I'm outrageously optimistic about the future
Week one of my 100 day project, heres what its done to my view of the world.
last week I wrote about the 100-Hour Passion Project; one hour a day, all summer, dedicated to the skill you’ve always meant to build. I’ll be sharing a weekly update here: the creation log, the honest account of how it’s going, and whatever it has me thinking about. This is week one.
I want to tell you about the week I just had, not because it was dramatic or because anything particularly remarkable happened, but because something quietly shifted in me.
Day one I read for four hours. Jet-lagged and slightly braindead and honestly just grateful to be still, and I felt my mind doing this slow, satisfying thing where it unknotted itself and became calm and creative at the same time, which is a combination I forget exists when I’m not actively protecting the conditions for it.
Day two I drew all day, sat in the art gallery, cooked a nice meal, and fell into a kind of deep creative quiet where I realized I was thinking in prose, like my internal monologue had shifted registers and everything felt a little more intentional and a little more observed. I wrote a poem that evening and the emotions just poured into it, surprising my intention, proof that they were words waiting to be written.
Day three I woke up with words flowing before I was fully conscious, which is my favourite way to start a day and happens so rarely that I always feel slightly chosen when it does. I watched the drawing from the day before improving in real time and felt that quiet specific satisfaction of visible progress, a kind that didn’t require anyone else to notice.
Day four I read and I ran, and when I was moving my body something came alive in me that I can only describe as gratitude so physical it made me want to skip and twirl and tell someone, anyone, about it. I pushed myself hard and I wanted more.
Day five I worked at the bakery, practiced my French in every conversation I could, drew for three hours, and felt this pull towards people, towards their stories, towards asking the next question and then the one after that.
Day six I wrote in the morning, made bone broth, read, drew, cooked, and felt something I can only describe as action-oriented in the best possible way, like I had something to give and I was figuring out how to give it properly and generously.
Day seven I wandered the flower market and read and wrote and felt, for the first time in a while, genuinely strong. Like I had located something I’d been slightly misplacing.
Seven days. Some of it slow, some of it boring in exactly the way I promised it would be, the early stages of getting good at anything have that texture of mild frustration you just have to sit inside and keep going anyway. But there was something underneath all of it that I haven’t felt in a while. The sense that the hours were mine. That I was filling them with something I chose. That I was building something real out of what would otherwise just be time passing.
And that feeling does something to the way you see everything else.
Allow me to indulge myself for a moment, because I’ve been reading articles all week that are helping me understand why this is hitting me as hard as it is, and I think it’s become something bigger than a personal project.
I keep thinking about the brilliant people of the world, the ones who are genuinely fascinating to be around, and what they tend to have in common is that they touch so many different areas and go very deep on a few. It makes their knowledge expansive and their comprehension expansive and it makes them the kind of person you leave a conversation with feeling like you understand the world a little differently than when you walked in. Creativity and curiosity are the engine of that, being curious about the world, about other people, about ourselves, and actually doing something with that curiosity rather than letting it get swallowed by the scroll.
Which brings me to the thing I cannot stop thinking about.
There is so much doomerism right now about what AI means for work and purpose and identity, and I want to say clearly that I don’t share it, not even slightly, and here’s why. The doomerism comes from looking at what we might lose and I think it fundamentally misreads what we’re building towards. We could see the future the way ET sees it, a world that makes us lazy and disconnected and robotic, outsourcing our thinking and our creating and our connecting until we’re just passengers in our own lives. That’s one version. But there’s another version and it’s the one I keep returning to, the one where all the functions that currently eat our hours — the maintenance, the administration, the execution of a thousand necessary but uninspiring things — simply get handled, and what’s left is us. Our creativity. Our communities. Our capacity to go deep on the things that make us interesting and alive and worth knowing.
Maybe we end up more like action figures, accumulating skills and levelling up every time we learn a new one, each one expanding what we’re capable of and who we are. Or maybe something even older reasserts itself, apprenticeships, craftsmanship, the kind of structural relationship to knowledge and making that we’ve spent a long time moving away from and secretly miss. Maybe once the functions that maintain society are taken care of, the cleaning and the maintenance and the innovation, what’s left is to create and enjoy the art that comes in the meantime. To exist in nature again. To sing and dance and hold each other close and experience the full beautiful complexity of being human in a community of other humans.
The societal problems, the war and famine and inequality, those exist because of scarcity and competition and the crushing weight of unmet needs. In a world of abundance, those pressures change. That doesn’t mean there won’t be conflict, we’re human and sometimes we simply can’t help ourselves, but it returns to the tribal level, the community level, which is a scale we actually know how to navigate.
Imagine that world with me. The positive one, the one of abundance and creativity and people who are deeply, specifically, gloriously themselves. I believe wholeheartedly it is the future we will create. And I think the 100-Hour Passion Project is, in its small and personal and entirely unglamorous way, exactly the right practice for it. We are building towards something, not away from something else. Towards more individual freedom, closer connection to each other, better paths to self-discovery, and a continuous loop of learning which, if you ask me, is what meaning actually is.
Maybe what's coming looks like more of this. More people learning to sketch so they can draw the faces they want to remember. More people learning to cook because gathering around a table is one of the most human things we do and food is the oldest language for love. More people learning the guitar and the languages and the old stories and the philosophy of people who thought harder about existence than most of us have had the time to.
Maybe we get to be more human, not less. Maybe we get to exist inside our communities and our creativity and our relationships with a depth that the current structure of our lives doesn't always make room for.
I’m building towards being someone who can sketch a new face to remember it, who can play guitar around a campfire and gather people to it, who can hold a real conversation in French with the wonderful souls in this village, who knows the greatest minds and stories and can carry them into every room, who writes in ways that don’t just resonate but revive.
Seven days in. Ninety three to go.
And I am, without any reservation, outrageously optimistic about what comes next.
Love,
HM
Love this! More please!