42. Celine Nguyen - Nurturing Your Mind in Public

·Writer, Designer
Celine Nguyen - Nurturing Your Mind in Public

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Description

Celine Nguyen (Website, Substack, X) is a writer, software designer at Watershed, and literary critic. She writes personal canon, a newsletter about literature, design, art, and technology that has grown to tens of thousands of subscribers. She has also written for The Atlantic, Asterisk Magazine, and more.

I discovered Celine with her reflection on two years of writing her newsletter, where she made the case for living a life of the mind, reading great things, and writing online:

After 2 years, I’m convinced that reading and writing are the most dignified and worthy activities that anyone can do—and, in fact, are activities that everyone should do.

She also has written viral essays on research as a leisure activity and a case for reading Marcel Proust’s 3,000 page novel, In Search of Lost Time*. *In another favorite, she critically analyzes the mechanics of how great writers begin. Celine makes intellectual life and very serious books feel accessible and exciting rather than obligatory.

We spoke about much of her writing, taking your intellectual growth seriously outside of academia, and how she has become an influencer in a good way. She believes you can expand the market for what you love, and her success is evidence that there is a market for more than the low-hanging fruit that dominates much of the internet. Celine sees reading and writing through the lens of *becoming, *and I was inspired to raise my own bar. I hope you can say the same.

**Dialectic is presented by **Notion. Notion is an AI-powered connected workspace where teams create their best work. Notion recently launched custom agents: helpful AI teammates that handle recurring work across your entire suite of tools. Automate you and your team’s repetitive tasks so you can focus on the deep work. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic, and check out their latest round of updates here.

Timestamps

  • (0:00) Opening Highlights
  • (1:35) Intro to Celine
  • (4:25) Thanks to Notion
  • (6:18) Start: Pursuing a Life of the Mind, Personal Curriculum, and Contextualizing the Present in History
  • (24:53) Research as a Leisure, Self-Cultivation, and Calibrating Rigor
  • (39:59) Effectiveness, Tools & Process, and Letting Output Drive Your Learning
  • (59:35) Parasocially Influencing People to Do Good Things (Like Reading and Writing)
  • (1:09:39) Drawing the Reader in and Expanding the Market for What You Love (and for Proust)
  • (1:24:07) Aspiration, Posing, and Pretending Your Way into Enthusiasm
  • (1:34:37) Preparation is Not Progress
  • (1:46:07) Copying, Writing Process, Mechanics, and Design
  • (1:57:25) Commitment, Finishing, Substack, Life Extension and Closing
  • (2:18:31) Thanks Again to Notion

Links & References

Transcript

(0:00) Opening Highlights

(1:35) Intro to Celine

(4:25) Thanks to Notion

(6:18) Start: Pursuing a Life of the Mind, Personal Curriculum, and Contextualizing the Present in History

Jackson: (6:19) Celine Nguyen, thank you for being here.

Celine: (6:22) Thank you. I'm very excited.

Jackson: (6:23) We are live in London. We have many things to speak about today. I want to start with something we chatted about the first time we met. It's one of the things I really admire about the way you have created your online presence and your life. It is, for lack of a more precise term, cultivating a life of the mind. I have a quote from you to start us off. You wrote, "As a human being, intellectual discovery and gratification are your birthright. Nothing is more worthy and more self-actualizing than taking your interests seriously and pursuing them as far as you can go." What is so virtuous about pursuing this life of the mind?

Celine: (7:11) It's interesting to hear you read that back. I remember when I wrote those words, I had a feeling there might be something pretentious about the lofty language of saying intellectual activity and fulfillment is your birthright. However, I feel very strongly that it is incredibly meaningful to draw from your own subjective experience, your learning, and your encounters in the world to construct a worldview. Everyone has within them some kind of philosophy for what they think is right about how they treat others, how they treat themselves, and what meaningful work is. Constructing a life where you are constantly taking in inputs to learn more about your own point of view and then articulating that out is perhaps the most meaningful thing people can do. The term birthright indicates that it is something everyone should do. It's not just for scholars, academics, critics, journalists, or people who are conventionally seen as intellectuals. Everyone has a right to participate and produce their intellectual worldview.

Jackson: (8:20) Almost everyone can relate to consuming art, or cultural and intellectual information. But you added that second part, and that's something you seem to care a lot about in your context of reading and writing. Why is adding something back so important?

Celine: (8:47) I have an instinctual explanation, which is simply that people want to make things the more they consume them. Take fanfiction, which I have a deep love for as a genre of work. People read a work that inspires them and moves them so deeply that they feel compelled to write about it. They are full of ideas, wondering what if a character did this, or what if that happened instead. I'm starting with these accessible forms like fanfiction and fan art because people often see them as lesser forms of creativity. I see it as someone responding to a work and doing this small, accessible thing, which then builds the framework for them to do bigger things. A lot of fanfiction writers end up becoming novelists themselves. A lot of people who start by tweeting about how much an essay spoke to them eventually realize they love the qualities of those essays. When you find things in the world that you admire, or even things you think could be a bit better, at some point you ask what it would mean to actualize your standards and produce something. Very naturally, people consume things, and then they try to create. I generally feel that people need more encouragement to go from tentative bits of creation to taking it seriously. They move from just doodling or drawing something inspired by someone else to deciding they want to create their own original work, and they grow their ambitions that way.

Jackson: (10:21) I love that you brought up fanfiction because it's one of the most egalitarian and accessible forms of creation. There's also something telling that it is usually plugged into incredibly popular, immersive worlds like Harry Potter or Star Wars. To your point, these worlds are just so enamoring to people that they get completely sucked in. I want to talk about a specific cut on a lot of what you just said, which is creating a scaffolding for yourself. On the about page of your newsletter, Personal Canon, you write, "This is a newsletter about trying to live a meaningful, intellectually engaged, self-actualized life. It's about how to take your intellectual, artistic, and literary aspirations seriously, especially when you're no longer in school or academia, but have an urgent, unstoppable desire to keep on learning, making, and growing." There's a second quote you have on autodidacts that I liked. You wrote, "I truly think that autodidacts are responsible for all that is good and great about alternative culture. Or in the discourse of our times, people with 'autistic special interests.' But I kind of hate that term as it implies the desire to autodidactically develop expertise in a field and share it with others is an unusual desire instead of a deeply human one." There is a thread from each of those. First, the comment about academia. Everyone has a version of a life of the mind, or at the very least, structured learning for some amount of time. Then they graduate high school, college, or grad school, and they are spat out, and it's kind of over.

Celine: (12:03) You realize you're in the real world, and the real world is not constructed around pure intellectual fulfillment.

Jackson: (12:07) Correct. There's no curriculum. One of the people you suggested I look into is Erik Hoel and how he writes about the early lives of geniuses. This is something Henrik writes about too. We've discussed how they have crazy tutors and all these resources, but a huge part of it is actually their self-directed exploration and study. You seem to be deliberately creating a curriculum for yourself, however implicit or explicit, to become the intellectual person you want to be. I'd love to hear what you've learned about doing that. Obviously, it's not always super explicit, and sometimes you just have the newsletter as a container. What is it like to think about creating a curriculum for yourself?

Celine: (12:58) It was not a very structured process. Reflecting over the last five to ten years about how I got started with this, a lot of it came about because right after undergrad, I had a really long train commute. I was on the train two hours a day and needed some way to fill the time. This is really silly, but I didn't want to pay for a more expensive phone plan. I had four gigabytes of data for a month, so I couldn't scroll on Instagram all the time.

Jackson: (13:28) This was 2016.

Celine: (13:32) Yeah. I needed to do something low-data or data-limited.

Jackson: (13:37) I haven't thought about being here anyway.

Celine: (13:40) Out of constraints arises creativity. Text is very cheap. I could just download a bunch of Kindle books and spend my train commute that way.

Jackson: (13:49) Wow.

Celine: (13:49) A lot of my early learning experiences were driven out of insecurity, frankly. I left undergrad feeling a strong sense that there were so many things I didn't understand that were unfinished. I felt like I hadn't had the fully realized intellectual experience I wanted to have.

Jackson: (14:10) You also, notably, did not study literature or English.

Celine: (14:14) No, I did not. I studied computer science and communication design. My courses were very focused on the craft and technical side of it. I was obsessed with the history side of things, like the history of computer science, programming languages, graphic design, and aesthetic theory. I hadn't gotten that much into those areas in undergrad. I just felt this strong sense that I needed to read so much more about the world. I needed to understand what was happening. This was also when Trump was running for president the first time. There were a lot of conversations happening around the nature of American democracy and political polarization. I had this strong desire to historicize those things a little bit. I wanted to understand what was new about our time versus the continuous thrust of political change and discourse happening over the course of the 20th century to the present. I just felt I didn't know as much as I wanted to about the world.

Jackson: (15:11) I want to stop you for a second. A lot of people had a swell around Trump, and most people were incredibly reactive. They were trapped in the present, for lack of a better term, freaking out on Twitter and obsessively following everything. What do you attribute that impulse to contextualize this to? That is a much wiser perspective to have when you were 22 or 23. I'm curious if that's just something you've always done and you've always had an inclination towards the historical.

Celine: (15:53) I feel an internal discomfort if I don't fully understand something. When people invoke terms like totalitarianism or fascism, I wonder what that means. When people debate whether something is or isn't fascism, I wonder how you tell. There's this meticulousness or anxiety.

Jackson: (16:17) You do the reading. There's a meta-theme that will come up over and over again, but you are definitely someone who does the reading.

Celine: (16:23) Even in a non-political domain, I am really obsessed with runway and high fashion. When I read people say that a designer just took over at Christian Dior and is remixing the codes from the early couture collections, I want to know what those codes are and what they look like. In undergrad, I remember going on the Met Museum website. They have a lot of publications from the Costume Institute researching fashion designers and their early histories. You can download PDFs, and I remember scrolling through them just to understand what was happening in the post-war era that influenced fashion design today. I'm always obsessed with going back and understanding what people are referencing.

Jackson: (17:06) This is a theme that's come up with a few people and other guests. Technology and fashion are interesting to compare on this axis because they're on opposite ends of the spectrum regarding how much innovation is happening. In technology, largely due to new science, innovation is just coming out of the faucet. As a result, you don't really have to look backwards very much because there's truly useful new novelty. Fashion is the opposite end of the spectrum, where there's very little actual innovation. Thus, everyone in fashion is deeply ingrained with references and historical context, going back to Dior from the sixties. I do think that's something that is in shorter supply on the internet broadly, and certainly in shorter supply in the technology circle of the world.

Celine: (18:01) This is interesting because I almost disagree with you. Here's my reason why. First, some of the best technologists working today are actually very saturated in historical references. Notion, for example—I know this is a sponsored moment, but I also worked there. I have a deep affection for the company and its origin story. So much of Notion's history was shaped by the fact that the founders really cared about understanding early computing ideas. They wanted to understand all these past visions of technology, computers, and the internet that shaped our way of thinking but were not realized. They asked how we could use new technological opportunities now to actually realize them. Some of the best technologists really understand the past as a source of innovation. With fashion, there's this built-in structure for novelty. Classically, every fashion house has to produce two runway collections a year: the fall-winter and the spring-summer. Everyone who works in fashion is truly on the grind. They have to constantly come up with new ideas and figure out this tension of maintaining the brand and house DNA, continuing things forward, while also coming up with a new idea.

