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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Book Progress Update: January 2026

I spent January turning all the underlinings and notes from around 120 scanned books into editable text so I can add to them and move them around once I start categorizing my research.

Now, I have to go over every audiobook I listened to (around 250), take the information from the bookmarks, and turn it into editable text, too. That’s gonna take me a few months.

Once I’m done, I’ll have all my notes, underlinings, and saved passages in editable text from the entire bibliography (around 500 books between e-books, physical books, and audiobooks).

It should all add up to roughly 10,000 pages of material to sort through, select, and categorize. That’s when the book will start taking shape.

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Progress Update: December 2025
(Start of Information Processing Phase)

I spent all of December going through videos and articles I had saved since I started working on the book. I’m done with that now, too. So, except for a couple of books that made it into my reading list over the past weeks, I already have all the material and research I need.

Next up: I have to take my notes and underlinings from books I scanned and save them as editable text so I can later categorize and move them into master documents for each chapter. It’s tedious and boring work, but it needs to be done.

It should take me about a month to finish if I work at it every day.

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Progress Update: November 2025 (End of the Research Phase)

Here are the books I read/listened to for my research during July 2025, and my notes on the progress.

Freud, Adler, and Jung (Kaufmann)
Nausea (Sartre)
Conversations with Goethe
Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty, sections)
Being and Nothingness (Sartre, sections)
Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. (Kaufmann)
Pitch Anything
The Let Them Theory (Hated it, could only stomach 3 chapters)
How to Not Kill Yourself
The Burnout Society (Byung-Chul Han)
Vida Contemplativa (Byung-Chul Han)
Derren Brown’s Rebind of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche) Clancy Martin Rebind Ed.

Notes:

•“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, che la diritta via era smarrita.”—Dante
(In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark forest, having lost the way)

Two years ago, broken and lost, I turned to philosophy looking for answers. It didn’t give them to me. It did something better: philosophy helped me find my own. That’s philosophy at its best; it encourages us to take ownership of our lives and live them as a work of art.

I’m done with the research I started those years ago. It feels like I took the longest inhale of knowledge and wisdom from our greatest minds, and now I have to breathe it out. Here’s where I move from reader to writer, creating something that can be a dim light for others finding their way through their own dark wood.

•November was a good closing month. The last seven books turned into a dozen, but I’m finally done with my research. The bibliography is now about 450 books (my aim was 400), and I feel confident with the material I gathered to move into the next phase of writing the book: going through every highlight, quote, note, and idea, and organizing them by theme. This means going back book by book, choosing what I want to use, and then deciding where it belongs.

It will be strange not to have my life revolve around reading new material anymore. Every day for these past two years, I woke up thinking about reading and making progress on the research. I’ll keep reading because I have to go over everything I’ve gathered, but the focus will be on re-reading, reviewing, and sorting what I’ve already read, rather than taking on new books (though there will be a bit of that, too).

•When I committed to this new book, I realized that if I wanted my research to be thorough without spending half a decade on it, I would have to turn reading into an obsession. Like every other crazy discipline project I’ve undertaken, it started with a challenge to my identity: Can I be the type of person who_____? In this case, can I be the type of person who reads three to four books per week?

This was the same identity challenge I went through before transforming my body a few years ago. Can I be the type of person who works out twice a day, measures and controls all food, and pushes through the resistance of a strict diet and a demanding workout plan?

Every major change demands a change in identity. At first, there is resistance to adopting the new identity, but once you entertain the thought, you open yourself to it, and step by step you build into a new self.

Now, the identity challenge is: can I be the type of person who goes through and processes mountains of information, and writes a book worth reading? I have to be.

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Progress Update: October 2025

Here are the books I read/listened to for my research during October 2025, and my notes on the progress.

The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism (Sections)
Que es filosofia? (Ortega y Gasset, sections)
The Meaning of Life: A Reader
The Art of Spending Money
The Essential Kierkegaard (Sections)
The Affirmation of Life
The Person and The Situation (Sections)
The Essential Goethe (Sections)
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
The Essential Schopenhauer (Sections)
Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Buber (Kaufmann, sections)
Pensées (Pascal, sections)
Universo de Emociones
Philosophy and Life

Essays:
Meditaciones del Quijote (Ortega y Gasset)
Historia Como Sistema (Ortega y Gasset)

Notes:

• October was another solid month. I’m steps away from the finish line; only seven more books to read to end my research. They’re long and dense books, so it might take me all of November to get through them.

