2023, We Hardly Knew Ye
The most popular 3am Thoughts essays of the past year.
It is not without irony that I realised the first 3am Thoughts essay this year was a meditation on time, before another year melted away in the blink of an eye.
Another irony I couldn’t shake over the past couple of weeks is the number of Christmas songs that sing about “peace on earth” or something similar. Good luck with that.
2023 was also the year that the free speech debate came for Substack, as a response to an Atlantic article where the author managed to dig around the platform long enough to find some far-Right newsletters. I won’t chime in on this, because Elle Griffin, the author of The Elysian, laid out the case for Substack here.
3am Thoughts is a very modest corner of the Substacksphere, sitting at ~1,000 subscribers (you can see the growth curve, below) but with an average open rate of ~62%, which is the part I’m personally grateful for (I’d rather a greater proportion of a smaller number of readers actually read the essays).
Given said modesty, it can be hard to select the “most popular” essays from this year, i.e., some essays get more “likes” but have less total views, and some have the opposite. So, I’ve used a mix of total views, likes, and comments, to select 2023’s most popular.
And while “top 10” is always the default, given there are twelve days between Christmas and the Epiphany, here are the “top 12” from 2023. I’ve omitted any of the Israel-Palestine series given that this is a still a work in progress.
As a modest corner of the Substacksphere, if you know of anyone who you think would enjoy 3am Thoughts essays, I would be very grateful if you would share any of the below, and recommend they subscribe, too.
Wishing you a great year ahead in 2024.
On Time
There is a constant sense that accompanies the period from late autumn to the deep winter, that of time slowing down. This sense of time dilation is purely imaginary, perceived as a product of my inner seasonal mood; time perception as a reflection of interoceptive awareness.
Sufficiently Truth-y Sounding
The American philosopher Harry Frankfurt distinguished between lying and bullshit by reference to regard for the truth. Liars are those who are aware of the truth, or at least their version of it, but deliberately seek to subvert and mask that truth. Bullshitters, on the other hand, are those who have no direct concern for the truth, but seek only to im…
Policing Language is About Controlling Thought
In 1996, an Australian academic at Monash University built a language model known as the “postmodern generator”, to generate text following the language styles of postmodern writers, i.e., the generator would produce sentences that were syntactically correct, but otherwise meaningless gibberish. Here is an example:
Why Do Progressives Loathe the Working Class?
After the colossal electoral defeat of Labour by the Conservatives in 2019, Deborah Mattinson, a UK pollster who had worked for the Labour Party, engaged a series of focus groups in the North of England in three towns: Hyndburn, Darlington and Stoke-on-Trent. These towns, along with so many others, considered part of “the Red Wall”, areas of the industr…
Finding Sisyphus
For twice trying to cheat death, Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to an eternal punishment; to push a huge boulder up a steep hill, and each time reaching the top, the boulder would roll back down again. Each time, Sisyphus would have to return to the Underworld, and begin his labour again, over and over. Sisyphus was, for Albert Camus, the ultimate “
Trivialising Ourselves to Death
The late American critic and writer, Neil Postman, deserves to rank among George Orwell and Aldous Huxley as one of the most prescient thinkers of the direction of our societies and cultures in the 20th Century. In his 1985 book, ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death
The Roots of Our Fragmentation
Jon Kabat-Zinn was the first person, at least that I’ve seen, use the term “dis-ease”; the deftly placed hyphenation diagnosing the malady of our fragmented and alienated times. We have dis-ease within ourselves, our sense of meaning and purpose, and dis-ease with the conglomerate of people around us, the mass that once resembled civil society. And in o…
In Defence of Books
I was recently referred to a couple of thoughtful essays (‘The Great Forgetting’ by Ruth Gaskovski, and ‘A Pilgrim's Creed’ by Peco), both of which, in different ways, explore how our ability to think, to learn, and to hold memory, are being eroded by our dependence on tech. As we are stripped of our “cognitive liberty” by the insidious screens to which…
The Left's "Diversity" Blindspot
In a very visible way, British politics in the past year has provided a stress test to the contemporary liberal shibboleths of “diversity” and the imperative to “listen to voices” of historically marginalised minority communities. It is a stress test that liberals have failed, and in doing so revealed a hypocrisy and lack of substance behind the sanctim…
Opinion Absolutism and Impoverished Perspectives
I hadn’t intended to interrupt the Israel-Palestine series, but this particular thought is something that has been ticking over the back of my mind for awhile and I had some time on a flight to kill, so here it is on a page. And as a brief essay, it may provide a little respite from the monographs of the Israel-Palestine series. In fact, the central poi…
The Starbucks Effect
In his 1899 ‘Theory of the Leisure Class’, Thorstein Veblen first articulated the theory that human consumerism and consumption could be understood within an evolutionary framework, as representative of social hierarchy. Termed “conspicuous consumption”, Veblen argued that consumer preferences are determined relative to their position in the social hier…
A Vacuum of Thought
Whenever I find myself in a thought-stream of existential torrents, I try and peer in and identify the source. With the political, economic, and socio-cultural challenges of our times superimposed over a volatile network of existential risks, from climate disasters to escalating geopolitical conflicts, there is no shortage of torrential mental terrain t…
Thank you, Alan, for having created this "small" Substacksphere, which has become so dear to me! While "Finding Sisyphus" may remain my "all-time-favourite" (which seriously has already provided comfort and a paradox kind of "hope" when I really needed it..), imho, each and every essay is a little masterpiece in and of itself, wisdom, knowledge, insights and thoughtfulness, beautifully put. Always looking forward to it, and I will be glad to share (and have already done so). With that said, a deep-felt thank you for sharing these "3am Thoughts", and an equally deep-felt "all the best for you" for 2024 (and beyond ;))!