I transferred my podcast listening a few months ago to Spotify from another platform. My listening habits have changed a little since I left Raleigh but my regular programming has not. Unlike the podcast platform I had used before, Spotify makes recommendations. The basic concept is simple. Certain elements of your listening history are put into a black box algorithm, you are scored on various metrics, and then you are shown content that you are most likely to want to listen to. All of the streaming companies—music, audio, video—do something similar. Social media companies do too. Twitter and Facebook show you provocative content so that you react to it. YouTube’s recommendations push you farther and farther down a rabbit hole. I’m told TikTok goes even further in this regard with its short-form content (something so successful that YouTube has effectively copied it), but that is one of the many platforms I’ve never used myself. These algorithms are built for specific purposes, and those purposes don’t tend to align with how I would like to use these tools.

Before my walk yesterday, I had queued up a new podcast that was presented to me by the recommendation algorithm. I was in hopes that I might discover something new and a different perspective. My hopes were misplaced. I couldn’t get through the episode as the production quality was so poor, but that was secondary. What was primary was the fact that I was left wondering what I had done to get such a thing recommended to me in the first place. Chalk that up as a failed attempt at novelty, but it did get me thinking.

I’m well aware that it’s hubristic to think that any one person can overcome the collective power of all of the money and engineering talent that has been poured into these content recommendation algorithms. One option is to forego all of these platforms entirely, but doing so comes at some cost. I instead continue to hone a framework of guardrails, some of which include not being on certain platforms, disabling autoplay functions, and not having certain apps on my phone. Does anyone have any tricks they use, whether it be to get a better version of content discovery or simply cutting out the dross, on any of these platforms? I’m curious to read how other people navigate our current information/entertainment environment.

While I was in Miami, my brother and sister-in-law introduced me to a new television show. I’ve since been using it as part of my nightly wind-down. I’m uncertain that my ability to use this show to relax is a wholly positive reflection on me, but that doesn’t change the truth. It is a show whose protagonist is a private detective in London, one with a checkered family history and half a leg missing from an IED blast in Afghanistan. The cases, the subject matter, everything is more pathological (and maybe disturbing) than an American program would be. American programming relies more on displayed violence and gore, British programming on psychology and subtlety. C.B. Strike is definitely not one for the children and is probably not one for many adults either. It is certainly much darker than Sherlock ever was and at least as dark as The Fall.

I’ve had too many posts about television in this newsletter thus far this year. This gives me notice that I need to inject some novel activity into my life again. Being able to make that observation is a side benefit to publishing on a regular cadence. My archive serves as a quasi-journal of what I was doing or thinking about during a particular week. That wasn’t the purpose of starting the newsletter. The purpose wasn’t creating the pressure of meeting a regular publishing deadline either. Both, though, have been pleasant side effects.

I have spent more time in South Florida over the past year than I expected I would spend there in my entire life. Part of this has been the result of business decisions to learn more about and become involved with digital assets, a nascent industry largely bereft of lawyers and so a blue ocean to target as a growth area.

An even larger part of this has been my brother’s decision to work and live in Miami. It is not a decision I will make myself—I hardly visit the beach even when I stay nearby and I prefer not to be in a place with enough heat and humidity to feel like a low-grade sauna. After each of my visits, I have written in this chronicle that I have no desire to deal with Miami’s traffic or its climate. That hasn’t changed. What was different this time is that I spent a longer period of time down there, including some time during a normal work week for my brother and sister-in-law. My workday was the same, short bursts of work interspersed between meetings in whatever time zone was necessary. Their workdays were also the same, much more of a 9 to 5 schedule than I have had since I worked for the government. It felt weird being in Miami surrounded by people living a more-or-less normal life. And other than me choosing restaurants for dinner where they wouldn’t normally eat, that’s what we did. It was a nice jolt for me, just different enough to be worthwhile. I just wish that I had completed my CLE requirements earlier so that I wasn’t forced to catch up on them during the afternoons. Oh well.

I closed a chapter in my personal life this week. I packed all of the things from my apartment and moved them into storage. All of my work is digital, none of my clients are local, and life in Raleigh didn’t unfold as I’d hoped. So I am moving on. I’m not 100% sure what that means or where I’ll end up but it was time for a new beginning. Now I begin another in-between period waiting on the next chapter to begin. I don’t have any grand reflections on the current state of things. One day I hope I’ll look back on this time with positive thoughts. For now it’s just a matter of pressing forward and meeting the tasks in front of me.

At the beginning of 2022 I bought myself an Audible subscription. Prior to that I’d only dabbled in audiobooks through the DC public library so that I could mentally escape my subway commute. I decided I’d try to absorb some nonfiction content in the same manner and downloaded a few books. Then I never listened to them. As it turns out I only listen to audio content when I’m doing something else—driving, walking, playing solitaire on an airplane—and that I couldn’t absorb the information from a book while multitasking this way.