Part of me is relieved to be moving into a new phase, but another part is filled with anxiety. I worry that aiming for thorough research has left me with an unmanageable amount of information that will take forever to sort through and organize. I don’t regret the years of heavy reading—I think I owed that to myself and the reader—but I look at what I’ve gathered and think, “there’s no way I’m ever going to finish this.”

My other worry is that I have become a collection of knowledge pieces and that I don’t have the mental horsepower to synergize them into something meaningful. I read writers like Walter Kaufmann analyzing Nietzsche, Goethe, and the existentialists, and think, “I don’t have that level of intellect, I just don’t. And no amount of reading and knowledge gathering is going to give it to me because knowledge and intelligence are not the same thing.” My consolation is that doing my best is the most I can do. I’ll redline my lesser mental engine to the breaking point and give this book my all. The result may be far from great objectively, but it will be my very best, and that should be enough.

“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” —Camus

• Other than gasping in admiration and then soaking in self-loathing while reading Kaufmann, I really liked “Philosophy and Life” by A.C. Grayling. It’s the best general philosophy book I’ve ever read. Highly recommended. Grayling focuses on the questions of how to live, and presents different answers from several philosophical schools. More importantly, he emphasizes building our own philosophy of life instead of adopting a pre-packaged “-ISM” (timely read since everyone’s gulping the Stoicism Kool-Aid these days). Clean writing and great content by an insightful intellectual. That’s a rare find. The book goes into my favorite reads of all time.

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Progress Update: September 2025

Here are the books I read/listened to for my research during September 2025, and my notes on the progress.

Here are the books I read/listened to during September:
Engaging Japanese Philosophy (Sections)
A Climate (Watsuji Tetsurō, Sections)
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Hume)
Goethe, Kant, Hegel (Kaufmann, Sections)
Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre (Kaufmann)
From Shakespeare to Existentialism (Kaufmann, sections)
A Book of Secrets (Derren Brown)
Del sentimiento tragico de la vida (Unamuno)
Before You Know It
The Birth of Hedonism
The Daily Stoic
What Doesn’t Kill Us
Resonance (Sections)
Sartor Resartus (Carlyle, sections)
The Ego and Its Own (Stirner, sections)

Notes:

• September was a solid month. I’m now 20 books away from finishing the bulk of the research, so I should be done before the end of the year if I keep up this pace. I do have some long and difficult books that will slow me down, but the three months left in the year should be enough time to finish.

I’m excited to move on to a new phase of writing the book, but I am terrified at the amount of information I’ll have to transcribe, sort through, select, and categorize. I thought that phase would take about 6 months, but taking a second look at all the material I have, I think it can extend to a full year. So, next year will be about organizing all the research, and then it will take a year to a year and a half for the actual writing and editing. If all goes well, the book will come out in 2028.

• The best read of the month was a section on Watsuji Tetsurō in the book “Engaging Japanese Philosophy.” Watsuji was a Japanese philosopher from the ‘Kyoto School’ who combined elements of existentialism and Nietzsche’s philosophy with Japanese philosophical tradition and way of life.

Nietzsche and the existentialists are often accused of focusing too much on the individual, not giving enough importance to the social dimension of our lives. Watsuji did a great job incorporating the constant tension and evolving dynamic between the individual and the group. For him, our individuality is created by rejecting the community; however, after doing so, we must give up parts of our individuality to rejoin that community (though we do so now knowing what we are not willing to give up of ourselves). The result is a negotiation between how much to reject the group to find and maintain our individuality and, in turn, how much to give up of our individuality to be part of the community.

Watsuji’s thinking is the result of putting individualistic philosophy in the hands of someone who grew up and lived in a group-oriented society. It was perfect synergy. I don’t know why he isn’t well-known (maybe because he is not European or Ancient). His thinking is sharp, original, and insightful. I loved what he had to say; I filled his section of the book with notes and underlinings. I’m glad I stumbled upon him.

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Progress Update: August 2025

Here are the books I read/listened to for my research during August 2025, and my notes on the progress.

