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
