Alexander Romance

I love overthinkers.

I love you because you probably overthink conversation openers and outfits and your day to day schedule — the life you imagine in your head muddies reality until your overthinking grows to throne itself as one of your life’s authority figures and mercilessly command your life.

And yet, overthinking is good.

Overthinking, no matter how much intellectuals like to demonize it, is potential energy. It’s proof that some part of you believes you’re destined for more than the mediocre life everyone around you has accepted.

The only slight hiccup with overthinking is that without an output it starts trashing and fighting, often manifesting itself as anxiety or procrastination. You want to do everything and do nothing — the most dangerous kind of ambition. The easy pacifier most people reach is consumption; if they aren’t going to find a creative output for their potential energy, they might as well find an input that soothes the ache of ambition.

Stanczyk by Jan Matejko + Pinterest

Most mega-corporations and attention-economy companies — think Instagram and… well basically every company since the advent of the Internet — understand this simple fact of human nature all too well and thrive on society’s overconsumption. The billionaires of today love man’s original sin.

This brings me to the viral “create more than you consume” rhetoric I’ve been seeing much of lately. Like with Ferran Torres at PSG, on one play the greatest striker to ever grace a football pitch and on the next a complete burger ($50 million btw), I’ve developed a love-hate relationship with this kind of content. I love it because it’s true; you need to create more than you consume. And I hate it because it’s misunderstood; most people aren’t clear on what “create more” means.

That’s what I, in my youthful arrogance, will now attempt to break down and hopefully change your life for the better, even if just a smidge.

Recently I read James Foreman’s Slop Suggests the Existence of its Opposite. It was both a phenomenal read and a sharp reminder that writers like James exist and that I have a long way to go. In it, he argues that the existence of slop, like the endless burger AI-generated content of ‘26, proves the existence of its opposite. Slop is parasitic — it feeds off real knowledge and real creation that demanded real, deep attention to make.

The Internet has grown thick with larpers who feed off the real masterpieces created by deeply creative individuals. Believe it or not, this is a good thing for creatives. The ocean of mediocrity is the measure of how rare and valuable directing attention onto thoughtful creation is.

The Voyage of Life by Thomas Cole (1840)

It’s taken me a while to properly define it, but here’s how I’ve come to understand creation: To create is to consciously direct attention into shaping the world. From sweet baby-making to writing to music to sports, interacting with the world in an attempt to materialize attention means you are creating.

James writes that when someone who actually knows something pays deep attention to their craft, “the object will become layered with his attention like a croissant.” Moby Dick and Frankenstein and other classics of literature endure because they hold attentional depth that keeps unfolding no matter how much time passes or how much you keep returning to them — they’re “imbued with an attentional depth that approaches infinity.”

Mastery is a sign of care.

Caring deeply about what you do has never been more important because a) depth and attention are rare nowadays and b) in devoting your full attention to something, the ever-watching and narrating “self” dissolves, leading to peak performance, flow, and as a natural consequence, fulfillment.

Devoting deep attention to creation also broadens your knowledge (of both your specific field and of the world). Real knowledge, as Plato knew, never comes from the words or the picture of success; it only crosses into you through real contact with real work.

In Robert Greene’s Mastery, he describes mastery as aliveness. “In moving toward mastery,” he writes, “you are bringing your mind closer to reality and to life itself.” creation is about bringing things to life, about imbuing a tiny part of the world with your soul, your life force. You understand the world more intimately when you help shape it.

Source — Pintetest

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies… The man who never reads lives only one.” — George R.R. Martin

I love books for the simple reason that they allow me to experience worlds ordinarily beyond my reach. I particularly enjoy listening to Russian aristocracy make small talk in War & Peace, or letting myself drift inside the smoky, jazzy current of 60s Tokyo in Norwegian Wood, or planning the downfall of Alexandre Dumas’ villains in The Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers.

I’m not going to tell you to stop consuming, it’d be stupid to never consume in a world rich with Christopher Nolan and Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky. I’m going to tell you to consume wisely. Just about the best thing you can do is tie quality of information to life span — this is known as the Lindy Effect, and it’s why you should treasure Meditations or The Art of War more than whatever slop self-help books are being sausaged out every year. The longer something has been around, the more valuable it is and the more valuable it will continue to be.

Read good books, read the classics, find the few masters of today and find the balance between contemporary and classical consumption.

If I were you, I’d delete all social media. I’m tired of pretending that social media’s good if you “consume wisely.” Son, no matter how much you try to “craft your algorithm” with motivational and productivity content it won’t change the fact that all social media platforms are biologically engineered to be addicting and that doom scrolling productivity content doesn’t make you productive. Seeing people flex what you don’t have (most of it is fake and highly-curated to create a sense of fomo and urgency, which perpetuates the cycle of anxiety that social media thrives on) and destroying your attention span has never gotten anyone anywhere.

Real — sourced from Pinterest

Remove all shit forms of consumption (you intuitively know what those are, don’t lie to yourself) and build a cathedral of thoughtful inputs.

And then create.

I write, and in deconstructing this act of creation I hope to bring you closer to finding yours and the feeling you should be looking for.

I’d like to think that in writing I can transport you, the reader, anywhere I wish. Good writing is ultimately reader-oriented. The prose and plot (if fictive) and ideas must intertwine delicately so as to let the reader paint the picture they wish — everybody’s version of Harry Potter is different — with the words you’ve written. To unconsciously transport you to Miyazaki-like realms with no effort on your part, that’s my goal.

To achieve this I must write, I must practice, I must create.

And for you to feel this aliveness and spread it throughout the world you must take the energy you’ve been pouring into your thinking and direct it to something real.

Take a pottery class. Write mini-essays. Learn how to freestyle. Find what ticks you and then master it. And remember that shit won’t be perfect, as Hemingway said: “the first draft of anything is shit.”

As I’ve come to realize the point of creation isn’t perfection but the act of creating itself, and the flow, fulfillment, and skills that come with it. Creation demands something and leaves something behind. If you’ve ever tried it you’d know that sitting down to write is a terribly arduous task. The excitement of the imagined Hemingway-writing-academic-studious-Pinterest-aesthetic gets crushed by the terrifying reality that the clear thinking in your head doesn’t translate to clear writing.

Writing, as most acts of creation do, makes you feel like a fraud.

Which I’ve learned is the point: when you create something you’re forced to accept there’s a Grand Canyon between imagining something and bringing it to life. Your skills paint or write themselves in front of you and guess what: you aren’t as good as you think you are. In realizing this, you give yourself needed space to improve. The cracks in my writing are how light shines in. It’s in doing things badly that we realize we’re doing them badly and can get one step closer to doing them less badly.

Perfection is unattainable yet worth chasing.

In an age where endless consumption is the default mode NPCs operate on and none process their own thoughts, the simple act of getting ideas out of your head and onto the world — be it through sport or art or music or writing — makes you much sharper than everyone else. You make something bad, then slightly bad, then you stay consistent, and then your efforts materialize into something slightly less bad, something others might call a masterpiece. Stop consuming the world, and go make it.

Remember — sourced from Pinterest

Nothing more. Nothing less.

\~ Alexander

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