For all the progress updates in one place:
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.