For all the progress updates in one place:
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.