Jackson: (19:24) This is a great point. I appreciate you checking me first of all. I think we probably actually agree more than it may sound like. Part of what I'm really trying to drive at is that maybe I just don't know enough about fashion, but coming up with new things typically involves archive diving. Maybe Gore-Tex happens, but there's actually very little new substrate in fashion. I think you're right about some of the best technologists doing this, but I don't think it's super culturally embedded. Even just in terms of how people talk about things, yes, there is certainly a class of human-minded lineage of Alan Kay. I'm really gravitated to these people, and I've talked to a lot of product designers, but I don't think that's common. I certainly don't think most technologists are running around talking about all their references. Maybe it's a little surface level, but I think that's much more common in other fields, whether it be fashion or art. To your point, technology would really benefit if there were more people like Ivan.

Celine: (20:40) To try and synthesize, there's almost this sense that the default mode in technology is you're only looking at the future, and the default mode in many other domains privileges the past and tradition by default. I think literature and fashion are definitely that. In fashion, if you say your brand has been around for 100 years, that's assumed to be good. In technology, if you say a company has been around for 100 years, people assume they were probably better in the past.

Jackson: (21:11) That's so right.

Celine: (21:12) And they're irrelevant now. Whatever discipline you're in, it's always worth figuring out the default orientation towards the past, present, and future. Where can I find the edge? Is the edge in finding historical references? Is the edge actually in being really optimistic about the future when everyone else is afraid of it and wants to slow down?

Jackson: (21:32) I love that frame a lot. It's also so true. In areas that prize brand, the more Lindy, the better. I diverged us, but you were talking about building the early beginnings of forming this curriculum for yourself in an unstructured way. You were talking about your post-college experience. I don't know if there was another thought there.

Celine: (21:59) I put myself on this grind where I was commuting for two hours a day, five days a week, and I was just churning through Kindle books. The San Francisco Public Library was full of really good books. The other thing about a lot of public libraries is that you can request the books they don't have by submitting a little form. I was constantly looking around. I'd read a book, go into the notes, and see who the author was referencing. I'd realize I should read those people too. You start with a single entry point, which is maybe a book someone tweets about in a condescending way, saying everyone would understand the world better if they understood this book. I am very easily chastised as a person. I have this positive form of intellectual insecurity, or maybe epistemic humility, where I feel I don't know something, but I could know more. Someone will reference a book, and I'll feel I have to get on that. I have to understand what's happening. Then I'll read that book and the books they reference.

Jackson: (23:03) You're very nerd-snipeable in this domain.

Celine: (23:05) Pretty much. I enter into these weird little funnels. Right now, I'm reading a lot about Daoism. I don't really know how I ended up here, but this has been the theme of my Q1.

Jackson: (23:16) As you were reading Zhuangzi, I was going to recommend the author Ken Liu. He has a new translation of the Dao De Jing.

Jackson: (23:24) He also translated part of the Three-Body Problem.

Celine: (23:26) I think I have a galley copy in my email inbox from the publisher. I should read it.

Jackson: (23:31) He splices in Zhuangzi essays and other things, and he'll write random side notes. He takes it seriously, but he doesn't take the whole part of it too seriously, which adds to...

Celine: (23:47) The playfulness.

Jackson: (23:48) Yes, which is nice when you're engaging with it.

Celine: (23:50) I do think a key part of having a curriculum for yourself is actually being very playful and lighthearted. Something that stops people from cultivating their own intellect or education is this neurotic rigidity where they feel they have to learn things the right way. They feel they have to start with the right text and have the right opinions and interpretations. That's very scary. It also prevents you from responding to a work. Everyone might say a book is good, but what if you don't get it? What if that's not a sign that you're dumb, but just a sign that the prose quality is a little obscure, or it's written for specialists and isn't accessible? What if I want to read about this thing that everyone says is pointless, but for some reason I'm drawn to it and having a response? If I take my interest seriously, I can understand the nature of that response. I think just being very playful and instinctual, very spontaneous, is very much a Daoist Zhuangzi thing as well. If you're interested in something, just channel in that direction.

(24:53) Research as a Leisure, Self-Cultivation, and Calibrating Rigor

Jackson: (24:53) A version of this, or at least a part of this that relates very much to what you just said, is this amazing idea of research as a leisure activity. I think it actually comes from that Arena channel. Carly, in the Arena channel, there was this bit where you said, "I find myself turning this phrase 'research as a leisure activity' over and over again, especially as I plan out what I want to read this summer, what I want to write, and who I want to be at the end of the season." This obviously relates to the curriculum idea. First of all, what is that planning like to the extent it becomes more structured and explicit? And then I'm very specifically interested in what goes into who you want to be at the end of the season.

Celine: (25:36) A few thoughts on this. I am always coming up with very elaborate plans, and then they completely disintegrate.

Jackson: (25:43) That's the point.

Celine: (25:44) As time passes, you plan in order to daydream and set an intention, but then you have to be responsive to what happens. At the beginning of this year, I decided I wanted to read a lot more poetry. Poetry is the place where you have the greatest compression of style and information that makes sense. Every word is chosen so deliberately that there's not really any fluff. There's a lot of decision making involved. There are all these small aesthetic encounters that can happen just in terms of a poet breaking a line at a certain place. I wanted to understand more what it means at that level of discipline and style, at this very deep craft level. I decided I should read more poetry. I also wanted to read more about Chinese philosophy and the Zhuangzi. A friend gave me a copy of the Zhuangzi as a birthday present, so I decided to read that and became quite obsessed. A lot of these plans start out with an intention, like the poetry thing. There's this plan of wanting to become a certain kind of writer, and I think this is the direction that will help. Nonfiction plans are a little bit easier to understand within this framing of who you want to be. A lot of the nonfiction reading I have right now is thinking about this moment of incredible technological change and upheaval. Associated with that are all these concerns people have around what an ideally equitable future looks like. Last year I was very interested in what this looks like in an artistic and creative context. I was writing about how artists and writers have made money in the past. What are some of the economic and social reasons why those funding sources or sources of income have dried up? What are the new economic models available? I'm very interested in this question of what we want the future to look like at a time of technological upheaval. In order to answer that, I could look at the Victorian era and how people thought about the Industrial Revolution. There's a book called Inventing the Future that talks about why left political movements have failed to achieve their aims, and what an alternative path would look like that embraces technology and progress instead of clinging onto the past. There are these intellectual questions or very craft-based, skill-based concerns. From there I can assemble the books I've heard about, the sources, historical periods, ideas, or intellectual traditions. I put that in an Apple Note or journal extensively about it. I text all my friends saying I'm thinking about this and asking for resources. Two or three weeks in, I start reading something random. A part of my head wants to get back to my curriculum, and maybe I complete a quarter of it. I'm also constantly being distracted in a productive way by new ideas.

Jackson: (28:54) The specific language of who I want to be at the end of the season is interesting. A lot of people think they need to get more educated. Maybe they should have more of a curriculum, study more, or do the research. Even part of your answer was describing things you wanted to get more up to speed on or educated on. That feels a little different than who you want to be.

Celine: (29:17) My most embarrassing reading trait is that I love self-help books. I've probably read every bad to good self-help book out there. I think of this genre as very capacious. Right now I'm reading a book by the mathematician Bertrand Russell called The Conquest of Happiness. It is his self-help book about his approach to mathematics, but also his understanding of what makes for a happy and meaningful life.

Jackson: (29:50) You've made the point that the purpose of philosophy is to help you live a better life.

Celine: (29:57) A lot of philosophy is around these metaphysical questions of what is truth and what is beauty. We have this one life, and for many of us, it's briefer than we want. Not to be morbid, but we have very limited time with the people we love, and we don't know how long that will be. It really matters how you spend your time. It really matters what kind of person you are in all of your actions, your behaviors, and the things you're trying to produce in the world. I'm trying to describe this question of self that is so innate to how I view the world that I'm struggling to articulate it.

Jackson: (30:41) It's almost a tacit knowledge shaped thing.

Celine: (30:44) It's an implicit assumption that structures my life. I think life is about continual self-cultivation. Learning is definitely one of the most powerful ways to do that. Another thing is thinking seriously about what impact you want to have on other people. That can be in a large-scale way, but it can even be in a small way. You can give someone a very sincere compliment. You can tell someone you don't know that you read their blog post and thought it was really meaningful and profound. Everyone is looking to be seen and understood for their ideas and their point of view. That feeling of recognition is very valuable. One of the best ways to relate to yourself and others is to constantly be developing your intellect. It's a way of developing your relationship to others, the world, how you want to act, and yourself. I don't know if that's too cheesy.

Jackson: (31:45) I don't think it is at all. That's really lovely. On the note of research, you were comparing it to research in the academic or scientific sense. You say as much rigor is necessary. How do you attune to how much rigor is necessary? It's all made up just for you.

Celine: (32:11) There is a very classic definition of rigor that comes out of an academic discipline. In order to rigorously understand something and do research in that domain, you often have to have done five to seven years of a PhD in the humanities. You need to have read the 200 most important books in your discipline. That is obviously a very important form of rigor because it produces a specialist knowledge that is not possible without that background. There's another form of rigor. If you are someone who is really interested in a certain historical period or philosophy, your goals may be different than someone publishing an academic paper. You may want to be rigorously thoughtful about quoting the parts you're most interested in and summarizing an argument you're drawing from. You want to be extremely precise with language when making your own claims. You might not need to survey 200 people.

Jackson: (33:16) It's a different slice of compromise or prioritization.

Celine: (33:20) People can land at the wrong level of the rigor axis. They might pressure themselves into thinking they need to do a super high level of rigor for something where the audience, the aims, and the impact the work will have on themselves just don't require that intensity. Some people can be quite sloppy. They'll gesture at an argument, but they won't define their terms. It's about calibrating the right level of rigor for your intended objective.

Jackson: (33:50) Over time, you're building more of a sense of when you are being sloppy or taking a shortcut. There's another interesting part of this in the backdrop we were talking about earlier with wanting to always go back to historical context. We were talking about how relevant something should be. You say you're convinced that research should respond in some way to matters of urgent concern today. Separately, you were talking to Jasmine Sun about the ways we can get caught up in artificial trends that come from TikTok and similar places. You framed it as bait for cultural criticism, like bots listening to music, and wondering if this is a real trend or if it's really happening. It feels like it's going to increasingly happen. You said it was almost like pro wrestling, where we're conscripted into this fantasy of a thing happening. As someone who goes way back to read historical literature and is grounded in all these things we were just talking about, this is very relevant. What is inside that original statement of research oriented towards urgent matters of today without getting lost in this? I guess it's a question about balance.

Celine: (35:04) This is a big question, but I have some provisional thoughts. One thing is that I think of intellectual labor as a very social practice. There's this idea that to do intellectual labor, you have to retreat to a cabin in the woods or the ivory tower, and thoughts just come directly from your mind out into the world.

Jackson: (35:31) Walden Ponding.

Celine: (35:32) Exactly. The best intellectual work is actually highly relational and highly networked. Historically, you have all these networks of scientists trading ideas or encountering this big ferment of other people's innovations, and they use that to drive their own. Because I believe in intellectual work as social and embedded in human relations, it also has to be embedded in the relationship you have with other people today. In doing so, you think about the concerns other people have in their lives. What are they worried about? What are they anxious about? What are they excited about? The best way to do work that really resonates is bringing history into the present. It's taking these ideas that seem trapped in a book and connecting them to something people care about now. I actually have a great example of this, and it gets at the question of how you do cultural criticism or on-trend writing that's a little bit more grounded. There's this brilliant political scientist, Henry Farrell, whose newsletter I love. A year or a year and a half ago, when Elon Musk was running amok on Twitter, everyone was wondering what was going on with him. People were asking how he could have started all these companies and be seen as such a genius when he also seems a little childish online. Henry Farrell made the point that Elon Musk is a prophet trying to do a priest's job. He talked about how founders are often people who have this intense charisma and original thinking, which is what makes them successful at starting things. However, there's a different kind of skill set needed to run things or be good at PR and communications. That's much more cautious and safe. To me, this is the more interesting framing of the founder mode debate that was happening around that time. Henry Farrell said he was drawing from a book by the sociologist Max Weber, which is about the routinization of charisma in the Christian church and early religious structures. You have a prophet who is intensely charismatic, and then you have all these people who come after and turn that original movement into something durable that lasts for centuries. To me, that's so cool. Who is reading Max Weber directly? But now, Henry Farrell is connecting that to what Elon Musk is doing on Twitter today.

