A fresh Putanumonit in your inbox! Missed me? I sure missed you.
The bad news: Putanumonit isn’t actually back. I’ve run out of math/rationality content I was motivated to explore in longform about 2 years ago. Putanumonit is definitely on an indefinite hiatus.
The good news: over the years, this became more of a dating/relationships blog, in large part because it’s the topic my readers were most enthusiastic about. If you’re one of them, you’re in luck: I am writing way more about dating over at secondperson.dating. You should go there right now and read all of it.
You will see hints of Putanumonit all over Second Person. Love is Love, Science is Fake could fit right into the defense against the dark arts tag, Markets in Dating is clearly in line with my writing about economics. There will be more math too, though obviously that’s not the main focus, and a bright thread of rationality practice.
But the structure of Second Person is much different. I describe it as a serialized book, and Putanumonit readers will know it means I’m writing sequences. I explore ideas over several posts, and the sequences themselves are planned to combine into a comprehensive philosophy of dating, agency, and the struggle between the raw personal and the presentably social. The introduction and welcome posts offer an overview of the themes and the structure.
Second Person is a paid Substack, with half the posts being paywalled. It’s worth revisiting what I wrote 4 years ago in SubOnlyStackFans, explaining why I won’t turn Putanumonit into a paid newsletter:
But the truth is that I hate discipline, and I’m not desperate for money either. Writing about my struggle to produce at my day job worked well enough as self-therapy; I am now churning out financial software product management, whatever that is, at a sufficient rate to keep the rent paid.
People talk about how the 90s promise of the internet as a medium of unconstrained individual expression turned into a reality of social media monopolies forcing people into homogenous boxes for data harvesting. But if you have something to express and show the world you don’t have to stay boxed up.
I suspect that both Substack and OnlyFans may become a Girardian bubble. Everyone joins after hearing from the few people who succeed; the thousands who slink away after months of effort netted them a mere 17 subscribers usually do so quietly.
This was all true when I wrote it, but my own purpose has changed.
First: I quit my day job and found writing discipline. Second Person posts are published at least every Friday, a schedule I’ve stuck to even when my entire family flew cross-country and were struck with the flu. I also spend a lot more hours on each post and sequence, I read several books and Substacks just for writing research, and I even learned some Midjourney+Photoshop to make the header images prettier.
Ultimately, the only thing that matters is if you think the writing is good, not how much effort I put into it. But I do charge a subscription fee to support that effort.
Second: I’m quite enjoying the freedom Substack provides. I don’t know a lot of other Substacks that are writing a sequency book but I find the format a good fit. I may also add extras such as a podcast, live Q&As, a chat, etc. and Substack offers solid support for all of that as a platform.
And finally: it’s true that only a few people succeed on Substack. I’m going to be one of these few. I’m writing ideas I’ve been developing for a decade in my unique style on a topic that I’m endlessly fascinated by. I reached 100 paid subscriber less than three months after launch with minimal promotion. I feel that I’m only just getting into my groove as a writer.
If you’re reading this, you may be one of the few people who are as optimistic about my own writing as I am. Thank you for reading Putanumonit, I’ll see you over at Second Person.
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