Long-game activism
Instead of spending 5 hours per day mad at trending social justice issues (20,000 hours per decade), I want to focus on building an institution for the essay. It’s a sort of illegible, seemingly irrelevant, idiosyncratic thing to do. But if it works, and if it somehow has any affect on how writing is taught in schools, and that improves the critical thinking of a generation, it will have way more influence than if I spent all that time protesting and howling for nothing. This just taps into a core belief of mine that the only way you can possibly help anyone outside of you and your immediate circle is to pick something dear to you and approach it with unreasonable fervor. If someone were to criticize me for ignoring a genocide, I’d say that all you can do is intensely dedicate your life to a single vector for multiple decades in the hope that you can tilt the scale away from next generation’s genocides.