For all the progress updates in one place:
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.