Methodical Thinking

A Winter Solstice Resolution

Tis the season for New Year’s resolutions, but mine came early. The winter solstice of Dec. 21, 2025, being the cold solstice, drove me indoors and more introspective than usual. I’ve never quite understood using an arbitrary human-made calendar to frame one’s goals (and to frame one’s self-worth in some cases), because a person can make a decision any day to change course. But if we need a special day, a solstice or an equinox seems like a day the solar system has set aside as natural times to reflect and maybe even to resolve to do something.

So on the winter solstice, having just finished a semester and already starting to plan the next semester, I thought about what I’d like to change about my daily and weekly routines for the spring semester, which starts in early January. I’d like to reserve my Sundays and my evenings for reading books, and to read a book a week. I’d like to read more books for two main reasons: to reduce screen time and to increase methodical thinking time, all in the name of resisting AI slop by exercising my HI (human intelligence) to the best and benefit of my ability.^⁠1 I want to read more books, repositories of human intelligence, in order to learn more about AI, human knowledge, and humanity. Books about what it means to be human and/or books about AI have been piling up in my house, so this will keep me accountable to actually read them!

After reading every word of a book, I intend to write a Substack post for each book, providing an imperfect summary and my main take-away(s). A person can read a book multiple times in their lifetime and have a different take-away each time; finding the words to explain how a book has given me something new to think about may not be easy but be assured that I will write every word using only HI (and maybe a thesaurus), so that I can legitimately attach my “Made with Human Intelligence” logo.

My hand-drawn HI logo.

At the spring equinox (March 20, 2026), I’ll pause and reflect and decide how to continue this resolution.

In the meantime, I hope the humble ruminations I share give you something new to think about. I’ll call this weekly series of posts…

My Take-Aways

Look for them each week!

¹ Instead of reiterating my objections to AI here, I refer those of you interested to a previous post that includes my “HI not AI” online presentation:

---