Maybe being healthy is actually bad for you (ambition-wise) (Monthly update #9)

Also: Spike Lee; roller skating; in memoriam of my podcast

I’m starting to wonder if getting in shape was a mistake.

I’ve been doing pretty well with my habits lately: I lift weights four days a week and try to do some cardio on the weekends. Haven’t touched alcohol or junk food in years, get plenty of sleep, ignore the screaming nonsense on social media and the news. And it’s all worked amazingly well—I feel better at almost-forty than I did at any previous point in my life, and not just physically. I used to deal frequently with anxiety and depression; now I just sorta feel great, all the time.

Which sounds great! Except it seems to have killed whatever ambition I had.

I dunno, y’all. For most of my adult years, I’d have frequent moments of “Why am I so miserable? I’m sure it will go away when I achieve professional and creative success!” But now that I’ve figured out that I was miserable mainly because I ate nothing but junk, never exercised, and constantly filled my brain with terrible/stupid things I was powerless to change,¹ it’s hard to remember what was motivating me to try to be the next Stephen King or Dave Barry or C. S. Lewis or whatever the hell it is I’m going for here.

There was a time when I saw other writers being successful (“I just signed a big book deal!” “I was just published by the New York Freaking Times™️!”) and immediately thought, “That could have been me! Why wasn’t that me???” These days, though, I mostly just think, “Good for them; I think I’ll go roller skating.” That probably makes me a less awful person, but it doesn’t make me a particularly productive writer.

I mean, it could be other things. It’s hard to crave the respect of your peers if you’ve lived through the last ten years and realized there’s nothing particularly valuable about said peers’ respect. And once you’ve realized that there’s no money in publishing, it’s hard to get motivated to earn all that non-money. Maybe it’s time to get a real (full-time) job, but who would have me? Writing is one of the few things I’m good at, and it’s not like my other skills are significantly more lucrative.

Meanwhile, after a year of effort, I’m about seventy percent done with the third (and, I pray, final) draft of my third novel, and my second novel (which has been complete since freaking 2018) is no closer to being published. But I suppose I should keep plugging away, because what else can I do? Maybe it’s time to open a beer and a bag of Cheetos and start hating myself again.

Nah, I’mma go roller skating. 🕹🌙🧸

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Poll of the moment

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Two years ago: I spent the last three years asking people why they’d changed their minds. Here are the ten wildest things they told me.

The further I get from this show, the more regrettable I find the cover art

This feels like a million years ago now, but from 2019 to 2022, I hosted what might have been the most earnest thing of my career: a podcast called Changed My Mind with Luke T. Harrington. (It was the Trump years; a lot of us were taking ill-advised detours into sincerity.) It was an interview show where I’d talk to people—everyone from friends to strangers to (minor) celebrities—about one thing they’d changed their minds about, and what sort of journey they’d taken to get there.

After I brought the series to a close, I published this capstone piece highlighting my ten favorite episodes. I don’t know if the show still holds up, but you can judge for yourself:

In the summer of 2019, I was in a dark place. My writing career was in the toilet, and so were American politics and culture. I couldn’t do much about the first thing, but I was confident I could solve the second, the only way an upper-middle-class white guy knows how: by starting a podcast.

So I did that.

At the time, the chattering classes were looking for an easy explanation for the problems the nation was facing, and one phenomenon they had latched onto was “The Backfire Effect”—the tendency people (allegedly) have to dig in their heels and refuse to change their minds, even when confronted with clear evidence they’re wrong. I thought the Backfire Effect was nonsense, though: we all know people who’ve changed their minds about something, and I wanted to know what led them to do so…. (Read more here!) 🕹🌙🧸

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⬅️ In case you missed it: Everything I’ve ever recommended here, ranked (definitively)

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Stuff I’ve been enjoying lately

Should I be ashamed to admit that I’m just now learning to appreciate the films of Spike Lee?

My introduction to the guy was his 2000 film Bamboozled, which…I dunno, I guess it was fine, but for the whole runtime, all I could think was “This is just The Producers, if The Producers wasn’t funny and stopped every few minutes to remind you how Important™️ it was.” I didn’t even disagree with the message (“Did you know that media depictions of black people are often demeaning and exploitative???”) so much as I thought the movie was a heavy-handed and ineffective way to make it. I disliked it enough that it put me off of Lee for a while.

Lately, though, I’ve been getting around to some of his earlier work and realizing that he absolutely deserves his place in the film pantheon. Malcolm X is a deeply felt portrait of one of the more misunderstood Civil Rights leaders, along with possibly Denzel Washington’s best-ever performance (which is, of course, saying something)², but the Lee film that’s left the biggest impression on me so far is 1989’s Do the Right Thing.

Do the Right Thing, I’d always heard, is a movie about race riot. While that’s true, the film makes the sage choice of taking its time to build up to the climactic chaos, which happens in the last fifteen minutes of the two-hour film. In the first hour-forty-five, we get to know every one of the characters in its Brooklyn neighborhood setting, from the black residents to the Italian-American guys running the pizzeria, to the Korean immigrants who own the bodega.

Do the Right Thing turns out to be a masterclass in storytelling, humanizing every one of its characters from the first frame—by the time the riot erupts, you know exactly why all of them are making the choices they are. You’ve seen their lives, their loves, their values, their frustrations. Each of them is trying his damnedest to (wait for it) do the right thing, and it still all ends in a gaping, tragic wound.

It’s an unforgettable viewing experience. If you haven’t gotten around to it, you should. 🕹🌙🧸

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Reminder: By popular demand, I’ve debuted a new monthly feature, Ask a church receptionist, where I (a real, honest-to-God church receptionist who literally wrote the book on the Bible) answer all the questions you were afraid to ask about the Bible, Christianity, and everything else. Send any and all questions to luke.t.harrington@gmail.com, or just click the button below:

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Favorite comment of the month

If you want further reason to be amazed that The Invisible Man was so good, consider that its writer/director was also the co-creator of Saw. —Thadd 🕹🌙🧸

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I like free books and I cannot lie

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Congrats to last month’s winners, tlbeslaughter and elianatuttle! (If you are one of those people, please reach out to me! I’ve emailed you twice to no response!) I’ll run the next drawing Jul. 1! 🕹🌙🧸

1. I have no excuse, by the way, for taking ALMOST FORTY YEARS to figure this out

2. That said, I will never forgive Max for removing it from their service the moment Black History Month ended. It’s partly my fault for watching most movies in 45–60-minute chunks while I lift weights, but I had to rent the movie from Prime Video just to watch its last half-hour. They could have at least warned me they were about to take it down. 🤬