So Nice That It Matters So Little

Welcome to the March 2025 edition of...
What I'm Into, What I'm Up To
#54

Thank you so much to everyone who filled out the survey I sent last month! I really appreciate your time and I hope the dystopian vibes for the second and third wave of responders were not too off-putting.

The idea of sending out follow-up emails about the survey gave me the same kinds of feelings as pointing a nail gun at my foot, trying to decide whether to pull the trigger or not. I wasn't excited about it. I decided to try and have some fun with it by inventing a narrative inspired by the show, Severance, and just my general anxiety about the state of the world right now.

(Strangely, taking on the persona of an evil authoritarian regime helped calm my fears around actual evil authoritarian regimes. I think Batman said something similar one time—become scarier than the thing you fear, or something like that.)

Anyone interested in the survey results?

Great, me too!

I currently have 115 newsletter subscribers. Normal open rates—assuming any level of accuracy, which is a pretty big assumption these days—are usually between 50 and 60 percent.

22 subscribers completed the survey. That's just under 20 percent, which might not sound like much but common wisdom says a good newsletter response rate is 10 percent. So I'm happy with 20.

Now, to the survey answers.

Some of my favorite spirit animals included: Honey Badger, Whale Shark, African Pigmy Hedgehog (so specific), Frigatebird (never heard of it, but fascinating), Narwhal, and Perpetually Exhausted Pigeon (such a great mental image). Also, something called a Kumodopus.

14% of respondents were 18 to 29 years old. 40% were 30 to 49. 32% were 50 to 69 and 14% were 70+.

Most respondents were from the good old U. S. of A., but others were from such exotic locales as Uruguay, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

29% were female, 66% male.

(If you're concerned about that math, 5% preferred not to say.)

These next numbers kind of blew me away. The amount of books people read each year broke down as...
0 to 11 books - 22%
12 to 23 books - 18%
24 to 35 books - 14%
36 to 47 books - 23%
48 to 99 books - 23%

I really need to up my reading game.

And finally, how do people prefer to read their books?

• 11 people marked ebooks as their number one most preferred reading method.
• 8 people prefer physical books to all else.
• And a measly 3 people prefer audiobooks.

There were some other great, very helpful answers in there which I need to spend some time looking into: authors I did not know about, like E. E. Smith (two people mentioned him alongside Robert Heinlein), influencers I've never heard of, like Nerdforge (who are these strange people?), and websites, like Early Bird Books (ooh, ebook deals, interesting), and trends, like #BookTok (which I've heard of, but never actually looked into).

So thanks again, everyone! Super happy with the results of the first ever, possibly last, newsletter subscriber survey.

In other news...

F1 is back! And better(?) than ever!

I'm not going to bore you with facts and tales of Formula One drama. Mostly I just wanted to comment on how great it is to have something in my life—which I really do love and spend not-insignificant amounts of time on—that really and truly does not matter.

At all.

I used to not understand why people liked watching sports. Like, who cares who wins. They're just going to play again next week, or next year. Why get so emotionally invested?

But, with my newfound love of this ridiculously high-stress, high-dollar, high-stakes, high-drama world of F1, I get it.

It's a form of escape, like any other. But it's also unscripted. I can get away from the feeling I'm being emotionally manipulated by a really clever group of storytellers. There are no writers or directors out there who know how the plot will unfold. (Unless it's all a massive conspiracy, in which case I'd probably just rather not know.)

And so many people are invested, year after year after year. Millions of other fans, ten teams, twenty drivers, and everyone who works to make the whole thing happen. We're all in this world together, following the same news, interested in the same stuff.

It's so great to be so into it.

And also, to know it's all ultimately meaningless.

There's something extremely comforting having at least one thing in life like that.

Happy March, everyone!