Post-Inkhaven Post
A retrospective
(Skip if you aren’t interested in Inkhaven chatter)
Inkhaven is over. I am sad.
Surprisingly: I didn’t actually find hitting the writing that hard. Lots of people, maybe the majority of the cohort, were working right up to midnight, and didn’t have and extra posts in the bank for days when they didn’t want to write.
It’s quite possible that their posts were just far better than mine, and that’s certainly the case for a lot of them. But I think a lot of people at Inkhaven were quite ADHD-brained and just started writing very late in the day. Write early!
I also didn’t find it hard to think of what to write. I came in with a few drafts and a bunch of ideas, but most of what I wrote were ideas I had at Inkhaven. Gwern gave a morsel of advice in the opening session: people say interesting things all the time which they aren’t going to do anything with. Don’t be lazy – pick up those crumbs and turn them into something.
My goal was only partly to write. There were lots of other things I wanted to get out of Inkhaven beyond publishing: making friends, finding a tribe, testing out the Bay Area for a potential move there, seeing how much being in a community was regulating for me. In some ways the writing was a head fake: yes, I have always wanted to write more, but I also wanted these other things which would be very hard to get by just showing up at SFO and trying to pull them out of thin air. The shared goal we pulling together on was what bound us together, made the whole thing an adventure.
I am mostly proud of the things I wrote. One of them was low quality (I made a point of posting eight times on one day to beat Claire’s record but the last one wasn’t great), most of them were good, some of them were excellent. I’ll put my highlights below.
I think the deadline is super motivating for some people, and so they ended up not starting writing until later in the day and going right up to the wire. Too dicey for me.
Being around a group of interesting, smart and weird people did wonders for me. I was the happiest I’ve been in a long time. I met some people I hope to keep as friends for good, but I can already feel those connections vanishing as people scatter to the wind.
The girlfriend of a resident came along a couple of days after we finished. She said the campus was a bit soulless. The odd way it’s decorated, weird rationalist-coded artwork (think Wanderer above the Sea of Fog but with a futuristic post-singularity scenescape in the background), astroturf everywhere. It’s a weird place for sure. But when she visited it was completely deserted, all the Inkhaven residents gone save for a few stragglers, stacks of empty pizza boxes and stray cans left everywhere from a party the night before. I think she would have felt differently if she’d seen it on a sunny day, full of people milling about and chatting and writing. It was terribly sad, seeing the place empty of the people who had made it a home.
I stayed in a room just across from the kitchen. My morning routine became cemented after about a week: wake up, put on my flip flops, walk the twenty paces to the kitchen, grab a filter coffee from the giant urn and talk to whoever was up. Usually it was the same little crew. And then shower and get dressed, maybe have some breakfast, and head to Glass Hall, the semi-secret coworking space with velux windows and a couple of sofas, on one of which I would always find Alec reclining, working on his piece.
By the sounds of it we were a bit less uptight than Inkhaven 1. The drinking didn’t start in earnest until the second week, but the flow increased steadily up to the end (I managed to restrain myself and avoid hangovers). Some amount of ketamine was consumed.
On the final night I brought over a girl I’d met online for a date. She enjoyed the weirdness of the place, singing karaoke with me in the ‘winner’s lounge’ and listening to two of my fave residents have a spirited debate about wealth taxes as we cuddled under a blanket by the fire. The karaoke queue app was running on my laptop so when they changed venues it locked and they needed my fingerprint. Emet came running out of building B, drenched in sweat, screaming “HENRY STANLEY WE NEED HENRY STANLEY’S FINGERPRINT”. I went up to help while he insisted to my companion that this was an AI alignment problem.
There was cuddling. There was drama. There were situationships (three, apparently; I only know the details of two so someone needs to fill me in). Someone got kicked out for posting late but was then un-kicked out but only after a literal show trial. Someone was miserable and hated the place and left overnight. Someone invited over a controversial Substacker who brought with him an entourage of coked-up lunatics who wanted to fight people. Someone got reprimanded for posting too much low-effort slop. We got crammed into a house in Bodega Bay where we slept six to a room and all nearly killed each other (but where I had the best day of the whole programme with lovely Evelyn, who took a few of us out to Jenner and then to the offsite Airbnb which had a hottub).
I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I guess what I’m saying is: Inkhaven is a weird and interesting social experiment in which a bunch of people who have been chosen solely on the quality of their writing, without so much as a phone interview are thrown together in a big place with lots of snacks and a shared goal.
I don’t know if it’s going to create the next Scott Alexander. But I can sure imagine it causing a lot more thoughtful material being put out into the world.
I wanted it to last forever. It wasn’t like any place I’ve ever been. I regret not talking to people more, not working harder on my posts, not soaking up every minute of it. I know that it couldn’t have lasted forever – am I going to just burn my savings indefinitely to write 500 words a day which will mostly be read by nobody? And I know that its shortness was part of what made it so sweet.
But still. I miss you guys.
My best posts:
🥲oh man
You🤝me
Writing Is Easy Chads