I write a lot. Professionally, I am something of a information trash compactor. I ingest information - from books, from journal articles, from judicial judgements, from legislation, from twitter threads, from satellite imagery and google street view. I then filter, distil, synthesise, analyse and summarise that information into something that is useful to people who don’t have the time or expertise to do the initial research.
And then, when the working day is done, I go home and do the exact same thing for Greater Canberra. I pour over planning rules, zoning maps, histories, apartment design guides, consultation reports. I then turn that into information into tweets, op-eds, radio interviews, blog posts, explainers.
There is hardly a moment of my waking life where I’m not writing something, or thinking about how I would write something. If I’ve zoned out in a conversation, there’s a good chance that there’s a draft twitter thread bouncing around my skull. Writing is, in a very real way, how I process and internalise the world.
If what you eat is what you are, then what you write is what you think. And for the past few years, I’ve written nearly exclusively on policy. What would be good for society to do? What is legal, what is not? What is the causal relationship between two variables? What is objectively true?
And I don’t regret any of this. Writing and thinking on public problems is both my vocation and my duty as a citizen in a democracy. But to do so exclusively creates a certain malady of the soul. What do I want? What do I find beautiful, what brings me joy? What do I feel? What is moral - not for society, but for myself? How do I make my own peace with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and the inherently arbitrary and baffling nature of human existence?
To neglect these question invites madness, that reduction of a human being to a set of political beliefs and tribal allegiances, whose inner life is nothing more than a reflection of political zeitgeist. It’s an existence where your sense of self becomes contingent on others - on political victory or defeat, on the approval of others, on the power structures and fabric of culture into which we were born.
To view oneself and others purely through this lens lies unhappiness. Sentience and individuality are wonderful gifts, to be explored and used to their full. Humans are more complex than our brain likes to deal with - bundles of kindness and thoughtless cruelty, passion and incurious indifference, petty malice and altruistic love. Choosing to recognise both - that we’re all imperfect and cracked in our own unique way - is cognitively hard work. But we’re better for it, more forgiving of ourselves and others when we do.
And while as a society we certainly shouldn’t be blind to the consequences of race, class, and prevailing systems of power, privilege and oppression, I’ve always found that change is driven by those whose sense of self is not dependent on it.
Where else could the courage to be different come from? Only those secure enough in themselves and their own beliefs to cheerfully weather ostracism could ever hope to be. The first voice is always alone.
A Journey
Tomorrow, I begin a journey to the other side of the world. That process is a lot less dramatic (and arduous) than in centuries past, since I am effectively just hopping on a plane to Europe for about a day of flight time.
Nothing that I haven’t done before, or many others in the advanced economies haven’t done before. Neither am I going for a particularly long time - about three and a half weeks before I return to Australia.
But the convenience and briefness of modern travel doesn’t detract from its wonder. I will meet new people, breathe cities I’ve never been to, feel the fabric of millions of lives (past and present) in new places and new experiences. My journey will be like many others, but will be completely and utterly unique to me.
And I want to share it with you. Except for the autobiography, there is perhaps no older form of personal1 literature than the travelogue.2 Writing is a way of immortalising the fundamentally fleeting nature of the journey, and I never feel itchier for a keyboard than when I am furthest away from my own.
I hope you bear with me along the way.
First up - the Bag.
‘personal’ here meaning something other than writing for the purposes of the functioning of the state (which includes various early religious texts and hymns).
The Diary of Merer, the world’s oldest papyrus text’s most intact tracts recount his journeys shipping limestone blocks up and down the Nile at some point during the reign of Pharaoh Khufu in 2589–2566 BCE. This is pretty borderline over whether this is truly a “private” diary, since it was also the logbook of a clerk, but I’ll take it.