08/02/2026

PROOF OF LIFE

i want to be humiliated again

The last time I wrote like this, I had much less to lose. I still felt like a wallflower on the internet without any real stake in the world. The people I admired online were still strangers, and I wanted so badly to be seen by them.

I got my start by writing 50 essays in 50 days in 2023 where I wrote lab notes on finding my intuition, about my love for playboi carti, essays that introduced me to new fields which led to collaborating with my heroes, essays that led to the creation of new funds, work where I followed my curiosity that allowed me to be early in many ideas. I was not consciously thinking about New Institutions™ at this point.

I believe that everything I’ve been able to accomplish with Analogue in the last 18 months has been downstream of these 50 essays from 2023 where I was extremely disciplined about my curiosity practice. It was almost a religious experience.

Doing five beats a day for three summers
That's A Different World like Cree Summer's

My friend asked me recently whether I’m proud of any new ideas I’ve published recently and in truth I had to tell him that I haven’t really had any new ideas. My work has become more commercial in a sense, but I have largely been recycling the same ideas I developed in 2023. In some ways, the work has become easier: ideas that once felt illegible now have a language, an audience, even a market. Analogue is well positioned for that moment. Part of me feels vindicated; another part grieves for the version of me who was rejected again and again for arguing that strange ideas deserved belief, patience, and capital. Maybe that is why I have been content to remain inside the work rather than return to the uncertainty that produced it. I feel like a musician coming off the world tour for a breakout album, finally going back into the studio to make sense of everything that happened along the way. 50 essays in 50 days was my Channel ORANGE. PROOF OF LIFE is my Blonde.

I’ve been wanting to do this practice again this entire year. My body has been craving it. But the truth is that I’ve been scared that I may discover I can no longer do it. Facing yourself for 50 days straight completely earnestly is not easy. It is humiliating. And I know that it will likely be even worse this time. There’s more abundance, more to lose, more distractions, more vices, more ego. Pieces like How To Know What To Do and Transcendence: An Emergent Life broke me and put me back together in the process.

However, I am glad to know that the transformation is in the uncertain space between the question and the answer, and boy did this practice make me hold that uncertainty for hours every day until I had to surrender enough for 1) the curiosity to naturally surface 2) find an unexplored angle of said curiosity 3) hold contradictions over and over again until a thesis emerged 4) test the thesis for actual internal alignment (want) versus just getting an essay out for the sake of it (should), which was unacceptable 5) risk being perceived by the world for said ideas because they felt too early for the time

The essays, whether I end up doing this for 30 days or 50 days, will likely not be remarkable, but the person I become during the intentional deliberation of ideas every day will transform me. My only rules again are to follow my curiosity of the moment. And absolutely no distractions, especially any consumption of any kind with an infinite scroll. Use twitter to post for accountability, but no engagement with any other content.

FEARS

The life these essays helped create has also complicated my ability to write them. The strangers whose validation I once craved became friends. Ideas became institutions. People I once observed from a distance became collaborators, funders, friends, and peers. I acquired more context, more social consequence, and many more reasons to edit a thought before I had finished thinking it.

There are things about proximity, power, desire, envy, friendship, ambition, and self-distortion that I have been afraid to examine too closely. Those are probably the things I need to write about.

I am afraid that writing honestly about these things will make Very Serious People take me, and by extension, Analogue - less seriously. That they will read this as instability, frivolity, and perhaps even incompetence. I have spent the last 18 months gardening an institution and a team I’m immensely proud of, and part of me worries that showing too much of the person behind it will weaken the institution.

By putting this out there, I’ve decided that seriousness does not have to mean self-erasure. The right people will not trust the work less because they can see the full person making it. And anyone whose respect depends on my remaining polished, disembodied, and strategically incomplete is probably not someone I want determining the future of the work, my work.

I didn't take all this time to become me to listen to you.

Maybe honest writing will close certain doors. It may also keep me from walking through the wrong ones. I would rather become more legible to the people with whom I am truly aligned than remain impressive to everyone.

So this is the main question underneath PROOF OF LIFE: can I consciously return to a creative process that worked precisely because I did not understand what it was doing to me?

There is only one way to find out. I’m going to be humiliated again!

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