Hardihood Books Newsletter 34
March, 2024
Greetings.
Welcome to the March edition of the Hardihood Books Newsletter. Thank you for supporting my work. I hope your spring is off to a good start.
Housekeeping:
No announcements at the moment.
Next Month and Beyond:
Full steam ahead.
Something Real:
I’m taking this newsletter out from behind the paywall, because I want what I have to say here to be publicly available. It will be part of something I’m building towards, which will hopefully give you a better idea of what Hardihood Books is all about. Next month, my newsletter will also be outside the paywall for this same reason. The essay I wrote this past month comparing Game of Thrones and The Wheel of Time is also part of this project, as have other things which I have written. In some sense, most of what I have written before has a role to play in building towards this project. Please forward and share this newsletter, as I’d like it to be read as widely as possible.
Recently, I read an article on book culture, specifically the growing divide between the people who read books (we used to call them readers) and the people who just pretend to read books for social media. Of course, a similar divide exists in many areas of life, between the people who do a thing and the people who want other people to think they do the thing (somewhere in the middle, you might have the people who want to be seen doing it – they do actually do the thing, but they are performing and they do the thing less effectively and less frequently than the people who just focus on doing it).
I see this every day in my work as a trainer. Some people look like they exercise. Some people film themselves “exercising.” And some people exercise. While there’s certainly overlap, the people who exercise the most don’t always look like they exercise (because at a certain point, more exercise will be negatively correlated with aesthetic appearance). I am constantly surprised at how much people are fooled (in the gym, and everywhere in life) by the difference between the people who pretend to do a thing and the people who do it. I have always hated fakery and I have always been attracted to the people who are actually doing things. Usually, the difference is so transparently obvious to any intelligent person who spends more than five minutes doing some research that I wonder whether people just want to be fooled.
I restacked (the Substack version of retweeting) a line from the author (Kat Rosenfeld), “The books that aren’t written according to [appearances, rather than what is actually in the book] are quickly becoming the exception,” and added that these were the only books I aspire to write and the only kind that matter. I truly believe that appearances matter very little, and only for a short period of time, and that public sentiment matters even less, because people in large groups are so easily fooled (whereas even relatively unintelligent people can be smart when they are thinking as individuals). Time and competition wear down all things and both are unkind to bubbles of hype. That which is virally popular momentarily will be forgotten. The best test of something is how long it survives, and the books which survive the longest are those with weight and substance and importance. Statistically speaking, that which is recent or new is less likely to survive than that which is old (i.e., that which has already proven its survivability), and therefore I am confident that in the long run, only books of substance will matter.
Many times, I have said that one of the reasons I started Hardihood Books was that I wanted to do something real. What do I mean by that? I mean the opposite of social media fakery (such as designing a perfect bookshelf filled with unread books to background your Instagram profile picture). I mean that I want to write on Substack because I want to write, and that I believe in doing the thing (i.e., writing), and that I could care less whether I have the trappings of the thing. I’ll write in literally any room I can stand up in, as long as there is a place to rest my laptop (and over the years, I’ve learned to be creative with boxes propped on nightstands in Airbnbs and the like).
I don’t believe there is any reason to do something halfheartedly, especially not to impress your social media followers. Either do it, or don’t waste your time bothering at all. My goal with Hardihood Books is to build a platform for my own work and for the work of other writers (i.e., people who write, not people who pretend to write), with an eye towards growing an audience of readers (i.e., the people who read, not the people who pretend to read). Luckily, on Substack, unlike the rest of the internet, there are plenty of both. I’ve placed a bet that there are other people out there like me: people who hate fakery and who crave substance and who will rally around something real. I’ve seen that happen before in my life, and I’ve seen that standing for something draws people far better than being welcoming to all but standing for nothing. Moreover, I believe that many people are hungry for something real and substantive, and they want to find people who are accomplishing things (rather than putting on a show). I believe the coming years will be a time of great opportunity for those who demonstrate they have substance.
Since I launched this Substack, I have always posted six times per month (or more) every month (not including this newsletter), even when I haven’t had many readers. I have written hundreds of thousands of words beyond what appears on Hardihood Books. Some of that will someday make its way to readers. Writing, to me, is like running: it’s what I do, whether or not people know about it, whether or not they ever find out about it, whether or not they believe I do it. I will continue and would continue if nobody read my work. If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is around to hear it, and the opinion of the whole world is that it never fell, it still made a sound.
Of course, this requires that one believe in reality and objective truth, and that one rejects the idea that narrative can alter what is real. I do. All the evidence in the world points in the direction of my being right. Reading a book matters more than posting about reading a book (that you didn’t read).
What more can I say? If anywhere on the internet has a claim to being real, it is Substack. It is certainly not any social media platform. The people who are here, by and large, are the kinds of people who value substance over appearance and whose opinions matter more than those who don’t. Hence, why I write here.
In another life, I would have been quite content with not being seen. I don’t have to write publicly. I rather like privacy and I rather hate having eyes on me. But I believe it is necessary for people like me, who believe in doing real things, who could care less about looking the part, to do our part, to demonstrate to wide audiences that there are still men and women of substance, who read books for the sake of reading books, who write books for the sake of writing books, who run or lift weights or swim for the sake of those activities, who do the work they have been called to do for the sake of the work itself. I hope I can build a wide audience of people who are hungry for something real, because I believe people need to see that it’s still possible, and that it will always be possible, to do something real.
“Does anybody read books anymore?”
Of course. If you’re reading this, you probably do.
In Closing:
Thank You and Until Next Month,
Ben Connelly