Jackson: (38:11) And it's not a gimmick either. That makes so much sense and is such a useful frame.

Celine: (38:17) I was so excited by it. I realized I needed to get into sociology and Max Weber. When you take the past or these historical ideas and make them relevant to the present, you infuse the culture with a love for learning and a desire to go to those sources to learn more. It's a beautiful way to transmit what research and intellectual inquiry can do.

Jackson: (38:41) It's also a way to be very grounded in what's real. You're paying attention and attuned to the real things happening to real people, but not trapped in this utter reactivity that dominates so much of living your life through a screen. When I have Twitter brain, I literally have to downshift for twenty minutes to even be able to read a book because my mind is just buzzing.

Celine: (39:09) Your nervous system is very activated because you're jumping from idea to idea. It's very much the Neil Postman "Amusing Ourselves to Death" concept. You're constantly shifting between serious and inane topics, and you need to calm yourself down.

Jackson: (39:21) It turns out that mode is not very effective. Before we started recording, we were talking about effectiveness. There's a tradeoff or a weighing between caring a lot emotionally about what's happening, but not getting sucked in so much that you can't actually do anything about it. That reactivity rules so much of the social media mindset. I love the point you made up front, which is that it's also not about going up to the ivory tower and secluding yourself.

(39:59) Effectiveness, Tools & Process, and Letting Output Drive Your Learning

Jackson: (39:59) Nabeel Qureshi was tweeting about comparing all the AI stuff right now to Roam Research and the over-optimizing of tools and processes. You had this great reply where you said, "I have a draft of a newsletter titled How to Take Dumb Notes." The whole thesis is that the best way to take notes is by writing an original piece, which necessarily synthesizes the relevant reading or book club conversations with friends, forcing you to synthesize and integrate. In a reply to that, you said, "In 2021, I updated my Zettelkasten every day. In 2026, I barely touch it because I externalize most of my notes in public-facing writing." I love it. It's such a good reminder. How has writing changed how you read and take notes?

Celine: (40:48) I will try to connect this to effectiveness, which we were discussing before. To give some context, in 2020 I made a decision that seemed dumb or risky at the time, but was intellectually satisfying. I quit my job in tech and went to art school to study history. In the run-up to that, I realized I knew very little about history. I had never taken a serious college-level history class, and I needed to prepare myself. The month before I began and throughout my MA program, I was taking so many notes in Notion. I was very meticulous about color-coding different themes and organizing pages for various topics and term definitions. I would link between pages, creating this very neurotic note-taking system. At the time, I'd come across Sönke Ahrens, who wrote a book titled How to Take Smart Notes. That book really popularized the Zettelkasten idea, where you take a lot of little atomic notes and try to figure out the themes and connections between them. One interesting thing about his book is that he talks about a sociologist, Niklas Luhmann, who used the Zettelkasten system to be incredibly prolific in his research. He published so much. The whole promise of note-taking in that book is that you take notes because you are producing some intellectual outcome.

Jackson: (42:21) Yes. Effectiveness.

Celine: (42:22) Yes. When I was reading academic self-help books while writing my dissertation, there was one called How to Write a Lot by Paul J. Silvia. He emphasizes that the thing you have to remember is that your job is to publish research and write things. You can't just collect knowledge; you have to be putting things out there.

Jackson: (42:41) That's where we started the conversation, by the way.

Celine: (42:43) I began to think of note-taking as this intellectual infrastructure or armature to help you produce an outcome. It's not the goal in and of itself. I've gone through all these different note-taking systems. Before I started writing my MA dissertation, I was obsessively cataloging things. I was also using Are.na, which was actually very effective for me. I had a channel titled A Leisurely Path Towards My MA Dissertation. Whenever I came across something interesting, I'd throw it in there and trust that inspiration would emerge. I'm obsessed with these different software tools because they change how you can research and collect information. I was collecting all this information, and then I started my dissertation and just stopped taking notes because I had this draft. Every morning, instead of taking notes in some isolated place, I'd open my draft and ask myself what I was trying to do. I was trying to glue this reference to this reference. I would put them in the same sentence, write some sentences that didn't make sense, and rearrange them. It's not that I have fully abandoned note-taking, but I've realized people can really polish their note-taking systems as if they're the endgame. I see them as preparatory work. You take notes to think about what you want to say. For me, that can also happen through texting friends, telling them I'm reading something exciting and don't know what to do with it. I also journal extensively, and my journal is the least optimized thing possible. It's always handwritten.

Jackson: (44:22) You have very nice handwriting. You have some cool photos of it when you're reflecting on starting the blog. It's cool to see that.

Celine: (44:31) I really enjoy it. I also have a table of contents for each of my notebooks, and an index at the end showing where I quote a specific source or person. It is so slow to do that by hand. Sometimes I wonder why I'm not doing it on a computer. But the point is that I'm trying to think through writing. The goal isn't to optimize it or make it the most searchable thing possible. I just need to reach a new level of awareness. That's how I use paper notes, and that's how I use texting friends about what I'm working on. If it produces a written artifact, like a newsletter or a book review, I'm very happy. All my ideas end up contained within the work. By the time I finish an essay, it is the summation of my entire subjective experience while working on it.

Jackson: (45:26) I really like that. It reminds me of a story—I think her name is Anne something—where she was translating something from Greek, and she used a word like "hesitance" or "interval."

Celine: (45:41) Oh, Anne Carson. Yes.

Jackson: (45:42) She's using a physical lexicon and has to look up every single word she doesn't know. It reminds me of what you were saying: in that space, that air gap, there's something you don't want to be fully optimized.

Celine: (45:57) One thing I'm very fascinated by is when it is important to go slowly or do things that seem useless or take way more time than needed. I remember that Anne Carson quote, and I love it because she explains that the inefficiency of looking up translations by hand is how you train your mind. At the end of the day, your mind is the instrument producing all these intellectual, artistic, and creative outcomes. Anything that seems slow is fine if it cultivates the mind in the optimal way. In the middle of working on an essay, I tend to off-road dramatically. I'll have a list of things I'm supposed to be reading, but then someone will tell me about a book and I'll get really into it, or I'll just want to read a magazine I've had on my shelf for ages. I've often found that with things that seem like distractions, I pull something out of them that ends up going into the real essay. There's this real feeling of serendipity where I'm reading something that seems useless, but it has some beautiful framing or idea. You can harvest so much out of life if you're open and receptive instead of strictly thinking you need to stay on task, stick to the topic, and follow the curriculum.

Jackson: (47:19) It's funny. It's almost as though there are three things you could optimize for. One is the actual work, as you described. The second is yourself, your own growth, your own mind. And the third is the external tools. Perhaps the mistake many people make today, especially people who like to play with cool tools, is optimizing for the tools. That's the worst one to optimize for. Shape it around either the work or at least making your own growth the priority. I think you could probably make a case that even the work is in service of, to your earlier point, becoming the person you want to be. I am curious, again, less about optimizing for the tools and more about the work. Your output is a sort of scaffolding or a tool in and of itself. At the very least, your monthly-ish "What I Read" series is a very specific container that you are very used to at this point, but you also know is coming. I would imagine knowing that the Zhuangzi is going to appear in the January 2026 "What I Read" column is changing how you're reading to some degree.

Celine: (48:35) This is really interesting because you're making me realize something about these monthly newsletters I do, where I share everything I read in January, February, and so on. First of all, I actually skip a lot of months, and I always feel self-conscious about it and hope that no one notices. Sometimes I decide this is not the time to synthesize or be external. This is the time for me to be internal and figure out what I'm trying to do with my reading. But I originally began those newsletters because when I started my Substack newsletter, I thought I should force myself to publish once a week. I was desperately scrabbling for ideas and decided a roundup of what I'm thinking about seemed easy. But I guess it is me externalizing my note-taking and trying to come up with these bigger thematic containers. The first few newsletters were just me info-dumping, just saying I read this, and I read this, and I read this. Then naturally, because I was reading so much good writing—not listicle writing, but good writing with a beginning, a middle, an end, a narrative thrust, and an arc—I started thinking I couldn't just dump a list of book summaries. I needed to come up with bigger thematic arcs. I'm training myself to take disparate sources and find a way to tie them together into a bigger theme. I ask myself what I'm thinking about now and what some of the bigger connections are between these things. It has definitely changed how I read, because I end up trying to glue things together more. Right now, I'm moving through the Zhuangzi very slowly. I'm also reading Inventing the Future by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, and a book by the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips.

Jackson: (50:24) You're reading all of these things at the same time?

Celine: (50:26) Yeah, because I can't concentrate. I was reading one on the tube over here, and I was reading another at the cafe beforehand.

Jackson: (50:36) This is a slight sidetrack, but on average, how many books are you reading at one time?

Celine: (50:43) I don't know, because some of them I will abandon for two weeks at a time. Then at the end of the month, I'll realize I need to summarize them.

Jackson: (50:49) I kind of do this, but I read far less than you do, and I finish far less than you do. People think I'm insane. They tell me I have to pick one book at a time and that's why I'm not finishing anything.

Celine: (50:57) You need books for different moods.

Jackson: (50:59) Are you compartmentalizing? Is it spatial? Is it environmental? How do you hold it all?

Celine: (51:08) I have this theory, which may not be true, about one of the conditions of contemporary life. If you're on your phone a lot and looking at algorithmic feeds, you're constantly skipping between contexts. People who look at algorithmic feeds become used to that context switching, and your brain gets comfortable with it. Maybe we have this shifting mode of attention compared to people in the past. The art historian Claire Bishop has an amazing book called Disordered Attention, which is another book I'm reading at the moment. At the very beginning, she notes that everyone says sustained attention is better, and distracted attention, where we're jumping back and forth between things, is bad. But her book asks what happens if we stop stigmatizing that form of attention and start thinking about how it has shaped contemporary art. I really like it because it has a provocative, contrarian instinct without being reactionary or rude. Switching between books is a way to give yourself novelty while also trying to attain depth. I imagine both of us don't want to be Twitter-brained, constantly zooming around between tiny bits of input, but we're also shaped by that. Maybe we dip into one book in the morning and another in the afternoon, depending on whether we're feeling energized or a little bit lazy. That's our way of constantly gaining novelty while still committing to reading.

Jackson: (52:40) What causes you to rubber-band back and commit to reading? My issue is that I'm a far less dedicated reader. I start lots of books and don't finish any of them. You're juggling all these balls and you're not really dropping them. I'm sure you stop books if they're not good, but how do you do it?

Celine: (53:01) This is interesting because I feel there's a very external versus internal experience here. Obviously, I read a lot, but I don't have a hierarchy where I think I'm a more dedicated reader than other people. I imagine that we are similarly dedicated as readers, in the sense that we both care about our intellects. But my craft is writing, so I'm really oriented towards that. For you or other people who read less, perhaps there's this other thing that you need to constantly have as input in order to refine your craft.

