WANTED: People Who Think for Themselves
The Kindness of Being Open to New Ideas
Hello, Protagonists,
Welcome back to Letters from the Creative Life. These occasional essays explore the quieter corners of living: small reflections on art, ambition, and the tender balancing act of building a meaningful life in a noisy world. Think of them as letters from our lives to yours. Enjoy!
xo,
Joanna & Evelyn
Every morning for the past 15 months, I’ve been doing a slow read (10 pages or so) of a classic book. It started with War and Peace, then Les Misérables, then A Farewell to Arms, then Wuthering Heights. In the evenings, I read something contemporary, whatever on my TBR shelf that’s happened to catch my eye.
Holding nineteenth-century Russia in my head alongside a novel published last year can be a little discombobulating sometimes. But I’ve come to love the way different centuries and sensibilities rub against each other, and how it keeps me from settling into any single mode of thinking.
Then the other day, it hit me: I’m hungry for people who think for themselves.
Not the ones who agree or disagree with me in predictable ways. I mean people whose conclusions surprise me, because they arrived at them through their own wrestling, their own analysis, rather than by simply absorbing whatever was handed to them by an algorithm or a headline.
These minds feel rarer than they used to. Or maybe I’m just more aware now of how much I crave them. So much of what I encounter—online, in conversation, even in books and TV and movies—feels pre-sorted. The opinions come in familiar clusters. If someone believes X, I can usually predict they also believe Y and Z. The packages are so tidy that I’ve started to wonder: did this person actually think this through? Or did they just adopt a worldview wholesale?
Admittedly, I’ve done it, too, sometimes without even noticing. We all have. It’s easier and faster and feels safer to belong somewhere, to know which ideas are “ours.”
But I’ve grown a little restless with safe.
In The Incredible Kindness of Paper, I wrote about small acts of generosity and how they ripple outward. Now, I keep coming back to the idea that listening is one of those acts of generous kindness. Really listening—not rushing to judge someone, not mentally sorting them into a camp, but staying open to the possibility that they might have arrived somewhere interesting through their own thinking. That’s a kind of respect we don’t offer each other enough.
And maybe it starts with offering it to ourselves, by letting our own conclusions be unfinished, contradictory, not quite fitting anywhere. By trusting our brains to do the work and allowing it to be messy.
I don’t know what I’ll read next. But I know what I’m looking for: Minds I can’t predict, and the pleasure of encountering a thought I’ve never had before.
I look forward to someone else’s thinking challenging me to do even more of my own.
I've been doing something similar with nonfiction. I have so many NF books I want to learn from, but the heavy subject matter is intimidating. But if I can handle 10 minutes at a time and balance it out with contemporary fiction, that's more digestible.
My thoughts exactly. Living in the MENA region makes it dangerous sometimes to think and express out loud. I crave having conversations in real time about what truly makes my soul alive. Literature, quantum physics, politics, the state of the world, the state of OUR world. Even Kaballah. As a Muslim woman discussing any of that in the open can be dangerous. I make up for this by writing the surreal, and teaching people say so much in so little as in flash fiction. I started a substak just to share and connect.