The End

What I learned writing 31 essays in 31 days.

7 min readOct 2, 2024

The author reflects on the last month of writing, shares what he learned, and sails off into the sunset. Goodbye, everyone.

On May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush addressed the nation atop the USS Abraham Lincoln, announcing the end of major combat operations in Iraq. Directly behind him, a banner with a backdrop of the American flag declared “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” in bright, bold WordArt.

Today, my fellow Americans, I am proud to announce that August is over, and I have written 31 essays in 31 days. I can think of no better parallel to the end of shitstack than the “conclusion” of my country’s escapades in the Middle East.

First, a retrospective is in order.

August in Review

When I started this daily publication, I wanted each essay to be able to stand on its own, despite having to write a new one each day. I wanted these to be real essays rather than banal observations like, “Today, I ate a blueberry.” Though they may very well be banal, I hope I succeeded in at least writing essays that are as real as I could make them.

So, what did I write about in August?

Topics & Themes

Of the 31 essays, 23 could broadly be categorized as “philosophy,” five as “comedy,” and three as “memoir.”
The philosophy essays divide into two segments. The first group focuses on practical advice about how to live a better life, examining common problems while tying in my own experiences and the thoughts of famous philosophers. The essays in the second subset are about the arts, primarily standup,¹ and concern topics like perfectionism, the relationship between performer and audience, and whether it’s possible for an artist to be authentic.
The comedy essays are satirical how-to guides and spoofs on the news. Writing comedy in a short period of time is very difficult, so having five essays here is relative success. Often, I would think of new jokes after these essays were published and secretly edit them offline.
Three essays are memoir, recalling specific moments in that day. These are often shorter essays,² and I specifically (tried to) avoid topics like blueberries.

Statistics

I wrote a little over 34,300 words, which is about 114 pages. For comparison, one of my favorite books, The Stranger by Albert Camus is 153 pages.³ If you read every post this month, you almost read half a novel.⁴ If I continued writing an essay everyday in August, it would make for a very strange and fragmented self-help book.
Each essay averaged over 1,100 words. When I started the month, my hope was that each essay could reach 500 words, but I kept choosing topics like “What is art?” and “Who is God?”
The shortest essay was Growing Apart, which is poem, rather than an essay. At 506 words, it explores friendships fading as we age. For a poem, it’s fairly long, and for an essay, it’s fairly short. One might describe it as “stylized prose.”
The longest essay is the penultimate one, On Separating the Art and the Artist, which deals with the most controversial subject in this blog (so far). More words were needed to add context and clarify my positions so I wouldn’t accidentally cancel myself.⁵ The word count was 1,666 words, which is fitting.
My favorite essay was perhaps Welcome to the Desert of the Real, which discusses how our perception of the world tends to be narrow-minded even though reality is more open than we realize. I like this essay because it examines an under-explored area, has several interesting turns of phrase,⁶ and puts pen to paper on an important realization of mine.⁷

What I Learned in Boating School Is…

This works.

The daily ritual, the deadline, and the audience pushed me to produce more writing in a concentrated space of time than in any other period of my life. Find what’s important to you, prioritize it with a system of accountability, and see what happens.

Ideas are the rewards of work.

In the first essay, I asserted that “creativity is a flywheel,” but wasn’t sure if it was true. Throughout the month, I was never far from an idea to write about,⁸ and if I wanted to continue wrtiting tomorrow, I could extract a new idea from my mind tonight. As the Matthew principle states, “To those who have everything, more will be given. To those who have nothing, everything will be taken.”

This is really hard.

Halfway through, I wondered if I would be able to finish. Spending four hours a night on essay writing is a big commitment. In Poland, I wrote the body of the essays the night before and added finishing touches on the morning of the due date. In New York, I wrote from 8pm-12am most nights and took notes during the day. “It doesn’t get easier. You get better,” played in my head often. Even 29 days in, I felt like I could barely finish these essays.
Writing reminded me of running in that even though you want to quit, you move forward by taking it one stride at a time.⁹

But the sacrifice is worth it.

This month, I left parties early, didn’t exercise, and wrote on dates. I traded short-term pleasures for lasting rewards in the form of work I can be proud of in the future. The schedule isn’t sustainable, but the principle is.

Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.
— Muhammad Ali

Act on the idea.

The best time to jot down an idea is now. The best time to write is now. The best time to edit is now. Now is always the right time.

Confront your limitations.

Every day, I had to kill the idea in my head and see it for what it was on the page. It never got easier, but doing it transformed those ideas into something real, rather than something ethereal.

Where do we go from here?

After the chaos of publishing daily, I want to explore longer format essays with softer timelines. When publishing on such a fast cadence, it’s impossible to make anything “perfect,” even though the sheer output is high. I’d like to spend more time editing to refine my craft. In the end, nobody remembers you for writing the most words. They remember you for the best words you wrote.

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In one of Joe Rogan’s podcasts, he describes the fear of putting out a comedy special and thinking up a new tag to joke after the special has already been released. This happened to me every day. After each essay, a new thought would occur to me, I’d find a better way to phrase something, or fix a typo. Especially with the comedy essays, you need time to play with a joke and tweak it. I want to strike a balance of giving myself more time while holding myself accountable.

In the next few days, I’ll do some standup, paint, meditate, and exercise. It’s been a while. I’m not sure if I’ll write tomorrow. The possibilities of life are open.

In the future, I hope to look back on shitstack¹⁰ as a time capsule of what I was thinking about in August 2022. Though I seldom wrote about my day-to-day life, it was a crazy month, and I’m happy to have finished this challenge in one piece.

Memorable moments included: staying up till 5am to get ahead of the next essay, typing topic notes on my phone while visiting the mountains in southern Poland and while walking around Oslo, writing an essay on the airplane back from Europe, planning writing in and around two weddings and two birthdays, publishing an essay in the Jamaica subway station as the humid air dripped around me, writing outside as the sun set in Flatiron and in Madison Square Park, writing on a small nightstand for two weeks in an apartment full of boxes, constantly rushing against the 11:59pm deadline, and often being left wondering, “Who writes these?”

Goodbye 👋

I hope you enjoyed these essays. I hope they made you laugh, made you cry, made you think, challenged you, sparked a smile when you were down, gave you a useful piece of advice when you needed it, and opened your perspective, if just a little bit.

It means the world to me that you took this journey with me.

Goodbyes can be hard, and this is goodbye.

Thank you so much for reading.

Because standup is the one I know best (if it’s an art at all).
Like jokes, memoir is also hard to write.
Not to compare shitstack to one of the greatest books ever written, but why not?
This one probably made you dumber.
Awaiting outcomes. Never say never.
If I do say so myself.
In the future, I’ll edit this essay to include some of my favorite quotes of the month.
But had a few close calls at 9pm when I abruptly switched topics.
Like an athlete, I developed superstitions this month. (Perhaps it’s the routine of the same cadence every single day). I would never talk about a piece before writing it because in The Creative Process: A How-To Guide, I joked about premature sharing. I also usually tried to tee up the topic in advance, hoping that I could spend time subconsciously thinking about it throughout the day.
Hopefully without cringing.