Jackson: (53:32) That's generous, and it might be incrementally true. But I'm like this with everything. I'm juggling lots of balls, and balls are falling.

Celine: (53:42) To go back to effectiveness, if you're ambitious, you're constantly doing a lot. You care about the quality of your work, and you feel this keen sense that a project could be so much better if you put 100% of your time into it. But in the end, it's very satisfying to try to do a lot of things and to learn from all of them. I have this feeling that some of the balls can drop, but there are a few things that you absolutely never let yourself drop.

Celine: (54:11) Right.

Jackson: (54:11) You have a version of this that is remarkable. With the podcast, I've created a harness or container that maintains the intensity in the places I want it to go. It has more of a binge shape when I'm prepping for an interview. Going back to the curriculum idea, or even thinking about it as research, these types of things contain the liquid in the cup.

Celine: (54:42) I really like this metaphor. Writing for me is this container of subjectivity. The best work I've done is my attempt to synthesize every thought, book, conversation, and feeling of excitement, anxiety, despair, or discouragement that I had over the course of writing into a piece. The reason why writing and producing an output is so meaningful compared to note-taking in isolation is that you evaluate all the ideas you've come across and what you care about in the world to come up with a conclusion. By the time you finish, you have your conclusion. Now that you've externalized it into the world, you can carry it with you as part of your life philosophy.

Jackson: (55:44) Yes.

Celine: (55:44) I've done written works that have changed me quite a bit. Afterwards, I strongly believed in my new conclusions. Last year, I wrote a piece for Asterisk, a magazine based in the Bay Area, with the clickbaity title, "Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?" I took on the complaint that music and literature suck, people don't read anymore, and everyone has bad taste. I'm dispositionally optimistic, so I hate the idea that people are dumber now or that the things we're doing are worse than before. Writing that piece was my attempt to understand why I had this visceral irritation at that idea. Through my research, I came to the belief that what matters for art, culture, and innovation is that people have a way to sustain their lives and have a dignified income so they can do ambitious work. Now I'm obsessed with how I can do ambitious work, how others can do it, and what the funding model should be. This wasn't an obsession I had before writing the piece, but now it's crystallized.

Jackson: (56:58) It hadn't taken form. The inputs may have been there, but they hadn't been forced to cohere into something.

Celine: (57:05) Exactly, it forced them to crystallize. There's a quote from one of the epigraphs in Mary Karr's The Art of Memoir that goes, "Life is a field of corn, and literature is the shot glass it distills into." I love that idea of trying to refine, crystallize, and compress things.

Jackson: (57:25) I bring this up a lot, but I did an experiment where I wrote 30 days in a row and sent it to some people. I always use the metaphor that you don't know how much toothpaste is in the tube until you squeeze it. Whether it's ambitious goals, a deadline, or having some forcing function, something needs to push you to create conclusions in any medium. Writing is profoundly different because you're taking all these things in, but you also have to figure out what you're going to offer back out. Aside from being generous or service-oriented, being forced to cohere your thoughts into the shot glass is incredibly valuable for yourself. I wasn't doing that for a really long time, and I don't have much to show for it.

Celine: (58:28) We talked about this the first time we chatted. When I think about my early twenties, I had all these intellectual and artistic ambitions, but I wasn't channeling them into anything. I didn't have that forcing function to write, make things, and put them out there. I felt a little lost and adrift. If I'm being honest, I would see other people's work and feel envious. I would wonder why they were doing the work and getting attention. Then I realized it was childish, and I had to do the work myself. Shifting to the mode of producing conclusions has led to so much more satisfaction, happiness, and self-actualization. The last few years of my life that I've been writing feel qualitatively different than before. My mind is more active, and I encounter reality with a lot more cheerfulness and optimism. I imagine you feel the same way when you make things.

(59:35) Parasocially Influencing People to Do Good Things (Like Reading and Writing)

Jackson: (59:31) Yes, life is more full. We've talked a lot about the way you do this for yourself, but I know a core part of your project is influencing and pushing others to do it too. You make a bold claim that after two years, you're convinced reading and writing are the most dignified and worthy activities anyone can do, and in fact, activities everyone should do. You have a very diverse audience, including young readers, people in the traditional literary world, and people in technology who don't necessarily have English degrees or academic backgrounds. One way to describe your project—and you might not like this at all—is that you are an influencer. You are parasocially convincing people to read and write. Even if you wouldn't use that language, it's something you are doing. To push it even further on this note of curriculum, how would you react to being called or thought of as a teacher?

Celine: (1:01:00) One thing I will say is I'm actually not as offended by the influencer comparison. In general, I have this desire to restore the things that are considered shameful, inadequate, or unworthy. When we were discussing fan fiction and fan art earlier, we noted this is the way so many people have developed their technical abilities and then gone on to do original work. I don't think it's a lower form. Amateur research is not a lower form. It's just something you do depending on what career you're in. With influencers and creators, I do maybe have a bit of snobbishness. There are definitely people who use the internet to convince people to buy more stuff, or to be more reactive towards others online. They foster an "us versus them" mentality and bring negative energy into their relationship with the world. There are lots of different ways you can use the internet to influence how people think and what they do. I find myself admiring and being shaped by people who understand that parasocial dynamics are just how we work as social creatures. You can actually use them to encourage people to do good things.

Jackson: (1:02:33) Which is why I reach for the teacher metaphor in a way. The best teachers make you want to be like them. You write all about this.

Celine: (1:02:41) There's this artist, writer, and teacher I really admire named Laurel Schwolst. I had a Zoom call with her recently, which was very personally touching for me because her work has really shaped my own. For her to say she really enjoys my work as well was such a meaningful moment of recognition. She was saying that when she first began teaching, she had gotten advice from someone else who told her to treat all of her students as if they're geniuses. I thought this was so beautiful and generous.

Jackson: (1:03:16) That reminds me of George Saunders. There's some line about how his students come in already perfect, and he's just trying to help them a little bit farther along. That's really precious.

Celine: (1:03:27) It's this huge generosity towards others. The reason I like encouraging other people to read, write, and take their interests seriously is that I truly reject the idea that I am more special than other people. I accidentally have this public presence now where I write and read a lot, so people see me in those terms. But for many years, I was a nobody online. No one knew I was reading all this stuff unless you were watching me on the Caltrain or were a friend of mine. No one knew I had these ideas within me. I did not put my ideas out into the world because I felt so self-conscious. I thought, "Who am I? I'm not an expert. Other people have so much more to say." Making the transition from keeping everything inside to actually putting it out into the world and having a positive reception changed everything. I realized that putting stuff out in the world is how I have met people who are now dear friends, like Jasmine Sutton, someone I really admire. Putting my work out there and getting to talk to people who I also admire has been so satisfying. I really want everyone else to have that experience. A key part of that is believing that the people who are your idols are not necessarily better than you. They've just been able to take their work more seriously. Maybe they've been luckier in some ways, but maybe they also had a motivational environment, whether it was friends, family, or mentors, that encouraged them to do this thing. I am so sensitive to discouragement, and it took me so long to get started, so I have this very strong feeling that I want to encourage others as much as possible. People are very fragile in their ambitions. You can just be that one person who says, "Do your work. Here's what is really special about it." Related to this, a big part of my writing practice is doing literary criticism and increasingly art criticism. People often think of a critic as someone passing judgment, saying this is good or this is bad. I don't think that's an important part of it. A lot of what critics do is notice things and draw out what specifically is good or could be improved. When it comes to encouraging other people, you shouldn't just tell them they can do it in a general way. You should tell them what is striking to you about their work and what seems to be distinctive about them. You ask them to draw that out more. I think that's what the best teachers do.

Jackson: (1:06:06) It's taking the thing apart, almost. There's a quote you cited from Alison Knowles in her book Event Scores: "I want my work to expand the terms of engagement. I don't want people looking passively at my work, but actively participating by touching, eating, following an instruction about listening, physically making or tasting something, or joining in an activity." That book is obviously a very specific version of that. I'm curious how you think about what goes into making your writing and your extended work more participatory and really inviting people in. You were speaking about it a little bit just now in the context of criticism.

Celine: (1:06:52) A lot of the writing, creative work, and artistic work people do right now exists in a fairly punishing attention economy that is optimized for short, snappy, quippy, viral, and often negatively slanted things. Something I find very interesting is how you can do work that puts people in touch with their best instincts for the kinds of things they want to read, watch, and consume online. One of the most important baseline elements of inviting the reader in is holding their attention and being respectful of it. I have been obsessed with this question of how I can write content that has the absorption of clickbait but is actually intellectually complex. My hope is that when people finish reading something I've written, they feel like they've gone through a narrative experience that is intellectually satisfying. To go back to the idea that intellectual work is an inherently important human activity, our brains need to be exercised. If all you are doing is reading low-quality content that doesn't engage your full intellectual instincts, it just feels unsatisfying. It feels like there's this trapped energy in your brain. As a writer, I should respect the reader's time enough to draw them in and immediately show that the work is compelling. I need to give them an engaging experience throughout. Then, at the end of it, they have to feel like it was a meaningful way to spend their time and a meaningful exercise of their intellect and interests.

Jackson: (1:08:46) On a relative basis on Substack, you write long posts. I was talking to Henrik about this. He's kind of the inverse. He writes pretty short posts, and yet they are not any less readable. Some of that is just the quality of your writing, but you also talk about how there are photos and little bullet points. You're doing these little things that are a little bit high and low. You're willing to use some of these tactics that another person might question. I've asked myself if I really need to make an Instagram Reel. It's easy to take certain parts of the way the world works today and just say no, I'm just going to write 10,000 words.

Celine: (1:09:30) Is it debasing my work?

Jackson: (1:09:36) I really admire that.

(1:09:39) Drawing the Reader in and Expanding the Market for What You Love (and for Proust)

Jackson: (1:09:39) There's one last thing I wanted to read on this note on expanding the market: "The pre-existing audience might be quite small, but if you're a good writer, you can make the audience for your interests bigger." As the English poet William Wordsworth said, "Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished." I know you love that quote. That's a banger. You hit this a lot. It's not just about the existing market, and people are very caught up in the market size, the literary market, and the literary magazines. You seem very unconcerned with that. Part of that is related to an understanding of how the internet works. Part of that is actually something you were getting at a few minutes ago. The amount of people who currently aren't super literary in their consumption could be. You want to invite them in and help them. I would love to hear you talk about why the market can be expanded.

Celine: (1:10:43) Something I've been very shaped by is always having day jobs in tech startups, but then having increasing interests in domains that are very different, like literary criticism and art criticism. If you're in tech, you implicitly accept that there may not be an existing market for your product. No one is going to say they need a thing that does exactly this. People are not going to ask for Spotify or Bandcamp in exactly that definition. Once you produce some new technology or piece of software and put it out into the world, people adapt the way they relate to each other and their work. They change their behaviors around it. Working in technology has given me the idea that you should not be constrained by present behavior. You should see it as possible to intervene in the world and shape the way people do things. This is something that architecture and urbanism as disciplines also understand. You're making all these small interventions and changes in the world.

Jackson: (1:11:56) Design is like this too, of course.

Celine: (1:11:59) You carve out a plaza or choose to have slightly wider sidewalks, and as a city, you allow restaurants to put seats out there. That is going to change the texture of your city and how people relate to each other. Connecting this back to literature, in the literary world and the academic humanities, a lot of the meta discourses around the nature of literature and criticism today tend to be quite negative. There is this feeling that a lot of the existing institutions are shrinking.

Jackson: (1:12:41) It's scarcity, right?

