2022 Annual Letter
Year in review and aims for 2023
Commitment
Searching for a theme this year I kept returning to the idea of commitment. Mostly, because it felt lacking. My ‘commitments’ this year, such as they were, were a bit of a mess. I didn’t do much of what I had hoped to at the beginning and I wasn’t really sure of the direction I was going on the rest. At the same time I made some decisions relatively off hand - like starting a podcast - that if I keep up with them I expect will be a huge part of shaping the next few years.
My general sentiment looking back is that I gave myself many degrees of freedom but the result of this liberty was that I didn’t get very far in any particular direction. What I called commitment was really just something that I kind of wanted.
I doubt I am alone with these sentiments. In general, it seems like commitment is in short supply. University students at prestigious schools gravitate, upon graduation, to consulting and finance jobs as a way to ‘maximise optionality’. The US divorce rate has admittedly been decreasing in recent decades (~4 per thousand in 2000 to 2.3 per thousand in 2020) but marriage as a whole decreased even faster (8.2 to 5.1) and the age of first marriage for women has risen dramatically. We have all also become very familiar with how our Governments seem to flip-flop on policy decisions at every swing of the opinion polls.
The negatives associated with making commitments are pretty clear. By definition when you commit you restrict your ability to act in another way. It is literally a constraint on your freedom.
Let’s say you wanted to commit to becoming a citizen of Singapore1. If you are male, not only do you have to do regular military service but you will have to renounce all foreign citizenship. If you’re looking to maintain your independence this seems like a raw deal.
There is a reason for commitment though. Commitment lets you reach heights that would otherwise be impossible. A committed person holds nothing back.
Singapore is in a precarious place. Perched on the end of the Malay peninsula it is a tiny sovereign nation surrounded on all sides by large, aggressive neighbours. To protect against this they have developed one of the most sophisticated and relatively large armed forces anywhere in the world. For immigrants, renouncing your foreign citizenship means you are part of that fight. If war breaks out there are no options. If you want to maintain your home then you need to take up arms to defend it2.
Commitment is brutal. When we commit as individuals, communities, and societies we bring about the death of our broad potential3. Luckily, there is another side to the coin. In return for commitment we can reach a depth of achievement that would otherwise be impossible.
Singapore has maintained its independence and today is richer on a per capita basis than the United States4.
Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.
Matthew 22: 37-40 (NKJV)5
It’s not until you are fully committed that you can imagine living up to an ask like this. When you leave yourself no way out you unlock your greatest abilities to overcome difficulties and reach your full potential.
2022 in Review
At the beginning of this year I had a goal to:
“Keep this Substack alive and growing with regular posts … [I will] commit to one email sent on the first Friday of every month with the first one this coming Friday the 7th. “
On the bright side, as promised the first one of those emails did get sent out on Friday the 7th! Unfortunately though, I lost steam quickly after that. It turns out that a monthly cadence can actually be harder than a weekly one. When I waited a month to release something it got a little daunting.
Luckily, I made it up somewhat in the last quarter. Beginning at the end of October I posted every week. As a result, to borrow the Github visual, the year looked something like this:
In total this was ~14 posts. It’s very slightly more than my original schedule would have implied but that's a minor salve for the lack of consistency.
The most popular post was Death may be the end, but maybe it isn’t.
My favourite was either The Sketch or The Miraculous Life of The Humble Beaver.
At the beginning of the year this Substack had 75 subscribers. Today it’s at 122. I’m very grateful for all of you that tag along and are interested in the thoughts I’ve posted here. It is a great motivator to continue to improve and nurture ideas worth sharing.
In my personal life I had posted a set of goals for the new year on Twitter. Some of these I achieved! In particular I’m proud of finally creating a small garden.
On the whole though reflecting on the list is a source of shame. Many of the goals fell by the wayside. I think there's a few reasons why but ultimately I’d chalk it up to having too many goals, not enough focus, and lacking clear motivations.
Going forward I will continue to have personal goals like this but I'm not going to post them in public. Despite the exhortations from the self-improvement community that publicly sharing your goals will increase accountability I’ve come to think that these things are more personal. Posting a goal without going through with it is a kind of unearned honour. I will be more motivated as well as more satisfied in achieving my aims if they are private.
Besides not everything has to be a goal. The need to make all experiences the equivalent of a LinkedIn list of achievements does not seem particularly healthy. In that vein, it was totally unplanned but one of my most powerful experiences this year was when I went to Red Rocks in Denver to see Lane 8.
Red Rocks is an open air amphitheatre about thirty minutes outside of the city. The space was created as part of the New Deal by the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration. It comfortably seats ten thousand wedged between two giant outcrops.
The rock towers above the space. There is something eerie and mystical about the overwhelming presence of this expansive geological history juxtaposed with the very human-scaled time of the crowd and unfolding performance.
If you ever find an opportunity to see something here I highly recommend it.
I also got to spend a lot of time with a cat. His name is Chartreux, he's older, very indoors focussed, a great enjoyer of sun patches, and one of the most affectionate creatures I've had the pleasure of meeting.
This is him surveying the great outdoors:
Looking Forward to 2023
This year, I’ll send out an essay with a set of interesting links every Saturday morning Eastern time.
As evidenced above I have ‘committed’ to writing here in 2021 and 2022 without the best results but with any luck the third time’s the charm. I know better now than I did then what a real commitment looks like. So, I believe I can stick with this.
I’m also hoping to make progress with the Volition Podcast. I got to speak to some wonderful people this year like Linda Lebrun and Justin Jackson. I don’t know what kind of schedule I’ll be able to keep up with but I hope that I can find a regular cadence of similar guests - I’ve learned a lot from the few conversations I’ve had so far. When new episodes launch I’ll announce them above the links in the weekly email.
Thank you for being a subscriber. If you ever have any feedback or if any of these essays spark an idea for you please reach out! You can send me a note to ben@benparry.ca or DM me on Twitter. I would love to hear from you.
Mood
If you’re interested, heres last year’s letter: 2021 Letter
I will admit that despite never having visited Singapore - something I plan to rectify this year - this is something I have spent a surprising amount of time researching.
As another sign of the faltering commitment it appears that a record number of people say they would not fight to defend their country. In ‘Europe’ 38% say they would not fight, compared to only 33% that said they would. Source
To give one more example: Despite what people may say if you have committed to a career as a medical doctor and done it for a few decades your options for a new career path are severely limited. You might get away with being an instagram influencer, an intellectual or a politician. If you are really talented, perhaps you will become a scientist. But the chances you will make meaningful contributions to the law, finance, architecture or engineering are slim.
Though of course there is more to life than riches.
While I have read some, I am not well studied in the Bible or the Christian tradition at all. It left an impression on me to find that this phrase is repeated four times. First in Deuteronomy where it is spoken by Moses, and then again in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.