I Am Dynamite! (Nietzsche’s Biography)
Untimely Meditations (Nietzsche, sections)
The Gay Science (Nietzsche)
The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche)
On The Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche)
Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche)
The Portable Nietzsche (Nietzsche, sections)
Basic Writings of Nietzsche (Nietzsche, sections)
The Will to Power (Nietzsche)
Human, All Too Human (Nietzsche, sections)
The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (Sections)
Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Sections)
Nietzsche and Philosophy (Deleuze, sections)
A Nietzsche Reader (Sections)
Essays and Aphorisms (Schopenhauer, sections)
A Short History of Philosophy (Sections)
The Essays (Montaigne, sections)
The Black Sun
I and Thou (Buber)
White Nights (Dostoyevsky)
The Meaning of Life (LIFE editorial)
How Buddhism Began (Sections)
Sabiduria de Japon
On Character
Holy Sh!t, We Are Alive
The Pathless Path
The Hedonist Manifesto
The Power of Meaning

Notes:

• I came back with a vengeance. After several months of slow progress, August was my redemption month. Some days, my eyes hurt from reading, and I hear voices as I fall asleep from listening to audiobooks all day.

Two reasons for this refocus: First, I don’t feel good back in Canada, so I decided to spend all my time making progress on my book; that way, I can slow down once I’m back in Italy or Japan in the coming months.

Second, after two years of reading like it was a full-time job, I only have 30 books left to complete the bulk of the research. So, with the frustration of wanting this over with and the motivation of seeing the finish line, I went full obsession mode. I’ve gone into that mode several times in my life, and as much as I know it is poison for my mental health, I like it. It’s one of the moments where the world around me fades and I feel most in my own company.

I should be done with this research phase by the end of the year. After that, I’ll move into compiling all my notes, underlinings, and bookmarks. That phase should take about 6 months.

• For August’s reading, I continued the Nietzsche binge I started last month in Sils Maria. I really liked his biography, “I am Dynamite!” It’s a well-harmonized account of Nietzsche’s life and philosophy. The author did a great job showing the interplay between the man and his thinking, much in line with Nietzsche’s own belief that all philosophy is a biographical projection of the philosopher.

Contrary to popular misconceptions, we find in Nietzsche a sensitive man who viewed life as a work of art. His philosophy is one of affirmation of life, not nihilism. He aspired to love all of life, including its suffering, of which he got more than a fair share.

• On the not-so-good side, I tried reading Difference & Repetition by Deleuze, but I dropped it after a few pages. I have no patience left for obscure philosophy and authors who don’t edit their work and use convoluted language and system-building to appear profound, especially when their work is a dissertation or a bid for a philosophy chair. Usually, there is little substance, and it could be explained in such basic terms that they should be ashamed for using so many words to explain simple ideas (think Kant, Heidegger, Hegel, and in this case, Deleuze). Fuck all of them; they are a significant reason why philosophy moved from the practical search for ‘how to live’ to a self-aggrandizing academic exercise that scares most people away.

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Progress Update: July 2025

Here are the books I read/listened to for my research during July 2025, and my notes on the progress:

Philosophy as a Way of Life
Divine Comedy (Dante)
The Ethics of Ambiguity (Simone de Beauvoir)
When Life Hits Hard
9 Steps to Build a Life of Meaning
Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering
The Antichrist (Nietzsche)
Ecce Homo (Nietzsche)
Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche)

Essay:
On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (Nietzsche)

Notes:

• July was another month of slow progress. I focused on my last weeks in Florence, studying Italian, rather than making progress on my reading. On the good side, I went on a Nietzsche binge in the last few days of the month while I visited Sils Maria.

• It was great to go through Nietzsche’s work while hiking the same trails where he conceived his ideas. The hikes were challenging, and he would do them every day for months. He chose a physical struggle that led to beautiful sights and the crisp air at the peaks of the mountains. The difficulty and effort were tied to the beauty of the ascent, the sights, and reaching highs above ourselves—all concepts of his philosophy.

He even said that if you wanted to understand him, you would have to go up in the mountains and breathe high-altitude air. He especially loved the Engadine region, and wrote several of his books there.

I realized he wasn’t going there to relax; he was there to calm the outside so he could rage storms from the inside.

It makes me think of Japan and what it means to me. If someone wanted to understand how I see life, they would have to visit Tokyo to get a full picture.

In that sense, being in Sils Maria gave me a better understanding of Nietzsche’s life and philosophy.

This was an important experience for my research, my thinking, and by extension, my book.

