Visits with my Muse

On Chains, Choices, and Commitment

Visits with my Muse, I

Originally Published on Twitter

September 30, 2024

When I visit my muse, she looks at me with hope in her eyes.

"Are we writing short stories today?"

I laugh. "Of course not! We're here for Twitter ideas."

"I don't have any Twitter ideas." She yanks on the chain, but the radiator refuses to budge.

"Other people have muses that give them ideas." I show her my phone and scroll.

Images of election news reflect in her tears. One story causes her to shudder.

"We're not writing about whether or not it's sexist that women have wider pelvises."

"Okay. But can we write about the fact that we're not writing about it?" She stares forlornly at her empty doggie bowl.

"Just this once. I'll make sure it has a neat ending."

Visits with my Muse, II

April 28, 2025

I again visit my muse in our garden. I have built a series of raised flower beds — a structure in which her nurturing touch can flourish.

We have written six short stories in seven weeks, and I have never seen her happier.

She doesn’t raise her eyes from her work while she addresses me.

“I’ve been thinking. What if we wrote a D&D-inspired story from the perspective of an NPC? They’d have stereotypes about adventurers while they try to live quiet lives.”

She looks up from weeding her darlings to see if I like the idea.

“What’s wrong?”

“The Substack isn’t going anywhere. Sorry. We need to rethink how I’m spending my time.”

She sinks her fingers into the soil.

“I threw a temper tantrum on Twitter and said that if I didn’t get 100 more Substack followers, then I’d start posting dating takes.”

“How many have we gotten?”

“Four. Net of unsubscribers.”

My muse’s hair stands on end, as though she is charged with electricity.

“How many read the SuperbMan story?”

“One hundred and fourteen.”

Tendrils of electricity arc between my muse’s outstretched hands and her metal gardening implements.

“Get my chain.” She hovers, her pale skin glowing white hot under the frustration of a neglected artist. Her voice echoes with an angry thunderclap. “BUT NOT FOR ME.”

I try to become someone else.

Earnest Dating Discourse

I feel the muse speak through me. I try to write down good dating advice, but she instead instructs me to say why I shouldn’t.

For the past decade, I haven’t focused on “getting good” at dating women in general. I have focused on being a better husband to my wife, the mother of my children. What would I know about becoming more attractive in general?

Then again, your other options are to ask loveless incels or crass lotharios, so maybe I’m the best option you have.

Another problem is that everyone needs different advice. Being well socialized is a calibration problem. Ask this many questions. Maintain this much eye contact. Some people need to assert more boundaries. Others need to follow the winds of fate.

This isn’t unique to dating. Aristotle taught that every virtue lay between two vices. Courage lies between cowardice and audacity. If you are struggling with dating despite physical and financial health, there are probably a dozen dimensions of vice-virtue-vice that you need to tune to your situation through experimentation.

This will be a painful process, and it will be far easier to sit in your room and blame macroeconomic forces, the hypocrisy of the other sex, or the state of the dating apps. Sorry. No greatness will arise from the easy path.

I struggle to think about what advice I will give my children. Aristotle also taught that different people had different optimal tradeoffs. A soldier requires more bravery than a janitor. The keenest dating advice for one generation will terribly mislead the next.

The biggest tradeoff young suitors face is between starry-eyed naivety and cynical awareness. Dating is ancient business driven by leviathans in your brain long thought extinct. Too much accurate advice forces cynicism, which may be worse. There is much I cannot say.

We live in an era of outsized returns to speculative gambles. If your startup succeeds, your net worth will be 100 times higher than if you had taken a stable path. This is true to a lesser extent for all upper-middle-class careers, such as attorneys or accountants. If you have great potential, it feels like you are squandering it if you don't throw your all into a career in your 20s. It’s hard to date and commit before the outcome of the bet is revealed, and - if you’re like me - you may suddenly wake up 27 years old, desperate to address the elements of your life you have been neglecting.

But one thing I would tell my children or 27-year-old me is that it’s easy to overvalue optionality. A few years ago, I was talking to a friend who was about to get married. He commented that he was holding off on buying a new computer until after the wedding so the funds would come from community property rather than his pre-marriage property.

I told him that I was excited for him to not have to think like that anymore. It was penny-wise for my multi-millionaire friend to consider how a $2,000 computer will be treated in a divorce. But the true comfort comes in being fully committed to your spouse. He reacted negatively to the advice and asserted that he was being judicious.

Six months later, he told me that he had been completely wrong.

Marriage is a beautiful gift. Turning the frantic energy of dating towards the goal of building a household is a profound joy. I am so lucky to be done with dating and be committed to my wife and the lives we’ve built together.

Committed.

Debt paid, the muse sets down her tools. Writer hits send.