Tom
e73455d2ca
theory/ EVIDENCE.md + THEORY.md, shared by everything a-days-walk/ Book One: CHAPTERS, CRAFT, FIELD_BRIEF, OUTLINE, drafts/ seasonal-intelligence/ Book Two: OUTLINE essays/ the six pieces archive/ superseded originals, unmaintained by design PORTFOLIO.md the split and the sequence Adds a README to each directory. Cross-references updated to the new layout; archive/ references left broken deliberately, as those are historical documents. Also revises chapter 6 of Book One: the notification scene is now four items rather than four hundred, since the narrator is a light user. The low volume is stronger evidence than a flood would have been - it is the case the attention-economy account cannot explain. Tracked as A26 in the argument ledger, planted in the prologue and chapter 1.
91 lines
6.7 KiB
Markdown
91 lines
6.7 KiB
Markdown
# The portfolio
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*What was one fourteen-chapter book is now three things, ordered by how much evidence each can stand on and how soon each can be published.*
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## The reasoning behind the split
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The original outline bundled four different books: a media critique, a seasonal-living book, a leadership manual, and a nature/health book. They shared a theory but not a reader, and not a shelf.
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Worse, the strategic priority was inverted. The **three-tier relevance model** is the original idea in this project — nobody else is arguing it, it generates concrete practice, and it is genuinely yours. The **seasonal frame** is the least-evidenced part and the most crowded shelf in the entire wellbeing category. The original outline made the seasonal frame the title and the spine, and buried the original idea at chapter 3 of 14.
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So: the relevance model becomes Book One and gets the whole argument. The seasonal material becomes Book Two, reframed as cultural history plus practical design rather than neuroscience. The leadership manual disappears as a book and survives as one chapter in each. The health material becomes essays.
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---
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## Book One — *A Day's Walk*
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**Working title:** *A Day's Walk: How We Lost the Ability to Tell What Matters*
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**Czech candidates:** *Na den chůze* · *Co se nás týká* · *Blízko a daleko: Jak jsme ztratili míru důležitosti*
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*(These need a native ear — offered as starting points, not recommendations.)*
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**The argument in one sentence:** The problem isn't that we pay too little attention, it's that our machinery for deciding what deserves attention has been fed information it was never built to sort — and the fix is retriage, not abstinence.
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**Why this is the flagship:** It has the original idea, the clearest single argument, the best-evidenced practical chapter (nature), and a contrarian position against the dominant "dopamine detox" narrative that the evidence actually supports. It is the book that gets you taken seriously enough for Book Two to exist.
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**Length:** 70–80k words, 12 chapters. Full outline in `a-days-walk/OUTLINE.md`.
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---
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## Book Two — *Seasonal Intelligence*
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**Working title:** *Seasonal Intelligence: Designing a Year You Can Live In*
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**Czech:** *Sezónní inteligence: Jak si navrhnout rok, ve kterém se dá žít*
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**The critical reframe:** Not *"your brain has seasons."* The evidence doesn't support that, and Meyer et al. 2016 points the other way. Instead: *"every society before ours built structure into the year, we flattened it, and rebuilding it is a design choice with real returns."* Cultural history plus practical design, honest about being a proposal rather than a finding.
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This reframe is not a retreat. It removes the book's biggest vulnerability, and it differentiates it from Katherine May's *Wintering* (memoir) and Jenny Odell's *Saving Time* (critique) — neither of which gives anyone a year to actually build.
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**Why second:** It needs Book One's credibility, it needs the seasonality evidence handled carefully, and the chapters most worth writing (8–11, the applied work-year material) need real case studies you don't have yet. Writing Book One buys you the year to collect them.
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**Length:** 60–70k words, 10 chapters. Outline in `seasonal-intelligence/OUTLINE.md`.
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---
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## The essays — start here
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Six pieces, publishable now. They serve four purposes: they find out whether the voice exists, they test which ideas land before you spend a year on them, they build the platform any publisher will ask about, and each becomes a chapter draft.
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Written roughly in ascending order of difficulty.
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**1. Stress Hunger** *(personal essay, ~2,000 words)*
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Ravenous after a day at a desk; barely hungry after four days walking with a pack. The observation, the cortisol literature, and an honest admission that the specific mechanism is a guess. **Write this one first** — it's the shortest distance between you and a finished piece, it's pure voice, and it's the lowest-stakes place to find out how you write at length.
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**2. Why 5,000 Steps in a Forest Beat 10,000 in a Corridor** *(~1,500 words)*
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The salience-environment argument, built on Bratman 2015. Best evidence-to-length ratio in the project and the most shareable. → Book One ch. 12.
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**3. The Dopamine Detox Is the Wrong Fix** *(~2,500 words, contrarian)*
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The reward-hacking story is real but shallow; the mechanism is misfiled relevance. The detox literature backs you: abstinence has the weakest record, changing *how* people use platforms beats quitting. → Book One ch. 6 and 10.
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**4. Within a Day's Walk** *(~4,000 words — the flagship essay)*
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The tier model itself. This is the piece the book proposal is built on. Write it fourth, once the first three have taught you the register. Pitch high: *Aeon*, *Noema*, *The New Atlantis*; in Czech, *Vesmír*, *Respekt*, or *Deník N* would each fit a different version of it. → Book One Part II.
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**5. The Middle of the Night** *(~2,500 words)*
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Biphasic sleep — told with the Ekirch/Yetish dispute as the story rather than as a footnote. The contested evidence makes it *more* interesting: a thing we thought was human nature turns out to be a Western European habit. → Book Two ch. 4.
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**6. January Is the Worst Time to Change Your Life** *(~1,500 words, seasonal hook)*
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Publish in late December. Tests Book Two's market with almost no investment, and the framing survives even if the neuroscience doesn't — you're arguing from cultural design, not brain states. → Book Two ch. 6.
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---
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## What was cut, and why
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| Cut | Reason |
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| Foreign-policy / interventionism argument | Unfalsifiable, politically loaded, discredits the rest by association. No replacement needed. |
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| DMN-based weight-loss protocol | Prescriptive health regimen on an invented mechanism. Observation survives as essay 1; the protocol does not. |
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| Diagnostic test scoring and thresholds | False clinical precision from a sample of one. Questions survive as unscored reflection prompts in Book One's appendix. |
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| "I" / "me" labels for DMN / TPN | Counter-intuitive, adds nothing, costs you a paragraph of defence every time. |
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| Standalone leadership book (old Part III) | Not a book. Becomes ch. 9 of Book One and ch. 9 of Book Two. |
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| Old ch. 3 / ch. 14 overlap | Resolved: the whole of Book One is now that territory, properly separated across chapters 6, 10, and 11. |
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## Sequence
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1. Essays 1–3 (three months) — find the voice, confirm you want to do this
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2. Essay 4, pitched high (month four) — the credibility piece
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3. Book One proposal + three sample chapters (months 5–8)
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4. Book One draft (year two)
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5. Collect case studies and interviews for Book Two throughout — this is the year to do it
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6. Book Two (year three)
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The only irreversible mistake available right now is spending another twelve months on structure. Essay 1 is roughly a weekend.
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