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Progress Update: June 2025

Here are the books I read/listened to for my research during June 2025, and my notes on the progress:

A Short Guide to a Happy Life
Everyday Ubuntu (Sections)
Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (Sections)
How to Get Rich
The Millionaire Fastlane (Sections)
Psycho-Cybernetics (reread, sections)
Rise Above
Fear, Hope and Carnage
Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain
Reasons to Stay Alive

Notes:

• June was a month of slow reading but fast living. It’s been a great adventure living in Florence and studying Italian.

Learning a new language takes several hours a day, which has cut into my reading and writing. But I keep reminding myself that engaging with the world and living an intentional life are what my book is about. In that sense, I could say I’ve been living my book more than working directly on it.

• This past month, I read some business books I had on my reading list for a long time. They aren’t part of my research for my next book, but I picked them up because I’m planning a major change in my business and wanted to get back into the business mindset before making those decisions. Despite the terrible title, “How to Get Rich” was a good book full of honest wisdom from a businessman who went through it all. As for “The Millionaire Fastlane,” I can’t understand how it’s so popular (maybe just good marketing?). It reads like a sales letter, and I found nothing new in it. This book is in serious need of a good editor. I ended up skimming a big part of it; it should have been half the size.

• The best read of the month was “Fear, Hope and Carnage.” It’s a series of interviews with the musician Nick Cave about his music and life. It’s the best account of an artist talking about their art that I’ve ever read.

When many artists talk about their art, you feel that it is important to them, but when Nick talks about his art, you feel it’s beyond important: it is essential. It’s part of his life in the same way breathing is. Art is not an activity he does—it’s part of his being. I’m not even a fan of his music, but fuck, I could listen to him talk about his process and the way he thinks about music all day. Amazing.

Here’s a sample:

“For me, vulnerability is essential to spiritual and creative growth, whereas being invulnerable means being shut down, rigid, small. My experience of creating music and writing songs is finding enormous strength through vulnerability. You’re being open to whatever happens, including failure and shame. […] I think to be truly vulnerable is to exist adjacent to collapse or obliteration. In that place we can feel extraordinarily alive and receptive to all sorts of things, creatively and spiritually. It can be perversely a point of advantage, not disadvantage as one might think. It is a nuanced place that feels both dangerous and teeming with potential. It is the place where the big shifts can happen. The more time you spend there, the less worried you become of how you will be perceived or judged, and that is ultimately where the freedom is.”―Nick Cave

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Progress Update: May 2025

Here are the books I read/listened to for my research during May 2025, and my notes on the progress:

Co-Intelligence
A Life Worth Living: Contributions to Positive Psychology
The Second Sex (Sections)
Positive Desintegration
Goethe: Life as a Work of Art
A Small Treatise on The Great Virtues (Sections)
The Little book of philosophy (Sections)
The Meaning of Life (The Oxford University Press one)
The Story of Philosophy
Experience and Education (Dewey)
The Art of Showing Up
Nietzsche In Italy
Reality+ (Sections)
Conquering Crisis (Sections)
100 Ways to Improve Your Writing
Writing About Your Life
Write a Must-Read

Essays:
On Not Being a Philosopher
Happiness is Everything, or Is It?
The Gold Pill
Some Key Differences Between a Happy Life and a Meaningful Life
De Profondis (Oscar Wilde)
The Soul of Man (Oscar Wilde)

Notes:

• May was a good reading month. I’ve been in a better mental space, so I worked consistently to redeem myself after a slow April. I’m also getting to the point where I can see the light at the end of the research tunnel (only about 80 more books to go). That’s giving me a second wind of motivation.

• This month, I faced another Titan: The Second Sex. Simone de Beauvoir continues to impress. She is sharp, clear, and well-structured. The Second Sex is a monumental work, and she wrote it while working on other projects, traveling, and keeping up with many more commitments. Respect, Simone…Respect.

• Since the actual writing of the next book is only about a year away, I started reading about writing again to sharpen my skills.

• My favorite reads for the month were “Goethe: Life as a Work of Art” and “Nietzsche in Italy.”

I knew I would have to go into Goethe’s life at some point since he’s been the example of ‘a life well lived’ for many philosophers. It was a great biography. What stuck with me the most is that even for such a talented and successful polymath, life was full of doubt, tragedy, frustration, and failure. Reading about his life reinforces the idea that problems and difficulties are not something that get in the way of life; they are life.

