2021 Annual Letter
Year in review and aims for 2022
Public Experimentation
I received a year in review letter from a friend a couple weeks back. It’s the second year that he’s sent one and it’s a wonderful way to hear about how he has filled his time. It’s particularly gratifying to be a fly on the wall for this guy’s life. He moved to Thailand just before the pandemic started and has ended up falling in love with the country. He’s embraced the local culture, is learning Muay Thai and the Thai language and is planning to stay there long-term.
I love reading about these exploits as well as what he has accomplished and planned for the future. Each year I see many such reviews from many people online. They serve as role models and guides, and spark ideas for ways that I could live. Though, I’m cautious about writing one - especially in a public setting.
By focussing so much on ourselves we run the risk of becoming self-centered, frivolous or simply banal.
From a cynical point of view you might say that these reviews are part of our endless adolescence. We never grow up and so never write things that require thoughtfulness, maturity, and objectivity. Instead, we pass off our random thoughts about the past year as nuggets of wisdom.
From a more forgiving perspective it could be that instead of being the result of childish egotism, the culture that is developing is better read as a kind of playfulness. A sign of freedom of expression. In a world where we don’t risk major repercussions, we can feel comfortable discussing our more subjective views. They are, after all, the views we know best1.
In Violence & the Sacred, René Girard says that it is almost impossible for us to understand the extremes of emotion that accompanied sacrificial acts in the past. For previous generations, violence, whether from within or outside of the group, was an ever-present possibility. This constant danger shaped peoples entire lives and this was reflected in their religious duties:
When the least false step can have dire consequences, human relationships may well be marked by a prudence that seems to us excessive and accompanied by precautions that appear incomprehensible. It is in this sense that we must understand the lengthy palavers that precede any undertaking not sanctified by custom, in this sense that we must understand primitive man’s reluctance to engage in non ritualised games or contests. In a society where every action or gesture may have irreparable consequences it is not surprising that the members should display a ‘noble gravity’ of bearing beside which our own demeanour appears ridiculous. The commercial, administrative, or ideological concerns that make such overwhelming demands on our time and attention seem utterly frivolous in comparison to primitive man’s primary concerns.
It is a good thing that we are not beset by violence. If we feel safe enough now to experiment in public and look stupid without fear of repercussions then that is something to be praised2. We have been given freedom to explore new kinds of expression and potential for growth.
Yet, at the same time, we have banished violence neither from our societies nor from our hearts. Experimentation and exploration is good but to ensure a peaceful society and meaningful achievements we still need a degree of investment that requires sacrifice and a form of communication that is noble.
I want to create honourable work even as I playfully take advantage of the garden we have created. So in the context of an annual letter like this what does that mean?
I’m partial to great businesses, so I think that the Farnam Street annual letters3 and Bezos’ early Amazon shareholder letters do a good job of navigating these muddy waters. They reflect on their company values and past actions, and then set out pragmatic but aspirational goals for the future while being vulnerable to invite the reader to understand the underlying thought process of the founders.
I’m also inspired by communities like The Side View, Palladium, Indie Hackers, the Halkyon Guild and the Applied Complexity network. These groups are experimenting in public while looking to create long lasting positive changes for their members and society in general. I hope that I can capture some of the qualities of these two inspirations in this letter.
2021 in review
Discipline is good, but a “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines”4. At the beginning of this year I committed to posting an essay every Sunday. In total that would have meant ~50 newsletters over the year.
In the end I kept this up for roughly seven months. At the end of July I was travelling and it broke my rhythm. Nonetheless, I sent out 36 emails in total including this one. It's not as much as I'd hoped but it's not a terrible showing for the first full year of trying to write online.
At the beginning of the year I had 6 subscribers (Thanks E for sticking with me from the beginning!). Today there are 75 people who will be sent this email. It’s not a large number but I am incredibly grateful that you all find something of interest here enough to keep receiving these notes. I believe I have a responsibility to continue providing value to you.
