Horizon Scanning

October 1, 2025

3-Item Status

• Current Location: Milwaukee, WI

• Reading: The Butcher’s Masquerade by Matt Dinniman

• Listening: Leash by Sky Ferreira

If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status.

Quick Notes

• New Work:

  • This week’s Let’s Know Things is about NATO and Russia

  • Yesterday’s Brain Lenses essay was on Wealth-Adjusted Life Satisfaction & the pod was about Social Judgement Theory

  • Last week’s Writing & Such was on Querying

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Horizon Scanning

There’s a term of art, “horizon scanning,” that initially emerged from the world of futures studies, but which has since been adopted by tech-oriented businesspeople, politicians, and even folks working in legal fields who hope to stay ahead of the regulatory curve.

The general idea is that we should keep tabs on what’s barely visible along the horizon, because in doing so we can glean hints about what comes next.

In practice, this might mean watching the ebbs and flows of public sentiment and political speech trends to determine where best to focus our fundraising or legal efforts, or it might mean keeping an eye on what consumers in other countries or demographics are prioritizing—a shift toward conservative purchasing habits might portend a near-future spending pullback in certain products or services, for instance.

I like applying this concept to personal-scale matters, because while I think fully experiencing and appreciating the moment is important, I also think it’s a good idea to maintain a situational awareness for things just beyond our current acquaintance.

The better our understanding of happenings in far off lands and in unfamiliar fields of inquiry, the less likely we are to be caught completely flat-footed when something changes and disrupts our plans or upends our expectations.

The better our sense of what the future might hold (that sense honed by years of horizon-gazing), the more likely we are to be prepared (or bare-minimum, not completely unprepared) for novel innovations, social movements, or other sorts of norm disruption.

All of which is particularly valuable at a moment in which so many aspects of life and the world are seemingly mid-tumult.

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Interesting Links

• The New Hotness

• The Last Resort

• Indian Names

If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.

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Trying something new with the next book I’m writing—mapped out the ‘beat sheet’ using index cards, and I’m using that as my chapter scaffolding. This one is has more of a thriller-genre pacing than the one I’m currently querying, so I’m trying to keep things moving along at the right tempo, from the foundation, up.

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What Else

I somehow got sick again; the last time was mid-August, and it knocked me out for close to two weeks before fully subsiding. This time around, thankfully, it was much less painful and life-disrupting, only lasting a few days and mostly staying relegated to my sinuses. I don’t know if I managed to hinder the post-nasal drip before it could cause more throat irritation, or if it was just a less potent flu/cold/covid, but I feel incredibly fortunate that it was just a wispy shadow of that last infection, which was torturous.

As mentioned in Writing & Such, last week I sent out my first handful of queries for Yore, which was a new experience for me! Not a particularly fun one, but it’s a process I’ve enjoyed learning about and participating in, despite its associated tedium. This week I’m more focused on getting the direct sequel to Yore mapped out; I have the story outlined, but I still need to make sure the narrative beats arrive at appropriate intervals.

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