“Nietzsche in Italy” was special because I just came to live in Florence for some time. Most of Nietzsche’s biographies talk about his time in Sils Maria, but it was Italy he loved most—and he had some of his most important ideas during his extended stays here.

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Progress Update: April 2025

Here are the books I read/listened to for my research during April 2025, and my notes on the progress:

The Wisdom of Life and Consuls and Maxims (Schopenhauer)
Oraculo Manual Y Arte de Prudencia (Baltasar Gracian)
Living With Borrowed Dust (James Hollis)
The Inner Game of Tennis
Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway
Staring at the Sun
The Gift of Therapy
How Emotions Are Made
What the Body Knows About Happiness
The Other Side of Happiness

Notes:

• April was the slowest reading month since I went into heavy research mode a year and a half ago. Life got in the way, and my mind decided it was more interesting to torture itself than work on the project. So that was that.

• The best book this month was “How Emotions Are Made.” Took me a while to get through, but it was worth it. The author knows her subject well and did a good job writing about it—the book could have easily been dry and difficult, given its content.

Books like this are why I’m afraid of missing something important, and the reason my reading list gets out of control. The author’s research presents a significant shift in how to think about emotions—one I would have missed if I hadn’t picked up the book. The new information puts me in a tough spot: I now have to rework a lot of what I had taken as a base for some ideas. But better to find out now that I was wrong than later in the process.

• On a different note, reading Schopenhauer is always fun. He’s such a sharp thinker and engaging writer. Even if I disagree with a lot of what he says, I enjoy seeing him think.

• Most of the month, I had my mind locked into Discouragement Radio Station, playing non-stop greatest hits such as: “You can’t do this,” “The project is too big,” “You are never gonna finish—and if you do, it will take so long that life will have passed you by,” “Is that even worth it?” and “Isn’t it ironic that you are writing a book on how to live and it’s killing you?” But among the noise, I choose to listen to a sadistic demon that whispers, “Get up. Show up. Make progress.”

Okay, maybe that’s over-dramatic, but it’s not far from how I often felt about the work.

• On the positive side, I’ve been working behind the scenes all month creating this Substack, which will be my writing home—and now I finally get to share it with you. I’ve uploaded a few favorite past pieces, plus a full course on habits I originally created for an online academy (you’ll find them in the “Extra” section).

Only one new post is up for now, and I’m currently struggling with another—but I’ll eventually bring it into submission.

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Progress Update: March 2025

Here are the books I read/listened to for my research during March 2025

The Art of Living an Absurd Existence
Zorba the Greek
Phenomenology: The basics
Mornings on Horseback
The River of Doubt
The Brain: The Story of You
On Mental Toughness
The Trouble With Being Born
The 5 Types of Wealth
A Joseph Campbell Companion
Happier Hour
Loneliness
Open When…
Be Your Future Self Now
How to Be Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable

Essays:
—Pidiendo un Goethe desde Dentro (“Goethe from the Inside” by Ortega y Gasset)

Notes:

• My favorite book of the month was “The River of Doubt.” It tells the incredible story of Teddy Roosevelt’s life-threatening exploration of an uncharted river in the Amazon Jungle. For those who have read and liked “Endurance” (the story of Shackleton’s surreal survival in the Antarctic), “The River of Doubt” would be a great next read.

• I read Ortega y Gasset’s essay on Goethe. It’s unfortunate that history has not given enough credit to Ortega y Gasset. He came up with the main points in Heidegger’s “Being and Time” years before Heidegger’s publication.

Heidegger denied copying Ortega y Gasset, but Heidegger was an all-around jerk, so that’s not surprising. Ortega y Gasset was either too much of a gentleman or too much of a coward to turn the matter into a public fight.

I think being Spanish played against Ortega y Gasset. Germans dominated the intellectual world during his time (and for a century before it). So, a Spanish philosopher coming out of nowhere was not taken as seriously. I believe that if Ortega y Gasset had been German, no one would know Heidegger’s name.

In any case, that’s my geek rant to give credit to a little-known philosopher who deserves it.

• I suffer from FOMSI (Fear of missing something important), so my “to-read” list tends to get out of control. But for the past few months, I’ve been closing the door and letting fewer books into the list. I’m reaching the stage where I feel I’ve done enough exploration and have enough material to start focusing on everything I have compiled.

I always think of research for any new subject or skill as a diamond-shaped <> process. First comes exploration and expansion, and then I go into integration and contraction. Now that I have a good idea of what’s out there and what has been written about my subject, I can focus on what’s most important.

