Welcome!
Quick links:
My writing: baxterwrites.com
My short-form ideas and thoughts: Twitter
Say hi by email: baxblackwood@icloud.com
Hey there!
I’m Baxter, and I’m a 22-year-old writer living in Austin, Texas.
In February 2023, I dropped out of college with a 4.0 because I felt like I was wasting time and my parent’s money on classes that were better taught on YouTube.
Over the past two years, reading and writing started as a hobby and turned into the most sacred thing in my life. In that time, I learned about the craft by writing almost every day, taking David Perell’s course Write of Passage, and working as a research assistant for a writer named Paul Millerd.
Out of all the things I’ve written so far, I’m most proud of the following 3 essays:
Content-Life Balance: The dangers of documenting yourself
People Want to Talk To You: Why people treat us how we treat ourselves
Snap Judgment Syndrome: Why you feel isolated from other humans
My writing in the past has been introspective and personal, but moving forward it will be a bit more centered around a mission of mine: to read the best books of all time and develop a well-rooted world view.
In the last few months, I shut off the Internet to read Walden, the Odyssey, and Understanding Media. These books and others made me realize something: I don’t want to fail to remember the very foundations of human culture. I don’t want to be another victim of the intellectual comfort crisis.
As the American journalist Bill Moyers once said: “We Americans seem to know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years.”
I want to give myself a Beautiful education, which involves two broad things: the classics and the basics. I want to read as many of the classics as I can get my eyes on, including The Bible. But I also want to study other crucial topics like media theory, the history of technology, economics, physics, biology, and statistics.
It should be said: this is not an In-N-Out-burger get-smart-quick scheme. I plan on reading for understanding. I plan on educating myself with books and supplementing with the Internet. I don’t care how long it takes. All that matters is that I can explain what I learn to myself and to you.
(As we speak, I’m reading The Bible as a nonbeliever. I’m OK if it takes me four years to fully know what it says.)
Regardless of how I make money, I will devote my life to reading and writing. I believe it’s the most important technology ever invented. I write for people who see that grappling and going to war with the ideas in the written medium is one of the most meaningful pursuits in life. I’m here for the crazy ones who have the courage to humble themselves in the intellectual dojo, day in and day out.
When I’m not reading or writing, you might find me listening to Billy Joel or Beethoven, playing piano, or walking around without a shirt or phone.
Nice to meet you,
—Baxter
P.S. I wanted to show you two of my favorite paintings. The one with Odysseus hangs in my living room, and the other is the screensaver on my Macbook :)
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