I didn’t share it publicly at the time but I also had a number of personal goals around education, learning and work that I had set for myself. I didn’t achieve many of the explicit aims but I was really happy with what did happen.
In particular, I got to participate in both the Real World Risk Institute (RWRI) and Applied Complexity Science (ACS) courses. Nassim Taleb and Joe Norman, the respective lead instructors for the courses, had taught me a lot already so I was very excited5. I was not disappointed by either. Not only did I learn a great deal, but it validated for me that online courses can be an excellent experience comparable to a university course.
In particular during ACS101 I met friends that I still talk to on a regular basis, and learned about concepts and frameworks that continue to shape how I think about the world. In honesty, half of my essays this year were just me trying to clarify and grapple with ideas from the course6.
Looking Forward to 2022
Inspired by the list that Simon Sarris posted in 2019 a couple of days ago, I posted my goals for the year on Twitter. Many are quite personal, but if you’re interested I’d invite you to check it out (I’d also love to hear yours). There are two that are really relevant here:
Number 5: “Keep this Substack alive and growing with regular posts” and number 19: “Help myself and others to become more capable of a future that is noble, creative, kind and peaceful”
Although it was great to be posting regularly and have a committed time for it each week, in the end I couldn’t keep it up and the results were unsatisfactory. A lot of the essays got rushed out at the last minute and the quality suffered.
So, this year I’m going to commit to one email sent on the first Friday of every month with the first one this coming Friday the 7th.
The email will include one essay that will help build a philosophical position, a set of conceptual tools, or a specific piece of analysis. I’ll also experiment with adding a set of links with commentary. I like the collections that Post Apathy and David Perell put out and I’ve been experimenting with this format at work for an internal newsletter after reading this excellent article from the Kool-Aid Factory.
There may also be additional emails on adjacent topics as they come up, though I think it's very unlikely I'll ever be posting more than a couple times a month.
At the same time I will also start doing more cross-posting of projects and ideas on Twitter, here and on my personal site. Last year I recorded a couple of interviews. I increasingly think that the project I had planned to launch with those won't materialise as I had expected. However, I still am committed to finish editing them and post somewhere if possible.
I’m not going to set a goal for the number of subscribers to this newsletter. Growth-for-growth's sake can be incredibly misleading. However, I think that if I do this in the right spirit there should be an increased number of people here so I’ll be using that as one proof point to make sure I’m moving in the right direction.
To keep myself honest, the driving motivation behind these efforts will be the second goal above. The central point is the cultivation of capability. Our lives are built out of the things we are capable of. I want my communities and me to be capable of a future that is noble because there is a special awe and grandeur to the greatest human actions; creative because creativity is central to being human; kind because all positive outcomes are inspired by love; and peaceful because peace is the greatest reward.
Again thank you for being a subscriber. I hope that these thoughts and hopes resonate with you as much as they do with me. If you have any feedback or ideas this sparks for you please share! You can always respond directly to this email or send me a note to ben.parry@hey.com I would love to hear from you.
Of course both perspectives have cases where they are merited. I don’t mean to say that there aren’t people posting banal and frivolous things about their lives but I’m most concerned with the positive examples. When I read my friends review I learn and am inspired it and I share in his joys for his life. This is what I aspire to.
There are obviously still potential negative repercussions for play around the world. These things are nuanced but I am made nervous seeing what has happened to Denise Ho, who was arrested in Hong Kong last week, and we should be very uneasy about the fact that Trump and other US political leaders and commentators cannot participate in the public forum properly because they were banned from Twitter. Nonetheless the threat of outright violence in retaliation for stated views for the most part receded dramatically.
Sadly it appears there has not been an annual letter since 2019 which is a great loss.
Self-Reliance, Emerson
Just in case you have not previously heard of Taleb or Norman this paper on pandemic risk published in January of 2020 might be a good introduction to their work.
For example see the essays on: Context Cascades, The Logistic Map, and Ergodicity
I'm very jealous that you attended RWRI.