"I have never regretted reading a Generalist newsletter!" — MWS, a paid subscriber

Friends,

It is popular, among a certain type of officious, self-satisfied person, to declare that one day is as good as the next when it comes to starting a new habit. “What good is a New Year’s resolution when you can make a change now?” such people ask while sipping a bilious green juice.

Annoyingly, they are (mostly) right. Every moment is a decision. Even the nothing dates of March 4th, September 23rd, or August 1st can inspire a new habit.

But these people miss something important, too: there are times the World works with you, and times it works against you. It is possible to begin a diet on December 15th, but harder to adhere to than if you’d started a few weeks later.

All of which to say: January has a special sort of magic. The World believes in New Year’s resolutions, whether you do or not. No month gives you greater latitude to edit your choices and customs, to reimagine the fabric of your everyday life.

Drink less. Eat less. Exercise more. Read more. Think more. Learn to paint. Start a business. Call your mother. Practice breathwork. Take up Cantonese.

For the whole of January (and half of February), you receive virtually no shit for such brazen self-improvement. Uniquely in the calendar, social pressure moves toward temperance and productive abnegation. Ride this wave, and you may make something important stick.

Earlier this week, I sat in front of a scrap of (virtual) paper and started writing out a few of the habits I wanted to experiment with while January still had some magic left. I have ambitious goals for 2025 and felt that achieving them would take a few shifts in my inputs, some fiddling with my quotidian code.

A list of 10 stubborn little dictums quickly filled the page. (A suspiciously round number.) Though perhaps I shouldn’t have been, I was surprised to discover that many directly involved technology. They focused on the machines, platforms, and intelligences I use and how they use me. Underlying many of them was a clear desire to assert greater control over the landscape of my mind: the information I allow in and the direction of my attention.

I decided to share them with you all, in part because I think they say something interesting about our marriage with dazzling, overmastering technology and its imprint on us. I also thought that doing so might encourage a few others to pick up a habit they’ve wanted to try.

With that, I invite you to participate in what I’m seeing as a month of focus and digital asceticism, a kind of gentle “Monk Mode.” Its a regime that is unlikely to make a Capuchin shudder, but it is a kind of 21st-century privation. Until February 9th, I will be adhering to the following 10 rules, which I share with a bit of background on why I’ve chosen them:

1: Walk 10,000 steps a day

This is straightforward enough. Writing is an absorbing, sedentary activity which means I can very easily spend 10 hours within a few hundred feet. Walking reliably brings me new ideas and is obviously good for your health.

2: Write fiction every day

For about 10 years before starting The Generalist, I spent an hour each morning working on my novel. (Which I’ve finally started soliciting agents to represent; fingers crossed.) Between finishing that project and the intensity of The Generalist, I’ve let it slip, writing fiction only in rare pockets. I’d like to write approximately a dozen short stories this year and that won’t happen unless I make time for it. I plan to wake earlier and carve out time each morning.

3: Fast for a minimum of 16 hours a day

When I fast regularly, I find I’m more productive and have a clearer mind. It’s also a bit of a “keystone” habit that influences many others. If I remember to fast, I tend to eat better, move more, and make better decisions. If I don’t, it’s easier to cave on the other things.

If you’re interested in fasting, I recommend Zero, a clean, intuitive app.

4: No social media

Another creeping habit over the past few months has been spending a bit more time on X/Twitter. Elon Musk’s centrality in the incoming government, heated conversations in AI, and another crypto bull cycle conspired to eat an increasing number of minutes per day.

X and Reddit reliably host interesting conversations that teach me something. But they equally reliably shred my attention, steal twice the time I intended to spend, and stuff my brain with pointless dreck.

Despite prevalent studies about social media’s deleterious effect on productivity and mental health, I don’t think most people fully appreciate the impact of this continuous oversaturation.

One attribute of these social platforms that I’ve only just started to appreciate is how persuasive they are — and what that means for a mind. We have all heard stories about being “radicalized” by YouTube videos, but since we’re not on the monkey bars at Al Farouq, we assume we’re unaffected.

For most of us, the risk is not being radicalized but denatured. When you are bathed in a monoculture, even one warring with itself, you begin to adopt its stances as your own. Under Musk’s management, X is an exemplar of this risk. It may bill itself as a fractal “town square,” but it has an increasingly monolithic perspective and set of values. Many are the skirmishes and disagreements, but there is only one direction of travel.

Surrendering to that momentum by donating your attention is a step toward losing ownership of your mind. It is too easy to find yourself adopting opinions and preferences you haven’t thought through but that are part of the fabric of these networks.

It has always been useful to be inventive, but it is increasingly essential as AI continues to bolt knowledge work in great hungry gulps. If it has not happened already, very soon, our greatest advantage will simply be the ability to think as ourselves — to rely on our unique accumulated training data and apply our singular algorithm. The more your data and algorithm adhere to the dominant monoculture, the less you will have to offer.

As much as possible, I would like to ensure that I continue thinking like myself rather than running someone else’s program.