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Progress Update: February 2025

Here are the books I read/listened to for my research during February 2025

The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence
12 Rules for Life (Peterson)
Beyond Order (Peterson)
The Ultimate Colin Wilson
The Outsider (Colin Wilson’s one, sections only)
Dancing with the Devil
Never Enough
Ideas (Husserl, sections only)
Heidegger (The Oxford University one)
Being and Time (Heidegger, sections only)
The Garden of Forking Paths (Borges, short story)

Notes

• My favorite read for the month was “Dancing With the Devil.” It’s a book on the value of ‘bad’ emotions. Not everything discussed in the book is good, but what’s good is REALLY good. The book would have been great if it had better structure and more polished writing, but the author is well in command of her subject and provides perspectives I haven’t read anywhere else.

• This month, I faced some titans I had been avoiding for some time: Heidegger’s “Being and Time” and Husserl’s “Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy.” You can tell from the title of the latter that it is not exactly an enjoyable narrative to pick up and relax with.

I only read sections of those two books. I had already read enough about both authors’ philosophies, but I wanted to delve into the primary sources to find some nuances and better understand their thinking. It was valuable to read their work, but it was the right move to consult secondary sources before delving into these notoriously difficult books—otherwise, they would have gone over my head, especially “Being and Time.”

• Current state of the process:

I’m frustrated by the slow progress I’ve been making since I started cutting down on my reading two months ago. I still have to read about 100 more books to complete the main part of my research, and at this pace, it will take me around a year to finish. So, I’ve been going back and forth between stepping on the gas again or accepting that it will take a while before I get all I need to shift gears and focus more on organizing and writing.

Adding to the distress is looking at the massive amounts of info I’ve already compiled and now have to sort through, reread, and categorize. Some days, the size of the project makes me feel like I can’t breathe. My file on scattered thoughts alone is about 150.000 words (that’s around 500 pages), and that’s before writing even a word of the actual book. I also have a file hundreds of pages long that is just quotes I’ve gathered over the past years.

In a couple of months, I’ll likely be looking at a few thousand pages of notes, book summaries, and my scattered writings, which I’ll need to categorize, select, and then shape into a coherent structure, seamlessly weaving philosophy, psychology, and personal experience with simple yet engaging writing. No pressure.

I often look at my writing and research files and think, “There is no way I can do this; it’s too much,” but then I remember that writing always feels that way: you’re frustrated, lost, overwhelmed, and discouraged all the way to the very end. So I’m trying to take it one day at a time, repeating the mantra “Show up. Make progress.” That’s my only job: “Show up. Make progress” every day until this book is finished...Or I am.

FML, but I chose this struggle, and despite the difficulty (or because of it), I love it.

Good times.

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Progress Update: January 2025

Here are the books I read/listened to for my research during January 2025

A Therapeutic Journey
The School of Life
How to be Authentic (On Simone de Beauvoir)
How to Live an Extraordinary Life
Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings (Sections only)
Introducing: Existentialism
Reframe your Brain
What Does it All Mean?
A Life Worth Living (Albert Camus Biography)

Notes:

The best of the month was “How to Be Authentic” by Skye Cleary. It’s a book on Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy, written by an excellent writer (and overall badass) who also has a great course on existentialism called “Existentialism and the Authentic Life.”

If you’re into existentialism in general, go for the course, but if you want to focus more on Simone de Beauvoir, read this book.

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Progress Update: December 2024

Here are the books I read/listened to for my research during December 2024

Life Worth Living
Phenomenology of Spirit (Only read the first part)
The Art of Loving
Nietzsche: Fighting Demons (Zweig)
Introducing: Kant
Introducing: Kierkegaard
Introducing: Sartre
The Art of the Interesting
The Sweet Spot
How Pleasure Works
How to Be a Stoic
The Confidence Gap
The Gravity of Joy
How to Live a Good Life
The Art of Focus
I will not Die an Unlived life
The Writing Life
Determined
Love’s Executioner
The Creative Act

Notes:

• The best read for the month was “Nietzsche: Fighting Demons.” The book is a beautiful homage to Nietzsche by Stefan Zweig, who is also the author of a biography of Montaigne, a great read, too. I loved this book.