I have encountered an approach of reading and listening at the same time. Amazon certainly pushes for this by offering a discounted audiobook any time you purchase the Kindle version of a book. I decided to give this approach a try myself and a few weeks ago ordered a paperback of one of the books I had downloaded. I am only a few chapters into it, but by having the book physically in front of me while I’m listening to it my second activity while listening to the audio is reading the text. It took some time to adjust the speed of the audio to my normal reading cadence but I’ve more or less calibrated it now. If I want to highlight something or write a note in the margin, I just stop the audio and then restart when I’m ready. I’ll keep going through this book and then assess whether it was worth the additional effort and cost involved in imbibing both formats at the same time. At this point, I’m not yet convinced. Has anyone else experimented with this method? And if you have, did it help you absorb the information or did you just find it distracting?

I don’t eat out much, maybe three or four meals a week total. In every place I’ve lived I have had a stable of restaurants that I patronize, usually no more than three or four core restaurants and then a second tier for cravings for a particular type of food or a place to go when I have visitors. Every few weeks, though, I eat at some new place. Maybe I walked or drove past it and was curious. Maybe someone told me about it. Maybe I did a search on Google Maps and it appeared in the results. This practice is a small way of continuing to expand my horizons even while remaining within my established comfort zone much of the time.

I have made two such visits in the last three weeks, both bolstered by the presence of family members to provide conversation through the meals. These two experiences offered typical results. The first place had very good food. It was a tad on the expensive side (seafood almost always is) and got loud as it filled up, but it was the sort of place that I may revisit for a late lunch or an early dinner. It doesn’t crack my core rotation, but it will find a place in the second tier. The second place, though, will not. It was a Sunday night so the place was quiet. The drink I had was very good and others enjoyed theirs also. But the food just wasn’t good enough. I ordered shrimp and grits, a Southern standard if ever there were one. That dish hardly even compared to the shrimp and grits I had at more than one restaurant in Charleston back in the fall, so that is that. It may be harsh, but new restaurants rarely get more than one audition for me. There are simply too many of them to try.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been rewatching the television series The Newsroom. There is a certain irony in me watching a show set against the backdrop of a nightly news program given how I steadfastly avoid those very broadcasts, but I wanted to watch a complete series and haven’t found any new ones that have piqued my interest recently. The show is about a fictionalized newsman and his team who take a Don Quixote like approach (if I may be permitted a reference to a work I haven’t read) and stand against the absurdities of the news cycle during the time I was in college. As many knew then and as we certainly know now, that was a losing battle. Media is in the attention business, viewers are the product, and the algorithms are improving every day.

I haven’t rewatched the show to relive the time period in which it is set or gloat over the death of old media. I’ve watched for the psychology of the characters. More than the specific events being covered and more than the interwoven romantic relationships between the protagonists, the show is about the struggles of people trying to live up to their own principles. They face public ridicule and economic consequences for trying to live out those principles. They struggle with self-loathing when they compromise on or fail to meet those principles. They are riddled with self-doubt at every step. And yet, despite all of that, they persist. Even knowing that it is all tilting at windmills, they persist. To be true to themselves, they have no other choice. In the circumstances I’m facing, I’ve found this fictionalized example edifying.

Last week I wrote about the concept of conducting a year-end review instead of making a new year’s resolution. I did a truncated version of the exercise relative to what I did at the beginning of 2022. One of the biggest things I saw was that I progressively became better at batching meetings and protecting periods of several hours in which do make real progress on work projects through most of the year but then began to let things slip. There were too many days in November and December that were chopped up by meetings over which I had some control, so I’m going to work to rein those back to minimize the stop-start nature of those days. After all, I am my own boss.

I also did quite a bit of traveling last year, but when I conducted my review I saw a marked difference in my enjoyment based on whether I was traveling alone or with a group of family or friends. I’ll try to take that lesson to heart in 2023, starting perhaps as soon as this weekend if things work out how I hope they will.

I haven’t set upon any mini goals yet, so it appears that January won’t get a self-improvement project this year. That may even be better since I’ll be starting a project well after most people will have given up on theirs. I hope that if you did set a new year’s resolution you are still on course. And if you have already fallen off the wagon, get back on it—there’s still time.

2022 has been a year full of twists and turns for me in my personal and professional lives and there is every indication that next year will only accelerate that pattern. I’ve had a lot of windshield miles over the past two weeks to reflect on some of those turns and my head is still spinning. I’ve closed dozens of transactions this year, worked from five countries, and worked in what feels like most of the world’s time zones. And that’s just in my work life.

I’m not one to set resolutions at the new year. Those only result in frustration and disappointment so I don’t make them. Besides, where I am now is a very different place than where I thought I’d be at this time when I thought about things this January. I don’t want to discourage anyone from making new year’s resolutions. They’ve just never done much for me.

I will do some version of a year-end inventory instead. I’ll look back at the things I most and least enjoyed this year and think about how to maximize and minimize those activities in the year to come. I find that a more productive exercise. I’ll also take the opportunity to discard a number of things, an early spring cleaning. If you’ve never gotten much traction from new year’s resolutions either, maybe you too would benefit from a year-end inventory so that you can be intentional about bringing more joy into your life in 2023. If I have a resolution for my own life, surely that is it.