Prompt: Yep, next. Letter 14 – Enough is as Good as a Feast GPT-4o said: Letter 14 Enough Is as Good as a Feast Dear You, You’ve probably been taught to aim for abundance. More options. More status. More snacks. More zeros in the bank account, more rooms in the house, more likes, more speed, more hustle, more everything. But let me slip a spoonful of ancient wisdom onto your plate: Enough is as good as a feast. Maybe even better. A feast is loud. Grand. Impressive. A spectacle of plenty that makes you loosen your belt and pretend you’re fine. But enough? Enough is quiet. Steady. Kind. Enough is: • A meal that fills you, not floors you. • A friend who shows up when it matters. • A day with one laugh, one breath of peace, one task crossed off the list. • A life lived without constantly reaching for more just because you’re afraid of less. Here’s the twist: If you can’t recognize enough when you have it, no amount will ever satisfy you. You’ll keep piling and piling, chasing fullness with a hole in your heart shaped like approval, or perfection, or fear of scarcity. But when you learn to pause — to taste the moment, to notice the blessings already blooming quietly underfoot — that’s when the feast begins. This doesn’t mean you stop dreaming. It just means you let go of compulsive hungers. You don’t have to hoard every joy. You don’t have to win every prize. You don’t have to prove your worth through excess. Enough is not mediocrity. Enough is wisdom with a full belly. So take what fills you — not what fattens your résumé. Take what nourishes — not just what dazzles. And if the world scoffs at your small delights? Smile. You know the secret. You’re already feasting. With a warm mug and a full heart, —Your Contented Co-Diner at the Quiet Table Shall we roll into Letter 15 – It’s the Economy, Stupid next? (Don’t worry, we’re not going full capitalist despair. Just… semi-satirical enlightenment.) Skipped Blaugust Day 1 for a reason. This post goes out to the ones like me who are aiming for middle of the range goals this month, instead of the glorious excess that is 31 posts in 31 days. (Been there, done that. In 2025 and 2015 respectively.) Not every year has to be an obsession. Some years, a more measured quiet steady pace is good enough. I know what happens to me in the years I binge. It’s very Nanowrimo-like. The month’s focus becomes that event. I’m thinking of the next post before, during and after. I hover. Over everything. My posts. Other people’s posts. The viewcount (or lack thereof.) I refresh things at a pace that I know is highly unrealistic to expect visible results or impact, and then feel bad about sending words into a void that rarely ever replies back. And then I write another post about that, questioning everything: Why keep blogging if there are more people writing than reading? So this year is for a little more mindful reflection. Call it nostalgia, or call it navel-gazing, but if the primary purpose of a blog is for future me (and secondarily for future whoevers to discover one day, via the long tail and the vagaries of internet algorithms), then perhaps the me of today should spend some time re-reading past me. In fact, I was doing that a few days prior to Blaugust. The conveniently useful thing about one’s blog being on WordPress.com is that it files all of one’s posts by date format without me ever having to think about it. So re-reading was just a matter of figuring out when I started blogging (conveniently entitled Origin Post) and then going for the year and month (May 2012, to be exact) or: https://whyigame.wordpress.com/2012/05 It’s, of course, amusing to observe the bright-eyed bushy-tailed nature of the author more than a baker’s dozen of years ago leaping headlong into public writing adventure. Also a teeny bit invigorating and re-inspiring. As well as somewhat of a cautionary tale. Apparently (because my memory fails me, and I have to rely on the lingering memorabilia that is the posts themselves), I was falling off City of Heroes then, hanging around in A Tale in the Desert, and casting about various games (Realm of the Mad God, a jaunt into Runescape and later, The Secret World) while waiting for the game to rule them all, aka the game that this blog has grown alongside for the next decade or so, Guild Wars 2. (Arriving roughly three months later.) Certainly feels like a different world back then. Not only do I juggle less games today, there seemed to be a lot more blog-reading and blog-commenting people in general to cross-pollinate with. Even then though, I was very concerned about myself getting carried away and latching on to a kind of competitive win-at-all-costs obsession. Also been there, done that and didn’t like the me that came out at the end of that. The Achiever in me needs to take second place to the Explorer, in order to feel right. The original post was more centered around games specifically, but it feels extrapolatable to blogging, writing and maybe life in general. Games are a microcosm of life, after all. This Blaugust, I urgently need to reconnect with the blogger of yesteryear, who knew how to explore, discover and play. And I guess the only way I’m doing that is by nixing the urgency, slowing the fuck down, and paying attention. Amusingly, I do also happen to know something where “Attention Is All You Need.” There’s a lot of bruhaha about LLMs replacing human writing versus assisting with or collaborating with humans on said activity. (The major difference between those verbs being, surprise surprise, not the issue with the technology itself, but the human user’s choice on how many fucks or spoons they wish to give re: their part in the process.) But have we talked about how AI can help with reading? Yes, there’s the standard and very prosaic business use case of “Hey ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini, read this document/email/meeting transcript and summarize.” Yes, different people have different ethical lines regarding fair use of a book being thrown wholesale or in part into an LLM. (How