 Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday. Except that, uh, it's not. I've been playing a small trick on you. As I'm recording this, it is, in fact, Thursday, October 28th. I have secretly pre-made a bunch of Vlogbrothers videos and taken the month of November off as a sort of mini sabbatical. What led to this minor ruse? I suppose five things? First, and I hope you won't take me saying this personally, but work is not the most important thing in my life. It used to be the most important thing in my life, my primary self-identifier, my shorthand for understanding my value, and so on, but I have worked, pun intended, quite hard over the last five years to get away from that sort of thinking. The most important part of my life is interpersonal relationships with friends and family and so on, and then the second most important part of my life is intrapersonal, my own time for reading and writing and thinking and exercising and being. Now, work is very important to me, and I want to do it well, but I also don't want it to be my whole life, so I decided to take a month away from certain regular obligations like Vlogbrothers and Dear Hank and John and some meetings in order to focus on the other obligations that often don't get prioritized, because they aren't, like, economically productive, they're just actually productive? Like, to use a very basic example, a while back I made a Vlogbrothers video about how the most important time in my day was the time spent chatting with my kids after picking them up from school, but on the day I made that video, I was actually too busy to pick them up from school. This is obviously not the proper alignment of priorities, so I'm gonna take a month to try to figure that out. Secondly, this whole, uh, boot situation requires a bit of rehab. Thirdly, for the last several years, my mental health has been mostly stable and good, which has been great, but then for the last little while, it was, uh, not that stable and not that great, which was unfun. Like, you know how when you feel faint, your peripheral vision starts to get clouded? It was like that, except, like, worry was invading from every direction. Fortunately, that's been getting better the last couple weeks, but I want to focus on it without neglecting Vlogbrothers. Like, I know I could have just hit pause on this, but I value the conversation so much I didn't want to do that. Fourth, I want to see if taking time away from regular work obligations gives me more time and inclination to write. I've talked about this so bleakly, but never directly. Somewhere along the line, though, publishing became pretty unpleasant for me. I don't know how much good it does to get into the details of this, but, like, publishing was my dream for most of my life, and it was really fun and fulfilling at the beginning. And then at some point, it became mostly stressful and scary. Like, I would only be able to think about what if the book is received terribly and what if people hate it and what if readers feel like I cheated them out of the $20 of faith they placed in me and so on. And so to be honest, while I always loved writing, that part of the publishing process became less something that I enjoyed and more something that I, like, got through. But then both the writing and the publishing process for the Anthropocene Reviewed Book were really fun and fulfilling. So now I'm not, like, in a hurry to write or publish anything. The Anthropocene Reviewed Book's only been out for a few months. It takes me years to write a book, but I'm actually looking forward to it. I'm enjoying the fun of writing and the immersion of it, and I want to focus on it. And lastly, I need to finish these ridiculously time-consuming circle drawings. One thing I've noticed over the years is that everything takes longer than I expect it to. Not least because I always assume that future me will be more productive than current me is able to be. So I don't know how much, if anything, I actually got done during this month of secret sabbaticaling, but even if I don't finish the circle drawings or write anything, it will have been a productive time if it was inter and intra-personally productive. In fact, one of the reasons I'm doing this is to remind myself, Hank, of what you have taught me that I need to expand my definition of productive to include the things I actually want to produce, like joy and connection and fulfillment. Next week there will be another small surprise, and then I will be back to report on how my time away went. Hank, I hope you had a good month. I'll see you on Friday.