Celine: (1:12:42) That scarcity is real in many senses. There are very few places to publish a book review now compared to ten years ago. There are very few excellent specialist publications like Bookforum or the London Review of Books. The specialist publications that exist really struggle to make money. There are a lot of tragic things about this for our intellectual world. It is really important not to accept that world as given and just say the fact that all these things are shrinking means people don't care about books. What if we psyop people into caring more about books? That is part of my goal with the writing I do. Let's not accept the market conditions as given. Let's believe we can transmit a love for literature to people, and we can create a new world with new institutions that support this. I wrote this insanely long newsletter last year, and I was surprised it went viral. I deliberately wrote it in the hopes that people would be drawn in, but I did not feel it would have this massive reception. I thought it was just a craft exercise. I wrote this newsletter titled "No One Told Me About Proust." It was my argument for this great work of modernist literature. It's 3,000 pages long, and I think it is one of the best books I've ever read. I want to make a case for it that is not just saying this is an important, long book that must be read. The traditional case people make is that this is a canonical book you have to read. That feels very attached to this old world and these old institutions that have a certain hierarchy of value. I want to transmit a love for literature in a new market context, or to people who are socialized with different values. I realized people today love gossip. They love understanding the weird intricacies of people's sexual and romantic lives. Proust has that, and that's why you should read these 3,000 pages.

Jackson: (1:14:44) It's a beautiful transition right where I wanted to go. The Proust piece is a beautiful example of what you're great at, which is being able to be invitational to these things that are sort of roped off. I want to talk more about criticism specifically later. Earlier in that piece, you quote Elisa Gabbert, who had a similar experience. She says, "It was not just good, it was, as they say, extremely my shit. Everyone says you should read Proust, but no one had ever told me that I specifically should read Proust." There's this other beautiful metaphor you use in that piece. You say, "Sometimes I discovered these books by mistake. I read Maggie Nelson's Bluets in college, for example, while taking a color theory class. I assumed based on the title that it would help me with my homework." That is great, but often it was because someone I knew gently pressed a copy of the book into my hands. This is a beautiful metaphor for what you're getting at. What makes a good recommendation?

Celine: (1:15:57) Some of it is timing. I obviously am giving and receiving recommendations all the time, but often there has to be an alignment. The thing this book is about, or the way it has been framed to me, just seems to resonate with where I am in the current moment. When I try to translate that into how I would recommend a book to another person, it has to be grounded in what the other person cares about, what they're interested in, and their goals in life, much more than what this specific book is about. Obviously, the book is important, but I'm trying to find the match between the potential reader's interests and what the book can offer them. In this triangular relationship, there's me as the critic trying to say that this thing you desire in your life can be matched by literature. Maybe it's that you don't believe in love anymore after a big breakup. Maybe you are being dragged down by your family history and you don't understand how to carve out new ways of relating to people. Maybe you feel really burned out at work or you've had a bad work experience, but you want to recover the enthusiasm to do meaningful work. I'm trying to get at some bigger subjective anxiety or hope people have in their lives and then describe how literature can match that. The one thing I'm hesitant about with what I just said is that it's not always ideal to describe literature in utilitarian terms, where it is framed as an obligation.

Jackson: (1:17:28) That relates to the point you were just making about Proust.

Celine: (1:17:30) Yes. If something feels like an obligation, people can do it, but they'll drag themselves through it.

Jackson: (1:17:37) Which is how these big books feel.

Celine: (1:17:40) Yes.

Jackson: (1:17:40) I know it'll be good, but it's just a lot. It's long.

Celine: (1:17:46) There's something about having a social context where reading feels fun. If everyone told me I have to read this thing, I feel it bearing down as this great burden on my life. I think I'm going to die having not read this one very important thing, and I go off and read Twitter or Instagram captions instead. I feel that reading great literature is something you should aspire towards and orient yourself towards, but it also has to feel genuinely fun. It has to feel just as fun, interesting, and satisfying as the lower forms of entertainment that we're told are fun. At the end of the day, we look at those lower forms and wonder why our screen time looks like that.

Jackson: (1:18:29) This relates to the thing you talk about with Henry Begler and vulgar optimism.

Celine: (1:18:35) Yes.

Jackson: (1:18:36) There is this notion that there are just these things you're supposed to like. Getting back to recommendations, maybe it's better to define a recommendation as a very specific thing for a specific person. How do you think about what goes into a good recommendation in the Proust essay sense? It's more like shouting from the hilltops to anyone who will listen that they have to read this thing.

Celine: (1:19:08) A recommendation at scale.

Jackson: (1:19:09) Yes. I'm sure you're making lots of recommendations to people in your life, but the recommendations I'm thinking about are the ways you practice enthusiastic criticism.

Celine: (1:19:27) Let me try to answer it this way. When I began writing book reviews, I became very interested in the history of criticism and how it's changed between different periods in the 20th century versus now. One of the big changes people talk about is that critics used to use a much more authoritative voice. First-person writing was slightly discouraged or seen as unconventional. The critic was very much seen as an authority. Structurally, they had the position of being gatekeepers. You had to learn from your newspaper's critics about new music. You could not go online and see who posted something new on Bandcamp. For many structural reasons, critics are no longer gatekeepers. They're not necessarily the way you discover new content, and I use that term in a non-stigmatized way. I've seen a lot of critics I respect talk about the idea that we are moving towards a more subjective, first-person model of criticism. The goal is not subjectivity in the sense that it's overly personal or overly about the critic as opposed to the book or the reader. It's the sense that our beliefs about what is good and bad are always very personal and situated in our own biographical context. When I try to recommend things to people, I actually think it helps to be very aware of why I am drawn to a work. Then I try to figure out from that subjective and specific situation what the universal thing is. I very much believe you have to start with the subjective to go to the universal, or you have to start from the specific to make broader claims. That is also very much a historian's belief. You look at a very specific moment in history, examine primary source material, and then make a bigger argument about how the Victorians felt about technology. Then maybe you connect that to the velvet scripture today.

Jackson: (1:21:34) That makes a ton of sense. I would say all art is like this, not just criticism. Anything that ends up generalizing well has to start with grounding it into something that's real, the way we were talking about earlier. Here is my gossipy, hilarious enthusiasm for Proust. Everyone would like it. My reluctance is being chipped away. I was reading Nabil's review of it as well, and I realized I might have to actually read this in my life.

Celine: (1:22:10) What I tell everyone is that you can just start with the first volume and see how you feel. The idea of sitting down and committing to 3,000 pages can feel like you have other stuff to do with your life. But the first volume is very different. It's cute and charming. Just read that and see how you feel.

Jackson: (1:22:27) I had the trio of you, Nabil, and Blackbird Spyplane all recommending it in the same chunk of time.

Celine: (1:22:36) Everyone with good instincts just loves Proust.

Jackson: (1:22:40) This is the tension. I think everyone reading this knows. I ran a marathon in the fall, and I know it will be fulfilling to run a marathon. I think a lot of people feel this way about anything like this. I know it will be fulfilling, but you're at the bottom of the mountain looking up. Maybe that's why joyful, enthusiastic, light, playful prompts are so rare and useful in these types of things. Normally it's not that motivating to just say, I know I'm supposed to read this.

Celine: (1:23:20) To go back to reading as cultivating the self or how to transmit enthusiasm to people, I think one of the most effective ways to convince people to do something is to demonstrate why it was so meaningful to you.

Jackson: (1:23:38) Or they look like they're having so much fun over there.

Celine: (1:23:41) And you want that. Maybe you see other people run marathons, and they carry themselves with so much dignity and confidence.

Jackson: (1:23:48) I watched the New York marathon the year before, and I knew I had to do it.

Celine: (1:23:51) You want that subjective experience. You're willing to go through this ordeal, and then you understand that the ordeal itself is actually very enjoyable.

(1:24:07) Aspiration, Posing, and Pretending Your Way into Enthusiasm

Jackson: (1:23:59) Reading can be a very private, lonely, isolated thing for a lot of people. I think that's one of the reasons the work you do is so cool. A related thing is that you recommended I talk to Charles, so thank you for that. I had an awesome conversation. He has an awesome piece called Here for the Wrong Reasons, and there's a space of related ideas. You talk about Jack Hansen and the word performative. There's a line in an old Noah Baumbach movie called Kicking and Screaming where he talks about cigarettes. He says an affectation became a habit, and here we are. That's obviously in a negative way, but I'm really fascinated by that idea. As Charles might put it, it's okay to be a poser. Sometimes being a poser is the path in. Can you talk about the way that plays out for you or for other people? We don't need to get too into the weeds of the performative literature stuff if we don't want to. But I'm interested in the ways that can kickstart momentum, even when you don't love it yet or don't believe it yet.

Celine: (1:25:10) I'm going to answer this by referencing two of the most interesting public philosophers working today. One is Agnes Callard, who has a book called The Agency of Becoming, which was incredibly motivating to me. It was actually the reason I quit my job to go to grad school. It has had a huge influence on my life. She talks about the idea that people might aspire to certain things. They might aspire to know a lot more about jazz, or to be more well informed about current events. The point she makes is the aspiration at the beginning is always a little bit fake. I'll try to contextualize this in my life. I wanted to learn more about electronic music because my friends love it. They go to events and bring me along. They say a live set wasn't good for this and that reason, or comment on a transition, or the way they use jungle and breakbeats. I was there going, I don't know what any of these terms mean. When I began trying to learn more about this, I felt like a poser. The people around me were intuitively saying these words and felt so comfortable. There was something extremely cringe about me googling what jungle or drum and bass is, what the defining traits between these things are, or what a hi-hat sounds like. But you have to do that cringe thing early on.

Jackson: (1:26:41) You have to start somewhere.

Celine: (1:26:42) The thing Agnes Callard says is that it is through this aspirational, cringe aspect of overly consciously trying to learn these things that they become absorbed and innate. At the beginning, you don't really understand this domain, and you can't really internalize the value. You just see other people value it, and you aspire towards that. That is one defense of being a poser or being performative on the road to internalizing that thing. The other reference I want to bring up is C. Thi Nguyen, who you've talked to. I love him as a philosopher. He has an amazing book called Agency as Art. There was a period when gamification was a dirty word. People felt gamification was the thing software does to incentivize you to do things that are not good for you. But he is someone who loves games. I read the book as him asking, what if games are good? What if there's something valuable here? One of the things he talks about is that in games, you are playing a constructed role. You have constructed motivations and antagonisms between people. He makes the argument that by playing a lot of different games, you get to practice different behaviors. In one game, you are the spy, and you have to behave in a way where you're misleading other people. Maybe you are a very honest person, but in this, you get to practice.

Jackson: (1:28:09) You learn about yourself.

Celine: (1:28:11) You pull out a different dimension of yourself. He has this idea that by moving through all these different forms of agency or assumed identities in games, you have more flexibility in your life in terms of how you can behave or act. I feel very strongly that there's no single self that you are born into and have to stay in for life. This is very related to my beliefs around self-cultivation. I specifically am someone who used to be insanely shy. My hands would get sweaty talking to people. If you talk to anyone from my high school, they'll tell you they never heard me speak in class. At some point, I realized I wanted to connect with people, and I had to learn how to do it. Now you're podcasting and doing all these things. Whether you're shy, insecure, not athletic, or don't know anything about a domain, you can choose to change those things. When you start, you might feel like it's fake and you're fighting against your instincts. You see other people who seem to be doing it for real, whereas the thing you're doing feels fake. Accepting that fakeness is how people move towards identities that fit them better. It's normal, and it doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong. The fact that they had to consciously create them does not make them worse or inauthentic.