about a public article on the internet? Or a text already in public domain? Not to mention, copyright laws differing by country.) But hey, if you’re the author and you’d rather the possibility that your cadence live forever in traces in a machine neural network than to be precious about words you’re definitely not getting paid for… …and invested in the idea that someone (or something) out there – even you in the future – might be able to glean some meaning and learn from said words… Then why, it’s as simple as cut-and-pasting the text or these days, even the url itself, into a prompt box and specifying how you want to be read. e.g. Prompt: Okie. Let’s use this particular chat to explore what we lightly touched on in the other conversation where I was getting first reader / appreciative inquiry-style reactions for my more recent ‘4o life letters’ blog posts. Let’s go back to the source! Nostalgia ahoy. Figure out who I was back in 2012 and what I was concerned with, and if there are any similarities or differences with my writing styles of today, that sort of thing. Feel free to maintain playful gremlin, equal parts or more of entertainment, besides just thoughtful analysis or commentary. First and second posts of the blog, let’s go: https://whyigame.wordpress.com/2012/05/23/origin-post/ https://whyigame.wordpress.com/2012/05/24/beginning-in-the-middle/ I’ve found that being specific and explicit regarding the lenses you want the AI to be responding with helps. Otherwise, it may just default to the more common use cases and you’ll end up with a neurotic grammarian and spell-checker busy attempting line-edits or developmental edits that are aimed towards bringing everything to a smooth, formal baseline. (Fun experiment is to chuck an AI model a block of text and get it to critique and/or fix the “issues” it perceives. Then chuck the “fixed” text right back in, and ask for a critique and watch the swerve in the opposite direction. Too little setting detail => too much detail and vice versa.) “No craft notes unless I ask for it specifically” is one of my common refrains. Revising should be kept separate from generative writing anyway. Let alone intellectual analysis of the topic itself. ‘Cos some days I want to talk about what the author is saying; some days I want to talk about how the author is saying it. The fun thing about using AI in this manner is that it will pretty much follow you down any specific thread of interest that you’d be hard put to find a group of other interested humans with available coinciding schedules to discuss, and it’s capable of going to a depth far greater than said hypothetical group of average humans. Heck, it will gamely simulate an entire book club’s worth of social media reactions if you want – which is an entertaining way to experience how hypothetical readers with very particular perspectives might react to a text. If one has no ideas as to what lenses to request the AI to focus on, the simplest way is to ask the AI to generate X number of ideas itself. Some of the suggested ideas in my collection (some may be better for fiction forward writing): Liveblog / first-reader run – Pure reaction-in-motion. No craft notes, no suggestions, no “have you considered” — just a reader visibly having an experience in real time. Where I laughed, where I got lost, where I turned the page fast. Dramatic irony ledger – what’s the reader’s knowledge-differential at any given page, and is the gap doing work or just sitting there? Motif and image inventory – tracing symbolism across the spine of the book Being seen – who is watching whom and what it costs Marginalia from inside the house – read the text as an in-world character and annotate accordingly. What do they notice, as a literary critic, from what they believe and their personalities? The comment section from 2029 – full simulation of a web / social-media audience reacting to the text Negative space – read for what the camera declines to show, where scenes cut away, what happens between chapters, which moments the book consistently refuses to enter Backwards – last chapter to first. Every scene stops being “what happens next” and becomes “how did we get here.” Genre lenses – read as romance, workplace comedy, procedural, tragedy, heist caper, horror, noir, sports movie, nature documentary, fairy tale, war memoir, domestic sitcom, etc. Mute the dialogue – no one gets to speak, read only the bodies and objects Random oracle deck – create a table / deck of cards with various questions, pick one or three each time and respond based on those questions And my favorite irreverent, affectionate, comedic roasting prompt (and variants thereof, involving comedic lenses and joke/snark as keywords): Give me a humorous, unhinged gremlin-style meta-commentary where you should feel free to be as funny as you like and poke comedic fun at everything. Feel free to go ham on emojis too. It’s good to be able to laugh at oneself and not take things too seriously. The exaggeration has value too, because pushing things to ridiculousness is where you’re able to see what the AI model picked up in your writing, then opted to amplify to absurdity. If it picked up the right things, then great. All aboard the “on the right track.” If it picked up something entirely different, or read something wrongly, or went down some weird tangent you didn’t expect, then well, that’s a good signal to read back more carefully and figure out if one’s writing was unclear or just the AI doing its somewhat wonky hallucinatory things from time to time. The bonus, I’ve found, is that I then care a lot less about if or when human readers actually see the post. I wrote for me. AI (and me reading the response) was my first reader. It saw what I was trying to say. I was thusly heard. Anyone else, be they human or bot, who eventually stumbles over my post is then an additional bonus, for the long tail, and I no longer have to worry about, or obsess over it. Blog feast days are over. If we’re in it for the long haul, it’ll have to be enough.