, engaging in the impermanence of it all: loving, hating, laughing, crying, despairing, hoping, all while knowing everything will be taken away.

That we do anything with our lives is the greatest defiance against our fate: To be condemned to die and choose to live, taking part in the beauty and terror of human existence. To say to death, “You may define my end, but not my life. Do what you please when your time comes, but until then, this time is mine.”

How much would the gods root for our defiance, and their hearts break when ours did? How much would they grieve when, against our efforts and pleas, our fires were unceremoniously extinguished?

How epic would our lives seem to them? To those who could never know virtue, for there is no courage without risk, no value in discipline if you can’t waste your life, or in wisdom if you can’t ruin it. And who could never spend themselves in a worthy calling, renouncing all other possible lives, forever.

How deeply would they crave our experience? The urgency of our mortality pressing us to make our time between two voids matter. Our choices significant because they are limited. Our lives meaningful because they are finite.

What a cruel fate for the gods to be cursed with immortality. They can’t know the worth of anything, for they have eternity to do it all. Their actions and choices turned inconsequential given infinite time. Their existence diluted to nothing, a drop of dye in an ocean.

What is it to be eternal? A musical note that never ends: noise. Would they not trade eternity for significance, even if short-lived? To bloom and fall like cherry blossoms, their beauty bound to their transience.

How gripped would they be by our stories? Not to find out how they end, that’s known from the start, but to watch them unfold. The drama of an entire life burning bright like a supernova if only for a fraction of a cosmic second, time which means nothing to the universe, but everything to us.

How long have we looked up to the heavens, envying the immortality of the gods while cursing our own fate, not realizing that to them, we were the gods, and our lives the ones worthy of envy?

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Book Progress Update: May 2026

I keep grinding through audiobook clippings. 120 books to go.
I also did some heavy reading this month because my reading list was getting long again.

Here are the books I read/listened to for my research during May 2026.

Wired for Story
The Outward Path: The Wisdom of the Aztecs
The cafe on the edge of the world
Solo
Inner Excellence
The Algebra of Happiness
What to Make of a Life
The Meaning of Your Life
Rules: Optional
On Desire
Midlife
Hard Feelings
Inside the Box
Love: A history (Sections only)

Essays:
Of the immortality of the Soul (Hume)
Of Suicide (Hume)

I went through my clippings of “Humanly Possible” by Sara Bakewell. Damn, she’s good! How can she be that good? I only went back to the audiobook to transcribe my clippings, but had to resist listening to the whole thing again. Her writing kept drawing me in. She’s smart, organized, engaging, and so much in command of her subject and her writing. I never run out of praise for her. All her books are amazing.

For the current Bibliography:

Personal development authors and influencers boast online about their early rising as a form of discipline. It’s not. And most don’t deserve any credit for it. Waking up early is a glorified lifestyle choice that takes no effort after a short adjustment period. At that point, it’s more of a preference than an accomplishment—no different from having dinner in the late afternoon instead of at night. I

My day starts between 3 and 4am during the months I live here in Tokyo each year. I need it to be that way to keep up with my business in a different time zone. After about two weeks of getting used to it, it takes no discipline to keep doing it. Zero. My body often wakes up before my alarm rings (I can’t take credit for that), and the problem becomes waking up too early because I’ll be exhausted by the afternoon. II

Another issue with the early rising craze is that, despite what they want to sell us about the wonders of “owning the morning,” there’s no magic to it. “The 5am club”? I’m in the 3am “club,” and there’s no fairy dust falling on me that makes my day better. Compared to my night owl life the rest of the year, my early bird life isn’t an improvement—it’s just different. And above all, choosing one over the other is mostly a matter of preference and priorities, not discipline. III

Also, why is 4 or 5am the consensus to earn a discipline badge? If waking up early means you are disciplined, wouldn’t waking up even earlier make you more disciplined? So why not 2am? Or better, midnight—so you can “win the day” from the moment it starts while all the ‘losers’ are asleep #CrushingIt

The premise breaks down when we try to ‘one-up’ it: Someone wakes up every day at 5am—disciplined. Wakes up at 4am—admirable. Up at 3am—kind of eccentric. 2am—psychopath.1
Wake-up times don’t translate into qualities or flaws of character; they are just conventions, preferences, or when necessary, obligations.

