The Pursuit of Happiness-Serendipity and the New Writing Workflow?

Cool Workflows
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Today, I began the research for a new blog article tentatively titled, Our Students: The Pursuit of Happiness and the “Box Top” for Life. The research included reading portions of Jeffrey Rosen’s New York best-selling book, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.* In the book, Rosen points out the contrast between the Founders’ understanding of the pursuit of happiness as enshrined in the United States Declaration of Independence and the contemporary understanding of the pursuit of happiness:

At its core, the Founders viewed the pursuit of happiness as a lifelong quest for character improvement, where we use our powers of reason to moderate our unproductive emotions so that we can be our best selves and serve others …

For the Founders, the pursuit of happiness included reading in the wisdom traditions of the East and West, always anchored by the canonical text of the Bible, in an attempt to distill their common wisdom about the need to achieve self-mastery through emotional and spiritual self-discipline …

The ancient wisdom fell out of fashion in the 1960s and in the “Me Decade” that followed, however, when our understanding about the pursuit of happiness was transformed from being good to feeling good …

Following the classical and Enlightenment philosophers, the Founders believed that personal self-government was necessary for political self-government …

If you had to sum it up in one sentence, the classical definition of the pursuit of happiness meant being a lifelong learner, with a commitment to practicing the daily habits that lead to character improvement, self-mastery, flourishing, and growth.

My serendipitous moment occurred when I needed to download the highlights from Amazon. I remembered that Obsidian has a plugin for this. I installed the plugin and downloaded the highlights from my Kindle books to a new Obsidian vault. I then recalled that one can access external folders from within Ulysses. Then it struck me, “What if I connected the Obsidian vault with Ulysses and DEVONthink, giving me immediate access to my highlights and research documents from within all three applications? With that in mind, I connected them as illustrated by this FreeForm diagram:

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I will test this workflow for a while before making any decisions. If it works as well as anticipated, I may make an exception to my strict “minimal subscriptions rule” and keep my Ulysses subscription, which expires in early October.

  • Rosen, J. (2024). The pursuit of happiness: How classical writers on virtue inspired the lives of the Founders and Defined America, Simon & Schuster.
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For this purpose, I find Roam Research to be excellent. It eliminates the three or four applications listed, including dropbox, and makes the highlights/notes adapt/connect to existing research in a more organic way. Having highlights in a txt file is surely future-proof, but having it in an app such as roam makes it more “alive” and “analysable” for further use. Just my opinion.

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I suspect you are right but I can’t justify the high cost for Roam Research. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I agree, but i see it as a means to “being a lifelong learner, with a commitment to practicing the daily habits that lead to character improvement, self-mastery, flourishing, and growth”. :slight_smile:

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It is indeed, I just want a cheaper route to virtue. :rofl:

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Did you ever learn what caused the data loss you experienced with Ulysses and find a way to prevent it from happening again?

I know you were able to recover from backups, but I wouldn’t want to rely on that for an app I depend on, especially for writing. I don’t recall whether you tried reaching out to the Ulysses devs about it or got any answers from them.

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Thanks for asking. I did reach out but no resolution was found. My best guess is that the problem was caused because I was using a beta version of Ulysses—the first time I’ve ever used a beta, and the last time I might add. :slightly_smiling_face:

I’m waffling on what to do about Ulysses. I like the app and based on the vast number of people using it for years with no issues, I’m not overly concerned about data loss. I just can’t decide if these two things make Ulysses worth it:

  • The subscription. It is minimal for me because I qualify for an education discount. But, I’m still “renting” my writing tool, which means if I stop paying, I can’t use the tool.

  • There is some friction using Ulysses when I export a document, I often have to clean up formatting after exporting to Pages. That represents friction. But, there is also the “overhead” or friction when writing in a word processor—larger files, dealing with the formatting, and what not.

I sometimes wonder if I’d been better off never having heard of markdown. I never once questioned using a word processor before hearing about markdown. :rofl:

Then again, there is this:

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I love plaintext and markdown, but depending on the project sometimes it’s just more efficient to write directly in a word processor if that’s where it’s going to end up or you’re including content that’s easier to create using its features.

You can make Word and probably Pages feel more like a writing app while developing early drafts by hiding the ribbon or even the entire interface and temporarily switching to a monospace or iA Writer font.

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When using my Mac, I can hide the toolbar and the format inspector in Pages, so I can focus solely on the content without distracting elements. Additionally, I make use of keyboard shortcuts for formatting headings, which means I rarely have to interrupt my flow by reaching for the mouse or trackpad.

Although the toolbar cannot be hidden on an iPad, the editor is clean:

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This is key for any good writing workflow. I think it was by Pages “07 or ‘09 that I first realized I could set a keyboard shortcut for each style on my document. I then moved this workflow to Word (it’s far more buried down, but the ability to set a shortcut to a given style is there as well).

One more tip: many of the times I previously find myself reaching for a mouse can be replaced by a ⌘F, followed by entering a piece of the text I need to move my cursor to and then, hitting enter. From there, it’s easy to navigate, select text, type or do whatever I need without ever reaching for the mouse. Also remember to use ⌥+arrows to move from word to word (arrows left and right) or paragraph to paragraph (arrows up and down).

As per @Synchronicity comments on making Word a minimalist text-first interface, they’re one step ahead from the comments we had in a previous @Bmosbacker thread on focus modes. And I dare say this step is definitely the is Writer fonts… they’re so gorgeous!

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Thanks for linking to that thread. I’d never seen it before.

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I use #F frequently but had forgotten about ⌥+arrows. Thanks for the reminder!

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There are all these, too (Mac shortcuts are in the right two columns of the table)

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