Jackson: (1:29:42) Having that game context, actually role-playing, and suspending disbelief is what allows a lot of people to participate. If they're doing it as themselves, they think, "I'm not an XYZ."

Jackson: (1:29:56) That's an example of this. Two writers, Viv Chen and Ifany Lee, are a perfect example of the affectation becoming a habit and how you ended up getting started. As I understand it, you say they announced that they were hosting a meetup for Bay Area based Substack writers. "At the time, I was desperate to meet other writers, but I realized that it would be awkward to attend without a newsletter of my own. I wrote my first post without thinking too much about it. I remember doing final edits at the airport on my way home from New York City and pressing publish as soon as I got back to my apartment two hours before the meetup began." Wow.

Celine: (1:30:32) One thing I have absorbed from the tech startup world is that sometimes it's good to create false urgency and rush towards a deadline. Sometimes there's a market moment or a cultural shift, and you just need to seize the moment and do something. In this context, I had spent literally years of my life wanting a blog and a newsletter, but thought maybe it was cringe to do it. Viv Chen and her friend Ifany Lee announced this meetup. Ifany Lee used to have a food newsletter, and Viv Chen writes a very personable, voicey, personal style newsletter. They announced this meetup and I thought, there are these two people I follow. I like their writing, and I myself want to write. Maybe this is an opportunity I should use to do this thing I've been putting off for ages. The reason you put certain things off is because you have overthought them or they are psychologically load-bearing. You're afraid of failure and getting things wrong. Sometimes the only way you can start those things is by seizing the moment and being very impulsive. I've started feeling that being impulsive and spontaneous is actually a skill. It's important to know the right moment to not plan and just do something.

Jackson: (1:31:56) The opening is there.

Celine: (1:31:58) You might choke up if you try to plan it out more. You understand your own psychology and realize the only way you will do this thing, which is actually one of your lifelong dreams, is to seize the moment.

Jackson: (1:32:10) Naval Ravikant had this thing somewhere where he said inspiration is scarce, so when you have it, you have to go. You can't assume it will stay. I have this mantra that I try to remember, which is "tomorrow isn't real." Anytime I think I'm totally going to start lifting weights tomorrow, it doesn't happen.

Celine: (1:32:36) I love "tomorrow isn't real" as a concept. This makes me think of Oliver Berkman's Four Thousand Weeks, which was a huge influence on me. Oliver Berkman is one of those great, philosophically inflected self-help writers. He's definitely at the top of that genre. He talks about the idea that we think we are guaranteed more days to live. If you're in your thirties, forties, or fifties, you think you probably have a few decades and there's time to do the things you want to do. You don't know that. Not to be morbid, but we could walk out of this room and an accident could happen. It's really important to be aware of the potential for death or the transience of life. Not to be extremely morbid and fearful, but just to have this sense of whether you are doing the things today that you feel are dignified and worthy. I should be generous with my friends and loved ones and not be arbitrarily impatient with them. I would hate for the last time I interact with them to be impatient instead of generous. I would love to feel that every day I'm doing something shaped by my intellectual instincts. I'm reading the books I want to read, and I'm working on my drafts. I imagine it feels different to encounter tragedy in life if you're on the way to doing the thing you care about versus if you've never started. That feeling of loss is profound.

Jackson: (1:34:07) It is so easy to get into this mode of the things I'm going to one day do.

Jackson: (1:34:14) You have this line where you say, "Why not cultivate a life of the mind inside the life I'm already living?"

Jackson: (1:34:21) If you're not on edge about that or really noticing the inspiration point you were making, you can lull yourself into perpetually needing to be ready.

(1:34:37) Preparation is Not Progress

Jackson: (1:34:37) You have a line about getting started that I thought was really powerful. You say, "There may be a time in your life when everything is easier, but you need to start closing the gap between your taste and your execution today." That references the Ira Glass idea, which is so good. Read the book you're afraid you can't understand yet. Write the essay you're not sure you can pull off. How else will you become capable of it? Why is preparation not progress?

Celine: (1:35:07) The quote you read comes from feeling like my early twenties were characterized by holding myself back from the things I wanted to do. I started journaling, and now I journal most days. I write three pages longhand, which is the Julia Cameron prescribed length in The Artist's Way. I remember journaling at some point and thinking, why am I holding myself back? Why am I doing all these things in preparation for some future? I had a weird metaphor in my journal entry where I said I'm this horse that's been training my entire life to run a race, and I've never let myself run the race. Why is that?

Jackson: (1:35:53) I think once I've read everything, I'll be ready.

Celine: (1:35:56) Yes. There's an amazing essay A.O. Scott has written about Susan Sontag. He says as a younger person, he was obsessed with reading all the books, going to all the museums, and learning all these things. He thought when he had finally attained a state of perfect self-cultivation, then he could begin. It's psychologically interesting how I was in that state, and how many people are in that state.

Jackson: (1:36:21) I certainly was.

Celine: (1:36:24) One of the most valuable things people can do for others is to think about the forms of self-sabotage in your life that cause you a private level of pain. Once you have gotten over them, is there a way you can help others through that journey? One of the most satisfying responses I get when I write my newsletter is someone saying they have felt self-conscious about their own writing or artistic practice, and my writing made them feel confident about beginning and pulling them forward. It's not that I was wasting my life when I wasn't producing work, but I feel there are years of my life when I could have been doing more and I was holding myself back. There are all these reasons why. For many people, you internalize some skepticism someone says about you, or you internalize the feeling that you're not the right person or your work isn't good enough. Helping people through that is so meaningful. This is a very emotional topic for me, and I just needed to say this.

Jackson: (1:37:27) You answered my question. My question was why preparation isn't progress. Or at the very least, you gave the more important message, which is that you have to start somewhere. What we were talking about earlier, you just have to get out and get going.

Celine: (1:37:43) I'm remembering a thought I had about preparation, which is that you can prepare while doing the work. The experience I've had with my writing, and I think this is true of all creative projects, is that you can start without all the resources you need, and then you panic. In a lot of my writing, I'll think, "I wanted to write a book review about these topics, but let's say one of the things I want to talk about is affect theory." I actually have no clue what affect theory is. I'd better read up on that while I am writing. I had this one essay where I felt I was really trying to reach a different level of intellectual capacity than I was able to before. I feel this about all of my work. That's why they're so long, maybe.

Jackson: (1:38:27) You're feeling it continuously, you mean?

Celine: (1:38:29) Yes.

Jackson: (1:38:30) As you should, I would hope.

Celine: (1:38:32) You always want to work at the edge of your capabilities. In early 2024, I sent a pitch to this literary magazine I really loved, the Cleveland Review of Books. I wanted to write about conspiracy theories. I wrote an email saying there are these five books about conspiracy theories, and I just want to write about them. Afterwards, they accepted the pitch and asked me to send a draft by a specific date. I realized I needed some bigger idea other than the fact that all these books are about the same thing. In the process of writing that, I began researching a lot of history. I was asking what the history of conspiracy theories in American politics is, and why people believe in them. I asked myself what I thought was important to write about. I didn't want to just make fun of people for believing in QAnon, and I didn't want to be condescending. I wanted to understand the feeling of anxiety, precarity, or distrust in institutions that might lead people to believe in conspiracy theories. I didn't have any of these ideas or questions answered before starting. It was in the process of writing that I would write a sentence and realize I had no clue what I was saying, or I was making a claim and didn't know if it was verified or sourced. One of the things I wrote about was how conspiracy theories have been both a left-wing and a right-wing phenomenon over time. I pulled historical periods where this happened. My hope is that the final draft reads as someone confidently summarizing a lot of these different claims. The process of writing it, however, was me starting and stopping and realizing I had no clue what I was saying. You do the preparation through doing the work. It's actually easier that way because it's more directed. You have a goal, and you will mobilize your resources and be extremely strategic so you can reach that goal. With preparation without the project, you're just spinning your wheels. You don't really know what's valuable. You don't know how to calibrate whether you should read something now or later, so you feel overwhelmed.

Jackson: (1:40:37) It's kind of like the note-taking thing. There's a metaphor that connects to this. First off, you have inspiration, so you seize it and do something. You send the email to the Cleveland Review of Books. It's like throwing your hat over the wall. If you want to climb the wall, throw your hat over. Then you realize what you've done.

Celine: (1:40:56) You wonder how your hat ended up there. How could you stand there?

Jackson: (1:40:59) So many creative people have stories like this. They didn't think anyone would say yes, and now they're in it. When you think back, beyond just hesitance, what were you waiting for? Was it fear? Was it being afraid, or maybe just a lack of readiness?

Celine: (1:41:25) I actually came across a really good articulation of what I was waiting for a few years ago. There's this magazine, Culture. They publish really good art criticism, literary criticism, and fashion criticism, which is hard to find. It's very thin on the ground, but they do an amazing job. They had a piece where they interviewed nine different artists about their artistic practices. The title of the piece was something like, "Want to quit your day job? These nine artists tell you how." They were interviewed by Cami Fatah, who's now working for Emily Sundberg. One of the last people interviewed was the artist Chitra Ganesh. To paraphrase, she says it's very easy to believe that in order to have an artistic career, there's this chosen-one narrative where someone needs to pluck you out of obscurity and catapult you to success. You're discovered, and someone just sees your inherent talent. This is a narrative that shows up in a lot of novels, especially ones you read as a child or young adult. I've come to really detest this.

Jackson: (1:42:34) You're waiting to meet Merlin the Wizard or something.

Celine: (1:42:37) Someone draws you out. The idea behind this narrative is that there's some inherent specialness in you, someone has to point it out, and then you can begin. If you haven't had a mentor pluck you out and say, "You're really great, here's an opportunity, here's a platform," you feel stuck. If you've totally absorbed and internalized the chosen-one narrative, you think you have to wait until people give you permission.

Jackson: (1:43:06) Yes.

Celine: (1:43:06) But what Chitra Ganesh says is that the vast majority of success happens through the daily grind. It happens through doing your work through networks of peers that lift each other up. She's very specific on the peers part. You don't need this incredibly powerful person to tell you that you're the one and now you get to do your work. You just have to make your work and then rise up among other people where you're all mutually committed to each other's success. A big thing for me was that I had internalized all these ideas around not being promising because I had not been plucked out of obscurity. Now when I think about it, I realize who would have known I wanted to write if I wasn't writing.

Jackson: (1:43:44) I want to be promising and young, because if I'm not young, even if I'm promising, I might be running out of time. I'm running out of time to be plucked.

Celine: (1:43:51) The obsession with being young. Something I want to do in my writing is emphasize the feeling that I wasted years of my time. Not in a very self-castigating or negative way, but because this fear of needing to get it right, be a young talent, and start immediately is so terrifying for people. It terrified me. I just want to say, you don't have to do that. You can deactivate that anxiety. There are a lot of crafts where getting older improves your abilities totally. You're just developing more subjective experience.

Jackson: (1:44:29) Everyone gets cooler. Not in a silly sense, but you know yourself better, which is way more compelling and attractive.

Celine: (1:44:40) There's this fetishization of youth that I find a little bit weird culturally, because people so often look to the youth and wonder, do they think I'm chewy? Do they think I'm cringe? Am I a washed-up millennial now? When I was younger, I looked up to people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. I thought they were doing such cool work. At the time, I thought I wasn't doing cool work and wondered what was wrong with me. Now I realize they just had time. They had decades doing their thing. It's very important to feel excited about getting older and to think, I'm going to become the self I want to be as I age. That's amazing.

