We’re constantly making decisions and cannot honestly explain why we made them. The brain creates narratives to justify the things we do and make it seem that our actions are pure cause and effect: we desired this, therefore we did that. But often these narratives are after the fact justifications.

I have elaborated on neurological processes in previous essays. But what I find interesting now is how similar our decision trees are to AI chatbots, which make probabilistic guesses with every word they spill out. Ask the same questions at different times and you will receive highly divergent answers. The same is true for humans, we just attribute the variance to mood or circumstances.

This is why I find highly plotted stories unsatisfying. They give a false impression of our reality, that there is an answer for everything, a meaning behind every act. It’s more comfortable to me to see a story meander and take wild digressions. I like that Philip K. Dick used the I Ching to determine where the story should move next in his book “The Man in the High Castle.” Writers should make better use of pure randomness.

I find myself having very little to say in these recent essays. What might normally take up 800 words I now typically wrap in 400 or less. I see this not as exhaustion with Montaigne, but more a disinclination to elaborate. We make decisions in life, good or bad, and we spend much of our time then adjusting to the effects of those decisions.

I am not one to take on a day with no plan at all. Checklists play a major part in my existence and I find satisfaction in ticking off my daily routines. These were not chosen randomly. Nor was writing about Montaigne, there was some impulse in me that pushed me in this direction. What’s interesting isn’t the action that’s begun, but the commitment to seeing it through, especially when there are no direct and immediate rewards.

Yesterday, I received an email from a college librarian in the UK, saying how much she has enjoyed my movies scene-by-scene series, telling me about her college’s film studies program, and then suggesting some movies they are studying as possible new subjects for my series. It was a wonderful email to receive on many levels.

And it will likely influence what writing I do next after I finish up this lap through Montaigne. There are influences around us in every moment. Sometimes I read books based on what’s in the Arts and Letters Daily daily scroll of humanities stories. Sometimes I have a random conversation or read something that moves me.

Who’s to say how or why anything influences us. Perhaps what is most important is how receptive we are to outside stimuli and what we choose to do with the random information. That is far more interesting to me that sitting down to outline a project and to finish a book based on its likely commercial appeal.