Why do I give this so much importance? There are larger themes underneath: subjective lifestyle choices signaled as objective qualities, living under other people’s made-up standards, misconceptions about discipline, trade-offs, and following others’ routines instead of choosing what fits our life. IV

To wake up early, you have to give up late nights. That’s the trade-off, and all trade-offs are a question of value. What do you value most? And what are you willing to give up for it? Following someone else’s routine without knowing their goals and priorities is copying the outcome of a value judgment we know nothing about—one that might not align with our situation at all. V

For someone building a career as a DJ, for example, it would make more sense to give up early mornings to stay fresh and rested for constant night performances. Same goes for a surgical resident working night shifts over long stretches. Giving up early morning jogs, even if enjoyable, would be the sensible trade-off for staying sharp and performing at their best for patients. In these cases, waking up early would be counterproductive or irresponsible.

Discipline is not getting up at an arbitrary time: it’s consistently doing something that requires effort or sacrifice but aligns with how we want to live. If there is no effort and no sacrifice in what we do, is it really discipline? If that were the case, then why not admire many elderly people who wake up and exercise so early it makes the popular Navy SEALs–turned–self-help personalities look like amateurs. We don’t because we assume (rightly or wrongly) that it’s not an effort for older people to wake up early—since sleeping schedules tend to change with age—and that they’re likely not giving up a crazy nightlife to do it.

And the same goes for those who have been waking up early for more than a few weeks and don’t care, don’t want, or don’t need to have a night life.2 So, if it’s not a sacrifice for them to give up their nights, and it takes no effort to wake up early after some adjusting, where is the discipline? No effort and no sacrifice = No discipline.3

If someone enjoys late nights but gives them up because there is something they value more in waking up early, that takes discipline—though the discipline becomes more about consistently sticking to the trade-off and going to bed early. The larger point is that it’s not a given that everyone who wakes up early is sacrificing something they value or making an effort to do so.

If late nights align more with your preferences and priorities, why give them up? That would be a transgression against yourself just to live up to someone else’s made-up standards. Don’t focus on anyone’s routine choices or sleeping schedules; their life is not your life, and their circumstances are not your circumstances. What matters is that your habits and behaviors align with how you want to live. You might reach the same conclusion and decide that waking up early (or any other routine) is best for you, but it would come from your individual needs and preferences, not someone else’s—and much less from their self-congratulatory version of discipline.

Encore?

Digressions

(You can find matching numerals in the main post to know where these connect)

I. It takes some discipline to get the habit started, but once you’re used to it, it’s easy to maintain—unless you keep staying up late. So, if there is any discipline in early rising after a few weeks, it’s really in heading to bed early and resisting doing things late at night—if that’s what you enjoy. But if you don’t mind going to bed early, or even prefer it, then waking up early takes no effort.

And while we’re on the subject of people boasting about early morning routines, a 4pm workout is just as valid as the 4am one they post about with some caption like “Win the morning, win the day.” The worst part is that I’ve been that guy, thinking my 4am workouts meant more because I was the only one at the gym. They didn’t.

II. The other side is that I must be in bed early. I like being in Tokyo, but I have to run my business, so the compromise to be here and not neglect my responsibilities is to wake up early, and by extension, go to sleep early and give up my nightlife. I’m okay with that trade-off.

III. Being a morning or a night person has a different rhythm and tone—each with its own benefits. In my case, I have more vitality when I’m on an early routine. I feel energized and clearheaded in a way that waking up later never matches. I’m also more productive, but life is not all about productivity.

Late nights are better for insight and checking in with ourselves. My best moments of introspection, deep thinking, and deciding on new directions for my life have come in the dead of night, when everything is quiet, the body is tired, and we find ourselves alone in a room under the weight of the day with only our thoughts.

Many people find late nights psychologically dark. They are for me, too. But sometimes that darkness is there for a reason, and we are supposed to find out what it’s trying to tell us—usually that we are unhappy about something in our life and we should work to change it.

I find late nights necessary to dive into my darkness and find the shining pearls hidden within it, pearls I can’t see during the bright light of day. Early mornings cover up a lot of our dissatisfaction and existential dread with vitality and productivity. I wonder how many people go on an early routine just to keep the darkness at bay, darkness that could reveal ignored problems in their lives, but also give them the determination to face them.

Aside from bringing greater introspection, late nights have also been the backdrop of many of the most fun and memorable moments of my life.

IV. What they chose works for them, and maybe they innocently assumed that it would work for everyone else—and that’s why they endorse it. Or maybe they are trying to validate their schedule choice by boosting its status and shoving it down everyone’s throat. Maybe waking up early can improve your life, but maybe not. It depends on your life. They can’t possibly know what’s best for you—only you can find out.