The nature of The Generalist’s work means that there will be times when it’s useful to promote a piece on LinkedIn or another network. When doing so, I plan to use Buffer, which allows me to publish a post without actually touching the network — a bit like putting a paper boat into the river rather than going for a swim.

5: Replace podcasts with audiobooks

There are many intelligent podcasts. Over the years, I’ve enjoyed S Town (a sublime work of art), Hardcore History, Acquired, The Rest is History, and BG2. However, when I reflected on my habits, I realized that I spend only a fraction of my listening time on truly high-quality productions and much more on generic conversations, breaking news stories with short half-lives, and entertaining babble.

For example, every week, I happily listen to three separate hour-long podcasts about my favorite football team, Chelsea F.C. The fact that they dissect the same game that I have very probably watched doesn’t seem to matter to my ears. I will listen again and again and again. There is nothing wrong with being obsessive about a passion, but I would prefer to trade what I consider lower-quality information for higher-quality alternatives.

Rather than force myself to choose the best possible podcast every time I open the app, a repeated strain on willpower, I’m going to simply trade them for non-fiction audiobooks. I can navigate to an entirely different app, sidestepping temptation.

I prefer to read fiction because the sentence craft usually matters more, and I find it easier to attend to with my eyes rather than ears. But listening to non-fiction works well for me. I’m currently listening to The Best of Minds by Jonathan Rosen. If you have audiobooks you enjoyed, I’d love to hear about them!

6: No alcohol or soda

I rarely drink, but since moving to England, I’ve noticed I’ve been doing it a bit more. It’s probably a combination of enjoying pub culture more than bar culture and seeing old friends. It’s very easy to slip into unhelpful habits without thinking much about them; putting this on my list is a prompt for me to reset. (As for soda: it’s not very good for you and I don’t love it, so I may as well stop.)

7: Default to the Reader app when browsing

If you are like me, after you finish a decent chunk of work, you have a little dessert: 5 minutes on Reddit, 10 minutes on X, and some directionless futzing on TechCrunch, the FT, or Bloomberg. I do this knowing full well that I have an enormous collection of intriguing short stories and long-form articles I’ve saved to read later.

Why don’t I read them? I think of it a bit like making a grocery list when you’re full but shopping when you’re hungry. Your better self may diligently list broccoli, brown rice, and salmon filets but an empty stomach will lead you toward the chips and chocolate.

To avoid that, I am making the Reader app my new default dessert. When I’m looking for a little break, I’ll hop over there and read a little bit of one of the pieces I’ve saved.

8: Give up television

When tired or bored, I find it easy to default to watching a YouTube video or browsing a streaming platform. Again, there are many masterful pieces of art sprinkled across these platforms but they are vastly outnumbered by attention-drains. Rather than trying to pick through them, I’d rather simply reset the habit.

I will make two exceptions. One is watching a show with my wife. It’s not a common activity now that we have a newborn, and when we do, it’s a fun experience, not time wasted. The second is watching Chelsea matches. One of the pleasures of returning to England has been going to matches again. I’m invested in this season and want to see how it progresses. Watching a match is also a very different viewing activity: active rather than passive, episodic rather than always available, and time-bounded rather than indeterminate in length. I consider it time well spent (as long as we win).

9: Give up games

In general, I think many games are extremely good for your brain. Some are stories in motion. Others are tests of strategy and decision-making. They are also distracting. With the advent of mobile games, it’s too tempting to hop into a 5-minute spin of something and spend 30 minutes hunched over an imaginary army.

Like so many of the other rules I’ve set, my goal is to disrupt existing default behaviors — mindlessly jumping over to Polytopia — and see which ones I want to keep.

The one exception to this rule is an app called Learn Chess with Dr. Wolf that I stumbled across late last year. I never learned to play chess growing up but have always been vaguely interested in it. After our son was born, I started reading The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin in the hopes of being a good teacher to him. Halfway through Waitzkin’s depiction of his childhood as a chess prodigy, I put the book down with sudden conviction: I had to learn how to play passable chess. It has become one of my resolutions for 2025.

The Dr. Wolf app is simple but effective. I’ve been slowly working through its curriculum and playing matches against its AI.

10: Use my iPhone on black-and-white mode

If you click the button on the side of your phone three times, it flips into black-and-white mode. You may have discovered this accidentally or never encountered it.

It’s incredible how immediately uninteresting an iPhone becomes once it’s been drained of color. Red notification bubbles suddenly hold zero power, and confectionary-colored apps have no more visual appeal than Settings. It’s a small change that I suspect will allow me to feel more present and clear-minded.

I will use color when using maps. I took a bike ride the other day, and after 5 minutes of trying to navigate in black-and-white mode, I was reminded of how useful color is in the right context.

What impact do I expect this month to have? I hope to be frequently bored but more inventive. I hope to feel I have more time and use it better. I hope to consume a lower volume of information but of a much higher quality. I hope to create greater distance between the current culture’s opinions and gain greater proximity to my own.

I will let you know how it goes. And if you’d like to join me, in whole or part, send me a note. It would be a pleasure to hear from you.