Nietzsche is one of the philosophers whom people love to judge and criticize without having read any of his work. Forget all you’ve randomly heard about Nietzsche. Read him, or read about him from people who studied his philosophy. You’ll be inspired and energized beyond anything you’ve ever read. You’ll also realize how much people have misinterpreted and spread misinformation about him over the years.

He wrote like ‘dynamite,’ making statements that would shake us out of our ingrained ways. But his powerful style is also what led people to take him out of context and use snippets against him.

What you’ll find in Nietzsche is a gentle soul, deeply in love with life, and a believer in our individual capacity for greatness.

• Another great book this month was “The Sweet Spot.” The author mixes science and philosophy to explore the value of struggle in our lives. I liked it a lot.

• One more thing to mention: Hegel. I have read about Hegel’s philosophy, but I had never read his work until now. It was a disaster. I think of the phrase by Richard Feynman, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you don’t.” The same must apply to Hegel.

Likely, I’m not smart enough (or sadistic enough) to follow Hegel’s thoughts, but many philosophers who were ungodly smart criticized Hegel for having no substance and only making things convoluted to appear profound. It’s an old trick: if your ideas are basic, use complex writing to make them appear smart. Or, in Nietzsche’s words, “They muddy the waters to make them seem deep.”

This might be a case of the emperor having no clothes. Saying you understand Hegel makes others think you are smart. Few will dare to say that the work is gibberish. But even Hegel’s ‘scholars’ and defenders admit to the unreadability of his texts, and his followers split into different groups because no one could agree on what the hell he meant.

Those who claim to understand Hegel are more likely just providing their own meaning and interpretation (hi, Marx) to words so vague that could be turned into anything we want to project on them (like seeing shapes in the clouds, or looking at a banana tapped to a canvas and interpreting it as a beautiful work of art). Fuck Hegel and fuck bananas, you both suck.

• That brings the heavy reading phase of my research to an end. For real this time. I think... We’ll see...

So here is the summary:

I read/listened to 251 books over the past thirteen months. The goal was to go through a minimum of 4 books per week, which I stuck to for most weeks, except during some travels (but I more than compensated in other weeks).

It’s the most I’ve read in a year (the highest was around 150) and not something I would like to do again; I just wanted to make a significant dent in the research for my next book.

The weekly goal was important because it gave me a rhythm, kept my momentum, and made my progress visible, which helped me stay motivated.

Books vary in length and difficulty, so if I had a particularly difficult or long book one week, I would add short or easy books to the mix. This kept me from getting exhausted. I also combined audiobooks and regular books, so if I got tired of reading, I could turn to audio.

I used to not like audiobooks, but I know @nicklovesbooks enjoys them, so I gave them a chance. They were very helpful in making progress (thanks, Nick).

My criticism of them was that we don’t get the same level of engagement because listening is passive, and many times, we are doing other things at the same time, which takes away our concentration. My workaround to the problem was to do almost nothing while I listened to audiobooks—Just raw-dog the entire thing. That improved concentration and engagement.

I still think listening to audiobooks doesn’t allow for the same level of engagement as regular reading, so I advise being selective about which books to listen to and which to read.

I still have about 100 books to read, so I’ll do some months of heavy reading here and there, but for the most part, I’ll be shifting gears to organizing all the information I’ve compiled from the research and all my notes. That should take me about a year.

Since I’ll be doing less reading, I won’t be posting research updates as frequently.

• Here are my top 5 books out of the last 13 months:

At the Existentialist Café
The Great Guide: David Hume
The Upside of Stress
Being You
Living an Examined Life

These are not easy books, and you probably won’t like them unless you are into the subjects. But if the topics resonate with you, these books are some of the best you’ll ever read.

As an extra, I don’t read much fiction, but I loved “The Midnight Library.” It was the right book at the right time for me. It’s a beautiful story about paths not taken and our relationship with our glorified, unlived lives.

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Progress Update: November 2024

Here are the books I read/listened to for my research during November 2024

How to Think Like Socrates
Introducing: Derrida
Never Play it Safe
Supercommunicators
Ethics (Spinoza)
Introducing: Postmodernism
Transcend
Happier
What Would Nietzsche Do?
*The Art of Thinking Clearly
The Art of the Good Life
The Evolving Self (M. Csikszentmihalyi)
The Further Reaches of Human Nature (A. Maslow)
Toward a Psychology of Being (A. Maslow)
Ni Alta, Ni Baja, Construye Auténtica Autoestima
Living an Examined Life (James Hollis)
Through the Dark Wood (James Hollis)
What Matters Most (James Hollis)
The Middle Passage (James Hollis)
Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life (James Hollis)
Lincoln’s Melancholy
The Confident Mind
Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder

Notes:

• November was a better month, but still a slow reading pace compared to earlier in the year, since I was traveling for most of the month.

