A summary of what I wrote in 2023
In 2023, I published 37 essays. I’ve spent the better part of the morning going through it all to see what the themes were—it is quite surprising to notice what emerges when you allow yourself to follow your curiosity and intuition for a full year. I wrote a summary of the themes.
At the end of this post, there are also some notes on my experience running Escaping Flatland in 2023.
The ten most popular posts were (some of these are paywalled halfway through, but the paywalls are placed so that the first half should be interesting in itself):
Also, since I didn’t curate a list last year, these were the five most read in 2022:
What were the themes this year?
Being ambitious in relationships
This theme is the biggest surprise to me. This is how it happened: in December I wrote a post that I sent to two friends who wanted to know what I thought about finding a life partner. I didn’t intend to make it public, it felt too private. But then it started circulating between friends and someone posted it to Twitter, and I thought, “Oh, well, I should just nip this one in the bud,” so I put it on the blog, and, well, it blew up. It was called “Looking for Alice,” in homage to Gertrude Stein, who, when asked if she was a lesbian, said, No, I just like Alice.
Because of that essay, I ended up having an unusual number of conversations about relationships this year, and I noticed myself saying some clever things along the way. I wrote some of it up as essays. I wrote one piece about how to have genuine, deep conversations with people, called “Dostoevsky as lover.” I wrote another about what makes some relationships have positive coevolutionary loops that make people fit together better and better over time.
These essays tell the story of my relationship with Johanna up until the birth of Maud. They were interestingly hard to write. I thought a lot about why this is. I think it has to do with the fact that our traditional narrative forms center conflict, which means that love stories tend to be anything but—they tend to be stories of infatuations, toxic romance, failed expectations, and so on. Writing about healthy, transformative love breaks our narrative forms. This means we rarely see it portrayed in fiction. How does this shape our expectations of love? I wrote an essay about that.
There were also some more practical essays about making deeper relationships. One talked about how using a notetaking system can improve conversations, turning the conversational stream into a conversational canyon. Another talked about using the tools of internal family systems to reinvent old friendships that have gotten stuck.
Another theme was: If we think beyond school, what would be better ways of educating?
Maud, our oldest daughter, turned six this year and officially enrolled as a homeschooler in August, so Johanna and I have been thinking a lot about how we are to help her and her sister mature into flourishing adults. This is a thread that we have pulled on since before the kids were born, when we both worked in public schools. But there was a shift this year. Previously, my aim has been mainly to reduce some of the harm to curiosity and dignity that I felt the children suffered in the schools I worked in, but this year, I realized that we can do a lot better than just reducing harm. I raised my aspirations.
The big essay on this topic was “Childhoods of exceptional people,” where I ploughed through a man-high pile of biographies of people who have done exceptional work, to see if there are any patterns. There were. Most of them were homeschooled until age 12, they were surrounded by talented adults who engaged them in serious conversations, they had plenty of time to be bored, they were tutored 1-on-1 and they were gifted.
In a similar vein, I wrote a piece about the talent networks behind the Swedish music miracle. There have been years when Sweden, with a population of 10 million, has supplied 25 percent of all top ten hits in the US. Why? The answer, as far as I can tell, is a combination of decentralized learning facilities that can be used in open-ended ways—a very Ivan Illich-like idea—and a strong tradition of mentorship. It is easy to start a band in Sweden, so there are (or at least used to be) strong scenes in nearly every town, and the networks are tight, so when someone talented shows up they are discovered while still in their teens and brought in to work with people like Denniz PoP and Max Martin (Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Taylor Swift etc).
My working assumption right now is that the best way to approach improving education is to frame the problem like this: it is about crafting subcultures that value excellence, where children are surrounded by people whose norms and skills they do well by internalizing. I haven’t written as much about this as I wanted—there are a bunch of drafts that are slowly coming together. Maybe next year.
I published a piece where I argued that this cultural aspect of learning means that AI tutoring systems will not make as big of a difference as many assume. Tutoring systems will only work well in cultures of excellence.
Trying to map out what is happening with AI
It feels like every non-AI essay I write comes with a big question mark at the end that says, “But what if you factor in continued scaling of AI systems? Does what I wrote here still make sense in such a world?” So I’ve tried to keep up with the developments and formulate a rough model of what is going on. Most people still radically underestimate how rapidly and profoundly things are poised to change. I wrote up my baseline predictions for the next ten years here—which include systems powerful enough to do mathematical research at a doctoral level by the time our oldest daughter turns 13.
