Three years of apathy, lassitude, and failure

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Numb at the Lodge is three years old tomorrow. This marks the end of its terrible twos, and if I’m honest, the last twelve months have not been particularly easy. In my first year on Substack, from September 2022 to 2023, I wrote forty-five posts, totalling just over 195,000 words. This is, when you think about it, quite a lot. About one Moby Dick’s worth. An average of 4,300 words, delivered practically every week. I think I was very puppyishly enthusiastic back then. I was just getting into something. Running around, tail wagging, mangling my new toy between my teeth. In my second year on Substack I calmed down a bit. For 2023-24 I produced thirty posts, with a word count just north of 150,000. This is significantly less, but still a fundamentally respectable quantity of text. If you put it in a book, it’d still be longer than Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Posts were longer, more deliberate, averaging five thousand words each. This year, meanwhile, if we exclude my India trip (which bar

Three years of apathy, lassitude, and failure If a mad dog isn't shot eventually it gets self-indulgent Sam Kriss Sep 17, 2025 72 Share Numb at the Lodge is three years old tomorrow. This marks the end of its terrible twos, and if I’m honest, the last twelve months have not been particularly easy. In my first year on Substack, from September 2022 to 2023, I wrote forty-five posts, totalling just over 195,000 words. This is, when you think about it, quite a lot. About one Moby Dick ’s worth. An average of 4,300 words, delivered practically every week. I think I was very puppyishly enthusiastic

Three years of apathy, lassitude, and failure

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