It’s Exhausting

I’ve developed a methodology for writing my Substack essays. I’ve been writing my Substack for three years, and I pretty much look at the world through the lens of “Could I write about that?” I have a general topic that I focus on for each day of the week, and I regularly save Substacks and other newsletters to an email folder called “Substack potential” if they contain a fact or point of view that I want to expand on in an essay. When I begin to write an essay on the day (or days) before I plan to publish it, I pull up my Substack potential newsletters, pick the topic that still interests me, and then write about it.

The problem is that my “Substack potential” folder has too much stuff in it right now. When I pulled up the folder yesterday, I saw I had saved a lot of ideas for potential essays. Here are some topics I set aside to write about:

• The on-again/off-again global trade war

• Uncertainty in general

• The erosion of the rule of law

  • Supreme Court

  • Deportations without due process

  • Targeted Executive Orders

• Capitulation of law firms and universities

• White-washing (and I mean this both figuratively and literally) of history

• The economic, social, political, and psychological effects of the war on civil servants

• The destruction of the political norms like checks and balances and separation of powers as the courts, the House, and the Senate enable all of the above.

• The dismantling of our public health structure

• The erosion of workers’ rights, workplace safety, and job protections

• And more.

Usually, I’m able to pick one nugget that fits my criteria, which are a little loosey-goosey but include these elements:

• I think it’s interesting

• I already know a little bit about it

• I think that other people either haven’t thought about it much or don’t always know as much about it

• I can encapsulate a piece of it so that I can write it in the time I have, and people can read it in the time they have.

When I employ these criteria, I can usually write something that I’m satisfied with.

I’m pulling back the curtain on this process because I’ve started a substantive essay three times for today and have stopped after a few paragraphs because I’m distracted by too many other ideas circulating in my head. Trump’s idea has always been to flood the zone, hoping that everyone will be distracted by things like, oh, I don’t know, imposing tariffs on penguins, but will not notice things like issuing an executive order to bring down the entire weight of the Justice Department on an individual that pissed him off somewhere along the line.

I’ll be back at it tomorrow, but that’s it for today.