Inpuuuuut!
When working through my depression I generally go through a few phases. One of those is something akin to trying to find connections with media which I liked in the past. This generally consists of rereading or rewatching things. Sometimes that works, but sometimes it doesn't and then I start consuming new material looking for new connections. This most recent bout I've been doing a mix of rereading (Murakami and Stephenson) and listening to new audiobooks (many plucked from the episodes of EconTalk I've listened to over the years). So here's a list of them since that seems like a semi-mechanical thing I could do since generating output has been a problem of late.
I also realized while relistening to an old episode of EconTalk (Andy Matuschak on Books and Learning discussing his essay Why Books Don't Work) that several of the non-fiction ones I gone through I have almost no memory of what the books talked about. So maybe there's no point to listening to them at all except as a way to keep my mind from wandering to the things which are actually bothering me. The fiction on the other hand... well I think I'm on my fourth (or more) pass on all of those novels... except Kafka on the Shore... which I've now read a second time.
In additional I've continued to consume my usual selection of podcasts. This pretty much consists of listening to EconTalk at least each week (for the new ep or possibly an relisten... maybe a separate post about EconTalk might be interesting), The Josh Marshall Podcast (produced by Talking Points Memo), and the Lawyers, Guns and Money Podcast (which I added to my rotation since I took up walking daily).
The next step in my recovery is obviously to try and get my journaling practice back into shape... we'll see how that goes, these posts to LinkedIn have been a step in that direction (probably need to do some writing about my "frustrations" with by journaling process...). In the meantime I'll continue with the current plan of shoving new input into my brain until something clicks. Currently up in non-fiction is The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf which has been a tangle of connections to all sorts of other things (I guess that's expected knowing a fair bit about biology) and fiction is occupied by Murakami's 1Q84. Might change tack on the non-fiction and transition to things I've already read... but maybe more on that later as well. The challenge for the last year has been the output side of the equation and I haven't managed to fix that yet. Though I did manage to write a tiny bit of code the last few days and this post... so we'll call it a win.
Fiction
Haruki Muramaki
Neal Stephenson
Non-Fiction