Welcome to Anything Different

A quick note before the first essay arrives in your inbox...

If you’re receiving this, at some point, you signed up to receive email updates from me.

You might’ve read something I wrote—perhaps “People Don’t Buy Products, They Buy Better Versions of Themselves,” or “We’re Optimizing Ourselves to Death”—and wanted to receive more.

You might’ve responded to my solicitation on Instagram earlier this week with your email address.

You might’ve given your email to a friend of mine after he mentioned I was trying to go “full author mode” after being let go from my previous job.

Regardless, I’m excited you’re here. That said, if you don’t remember signing up and would like to be removed, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to take you off the list.

That said, this will mean you won’t receive the first essay in the _Anything Different_ series, which I’m pretty excited about. It’s a contrarian take on why humans reason (hint: not to make us help better decisions), illustrated by both personal, anecdotal experience, and an episode of The Office. It’s my favorite thing I’ve written in a long time, and I’m excited to share it with you.

Full transparency: I’m moving to Substack to see if I have the chops to write full time. This means getting readers to pay for what I write. (I managed to do this on Medium, but Substack lends itself better to direct relationships with readers and recurring revenue.) I’ve created two subscription options below—$5/month or $50/year. You can also click the “founding member” option and donate what you’d like (again, per year). It’s set to prompt you for $250, but you can do less or more… up to you.

Your support would mean everything to me. That said, I’ll take each subscription as an indicator that I’m doing good work—so please only subscribe if you think so! If I see subscription numbers tick up, I’d like to be confident that it’s because I’m providing you with value—not because we’re friends, and $5/month is the cost of a beer at some bar you haven’t been back to since February of 2020.

A quick summary of essays that are in the pipeline:

1. “Reason Didn’t Evolve to Help Us Make Better Decisions; It Evolved to Help Us Win Arguments.” The title gives away the gist of the essay here. A 2011 paper by Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier argues that reason evolved to help us win arguments. I like this take a lot. I back it with anecdotal evidence, along with a scene from my favorite episode of The Office: “Dinner Party.”

2. “The Pandemic Reminded Us We Are All Communists.” This is likely not at all the take you think it will be. Using evidence from Debt by David Graeber, I propose that COVID’s disruption of our social lives can be especially well-understood by analyzing our relationships with one another as inherently “communist.” This has nothing to say about the political system, per se—just about the communistic nature of our social lives.

3. On Failing to Heed David Foster Wallace’s Warning in “This is Water.” A few weeks ago, I had a totally shit day. David Foster Wallace’s point in “This is Water”—his iconic commencement address given at my alma mater, Kenyon, in 2005—is that the liberal arts education should be about giving students the ability to exercise some restraint over our very human tendency to think of ourselves as victims when bad things happen. (This is an oversimplification; I’ll elaborate in the essay.) I failed, but I learned something.

For now, all of the essays I publish will be available WITHOUT paying to subscribe. This will not always be the case, but I’m doing this to try and build up a following on Substack.

So yes, if you’re asking the question “Well, why should I pay you?” The answer isn’t quite “charity,” but it’s somewhere along the lines of “you’ll be giving me faith in my own future as a writer.” If that’s something that appeals to you—which it probably only will if you have enjoyed work from me in the past, or find value in what I publish going forward—please consider clicking “Subscribe now” below.

Clicking below will take you to a landing page where you can select a tier—“monthly,” “annual,” or “founding member”—and add your credit card information. You can always come back in and unsubscribe later.

Also, Substack requires that you stick to a fixed amount per month or year. If you’d like to support me with less (or more!), you can visit my Patreon by clicking here. Once there, simply click “Become a patron” and follow the prompts.

Finally, one of the best things I ever did for myself was adding a line on my Wordpress blog suggesting people reach out to me to grab a beer, or a coffee. If you’re in Chicago or the Bay Area, or anywhere, really—I love visiting new places and meeting new people—feel free to reach out and suggest we grab either one.

Okay—that was kind of a lot! Regardless of what you decide, thank you for being here. I’m excited to be writing again and look forward to what the future holds.

-Zander