"If popular psychological wisdom has it that you have to love yourself before you can love another, my story suggests that you have to love life before you can care about anything. The wager is that, to some small but irreducible extent, one must be enamored with existence and occasionally even enchanted in the face of it in order to be capable of donating some of one's scarce mortal resources to the service of others."
TL;DR:
I feel like I finally grew up and stopped pretending I was as smart as Thomas Pynchon
I feel like there are two phases of my life as someone who considers himself a writer: the first phase, which started when I was 10 or something and is mostly me wanting to be Important, and the second phase, which started during the pandemic when I simultaneously discovered GPT2 and Charles Portis.
I have no idea what this means for the work, but something about my approach has changed that I can't quantify.