If experience is the goal, then you always win

You can measure internal congruence by the lag between desire and action. We all have friends who want to change something about their lives, sometimes harboring secret desires for years, yet stay static in place. Others upend their lives on a whim. Reinvent. Start anew. What separates them? My hunch is that the latter view experience as a goal in itself, where most of us see-saw between rational pro and cons lists, or terminal value calculations. And if experience is the goal: whatever happens in the process, you always win. Earlier this year I had an inkling that my writing interests were shifting from cataloguing the movements of my own mind, to creating something more akin to a communal practice - writing with, and about other people. I wanted to experiment more, but I felt somewhat suffocated and trapped inside of my own register. This resulted in my latest essay series, New Ontologies , which is quite a different format than my prior work. This was a hard realization, as the style of auto-fiction and personal writing is what I’ve been doing since I started writing on Substack. More broadly I’ve observed that as you grow older and gain experience in any domain, you’re rewarded for staying in your circle of competence and deepening the gyre. You don’t charm anyone by constant pivots, lest you seem unserious, un-devoted. And your identity gets quickly socially bound to past experiences. You’re the person who does X, you belong to a certain tribe and earn brand equity on a particular vantage point on the world. Comfort in a continuous unbroken identity can keep us stuck creating within a limited perimeter. But I don’t want this to be the case in my own writing, or any of the pursuits I take seriously. More recently, I started looking for inspiration in artists who remain startlingly fresh across years of prolific creation. Artistic fearlessness, I noticed, often coincides with anti-nostalgia. A spirit that would rather risk sales and accolades than sacrifice the impulse to reinvent. In “ The Miles Method ", an essay by Simon Drew, Drew describes the ethos of Miles Davis, arguably the most influential jazz musician in the period of post-World War II. Davis contributed to the grand transformative arc of jazz: bebop, cool jazz, modal jazz. “He wasn’t interested in playing what he’d already played,” Drew writes, “and if he was, then he was going to reconstruct it.” Davis was extremely present-oriented and dramatically leapt onto five or six distinct jazz movements across his career. He never clutched or hoarded an old style, so much so that he sometimes refused to play any old music at concerts. He alienated much of his original fan base that came for modal jazz, a style they wanted from him indefinitely. Many of his records from the 1970s which were reviled and mocked by rock and jazz critics, were later re-reviewed as prophetic. Davis believed “being an artist was not about finding a sound and staying with it…it was about listening for the next s