George Saunders on What Do Now

 I highly recommend George Saunders' Story Club on Substack. Usually, it is about writing - technical stuff. However, his What to Do? A Self-Directed Pep Talk goes beyond the usual. I recommend reading the whole thing.

This is what prompted me to make this post:

Also, importantly (and this is why I’m writing about it here): my art. My writing is “reliably aligned with my deepest beliefs,” or at least I can try to make it that way (through (guess what?) revision).

This realization – though, as I’m writing it, it feels kind of obvious – has given me a strange sense of peace. We can only control what we can control. If a person is feeling, as I am, that certain larger systems (the government, the economic structure, our auto-fealty to corporate interests, the distorted way we receive information, the corporate-entertainment complex, to name just a few) are disappointingly out of alignment with one’s inner sense of right and wrong; well: a person can (and maybe should, in the name of virtue) subtly send his energies elsewhere.

sch 12/16