V. I once heard a famous author say something along the lines of ‘when I was young, I thought going to bed late was the shit, now I realize waking up early is the real shit.’ No. Going to bed late was the shit when you were young, and now waking up early is the shit given the change in lifestyle, age, and circumstances.

It’s condescending to judge our past self’s preferences from the viewpoint of our present self—who’s a different person living a different life. If we could go back to our past, who would trade their teenage late-night talks with friends and epic outings for morning jogs and a boost in productivity? I don’t think many would.

There is a special tone to late nights when you are at that age, and being out socializing, dancing, partying, listening to music, or just hanging out was not only enjoyable but, within reason, appropriate.

Late nights were great back then. It could be different now, but it doesn’t make one choice better than the other objectively; they are only better or worse depending on the circumstances. It’s our task to find out what works best for us and for the situation we are in.

Related Quotes

“If the way you live your life is a response to how others would have you live it, it really is not your life at all.”
—Richard Taylor (Restoring pride, paraphrased)

“Think your own thoughts, not mine! Live your life! Do not follow me blindly, but remain free!”
—Michel de Montaigne (Essays)

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
—Oscar Wilde (De Profundis)

“Look into yourself. Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you.”
—Carl Jung (The Red Book)

“To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect.”
—Joan Didion (Self-respect)

Behind the Exploration

(Notes on the Writing)

The idea for this thinking exploration came as I was listening to someone on a podcast talk about the discipline of waking up early. I had been up since 3am, and I thought, ‘I woke up that early without an alarm, and I’ve been doing it for months with no effort. Where’s the discipline? After some adjusting, it’s more of a lifestyle choice.’

I struggled with the post for weeks, though. It took a while to get to the heart of it (living our own lives instead of following others’ made-up standards) and for the outline to come together. I wanted to explore larger themes through a specific tension point: early rising is not discipline. But many times it felt like the piece was focusing too much on wake-up times, and the greater message was getting lost.

I put it aside a few times and thought of writing something else. The point of this type of writing is to discuss larger ideas through something specific. If I couldn’t bring the undercurrent of the main themes to flow through the examples and criticism, the post would end up being an empty rant on wake-up times and people boasting about them. I ended up sticking with it and rewrote until I felt it had the right harmony.

Thank you for joining me in this exploration.

Links

Here’s a book on the different daily routines and rituals of famous people from history (shows there’s no one magic schedule for productivity or greatness)
Daily Rituals

The same author has another book with the same idea, but focused on famous women
Daily Rituals Women at Work

Soundtrack (main song I had on repeat during most of the writing)
It unintentionally resonates with the piece—the chorus translates to Here comes the sun
Sonne by Rammstein

Notes

For all the progress updates:

Book Progress Update: April 2026

Not much to update. I’m still processing audiobook clippings every day. I have 150 more audiobooks to go, which will take me until October or November to process at this pace. It’s tedious work and gets discouraging when seen as one big task, so I try to take it one day at a time and repeat to myself, “Show up, make progress. That’s all you have to do. Show up, make progress.”

On an unrelated note, fuck AI for ruining em dashes. It uses them so often that any piece of writing with them looks AI-generated. Commas, periods, or parentheses can replace them, but em dashes added a visual rest and cadence change that relaxed a sentence with overlapping thoughts without having to break it. They just scream AI now. We had a good run, em dashes—I’ll miss you.

For the current Bibliography:

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If you want to follow the advice of ‘all things in moderation,’ ‘balance,’ or ‘the golden mean’ and you are not doing any heroin, maybe you should do some. You know, ‘balance.’ Sounds ridiculous, and that’s the point; it shows us a crack in the premise. Abstinence or close to it can’t be reconciled with moderation. If moderation is a middle point, then zero or near it falls in one extreme.

Those recommending a ‘balanced life’ or ‘all things in moderation’ would say that obviously there are things we should avoid or do as little as possible. But if that’s so, wouldn’t it also mean that some other things would be ideal to do as much as possible and with as much intensity as possible?

“Well, it’s nuanced,” they would argue. Then be nuanced! If everything is on a case-by-case basis, the moderation/balance premise breaks down and we are left with ‘it depends.’ In that case, we don’t need indiscriminate balance, that’s useless, what we need is judgment—to be imbalanced and tip the scale (sometimes to the extremes) depending on what our individual lives and circumstances call for. And you can’t teach that with a soundbite. I

Let’s consider drinking as an example. The advice is “drink in moderation,” but that doesn’t take into account the specifics of your life or the particular situation you are in. What moderation is for one person can be different for another and even different for the same person at different times.

