"it requires a long performance and there is nothing, by definition, between the acts"

When you get to know someone intimately and keep knowing them for several years, you’re sometimes fortunate enough to have a disquieting realization. The realization is: This is only the beginning. Suddenly you are staring down the barrel of a very long stretch of unknown time. The same thing might happen if you write, er, a Substack about emotions and interpersonal relationships. One day you will realize that you’ve been doing this for over three years, and there’s really a lot more you could be doing with it. You might have a lot of ideas. And this sense of possibility, of all the future directions your work could go, might inspire joy. It might also inspire this sense of: oh God, I have to keep going for how long? And then you look at someone who’s been doing it for twenty years and you want to beg them for advice but you do not. In the same way that people who’ve been married for twenty years tend to give out pithy aphorisms when asked what’s the secret, there are certainly types o

When you get to know someone intimately and keep knowing them for several years, you’re sometimes fortunate enough to have a disquieting realization. The realization is: This is only the beginning. Suddenly you are staring down the barrel of a very long stretch of unknown time. The same thing might happen if you write, er, a Substack about emotions and interpersonal relationships. One day you will realize that you’ve been doing this for over three years, and there’s really a lot more you could be doing with it. You might have a lot of ideas. And this sense of possibility, of all the future dir