Dear Reader,

How are you? How’s life? Can you really answer these questions? You can reply to this email and the replies will automatically get posted as comments under the blogpost for this letter. And if you do that, I will definitely read them and reply and perhaps even continue the conversation.

But the more important question is, will anyone who reads this letter in their email inbox, want to answer those questions? Aren’t they more of a rhetorical device used to signal that the writer of the letter isn’t a narcissist only caring about his own views and his own life?

The even more important question is, do I really want to know about how my subscribers are doing? Do I really care? The honest answer is that if someone does reply, I will be happy to care about their life for a few moments but in general, it has always been difficult for me to care about others and think about their life.

I’ve always been self-obsessed and self-absorbed. It’s not like I’m a psychopath. When I do become aware of someone’s life, I do tend to sympathize and sometimes even empathize with them. It’s just that I never seek out, unprompted, completely on my own, how other people are doing.

The most important point though, is about what am I hoping to achieve from these letters? When I started this series, I was trying to be more of a doer and less of an overthinker. I thought, I’ll start a newsletter which won’t have any news and which won’t try to sell stuff to subscribers. In theory, it felt good to start a letter series that’s not about anything. A series that rebels against our age’s obsession with productivity and marketing and consumption. And I said to myself, “don’t worry about what value you’re providing to the reader. These silly little letters will be valuable in themselves if they are a break from newsletters that are full of links that try to get the reader to click and go deeper down the sales funnel. Like a strange capitalist Alice going down the rabbit hole.”

But now, I’m not too sure if these letters provide any kind of value at all. I’ve started feeling that even newsletters that are open about building email lists that can be marketed to, provide better value than this series of mine. It seems to me that these letters are more about me than the reader. I like writing these letters. These are like my journal entries. I sit down and start writing whatever comes to my mind and it feels good to me to clear my head.

So, like so many times before in my life, I’m tempted to quit this little experiment. Write one more letter after this one to get to #007 and then end it. But I won’t give in to this temptation. Not this time. I might have started this on a whim but that doesn’t mean that it can’t become something good. Instead of quitting when things don’t go my way, I need to learn how to improve them and make the most out of them.

One way to do that is to focus on the process. I’ve been thinking about improving my blogging process and there are a few simple things I can start with. The first one simply is to edit and rewrite. Good writing is rewriting. First drafts are never great and what I’m doing by writing these letters in one sitting is basically sending out first drafts. Even though I want them to be spontaneous, that doesn’t mean that they actually have to be written in one sitting and then posted. I could write the first draft in the morning every Sunday and then edit it at night before posting the letter to my blog.

To take it to another level, I might start maintaining a list of topics that I want to talk about. That will allow me to think about and make notes about that topic throughout the week before I sit down to write the letter on Sunday. Of course, I need to improve my writing as well. Unfortunately, all of these changes will be applied from next week. So this week, this journal entry is what you get from me as a letter that pretends to care about you by beginning with asking about how you are doing. Still, if you do reply, I will take the time to care about you. For a while.

Thanks for reading these letter/journal thingies,

Rudya Aditya