RIP MidThoughts
What it was, the fall off, and the future.
TLDR: MidThoughts is dead. But I’ve been writing consistently on my personal website. Go check it out.
Pour one out for this newsletter. Put a fork in her, boys. She’s done.
I just couldn’t do it justice. The energy couldn’t match the vision. There was a good run in here somewhere. But the demands of my normal-ass life had its way with me, and I just couldn’t keep this thing going. I made a lot of promises here, and I couldn’t keep them.
I’m sorry.
MidThoughts unraveled, possibly before it even began, due to my inability to attain a proper balance. This is the result of past decisions that led to a life I thought I wanted, but eventually hated, and the crippling fear of risk-taking, which has haunted me for most of my adult life.
My day job is relentless, constantly barfing anxiety and pressure down my throat. I’ve found it near impossible to sustain a creative practice while I’m being pushed through day after day of pure multitasking ninjitsu. The number of things I’m expected to retain in my skull-computer on a daily basis is simply unsustainable.
It seems that my brain often attempts to seek shelter from this daily assault in familiar places, which is why I’m somehow still able to input the blood code for Mortal Kombat on the Sega Genesis or recite entire stretches of dialogue from Bloodsport (”You are not a Tanaka! You are not Japanese!”) without blinking an eye, but forget to reply to that important email from my supervisor or make that meeting with one of my techs I scheduled just the day before.
It’s been the main dilemma of this newsletter and every writing project I’ve ever set out for myself in the past decade: The boring, exhausting, and uninspiring stuff I sink my time into in order to pay rent and provide caloric intake draws from the same pool of mental energy as my creative endeavors. This balance would be achievable if I were allowed a substantial portion of my work week to spend on low mental-load, menial tasks to zone out to on autopilot. However, in the world of management, this is sadly not the case. Everything that floats your way is The Most Important Thing in the World at that moment, to someone, and you have to make it happen.
And as someone who has always felt creatively inclined, well that kinda sucks. In the ideal scenario, your creative projects are a restorative refuge. They are how you rebound from the dull tasks you kinda just have to do in life. These personal projects are supposed to sustain and reignite you so that you can go back and confront all of the wack, uninspiring stuff.
Creativity is how I properly digest all the nonsense that the universe throws at me. It’s how I manifest meaning in a world that does not, and will never, go out of its way to bring it to me. And without the ability to synthesise all of this stuff flying at me on a daily basis, it’s like I’m being steadily pelted with mushy tomatoes like a sad clown, and forced to just stand there and take it.
MidThoughts is the latest casualty of this savage spin-cycle that I somehow tossed myself into over a decade ago. I get curb-stomped by my job, realize the need to break away with a creative project, but over time, the job. always. wins. It wears me down, wrings me dry, and forces me into submission.
It makes me sad. I truly thought I was onto something with the MidThoughts name. It was simple and just specific enough to give me a broad direction (essays about a xennial navigating midlife), but still ambiguous enough to let me run a little wild and have fun.
At my apex here, I was regularly commenting, making a few friends, and even had my work mentioned by a few Substackers far more successful than myself. For a while, at the outset mostly, I was consistent. I’ve spent a decent amount of time in long-distance running, and thought, how hard can it be to keep this up? Turns out, pretty damn hard when you have work emails steadily running into your inbox like conveyor belt sushi for 9 hours a day.
So I abandoned the newsletter, retreated from the community, and let it all grow stale. I let life have its way with me for the past year and a half or so, and here I am again, back to that part of the cycle where I decide I need to re-establish some kind of creative practice.
I’ve been writing on my personal blog recently, and pretty damn consistently, I might add. If you want to pick up where MidThoughts is leaving off, you can join me over there.
I can see you readers, who have somehow stuck around through this failed experiment on Substack, rolling your eyes at this announcement. But I do have plans to continue over there and to eventually roll out another newsletter. (I was thinking of resurrecting it as MidThoughts, but I’m also thinking that might not be the best name for where I’m heading).
So what could make anyone possibly believe that anything will go differently this time around? Sure Dan, go ahead with another leaky bucket, full of broken, unsustainable promises.
You are so right to judge.
The difference is that now I’ve developed some kind of Buddha-like sphere of consciousness around this whole thing. I’m aware of the cycle and have a full understanding that at 47 years old, my choices have been narrowed to:
Repeat the cycle forever, resign myself to the cold reality that I will never be able to get any creative endeavors off the ground, and be generally miserable for the rest of my life.
Shake The Pillars of Heaven and bring this whole-ass life I’ve built crumbling to the ground.
In the past, option two felt like a fantasy to me. Now it appears to be a necessity.
How important is stability, really, when all it’s doing is holding up a shoddy, uninspiring existence? Sure, I can just march to my grave with a fine old pension and the option to shop myself into submission on Amazon whenever I want. But I don’t want to do that with the time I have left. I want to do something real, to honor myself for once instead of sacrificing the best hours of my days chasing a salary. None of this will be resolved until I fundamentally alter the underlying circumstances of my life.
Remember that crippling fear of risk-taking I mentioned earlier? Yeah, about that. Well, I’m ready to take the risk. I’m ready to test the waters and do something drastically different, even if that means burning this whole thing I sunk so many years into down to its foundation in order to build something new in its place. What good is a guaranteed track to retirement if you give up your soul in the process? Naw bro, screw that noise.
A bold proclamation? Maybe. I have big changes in store for myself in the coming months. Changes that I never thought I’d have the courage to make. I’m ready to abandon life’s default road for something more in line with my truest values and intentions.
If you’re interested in this next chapter. You can join me over at danbenson.me.
Requiescat in pace MidThoughts. I needed you in order to get myself here.