The nonsense I write

I'll be on sabbatical until August 2027 and using the time to explore some deeply profound questions ... including why I spend so much time writing stuff so few people want to read!

Image: Midjourney

OK, so I’m being a little tongue in cheek with this newsletter’s title. But as I embark on a sabbatical for the coming academic year, I’ve been thinking quite hard about why I write this Substack.

Between now and August 2027 I’ll be putting aside the daily hustle of life as a university professor as I take time to decompress, to think, and to explore new ideas and possibilities.

It’s one of those privileges of being a tenured professor that I haven’t taken advantage of before. But I’m at that point in my career where, working flat out seven days a week while feeling guilty that it’s never enough, has made me realize that it’s time for a bit of a reset.

Of course, the idea of a sabbatical isn’t just to take a break.¹ Rather, the aim is to recharge your intellectual batteries so that you come back refreshed and raring to go (assuming you haven’t found somewhere else you’d rather be in the meantime).

And so that’s what I’ll be doing.

The plan is to use the time to explore emerging thinking and understanding around the intersection of AI, society, and the future we’re creating (or stumbling toward).² But I’ll also be using it to do a bit of soul searching around my public writing.

I’ve been writing for public audiences for nearly twenty years now. It started with an invitation to write a weekly blog on nanotechnology back in 2007, and has since become central to my conviction that the work I do as an academic should be as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. Not as an add-on to my research and scholarship, but as something that’s integral to how I explore, test, and share new ideas and insights.

In 2023 I made the decision to channel these efforts through the Future of Being Human Substack rather than higher-prestige platforms.³ It was a risky move, but one that I felt worth committing to as it allowed me the freedom and flexibility to combine my writing with my thinking, while connecting directly with my readers.

Whether it’s paid off, I don’t know — and this is something that the sabbatical will give me a chance to look at more closely.

Without a doubt, combining my thinking and research with the discipline of writing weekly public articles has allowed me to grapple with new ideas and insights in ways that would have been hard to do otherwise — especially given the speed with which things are changing around transformative technologies like AI. And it has allowed me to expand the reach and relevance of my work and that of others — quite considerably at times.

And yet, there have been distinct downsides to this.

Most of my colleagues do not read what I write, or recognize it as having substantive value and relevance — and I know this is just how these things go as everyone’s busy, but it still stings. Many people assume I’m just a commentator, and not an established expert in my field who uses public writing as my medium of choice. And some assume that what I do is simply an ego trip, and not something they should be encouraging (and maybe it is — although I hope it isn’t).⁴

This is all OK — it’s the cost of the decision I made to put public good before academic prestige, and something I am comfortable with.

But it’s only OK if there really is public good that comes from my writing.

And this is what I’m not so sure about.

By academic standards, my Substack posts do alright. But “academically alright” is a pitifully low bar. In reality, they rarely make much of a dent on how most people are grappling with the issues I write about. And in spite of the encouragement I do receive (and I deeply value this), I struggle each week to reconcile the time and effort spent with how little traction I get — at least in how this is reflected in the number of people reading and sharing what I write.

And here, my worry is that what I write has no real value to those who might read it. Not because it doesn’t have intrinsic worth (I know my stuff), but because it makes no sense to them.

In effect, my concern is that they don’t see why it might be relevant to them, or useful, or advantageous in other ways. And because of this, they see no sense in investing time in it.

In other words, to them it’s nonsense — literally making no sense. Hence the title of this piece.

I hope this isn’t the case.

And yet, to write without care for your readers is a very academic trap to fall into. That modality where it’s publishing the thing that counts, not the impact the thing has.

And that’s a trap I’d rather avoid.

And so, as well as taking time this coming year to rethink and reset my academic work, I’ll also be taking the time to think carefully about why I write for a public audience, who I’m writing for, what I am hoping to achieve, and why it matters.

Of course, that’s not going to stop me posting the occasional piece here as the muse strikes — this is a sabbatical, not rehab!

But I will, hopefully, be more mindful as I do, of the “nonsense” I write.

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Postscript
In my haste to press “publish” I neglected to add that I deeply value the many subscribers and readers who do read what I write. Thank you!

1. I was at an event a few weeks ago where our University President, Michael Crow, exclaimed that it was inconceivable to most Americans why academics thought they had the right to bugger off on full pay (my words, not his) while students are struggling to pay their tuition fees. And he had a point — which made our conversation afterward just a little awkward when I admitted that I’m doing the very thing he’d just derided! The reality though is that, for many academics, the opportunity to reset and refresh that a sabbatical gives them allows them to get out of repetitive and stale ruts, and to be far more effective at what they do as a result. And it’s not quite on full pay — I’ll be on 3/5 pay this coming year and funding my own sabbatical-related travel. But it is, without doubt, a privilege, and one that needs to be taken seriously.

2. I’ll be traveling to different places to sit down with interesting people and have interesting conversations with them about interesting and emerging ideas — ideally over good coffees.

3. I have the advantage of having a pretty solid academic profile based on conventional measures such as H-index, publications, and citations, and so can afford to spend time focusing on platforms that come with lower academic prestige but higher public relevance. For many years I focused on outlets like Slate, The Conversation, and the occasional piece in places like The Washington Post. But these come at an editorial price, and you end up compromising content for clicks if you’re not careful. In contrast, moving to Substack offered the opportunity of full editorial control, albeit with more effort needed to build an audience.

4. I was called out by a colleague in a faculty meeting a couple of years ago for being a self-centered egotist who’s stuck in my ivory tower, so maybe there’s also some self-reflection needed here.