ON DOING ENOUGH, PROOF OF EXISTENCE, AND FEELING LIKE I COULD TALK ALL DAY
Sunday October 18 2026
Dear Sarah,
I made notes for my letter to you throughout this week, maybe even starting last weekend, and today it is Sunday and I’m not sure how it will all come together, but I’m here for it!
We are in the midst of a Venus retrograde, which means that astrologically it appears to us right now that the planet Venus is moving backward in the sky. Venus moves in eight-year cycles from our perspective on Earth, so that every eight years Venus returns to the same place in the sky. This means that the Venus retrograde we are now in has echoes of the Venus retrograde that happened in October of 2018. Hmm, did we do anything special together in October of 2018? Why yes, we did!
Venus is the planet of love, values, money, beauty, pleasure, art, and aesthetics. During a retrograde period — this one is happening in the signs of Scorpio and Libra — you might find yourself reviewing elements of your life tied to those qualities. I’ve found myself reflecting and reviewing my home and the way I live here in LA, including the arrangement of my belongings, what I own, how much money I spend (and earn), what makes a home beautiful and comfortable to me, what I want my home to be.
I’ve been thinking too, again, always, about what and how to make creatively to embody whatever is my purpose in this life. On one hand, maybe I am embodying it already. I am living in my body and I am doing creative things on my own and with other people, and I am enjoying myself, so that’s that. A recurring question we’ve circulated in these letters: Must I (we) be circulating our creativity further than those in our fairly immediate proximity? Am I doing enough?
I have been thinking a lot about the legibility of one’s creative practice. I have difficulty with the templates available to us right now. Write a newsletter, make a blog, post on social media, make videos. Of course, it is up to us to make new shapes and new templates. To some extent we expect other people’s creative practices to slot into shapes that are familiar to us; we expect to understand what they are doing with their time. I feel that it may not look clear what I am doing with my time, but it feels clear to me that I am on a path, or I am on multiple paths, and the paths will converge at some moment and the clear feelings may connect up into something that is more clearly legible to others in the external world. Or maybe not, maybe never; maybe it is possible to make a practice of illegibility. Shapes for creative work that have existed and that continue to exist, like zines, appeal more to me these days than creating any online “content,” anything meant to be shared in a purely digital form. In fact, real-life offline content feels more like the order of the day with each passing day. We know now that people’s existing creative work has been scraped, manipulated, fed into machines to blend into a mass of nonspecific nothingness. I want nothing to do with a voice that is not a voice.
I had a calm wave of feeling today (a day this week) that perhaps my writing is simply not meant for wide public consumption. I had just read an essay or a piece by Catherine Lacey via her substack. I liked reading it and I like reading Catherine Lacey both as she writes fiction and tells stories of her life on her substack. I do not feel compelled to send out my writing via substack. Perhaps I am reluctant, as ever, to tie my writing to anything that feels like a requirement. A newsletter or a regular schedule of essays becomes a requirement. Even an irregular schedule of essays becomes a requirement to me. These letters never feel like a requirement; they are a conversation, and I sometimes feel that I could talk all day. The writing that I do sets me up for talking. Sometimes the writing that I do is the talking, like these letters, or like text messages I send to friends. I want to talk about everything and if I am not talking with someone at the precise moment that a thought comes into my head, I want to write it down.
It is Monday and I am just back from Michigan. The weather here cooled off with rain and I have the windows open and am cool enough to wear a sweatshirt and wooly socks in my apartment. Later this week the highs will be back toward 90 but for now I am feeling a little autumnal. It is Sunday and sunny and warm and I am headed to an experimental performance development class. It is every day this week that I have been thinking of writing to you, making notes for this letter, and here it is now!
Much love and looking forward to your words,
Eva
Saturday, October 17, 2026
We meet here again! I feel the urge to toast with you, perhaps clang the two mugs we are likely sipping on as we each type in faraway rooms. At this point, our letter writing has established itself as one of the treasures of my life. The ancient, powerful technology of epistolary correspondence seems almost like a kind of magic to me. I am so grateful we stumbled upon it nearly a decade(!) ago. Dipping in and out of the practice as we have in recent years adds a different flavor to the stew. Rather than a discipline, it has become a ritual we come to when it calls to us.
