What I’ve Learned After Four Years on Substack

My second book is officially underway. It is titled Luxury Beliefs (I know you didn’t see that one coming). The news was recently announced on Publishers Marketplace: Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while inflicting costs on the less fortunate. I first coined the phrase in 2019. I elaborated on the luxury beliefs framework in a series of essays in the NY Post, Quillette, The Free Press, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, as well as here on Substack. Since then, the term has entered everyday conversation in ways I didn't expect. It sometimes gets misused and misunderstood. A full book will help to set the record straight. The core idea came from my own experience moving between social classes, plus reading deeply about the sociology of class and the psychology of social status. As I spent more time around upper and upper-middle-class people, I noticed a pattern: many of them held beliefs they did not actually live by. And when those beliefs did carry costs, these people had the money and other resources to protect themselves. People lower on the ladder do not have that option. Most people who hold luxury beliefs are sincere. But I have also met people who express these views for cynical reasons, to protect their reputation or advance their career. They don't necessarily believe what they are saying. They just know that saying it pays off. Just as some people buy expensive objects they don’t really like just to impress other people, they also espouse luxury beliefs for the same reason. This will likely be the last time I share anything about Luxury Beliefs until there is a pre-order link, which will be available late this year or perhaps early next year. It’s a good feeling to land a second book deal. It came with far fewer headaches than the first time around with Troubled. But writing about writing and the process of publishing, while mildly interesting, takes time away from doing the actual work of writing the book. Candidly, there have been moments when I’ve worried whether luxury beliefs will retain relevance by the time the book comes out (late 2027). I’ve thought, well, maybe the moment has passed. Recently, though, after the lunacy of that recent NYT interview where 3 prominent members of the cultural elite glorified shoplifting (which they termed “microlooting” because so much of upper middle class life is about rebranding disreputable behaviors in order to retain one’s position in the hierarchy) and all but justified the killing of healthcare executives, those concerns were put to rest. The pathology of elite status signaling, as expressed in the form of luxury beliefs, shows no signs of burning itself out. From an interview with Jerry Seinfeld: David Remnick: I was once talking to the writer Adrian LeBlanc, who’s been working on a book about comedy, and I asked, “Who are the two smartest comedians about comedy?” I expected her to name two obscurities. And she said you and Chris Rock, because you study it. You’ve been thinking about this; it’s not just a bunch of jokes. Jerry Seinfeld: Yes. Chris is the smartest person, maybe, I’ve ever met…I was with Chris a couple of weeks ago, and he was talking about a young comic. He was asking the comedian about what he did that day. And the guy said, “Nothing. But I’m going to do a set tonight.” And Chris explained to him, “You make money during the day. You collect it at night. During the day is where the money is made.” You make money during the day. You collect it at night. During the day is where the money is made. Seinfeld is saying that becoming a good standup comic requires you to live life, pay attention to your surroundings, have lots of experiences, and speak with interesting people. Then you take all of this material and convert it into art. Elsewhere in the interview, Seinfeld goes on to say “This is a writer’s game. If you can write, you succeed. If you can’t, you will not make it. The performing, being funny onstage, that’s great. Any comedian can be funny onstage. But the bullets are the writing.” Good material comes from taking what you have accrued and making it informative, entertaining, or thought-provoking. As my friend David Perell points out, even full-time writers spend the majority of their time away from their computer. You don’t log 40 hours a week typing away at your keyboard. Doing so would leave you with nothing of substance to say. More from David: “Experiences become shareable creations the way tree sap becomes maple syrup. It takes 50 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. So whenever I feel like I don’t have enough ideas to create something meaningful, I go collect more experiences and spend time processing them by writing and talking to friends.” Most good writing happens beyond the page. Gathering experiences, observing the world, letting ideas take shape. By the time you sit down to write, you’ve already lived through the material. Even if the exact words have yet to come. Depending on the type of writer you are, reading is also critical. Being social and engaging with others is important. So is solitude and quiet reflection while engaging with ideas. When asked for advice on how to become a better writer, C.S. Lewis shared 8 tips, one of which was “Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. (Notice this means that if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about…).” Shane Parrish of Farnam Street writes, “If you want new ideas, read old books.” Gustave Flaubert once declared, “My life is as flat as the table I write on.” Aside from a few trips abroad and occasional appearances in high-society Paris, he fiercely protected his quiet routine and solitude—conditions he deemed essential to his work. This reclusive tendency is common among public intellectuals; developing the implications of a system of thought often demands long stretches of retreat from public life, as deep knowledge rarely emerges without the private disciplines of reading and writing. According to some accounts, Carl Jung was known to value solitude deeply and often retreated to his secluded tower in Bollingen, Switzerland, where he read, carved stone, and reflected in silence—often with his pipe in hand. While he did produce a vast body of written work, he did not always enjoy the act of writing in the conventional sense. Jung viewed writing more as a means of clarifying his thoughts and sharing his psychological insights than as a pleasurable pursuit in itself. Jung wrote extensively. But he preferred quiet contemplation with a pipe and a book. Hemingway compared daily writing to regularly drawing a few buckets of water from a well; each time the water will naturally rise back to its original level. If, however, you suddenly pump out a large amount all at once, you might find yourself without water for a long while. You gotta take breaks on occasion. Your unconscious spits out material related to whatever you put in. I learned this while writing Troubled, which consumed my life for the better part of four years. Your unconscious can produce profound insights seemingly from nowhere. But if you spend your days engaged in arguments on social media or whatever, your mind will generate clever dunks during your walks. Read lots of news and current events, and your unconscious will cloud your inner life with gloom and pessimism. Concentrate fully on a project or a piece of art, though, and ideas will come to you. The more mindless external stimuli and meaningless minutiae you absorb, the more mental clutter will block your creativity. If you want those gifts, if you want your unconscious to deliver creative and insightful outputs, you have to protect its inputs. From mathematician Richard Hamming’s famous 1986 lecture, “You and Your Research”: “Everybody who has studied creativity is driven finally to saying, ‘creativity…