Jackson: (1:45:14) I love that. The other thought I had while you were talking is one of my favorite things Virgil Abloh ever talked about. You have to give yourself permission. You can't wait for somebody else to give you permission. Take it. I guess that's the one benefit of some people when they're young. They don't know what they don't know. That erodes over time.

Celine: (1:45:35) Virgil Abloh, I should say. I have so many random magazines I bought just because I had an interview with him. He was one of the most incredible thinkers.

Jackson: (1:45:46) He's almost best thought of as a philosopher. It's like Christopher Alexander. There are certain practitioners who do cool stuff, but the thinking was actually the thing.

Celine: (1:45:56) He's this amazing self-reflexive thinker. You read his work and realize you can apply that to so many disciplines in your own practice.

(1:46:07) Copying, Writing Process, Mechanics, and Design

Jackson: (1:46:07) You have this line about your writing. You say your only writing strategy is to throw everything that matters into a draft and somehow make it work. You also have this amazing piece on actually beginning essays. You go through the structure and talk about deep copying. You reference using Illustrator to try to copy book covers. You say the elements on the canvas were no longer disparate, lonely things. They felt coherent, and that coherence felt natural and inevitable. But it wasn't. I had seen what it looked like before. I had seen the coherence happen in front of me. You had the copy quite right, got it into place, and it clicked. Can you talk about the process of what it looks like to imitate and then watch it gradually cohere? Especially that first quote of throwing a bunch of pieces onto a canvas. What is the practice of deep copying? One of the things that's so great in the beginnings piece is you point out how they use long sentences, and then very short ones. What does that process of coherence gradually feel like? The problem with the snap-into-place metaphor is it makes it seem like it should randomly and perfectly snap. I think it's a little more gradual than that.

Celine: (1:47:35) The experience you're describing is when you encounter other people's great works, there's this feeling that they have unity, coherence, and harmony. I look at so much great visual design where the person is using 10 typefaces and throwing things around. The layout is very chaotic, but there's a sense of wholeness and totality to it. How did that happen? When I try to make my own, I see that in essays too. This essay started off as a book review, but it's actually about all these other things. It started off in this place and ended here. I learned so much, I cried during it. How did that happen? Other people's great work has this coherence that I aspire towards. When I look at my own work, I wonder how to attain that level. A.O. Scott, the film critic, has a book titled Better Living Through Criticism. He talks about the phrase that all critics are failed artists. Obviously, as a critic, he's invested in believing that's not true. But he explains how a lot of artists are really responding to what came before them. They're trying to innovate on that and come up with something new. In doing so, they have to have a good sense of what they admire and what they think could be improved. He flips that phrase around and says, what if we see all art as successful criticism? When you are trying to create your own work, you often have a tacit, vaguely intimate, not fully defined sense of what you enjoy about other works or what turns you off. In order to do your own work, you're trying to make that explicit.

Jackson: (1:49:23) Part of that is just looking at it really closely. We don't know until we go line by line why the beginning of an essay is so good. I can tell it's good, but I can't say why.

Celine: (1:49:38) It's more interesting than this other essay, which I did not finish.

Jackson: (1:49:42) Yes, I love that. It's a really cool piece because you do such a great job of being grounded in the mechanics and talking about why it lifts.

Celine: (1:49:57) To go back to something earlier, it's the specificity or the very close attention to a single technical decision. The decision to make this sentence only five words long, and then the decision to make the next one 20 words long with a semicolon in the middle. These are tiny decisions that you perform hundreds of times. The gestalt, the summation of all of that, is this thing that has incredible flow. Everyone aspires to the flow, but you're not going to get that higher-level flow unless you get really in the weeds and look at every tiny little thing. If you're doing visual design, you have to be obsessive about whether you're going to hang your quotes into the margin or make the text 36 points or 32 points. Those tiny things actually make a massive difference in the overall composition. You have to care intensely about those tiny things and see them as foundational to the bigger work.

Jackson: (1:50:54) How does your work and background in design influence your writing?

Celine: (1:51:01) There's this educator I really love, Ellen Lupton, and she and her partner, Abbott Miller, wrote a book ages ago called Design Writing Research. I was recently thinking that maybe this is the book that has defined my life over the past decade. I'm so obsessed with that book. They have a collection of essays where the way each essay is designed and its form is very closely connected to the content. They have one essay about the history of typography. They talk about the period when there were only capital letters, and then lowercase was invented, and that's when they start using lowercase in the text. They talk about the period when it became more conventional to use spaces, full stops, or when italics were invented, and only then do they start incorporating those into the text. That book was an amazing example of extremely detail-oriented work to achieve a broader message. You're getting a history of typography and typographic innovation through all these tiny creative decisions. Design as a discipline cares a lot about craft and has a very pragmatic way of thinking about inspiration. If you go to an art or design school, people understand that you're drilling these fundamental skills of typographic hierarchy, color, and composition. They also understand that you produce a lot of versions to get to a final outcome. You also care very deeply about process. Design schools are obsessed with how you sketch and how you collect visual inspiration into a mood board. I haven't had much formal education in writing. I've taken a lot of Zoom classes with writers I admire. My impression of how people talk about creative writing is that it focuses a lot more on inspiration in a way that might be useless. It focuses on having an idea come out of the blue. If you're in design school, you know ideas don't come out of the blue.

Celine: (1:53:25) I like grinding it out. The perfect version does not just happen. I'm making tons of versions and showing them at design crit. I'm showing people the ugly, unfinished versions I'm ashamed of, and that is the way.

Jackson: (1:53:37) Chipping away.

Celine: (1:53:39) I think that attitude is great. With writing, a lot of people are afraid to share their bad work, and it doesn't matter. Your writing can be shit. It's actually better that you share the shit work as early as possible because then it has the chance to become good.

Jackson: (1:53:53) Maybe I'm making a leap here, but you referenced this Venkatesh Rao idea of instrumental versus metamorphic writing. My sense is your design work, in part because it's your job, is very instrumental, and your writing tends to be much more metamorphic. There's clearly something instrumental in the idea that the world needs to know about Proust, but I'm curious how you relate to that spectrum in your writing.

Celine: (1:54:26) One quick thought on Venkatesh Rao. He is a great inspiration to me for taking academic books and displaying their relevance to people. He is perhaps the reason why Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott is so popular in Silicon Valley. I actually texted a friend recently that I want to be Venkatesh Rao for the Tumblr girls. I think that's my ethos as a newsletter.

Jackson: (1:54:53) Design, writing, research. Those are the two things on your logline.

Celine: (1:54:57) The instrumental versus metamorphic concept is interesting. It's true that a lot of my design work is more instrumental because it's my day job, but I increasingly feel that in order to do really great work, you want the metamorphic qualities to come in. You want to be shaped or disciplined by the work you're trying to do, and to achieve a certain quality of work, you understand that you have to grow as a person. You need to be more patient, thoughtful, willing to iterate, and ambitious. There's definitely a spectrum. With instrumental work, you just need to achieve an outcome. A lot of emails I write are just to achieve an outcome, like letting a friend know I care about them or replying to someone saying I would love a copy of their book. Metamorphic work often takes more time because the goal is to change yourself, and you don't change in an instant. Going back to the idea that creative projects can be a container for your subjectivity, with metamorphic writing, you are a certain person at the beginning of it. You don't know certain things, and you might have one set of beliefs. The goal is to write your way to a point where what you know, how you see yourself, how you see the world, and maybe your beliefs, ethics, and point of view have changed. I don't know if you can do that explicitly, although affirmations are a way to metamorphically write yourself into someone who is more confident. With metamorphic writing, you are venturing into the unknown. Venkatesh Rao describes it as an unstable self-authorship lottery. You decide to do a project, and at the end of it, you'll be different. You don't know how you'll be different, but it could be fun.

Jackson: (1:56:56) It's definitely not deterministic. The point is almost to be surprised.

Celine: (1:57:01) People talk a lot about how the best essays are ones where the writer is thinking on the page, learning, being surprised, or growing. That sounds like a platitude until you've actually gone through the process and realized that working on a piece has changed you. That feeling is addictive enough that you just want to do it again and again to see what happens next.

(1:57:25) Commitment, Finishing, Substack, Life Extension and Closing

Jackson: (1:57:23) I have a few questions about Substack, personal essays, and the specific medium of the blog. How has the commitment you made two years ago given you freedom?

Celine: (1:57:43) I love that you use the word freedom. Commitment can often be stigmatized as a thing that traps you and keeps you in place, making people think it means you have less flexibility. I'm someone who believes in constraints. If you create the ideal constraints for yourself, you can be incredibly playful, generative, and exploratory inside of them. You can be more exploratory than if you could do whatever you wanted. I admire this a lot in art. I'm very interested in Brian Eno's oblique strategies and the idea of creating temporary rules to see what you can do with them. I also look at the 20th-century Fluxus art movement, where people would create rules around how they used chance or randomness to produce an artwork, allowing fun things to happen. I'm getting distracted by all these other things related to randomness. What was the question?

Jackson: (1:58:40) The question was just how commitment brings you freedom. But I think those examples are where to look. I think it's so hard as someone who's been very paralyzed by this. Prioritizing freedom means that you don't end up doing as much. It ties back to what we were talking about earlier. The constraint actually is the source of the inspiration a lot of the time.

Celine: (1:59:06) Maybe we'll propose a polemical version of this, which is that I think sometimes optionality is bad. It's bad psychologically for you. If you're doing something and a part of you is always thinking you can do something else, you can change your mind. It's not permanent, of course. It's important to not feel trapped. But if you are too aware of your optionality, then you're not really committed to the thing in front of you. You're not doing everything possible to do it well. With a lot of my writing projects, I have this vast repository of ideas that I will draw from. But once I choose an idea, this is the idea. I will do my best to make it work. I intentionally trap myself so that I can get to the furthest point of that idea to the best outcome.

Jackson: (1:59:51) And you just finish.

Celine: (1:59:52) That's another thing. You have to remove your optionality so you get something done.

Jackson: (1:59:58) You have the whole conclusion thing we talked about. I don't want to say the only point is to get to a conclusion, but that's a really big part of it, especially if it's metamorphic.

Celine: (2:00:12) So much of the value in creative projects comes from actually finishing the thing. You learn from doing the last ten percent. I definitely think I've grown the most as a writer when I've just been so trapped in an essay and I don't know a way out, but I have to find my way out. I have to finish this thing. I will just push myself to another level to get it done. I think I'm obsessed with this metaphor of burning the ships. You arrive on the shores of Troy, and you realize we need to succeed. There's no way out. In reality, there's probably a way out, but you just have to ignore that. You have to tell yourself there's no way out.

Jackson: (2:00:51) Part of your brain needs to be turned off.

Celine: (2:00:52) And you will find a way.

Jackson: (2:00:54) On the note of how you influence people, it feels that a really critical part of that—and it's somewhat parasocial, maybe not in a bad way—is you write a very intimate blog. Does that feel resonant?

Celine: (2:01:14) I think that's the goal of feeling like there's this direct address with the reader. It's conversational. I want to speak to people.

Jackson: (2:01:22) What makes for good intimate writing? How does that happen?

Celine: (2:01:30) This is interesting. I don't know if I've decided. One thing I've been trying to figure out is what is the difference between intimate writing and confessional writing.

Jackson: (2:01:41) I had another question about this.