I have felt the call recently. I am not sure I can identify and articulate exactly why, but I think it has to do with being at the precipice of major life change. Often, we don’t know when change is coming, and surely there are shifts brewing that I cannot predict. But some changes are predictable, the natural order of things. Children growing up is one of them. I have been thinking about how parenting can function as a kind of validation of existence. Not to say that I wasn’t sure I existed until I had kids, just that I think, like anyone, I am hardwired to look for evidence that I matter. Being responsible for the wellbeing of another is a kind of visceral, literal proof that your presence and your actions have an impact. You are keeping someone else alive! As children age and become more self-sufficient, that evidence gradually diminishes, or at least takes different, more subtle forms. I guess I am just realizing I had unconsciously become reliant on that nice, ready “proof of mattering” in a way that makes its slow decline manifest as a loss. I am back to being responsible for my own purpose, and I’m out of practice with that!
I have also gotten a little flabby in the muscles it takes to stay attuned to little wonders. Here, too, it is easy as a parent to slip into reliance on the delights of your kids. The other day I walked by a house where a mother and her three kids were putting up Halloween decorations all over the yard. The smallest kid, he couldn't have been much over 2 years old, turned to me, both arms raised to the sky, and said, “We are building a haunted house!” He was bursting with excitement, so much so that he couldn’t help but share it with a stranger (me). It was the kind of earnest happiness that almost hurts to observe. I glided home on its glow, thinking about how I missed the uncomplicated delight that so readily pours out of humans when they are wee. This must be one of the perks of the job for my family members who teach preschool. It was certainly a glorious aspect of parenting young kids; there were near-daily injections of this kind of vicarious joy. I leeched on it like a vampire. The thing is, I know it can also come from within. Not that I want to start excitedly telling passersby when we are putting up the Christmas tree this year (or maybe I do!), but I do want to rediscover my own delight in the little things of life that satisfy me.
What better way to work on all of this than the letters, which are a vessel for paying attention: to our own lives, to each other’s words.
Sidebar: do you ever go through phases in life that have a soundtrack? I am in one right now. Since it came out in April, I have been obsessed with Noah Kahan’s new album to an inexplicable degree. The bittersweet sounds and lyrics have felt like an IV I never want to take out. I have listened to it so much that it will surely come to define this patch of time in my life when I hear it down the line, like Tori Amos does for my early high school years or Pearl Jam for angsty middle school times. And just as I did in my adolescence for my musical obsessions, I find myself devouring interviews of the artist to learn more context behind the music. Follow our interests where they take us, I say! (Even if it means you are the middle aged woman at the stadium full of 22 year olds singing every word at the concert.)
I want to tell you about a podcast interview of a mathematician named Steven Strogatz who is grappling with the fact that today’s AI technologies can solve math problems that had previously been unsolvable. In the interview, he was brought to tears multiple times talking about the reckoning this has caused for himself and for the wider math community. On the one hand, he is excited about the potential. But on the other, and perhaps more significantly, he is grieving what it means for his purpose in life. He fears it will rob him and his peers of one of life’s great satisfactions: the pleasure of solving hard problems.
Likely because I am not an elite mathematician, I have never had the experience of being one of the few people on earth who can solve a problem of any kind. This means it does not feel new or foreign to imagine AI systems being capable of doing things I cannot do, just as there are currently all kinds of people in the world doing and solving in ways I cannot. This fact – my unexceptionalism – has never felt to me like a barrier to satisfaction when I discover something new. I am thinking of my experience in business school, where I learned simple finance concepts, like calculating net present value, and still found it gratifying to crunch the numbers myself, even though a machine could do it instantly. It is wild to imagine being so far on the frontier that the idea of machines edging out your capabilities threatens your entire sense of purpose in life. I cannot relate!
Still, it is fascinating to consider what it could or will look like as AI technologies start replacing existing human jobs. There surely are many things that some humans have gotten quite skilled at that lend themselves well to being done by systems that function by processing all human knowledge to find patterns. Things like giving a differential diagnosis, or, in my own field, assessing a fact pattern to discern if there is a plausible legal claim. It stands to reason that a machine with instantaneous access to the world’s information could do these things efficiently. I suspect the years ahead will include a gradual sorting and sifting of human jobs into activities that are not suited to that kind of data-crunching.
Strogatz got emotional talking about the intergenerational companionship of Paul Erdös and Terence Tao, how they would get together and jam on math problems when Tao was 8 and Erdos was decades older. He seemed to fear that a beautiful collaboration like that would not happen in the future if we could rely on the machines to spit out answers. But I can’t help but wonder why that would be true. Some types of puzzles may become easier to solve, but will there not always be truth to seek together?
With that, I will wrap this first letter and read the one from you that is waiting in my inbox! Cheers to another round of letters!
Yours,
Sarah