Reflections on my craft
I’ve never written as much as I have this year, so there have been plenty of growing pains as I’ve had to learn to navigate that. Both in doing the internal work necessary to push ideas on, and also, the work needed to emotionally handle the pressures that come from my readership suddenly ballooning (in May, when the blog turned two, the readership had grown 42X year-over-year, which is a pretty disorienting experience).
My favorite essay of the year was in this category. It was called “Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born,” and was based on close readings of the workbooks of the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck and the filmmaker Ingemar Bergman. It was the first essay I wrote together with Johanna Wiberg, which was a fascinating experience. Johanna is a much more rigorous and ambitious thinker than I am, and I decided to suspend my judgment and allow her to set the pace, which led me to stay much longer with the ideas than I usually do. It taught me how it is supposed to feel to push an idea as far as it deserves. I wrote about that experience (indirectly) in a follow-up called “Being patient with problems.” Also, since this was the first essay that Johanna wrote, it made me happy that it made it to the top of HackerNews. It is one of those “I’ve made it as a blogger” achievements, and it is very much her style to do it on the first attempt.
Other essays about craft included: “Writing up,” which is a reminder to myself to address readers whom I admire when I write; “Writing in a way that gets your thoughts to flow”; and “Writing as communion,” which is something of a sister piece to last year’s “A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.”
I also published a very long and detailed description of how I wrote “Looking for Alice.”
What it felt like writing all of this
When I was 26, I was sad that I couldn’t write well. To get around that feeling, I decided that I would write every day for the next 25 years and worry about how good or bad the writing was when I was done with that. I figured that way I might discover at 50 that I had written a few great essays in my 40s. I’m now 34. Although I haven’t written every single day in the last 12 months, I managed 351. I had more fun writing than ever before.
On the production side, Escaping Flatland evolved away from being a lonely guy in a room toward something more akin to a village. There were more than 40 people (!) who helped out with the essays this year—collaborators, editors, friends giving comments, and intelligent-seeming strangers who pointed out flaws in my thinking and whom I invited to give feedback on upcoming drafts. You know who you are.
I hope you also know how grateful I am.
This year was also the first when I allowed readers to support my work financially. I was unsure about doing this. I was afraid it would introduce pressures that would make it harder to stay committed to my long-term goal. It did, indeed, cause some emotional stress at first. But after a while, it did the opposite. It turns out that a membership program is a good filter: those who value what I do enough to support me are to a surprising degree people I admire for their own work and/or people I feel unblocked when I talk to. So the membership essays ended up being a place where I felt less pressure to conform and instead felt encouraged to raise my aspirations and be more personal. (It is good to run experiments—sometimes you’re assumptions are wrong!)
Thank you. All of you. Readers, members, collaborators, friends. It has been a transformative year for me. I hope you liked it too.
It is hard to overstate how big of a difference paid subscribers make. I was able to work part-time this year by eating into my savings, but it now looks like I can continue to do that thanks to you. Imagine that.
If the work we’ve done in 2023 has been meaningful to you, becoming a paid subscriber is a vote for a world in which I’m able to continue writing ambitiously (you also get twice as many essays).
If you feel like a subscription is too expensive but still want to have access to everything, just shoot me an email. You do that by replying to the emails I send out. I can do discounts and so on.
I hope Escaping Flatland can grow into a place that feels expansive and human and out of time. I think we can do that.
See you in 2024. Take care of your loved ones.
Henrik
Your post "Writing up" inspired me so much and talked me out of that same thinking you had when you were 26-- I'm sad I can't write well (I am also 26; it's comforting to know people go through similar experiences at the same age). Over and over again, your essays and posts challenge me to think and push boundaries of what I can write about. Looking forward to more of your work! I'm so grateful I found your writing :)
Hello! I found your stack after Cal Newport's recent email newsletter in which he mentioned your article on slower publishing cadence. I too have been trying to post something every week but pushing out pieces that could be better doesn't really sit well with me. You've inspired me to focus more on producing something good!
Also, judging from your overall "themes", I didn't think I would find so many pieces I'm curious about here! This summary seems like a good starting point to dive deeper into your thinking. Thank you & wishing you a great writing year in 2024 as well!