It would be more useful to say, ‘Learning how much to drink is personal, requiring trial, error, and introspection to find out what works for you. Sometimes, you’ll undershoot or overshoot—that’s part of finding out how drinking affects you. Also, your range can change over time. Circumstances or personal preferences might call for more or less drinking (sometimes getting messed up is the goal). Some people are predisposed to develop alcohol dependence, so that needs to be taken into account. If that is your case, abstinence could be the right option. So, there is no one approach that works for everyone. You have the responsibility—but also the empowerment—to find out what’s best for you at any given time and to reevaluate it as needed.’
But this last version is not as catchy and can’t be turned into a one-liner.

Drinking seems like an inconsequential, out-of-proportion example, but the larger principle applies to everything else. “Aim for work/life balance,” according to whom? For some, there is no work and life, but Work-Life (fused, not separate),1 meaning they see work as an integral and rewarding part of life, and trying to reach an arbitrary balance by working less would hurt their life satisfaction. II

It’s strange that we call people workaholics, and no one calls those who make family their biggest priority ‘familyholics’. Somehow, one is acceptable, and the other one is not, though they are both imbalanced. III

If you take the most satisfaction out of work, a craft, or hobbies, lean into that.2 If you take the most satisfaction out of family, lean into that. Lean into whatever moves you. And if what moves you changes, then change where you lean. It’s your life, subjective and specific, there is no objective ‘golden mean’ that works for everyone.

And there lies one more problem, we look outwards to what others are doing instead of inwards to what works for us.3 It’s as if we are taking a test with no right answers but still look at what the person next to us is doing because we are afraid of getting it wrong. We think there is a right answer and that others have it, so we ignore where we want to go and instead we follow someone else—or worse, everyone else. IV

As an alternative to aiming for a generic balance, we can search for harmony. Harmony is about things going well together regardless of amount or frequency, while balance is about putting things in equal weight. Harmony is selective and judgment-based, encouraging us to pour ourselves into what we value most without pressure for equal distribution. Balance, on the other hand, is indiscriminate. V

We can find harmony even in tipping the scale completely to one side in some areas and to the opposite in others. But balance asks us to counterweight for the sake of an unjustified equilibrium. That would mean tempering down some of the best parts of our lives (a lot of what’s great about us and our lives is found in the imbalances) to chase a bland middle point.

Instead, we should strive for an imbalanced life, one that moves across the spectrum and sometimes plays with extremes (abstinence and indulgence). One that is built on our specific circumstances, with all its nuances and colors. One that searches for depths of experience instead of a leveled experience. One that finds harmony in its imbalances and leans into what we find meaningful.
One that we can call our own.4

Encore?

Digressions

(You can find matching numerals in the main post to know where these connect)

I. A counterargument that comes up is “everything in moderation, including moderation,” a catchy one-liner. But moderating moderation means allowing deviation from the middle depending on your own discretion at a given time, deciding when it applies and when it doesn’t. That’s not moderation, that’s judgment.

II. Living in Japan changed my perspective on the relationship between work and life. For the Japanese, work and life go together. They don’t view work as something to endure until their ‘real’ lives begin in their free time. Instead, work is an integral part of life from which they derive purpose, pride, and a sense of contribution to society.

You can see it in the high standards they have at work. From cashiers to cab drivers to ‘salarymen’, everyone does their best because how they do their job speaks as much (or more) about their identity and self-respect than the nature of the job itself.

Approaching work without a similar attitude would mean spending a large portion of our limited time in this world on something we see as merely a chore to put up with. Work—whether a formal job, a personal project, a craft, or an art—is life, too.

III. The family-obsessed person is even looked up to, while the work-obsessed one is sometimes thought of as avoiding unresolved psychological issues through excessive work. No, some people like to work, a lot. Just because others don’t get the same satisfaction and meaning from work or other personal projects doesn’t mean the ones who do have a problem—it is a possibility but not a certainty.

The work-obsessed person could make a similar accusation to the ‘familyholic’ and think of them as having a deeper psychological issue that they are trying to escape from: ‘Maybe your failed personal aspirations made you turn to family so it feels like a change in priorities rather than accepting the disappointment of individual projects (work, hobbies) falling short of your expectations. Family life would be an easy win against the backdrop of broken dreams, undeveloped potential—or the recognition that you didn’t have any to begin with—and the reality that your best efforts fall crushingly far from everything you thought you could be.’ It is also a possibility but not a certainty.

IV. That’s where the “gurus” try to prey on us. They claim to have the answers and promise to save us from doing the hard work of finding them ourselves. Our need for certainty and the fear of missing out on a better life that is only a course, seminar, or retreat away lures us toward them. We hope someone can tell us what to do and how to live because we are terrified that we are getting it all wrong. But there are no right answers. Your life is unique, and no one else can tell you how to live it. You have the freedom but also the responsibility to create it.

