What then? 2025 Recap and 2026 Path Forward
Books, documentaries, τί οὖν, essays
Why “What then” in the first place?
There have been quite a few new subscribers recently, so this 2025 recap is timely.
I call this platform What then? after a question Epictetus asked with faintly maniacal repetition: “τί οὖν”. This translates to “So what?” or “What then?” He did this because it forced the individual he was interrogating—or, if there was no one to interrogate, when he interrogated himself—to dig one layer deeper, to keep asking questions until ignorance was stripped away and some fundamental truth was revealed.
But unlike Epictetus, these essays are neither self-help nor instructional. There are many writers who excel in that domain and I am not one of them. Instead of how, my loves are the why and the what. Why self-help, self-destruction, civilizational atrophy, and meaninglessness define our age. What the most awake and alive expression of human experience once looked like—and could look like once again.
Favorite books of 2025
I read 86 books this year. The four most striking were Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky, Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer, South by Sir Ernest Shackleton, and Existence by Rollo May.
I am in love with literature once again. All I read as a kid was fiction. I had a book with me every second of the day, and would grab whatever random tome on the library shelves I could reach. As an adult, I grew away from fiction believing it was irrelevant to getting things done—that it detracted from the actual act of living. I was horribly wrong. Once I started reading literature again, entire worlds of the human condition opened themselves up before me. With my eyes open once more, I can now look back and realize how profoundly all that fiction reading in my youth revealed layer after layer of depth both within myself and everyone I have ever met. It will forever be part of my reading regimen going forward. I usually balance two books at once: history or philosophy in the morning, and literature at night.
Favorite thing watched in 2025
Rarely is a philosopher caught on film. Not an academic. Not an influencer. But a truly original thinker. We do not know what Aristotle, Epictetus, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer would have been like on film. But I found an interview series from the 1960’s with Eric Hoffer and it is simply remarkable. My sense is this is what Epictetus would have been like on film: we see a philosopher’s brilliance, passion for ideas, and authenticity on camera.
Eric Hoffer was homeless, did not have a high school diploma, hitched rides as a migrant worker, and then settled down as a longshoreman. He was self-taught at public libraries, a genuine autodidact, a devotee of “books and brothels,” and lived the poverty-stricken life of an original thinker.
This is the video of Eric Hoffer.
The video is 30 minutes and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Top essays of 2025
This was the most “liked” essay, I can only assume because it assaulted the ever so assaultable concept of self-care.
This was the most engaged essay. This is hopeful because it edges up against one of the core themes of my upcoming book. I plan on doing at least 2-3 more major rewrites of this short book before letting it breathe the free air, as it is a labor of love, and I may even enjoy the act of rewriting it more than the eventual act of publishing it.
This was my favorite essay to write. I felt myself completely letting go. It is also part of my exploration of how Stoicism fits into actual human affairs. Not Stoicism as an academic study, not as a tribe with influencers to follow, and not as a strict discipline that demands us to obey every nuance of its logic, ethics, and physics. But Stoicism as a means to codify anthropological truths.
But this was the most personally impactful essay I wrote. I believe in my bones the dog is an existential anchor. Lifetimes could be lovingly spent doing no more than contemplating the virtues of a dog and their positive impact on the human situation. This essay—to this day—still shapes the way I look at my four-legged furry beast of a best friend.
Excellent Substacks
One of the surprising benefits of writing on Substack is not the writing, but the reading. Check out the “recommendations” on my home page for some excellent writers.
Path Forward to 2026
My essays are evolving. The more I write, the more I love it. I still write with ink and paper. I do not use AI in my writing nor will I ever because I savor the slow time; I savor having some striking idea and using it for thinking material day and night; I rejoice in hurriedly writing some spontaneously articulated sentence in mind in my notebook before it vanishes and leaves me wide eyed, trying vainly to put words to the emotional residue left in its wake.
My point is this is only the beginning.
2026 is going to be epic, for the human situation only gets more interesting with time.
If you enjoy What then? and believe these ideas should reach more eyes and ears and hearts, there are a few ways you can support. I am temporarily decreasing prices for those who feel the call to double down. One is an annual membership of $30 per year. Another is a Plank Owner membership of $100 per year. A Plank Owner is a Navy expression to refer to the members of a crew on a newly commissioned ship. When ship decks were made of wood, a Plank Owner would receive a small piece of the wooden plank when the ship was decommissioned after sailing the high seas. I do not offer a piece of wood (yet!) but paying members help keep the lights on.
Thank you, and Happy New Year from What then?
There are millions of blogs and commenters, but very few like you.
Keep it up!
You did a brief note about your return to fiction a month or so back and the concept’s been rattling around my head ever since. I felt the same way this past year, and returned heavily to reading fiction. For some reason, I started to believe it was a guilty pleasure, maybe even childish, and felt that it’d be more responsible to throw down some more “informative” reading. As a result, my fiction time started to wane.
Sometime early last year, instinct refused to be further ignored. I cut out anything I was slogging through and returned to the useful (for me) groove of breathing in vivid and powerful storytelling. I learn so much more from a story than I do from an instruction manual (in most cases).
Preamble complete.
This led me to thinking that we’re all just living a fiction, with the untold number of experiences that shape our unique perspectives serving as the world builder, our ability to pay attention providing a steady hand on the pen, and our ability to feel serving to keep the ink flowing.
My stories are “true”. And so are yours. We saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt them. But if you weren’t there, and vice versa, did they really “happen”? Fiction helps us to believe in very real phenomena that we don’t have the “metrics” to prove.
It’s a common occurrence for two experiencers to tell two different stories, a phenomenon that is often used to discredit, but viewed properly could very well explain half of what makes life worth the living.
The other half would be developing the empathy to see the other side.
🙏