• My favorite book of the month was “Living an Examined Life” by James Hollis. If you are facing a major change in your life or going through an existential or identity crisis, “Living an Examined Life” is a great book for you. James Hollis is now one of my favorite authors. I’ve read about five of his books in the last year.

• My favorites from this batch: “What Would Nietzsche Do.” It’s about complex philosophical questions, such as “Is there a qualitative difference between high culture and popular entertainment?” This is explained through light examples, such as “Is Shakespeare better than The Simpsons?” This is a good entry point for those interested in philosophy but who are put off by the academic language and dry discussions of most philosophy books.

• Another good book from the list was “The Art of Thinking Clearly.” This is an enjoyable read on thinking biases. Short chapters, easy read, well-written. Highly Recommended.

It was another week focused on reading psychology. I’m working my way through Maslow’s thinking and contribution. I’ll finish with “Transcend” this week and then take on more philosophy again, which I haven’t read in some time.

I took so much out of James Hollis’ book from last week that this week I decided to binge on his writing. All four books from this week are by him.

The same themes and ideas come up throughout the books, but are sometimes presented in different ways, which helps to internalize the message.

Hollis is one of the rare authors whose both content and style are amazing.

Of the six books I’ve read by him over the past year, “Living an Examined Life” and “A Life of Meaning” are the best. Highly recommended.

• The best of last week was “Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life” by James Hollis.

The book is a wealth of information on psychotherapy and the search for meaning in our lives. Hollis is one of those few people who combine beautiful writing with amazing insight and wisdom. I’ll be reading more of his books in the coming days.

• October was a slow month. I took about two weeks off, and traveling is cutting into a lot of my reading time.

November will be the 12th month of this research phase, and depending on the progress, I’ll balance reading with organizing the information I’ve gathered.

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Progress Update: October 2024

Here are the books I read/listened to for my research during October 2024

The Will to Meaning (Viktor Frankl)
Meaning in Life and Why it Matters
Clear Thinking
Same as Ever
Being You
The Way of the Champion
The First Rule of Mastery
Finding Flow
Meditations for Mortals
Stop Overthinking
Conscious

Notes:

• My favorite read this past week was “Clear Thinking” by Shane Parrish. The book covers thinking biases that get in the way of good decision-making and how to set guardrails for ‘clear thinking.’

• “Same as Ever” by Morgan Housel was good, too. I love Morgan’s writing style: clear, engaging, and concise. He’s one of the authors I look up to most for how to present ideas. Morgan is also the Author of “The Psychology of Money,” one of my favorite books of all time.

• Settled back into a good rhythm after an almost two-week break from reading

I’m glad that all of last week’s books were good reads; it made it easier to get back into heavy reading after the break.

• “Being You” is the best book on consciousness and ‘the self’ I’ve ever read. The book is clear and well-written; it also has the right mix of science and philosophy. The subject is complex, making it a challenging read that took some time to get through. Don’t be discouraged by the difficulty; this is an amazing book.

• “Meditations for Mortals” is by the same author of “Four Thousand Weeks” and “The Antidote” (both excellent). I loved this book. “Meditations for Mortals” is a no-fluff, almost pure insight book on how to improve our lives by accepting its limitations and flowing with the imperfect as well as the uncertain. Highly recommended.

• I mostly took a break from reading in the last two weeks since I had some traveling planned, but I still wanted to make small progress to reach an important milestone:

As of today, I’ve read/listened to 200 books since I began my research last December. I still have a month and a half to go to complete a year of heavy reading, and then I’ll shift gears to spend more time organizing what I’ve compiled and begin writing.

• “Conscious” was a great read on the nature of consciousness and how it relates to free will, phenomenology, and our idea of ‘self.’ Highly recommended for those interested in these subjects.

I’ll return to my regular reading volume (about 4 books per week) starting this week.

• “The Noonday Demon” was the best read for the month. The first chapters alone make the book worthwhile. It’s a heavy read and not for everyone. The author’s account of going through deep and extended depressions is heartbreaking. I’ve never read anything like it.

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