I Am Not an Academic

On the future of “Breaking Big Brother.”

I’d like to start off with a disclaimer: I’m not abandoning this book.

If I hadn’t started writing it publicly, if I hadn’t received such positive reactions to it, reinforcing my idea that it is an important project, I may have abandoned it. I also may have abandoned it if I weren’t notoriously stubborn and unwilling to admit defeat.

I intend on finishing Breaking Big Brother. However, if you’ve been following the project, you’ve probably noticed that progress has been slow. It’s been kind of painful. Therefore, if the book ever is going to get done, I need to see what’s been going wrong.

I could do this privately, but this project isn’t only mine anymore. Readers’ feedback has been instrumental in what I focus on and which way I direct my research. The downfall of this thing has been public, and it only makes sense that it should be salvaged publicly, also.

So here goes—stay tuned for a list of excuses. Here are all the reasons why I haven’t been able to work on Breaking Big Brother.

1. It’s too ‘scholarly.’

I’ve been going back and forth on this my whole life. On one hand, I loathe ‘academic’ work. On the other hand, I like the idea of it, and I’m actually not bad at it.

As an aside, this strange dichotomy made me start not one, but two graduate degrees that have threatened to smother the life out of me. I just kind of hate school (which sucks, since my latest ‘foray’ was into the world of teaching). And the problem with Breaking Big Brother (and why I’ve found it so hard to continue) is that it feels way too much like school.

Obviously it’s not exactly like school, because I’m entirely in charge of what I’m studying, and there’s no one telling me how to do it. However, tracking down quotes that I remember but can’t exactly place and rereading essays to make sure that I got every single part of them exactly right seems an awful lot like school at times, which kind of sucks the fun out of it.

It’s made me realize that these research projects are just not really my thing—which sucks, because I’m a pretty big fan of taking ‘deep dives’ into subjects. It’s kind of sad. What’s the point of learning about stuff if you can’t write about it?

That’s why I think it’s time to approach this differently. Basically, I’m going to retain all the best parts of learning without any of the drudgery. I’m going to throw out my receipts. I’ll tell you what I think, and you can verify it.

After all, I started this project with the disclaimer that I’m not an academic.

2. It’s too ‘sprawling.’

I think I missed the mark with the way I organized this project. I had this idea of starting with a biographical section and then moving on to my analysis section, but it’s kind of gotten to the point where the themes have gotten lost in the drudgery and I’m not sure what to focus on.

In other words, it’s a mess, and if I ever do plan on printing this thing up into a physical book, there’s a lot of editing that needs to be done.

Luckily there’s only two ‘biographical’ chapters left before we get to the good stuff.

3. Deadlines have been too relaxed.

I’m not the kind of person who can exist without structure. I need the deadlines. If you can forgive the much-too-flattering comparison, imagine Hunter S. Thompson hastily narrating whatever came to his head into a tape recorder scrambling to keep his deadlines. That’s me on a Monday morning scrounging together a Think Tank before work. If I do not have a deadline, I do not write. Period.

Of course, this means that if the book is going to get done, its deadlines must be strict. Breaking Big Brother will be released every Tuesday—not every Tuesday that I feel like writing it.

4. Expectations are too high.

This one is my fault, and it probably applies to some extent to every abandoned project on the planet. I keep on thinking that I need to reinvent the wheel with this one, that everything that I say needs to be profound and unique in some way. In my pursuit of perfection, I do nothing, because I rarely (i.e. never) feel like I’m in the ‘mindset’ for perfection.

In reality, the reason why I haven’t finished this book is because in the years since I read all of Orwell’s writing with the intent of writing a book about it, I’ve built it up too much in my head, to the point where now I feel like it’s some mythical thing that I’ll never be able to measure up to.

In short, my approach to this thing is breaking the ‘golden rule’ of writing (and creating art in general). You cannot control the outcome of a project. You can’t tell what the outcome of a project is going to be when you go into it. In fact, if you try, it will only disappoint you. So stop it.

Anyway. My point of this is to officially announce that, starting next week, Breaking Big Brother is back. It’s back on a regular schedule, because I want to finish this thing.

I’m probably going to approach it differently. There might be fewer quotes and citations. It’s probably just going to read like a conversation. That’s what it is, in essence—me telling you about all this stuff that I’ve read and how it’s changed the way I look at the world.

The pressure is off. It might suck, but at least if it sucks and it’s finished, we can all move on.

I hope it will still be worth reading.

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