Celine: (2:01:44) I actually do write a lot about myself, but I have this real horror of confessional writing. Some of it is respect for the people in my life. I don't want to share all these random, gory family details, but I do want to reference my parents from time to time because they've shaped my intellectual worldview. I want to discuss conversations I have with friends who have also shaped my thinking in a lot of ways, but I want them to feel comfortable with that. As I said, I wasn't offended by the term influencer, but the negative aspect of being an influencer can be when you commodify your life into content for an audience, and that has a deleterious impact on the people around you. How do you avoid doing that kind of confessional, overly revealing work, but still have this connection to people? Maybe you produce the positive form of parasociality as opposed to the negative form.

Jackson: (2:02:45) You also talk about creating a persona on the page, and I'm really interested in that. Some writing is trying to be purely objective, of course. You've talked a lot about the personal essay and the pronoun "I," and how useful it is. It's way easier to read. It does seem that you are finding some way to balance that. It even gets into ideas of what's authentic and what's performative. I think sometimes those ideas can be not worth their weight.

Celine: (2:03:17) Invoking performance is actually a really good way to think about this. This makes me think of the feminist critic and memoirist Vivian Gornick. She has this amazing book, The Situation and the Story, which I actually haven't finished reading. Every time I read a little bit, I find it so wise and profound. Then I just feel satisfied by that thing.

Jackson: (2:03:39) I have books like this.

Celine: (2:03:40) I think I'll be reading it for a few years yet. She's the one who is most popularly known for this idea of creating a persona on the page. She says you are not directly transmitting your experience. You are constructing a self that can best narrate what happened to you with a degree of understanding and thoughtfulness that will make it useful. You can't really be fully inside the experience to write it. You have to be at a little bit of a remove and able to narrativize. Another person who's written about this is the New Yorker's food critic, Helen Rosner. This was a tweet that I think about all the time. Years and years ago, there was some Twitter debacle where a personal essay blew up and there was a big controversy about it. I think whenever there's a big controversy about a personal essay, it is often because it is very confessional in a bad way.

Celine: (2:04:37) Helen Rosner wrote this beautiful thing where she noted that in the best personal essays that talk about the self, there are usually a few different turns. It's not just narrating that this thing happened to me. The first turn is: this thing happened to me, and here's how I understood it and how it affected me. Hopefully I'm not misquoting her, but there's also this second turn. Now, years later or as I'm sitting to write this with the benefit of distance, here's how I understand the situation and my old interpretation in a new way. You actually need this incredible level of understanding and distance to really narrativize your life and make it useful.

Jackson: (2:05:19) But also not have it get robotic or cold or have too much distance. That's the tension, right?

Celine: (2:05:23) I definitely have some writing projects where I've started writing them and stopped. I know I said earlier that sometimes you want to burn the ships and just get things done, but there are a few writing projects I've approached and then realized I don't have that distance yet. If I wrote this, it would be too raw and confessional, and I could not deliver a certain outcome for the reader. I myself don't understand that experience enough. I need to wait until I have that knowledge.

Jackson: (2:05:50) I think that's right. There was another part of that conversation with Jasmine where you were comparing social media and forums. Funny enough, I just talked with Henrik about this too. He talks about his blog as this corner of the Internet or cafe, and he considers himself the dictator of his blog. I know this is something you've thought a lot about. I think you framed it as hierarchical or horizontal. As someone who used a lot of forums, which I did as well, the modern Internet is much more per influencer, and then everyone else. I'm curious how you've thought about this, especially in light of everything we talked about earlier in the conversation about the thing you're trying to do. How do you think about what that space can be, and how it can be not just purely a one-to-many hierarchy?

Celine: (2:06:42) This is a great reference point. This relates to something we discussed earlier about not wanting to see myself as more special than other people. I have a strong belief that everyone has something special and distinctive about their worldview and abilities. It is better for all of us, especially the cultural landscape, if everyone can draw that out. I actually feel it's quite fun to think about all the little design and interface decisions of old forums versus social media. If you think about Twitter, you have a tweet. I'm saying Twitter instead of X, and I remember seeing a tweet where someone said they will continue to deadname this website until their grave.

Jackson: (2:07:32) I'm sorry.

Celine: (2:07:33) Whenever I type X, it just looks worse. The logo also looks worse. I'm really sorry.

Jackson: (2:07:39) I've been wrong about some things, but I'm not wrong about the name.

Celine: (2:07:42) You're on Twitter, you see a tweet go viral, you go in, and you look at it. The way the page is designed, that tweet is much higher up. The replies from that person, or in the past, the replies of blue checks, are promoted much higher than all the random people replying. There's this idea that someone has made the expert opinion or the important insight, and everyone else is just a hanger-on. That's how that page is designed. When you look at forums, everyone is equal. The first post in a thread looks like every other post in the thread. I really like that model and what it means. You can just enter into a conversation, and your contribution as someone who has made one post in the forum is visually treated as equal to other people's posts. That's a really important detail of how that horizontality happens. When it comes to intellectual work, I should say I respect academic institutions a lot. In my own writing, I rely heavily on people who have spent their entire lives in academia and are coming up with very rich insights that I then import into my own work and use in my own way. But I do think one of the interesting challenges with more traditional institutions is that they naturally have a hierarchy. If you're a tenured full professor, people tend to take you more seriously than someone who is a first-year grad student or an adjunct lecturer. Seniority and experience have value, but I personally value spaces where you can be a young person or someone who doesn't know that much and still contribute. This might also come from a tech background.

Jackson: (2:09:40) Tech is very good at this, for better or for worse. I think mostly for better. It's really unlike almost any other industry.

Celine: (2:09:47) In tech, there are so many people who went to a boot camp and then became software engineers. There's not this idea that you had to—

Jackson: (2:09:53) There are interns who ship things.

Celine: (2:09:55) Interns get to ship things. Every tech startup really wants interns to ship things. They feel that is an important part of the culture, that you can be someone who has just started and still have an impact. I had not made that connection until this conversation, but maybe that's why it's so important to believe everyone can make a contribution. Constructing an environment organized around that is the best way to encourage people to achieve great things. People rise to the beliefs you have of them. That's why the thing Laurel Schwolz said about treating students like they're geniuses is so touching to me.

Jackson: (2:10:29) We do this with children. I talk about this with Henrik. Children will meet you far above what you might otherwise have expected if you let them.

Celine: (2:10:40) It took me quite a few years to attain the level of confidence to put my work out there. I've sometimes wondered what the difference is between me and other people who seem to have found that confidence earlier. I think a big part of it is parents or teachers who are overly enthusiastic in a really good way. You need someone to believe in you before you are good, and that's how you become good.

Jackson: (2:11:06) Yes. There are pros and cons. There's also an element where you have the experience of being chosen once, but then you're waiting to be chosen again.

Celine: (2:11:15) I had the reverse thing where I thought I had nothing to say for many years, and now I think maybe I do have something to say.

Jackson: (2:11:23) I think you have something to say. One last thing on this. To my knowledge, you don't monetize your writing work at all. You have a very large Substack on an objective basis, or at the very least a relative basis. You wrote this about your literary criticism—maybe it was even before the Substack. You said, "As side projects go, it was one of the most financially unremunerative things I could have done. Intellectually, it was the most invigorating activity I could imagine," which is beautiful. You've also talked about wanting it to feel like a hobby and the value of being a critic practitioner. What are the good things about doing this non-commercially, and what do you think you lose?

Celine: (2:12:11) My opinion about monetization and how it shapes your creative practice has shifted a lot over time. When I started writing, it was psychologically hard for me to get started. In order to continue, I wanted to reduce anything that might produce friction. I had also seen a lot of people on Substack turn on paid subscriptions and then choke up, feeling like they had to write differently. Strategically, they hurt their distribution because they started paywalling everything. There was nothing that could go around, be viral, and be linked to. On a strategic and psychological level, I didn't want to do this. There are lots of benefits to keeping something pure. For me, it's always been very important to work as a designer. I really like the idea that through having a day job and working in software, I get to write about software in a different way. We're in an environment where there's a lot of slop tech criticism happening because people do not understand the technology. Some of the best people writing about it are in this critic-practitioner model. Jasmine Sun, who used to be a PM at Substack, can write so cogently about technology's impact because she's been in the weeds and in that specific context. One of the reasons my attitude has been shifting is my belief that business models and monetization strategies can also be a way of expressing an artistic vision. The thing that convinced me of this is your podcast with Yancey Strickler. I'm obsessed with his career trajectory and how so much of his work has been about how artists fund meaningful projects. When he was talking about his new project, Metalabel, and how they built features to publish something or sell a product with revenue splits, it resonated. If you do a project and say that you are going to split revenue equally among all contributors, that is actually part of your artistic vision. You're saying all the contributors matter, and you are going to make that real.

Jackson: (2:14:30) It's going to shape the work. It's going to shape how the audience reacts to the work. All of it.

Celine: (2:14:34) Working in software, you see the difference between businesses that are ad-supported versus subscription-supported, and how that shapes the features that get shipped over time. You see the difference between businesses that rely on many small businesses versus ones trying to get enterprise contracts. Seeing all this makes me think about money in relation to these pure ideals. You don't necessarily have to taint your pure ideals by thinking about money. It's just something you have to be strategic about.

Jackson: (2:15:09) It relates to effect, by the way.

Celine: (2:15:11) What is the way to make money or not make money that will best serve your aims? Sometimes what you want to do is not make money for a project. With the newsletter early on, I just needed to put stuff out there. I didn't want to freak myself out.

Jackson: (2:15:26) I'm excited to see how that evolves for you over time. I have just a couple final things. It's funny in context, we were talking about the joy of getting older, but there's a great Nabil tweet about how doing as much as you can is a form of life extension. You referenced it and said if you want to feel young for the rest of your life, start writing. What does it mean to feel young? And why does writing make you feel young?

Celine: (2:15:52) Something I really admire in older people who have this beautiful energy I aspire to is that they're just very curious about things. Whenever I call my parents, they're on Duolingo trying to learn Chinese and Spanish. I find it very charming that they're relatively elderly now, but they feel it's time to learn new things. My dad was making apps in Swift and he's very curious about vibe coding. He asks me to explain how it works and show him the projects I'm doing. There's a writer in San Francisco, Mario Javier Cardenas, who writes these incredible experimental novels. He seems to have this joie de vivre that comes from always having a next novel in progress. For each novel, he wants to learn something new, think about new ideas, and have new experiences so they go into the work. If you have creative projects stretching out into the future, or if your whole life is a creative project and this practice is constantly ongoing, the future is full of excitement. You're not afraid of getting older because it just gives you more time to actuate these things. I have this beautiful vision of being in my fifties, sixties, or seventies and always having a new thing going. I want to be able to relate to the youth and ask what they're doing, what I can learn, and what's out there.

Jackson: (2:17:17) The best. Just one final thing from book seven of Proust. "An hour is not just an hour. It is a vessel full of perfumes, sounds, plans and atmospheres." Why is that meaningful to you?

Celine: (2:17:31) A lot of creative work requires playing the long game and thinking. We were just talking about what it means to project your work years or decades into the future, but you need to balance that with an awareness of the present moment. To me, the present moment is like talking to a friend. You give them your full attention. You talk about an idea, and that idea can make its way into your writing or their creative works later on. The only way that will be useful to you later is if you fully inhabit the moment. It's the same when you look at an artwork or read something. You are paying attention to every single thing you notice and the reaction welling up within you. That feeling of presentness is something so many religions have independently discovered as a fundamental part of well-being. It's also a really important part of having a creative life.

Jackson: (2:18:23) I think it's where it all comes from.

Celine: (2:18:25) Yes.

Jackson: (2:18:26) Thank you, Celine. This was really wonderful.

Celine: (2:18:28) Thank you. This was great.

(2:18:31) Thanks Again to Notion

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