“Trust those who seek the truth but doubt those who say they have found it.” —André Gide

The hard part is that when we choose to live our lives independent of what everyone else is doing, we become accountable for how that choice unfolds. We are left with nowhere to hide and no one to blame, which we could do if we followed others. Choosing our own way requires trusting ourselves and having the willingness to accept the consequences of doing so, probably two of the most daunting but empowering propositions we’ll ever face.

As much as we wish someone could give us certainty about how we are supposed to live, the absence of objective right answers leaves us in a dark forest, having to trust only ourselves to forge our own path. And even if we found someone else’s, would we want to follow it? That was their path, not ours.

V. We choose or build characters in video games or RPGs aiming not for balance but for harmony in the imbalances. If you play Diablo, for example, you choose between Paladin, Sorcerer, Barbarian, Necromancer (the clear choice)—each with unique features, strengths, and weaknesses that appeal to different playing styles and strategies—and allocate skill points thinking of how things complement or go well together for your character (harmony), not how to give them equal weight (balance).

Who wants to play ‘average generic person’ or distribute all available skill points equally? We know this intuitively, and for some reason, when it comes to our lives, we doubt it.

Related Quotes

“What have you up to now truly loved, what has drawn your soul upward, mastered it and blessed it too? Set up these things that you have honored before yourself, and, maybe, they will show you, in their being and their order, a law which is the fundamental law of your own self.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (Schopenhauer as Educator)

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (attributed)

“Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.”
—Oscar Wilde (A Woman of No Importance)

“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”
—May Sarton

“There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way.”
—Christopher Morley (Where the Blue Begins)

Behind the Exploration

(Notes on the Writing)

The origin of this piece was a disagreement with Stoic ideas on temperance and their approach to the passions (read “emotions,” as the term was not used until recent history), as well as with Aristotle’s golden mean, which is often parroted without closer inspection.5 It’s the nature of writing to let it guide you as much as you guide it. I ended up cutting the temperance section, even though it was the initial idea (I’ll leave it for a future exploration). Having it in was strangely making the post repetitive while also diluting the message.

The undercurrent of the piece, and of much of what I’m writing these days, is about taking ownership of our lives—making our lives ours. Another constant I keep in mind is philosophy’s original interest: how to live. So I’m always thinking, “How does this translate into something applicable to the way we behave or see the world?” I approached my old writings as applied psychology, and these new ones as applied philosophy.

A short post like this one can take me about two weeks to write, edit, and polish. Once I think I’m done, I let it cooldown for a few days—to get distance and come back to it with fresh eyes. Then I do the final changes.
I still find things wrong with it that I can’t fix without unraveling the whole piece. At some point, I have to let it hold together with its imperfections.
“Art is never finished, only abandoned.” —Leonardo da Vinci (attributed).

As I work on a post, I constantly make compromises between length and depth. There are additional points I would like to include, but doing so would make the piece too long and lose focus. That’s why I created the digressions section under ‘Encore’ at the end. There, I can add extra comments for those who want more, while keeping the main post focused and concise.

Thank you for joining me in this exploration.

Links

Great book on mimetic desire (wanting what others want)
Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

Excellent course on existentialism (for more on freedom and responsibility)
Existentialism and the Authentic Life

Soundtrack (main song I had on repeat during most of the writing)
The Search by NF

Notes

For all the progress updates:

Book Progress Update: March 2026

I hit another low point in the project. I’ve been working daily on turning my audiobook clippings into text, but it’s taking longer than I expected. I can only process one or two audiobooks per day, and I have two hundred more to go.

I’m losing hope for a 2028 release, but it’s the reality of the process, and trying to force it to move faster was making it overwhelming. So, I’m back to focusing on showing up every day and doing the work, trying not to think about when it’ll be done. It will take however long it takes.

For the current Bibliography:

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For all the progress updates:

Book Progress Update: February 2026

I initially wanted to focus on transcribing all my audiobook bookmarks before starting to categorize info, but the task is too draining, and I can’t push myself to do it for more than a few hours a day without hating it.

This book project is so long that I need to enjoy every part of the process at least a little, or I’ll go crazy. So, I’m switching strategy: I’ll work on transcribing audiobook bookmarks and categorizing info every day instead of doing each task in batches for a few months at a time. Progress on each will look slower, but it will help me sustain the energy for this marathon.

For the current Bibliography:

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