Dear Ben

Epsilon Theory Unplugged is an ongoing series featuring a rotating cast of authors. Each Tuesday, a new note is published. We cover a variety of topics, all focusing on our relationship with technology and ourselves. Sign up to keep up to date on the latest Unplugged notes.

Brent Donnelly is president of Spectra Markets and is a veteran FX trader and market maker. He is the author of The Art of Currency Trading (Wiley, 2019) and Alpha Trader (2021), with a sequel Trade Outside the Box (2026) out now.

Dear Ben,

I want to begin by apologizing for the thing I am about to do, which is to write you a nonfiction essay explaining why I no longer wish to write nonfiction essays, a maneuver so self-defeating that I can already feel the irony tightening around my ankles like a fishing line attached to a rod in my own hands.

No, that’s not quite right.

Dear Ben,

I am writing to explain why I don’t want to write too many nonfiction essays for Panoptica, and already I see the problem: this sentence is itself the first sentence of a nonfiction essay for Panoptica, and therefore an example of the thing it is trying to escape. I have sat down to explain my reluctance to add to the pile, and the explanation becomes another booklet on the pile. Another .doc ready to be converted to HTML. Another thoughtful, weary, 2,400-word lament about the thoughtfulness and weariness of the laments about our current age.

Let me try again.

Dear Ben,

There are too many essays.

That’s not quite right either. There are too many essays about the problem of too much. Too much information. Too much content. Too much financialization. Too much optimization. Too much dopamine. Too much phone. Too much capital. Too much spectacle. Too much choice. Too much measurement. Too much loneliness. Too much publicness in private. Too much politics in everything. Too much technology pretending to be society. Too much seeing through the looking glass to observe how we have been reverse-engineered by technology. Too much nature being converted into capitalism. Too much doom. Too many smart people standing on hills, pointing at the same fire.

And then, after pointing at the fire, each essay eventually performs the required turn. It must not end in despair. It must not be merely diagnostic. It must not say, “We are cooked,” and leave the reader alone wearing oven mitts. So it adds, near the end, after the exquisite vivisection of the present, a paragraph called What Can We Do? Or A Way Forward. Or Toward a More Human Future. Or Notes for Resistance. Or, if the writer is feeling especially modest, Three Small Practices.

Delete the apps. Touch grass. Read books. Pay attention. Talk to your neighbors. Go outside. Make things. Pay attention. Refuse the algorithm. Reclaim your time. Love your family. Find community. Plant a garden. Buy less. Vote. Pray. Cook. Walk. Pay attention. Call your mom.

All good advice. All true. And yet the repetition creates its own weather. The solutions begin to feel like fridge magnets spelling out a message on a refrigerator inside a burning house. I do not mean they are wrong. I mean I have read them so many times that even hope has acquired the texture of something manufactured.

The first problem is capitalism, which is too obvious to mention and too large not to mention. The second problem is technology, which has birthed some weird and warped form of monopolistic surveillance neocapitalism. The third problem is social media, which is technology’s idea of a town square after the square has been paved over, securitized, gamified, surveilled, and filled with people shouting “actually” at one another under fake names. The fourth problem is overdiagnosis of the sort I am performing right here.

I need a detox. Need to clear the cache.

Not from writing. I don’t think I need a detox from writing. Writing remains, for me, one of the few non-fake ways to discover what I think. I need a detox from the essay-industrial posture: the leaning-forward, chin-in-hand, macro-humanist grimness of the professional noticer. The writer’s equivalent of the grunge star pumping out radio friendly unit shifters. I need a break from the part of the mind that sees every act as a metaphor, every headline as a symptom, every movement of a scrolling thumb sliding the minute hand closer to the inevitable midnight of civilizational decline.

Where we are now: sitting at a desk, writing to Ben Hunt about why we should maybe not write so much about where we are now.

There: the sentence has folded back on itself. It has become a little origami swan. This is the middle, maybe. Not the chronological middle, but the emotional middle. The place where the essay notices that it is implicated in the thing it critiques, blushes, and continues anyway because implication is not the same as invalidation, and also because we still need to finish the piece.

You asked me for more pieces for Panoptica. I sat down to write them. And what comes out is The Essay. You know the one. It begins with a vivid anecdote—the barista, the airport, the thing my son said—pivots to a diagnosis of Everything, indicts capitalism by paragraph four, then the attention economy, and the dopamine loops, and the enshittification of the platforms, then quotes first an Atlantic writer, then Neil Postman, then maybe Ed Zitron.

We are fractured, alienated, hyper-financialized, and hurdling toward an abyss of our own algorithmic design. I get it.

That is the real thing I am trying to tell you, Ben, underneath the cleverness, and watch how hard it is to say it without immediately wrapping it in a clever frame: I have run out. Not of words—words are cheap, words are the one thing the era manufactures in catastrophic surplus—but of the conviction that mine are needed. That people will believe that previous sentence is not AI because I used an em dash. I open the document and I hear the click of a counter incrementing somewhere, +1 essay, and I think about the marginal essay the way an economist thinks about the marginal cookie (the bakery kind, not the tracking kind) and the marginal essay's value is approaching zero, possibly going negative, possibly I am now subtracting from the commons by adding to it, the way one more car doesn't add convenience; it adds traffic. I think I need to stop.

The takes have eaten the meta-takes have eaten the meta-meta-takes, and somewhere in there the actual barista, the actual airport, the actual thing my son actually said, got composted into Content, and I find I cannot remember what the barista looked like, or the airport smelled of, or what my son really said.

And the irony—the delicious, paralyzing, Möbius-strip irony that stays my hand today—is that to write an essay complaining about the formulaic nature of essays complaining about society is simply to feed the beast its own tail all over again. As I write this piece for Panoptica declaring, "There are too many essays outlining our doom," I have just added a new wing to the panopticon I am trying to escape. I am standing in the middle of a hurricane holding a megaphone, shouting, "Has anyone noticed it’s quite windy?"

Then I look around and see 10,000 other people all holding megaphones and all screaming, “Has anyone noticed it’s quite windy?”

Yes. Yes. It is quite windy.

Consider the paragraph you are reading right now. It is functioning exactly as the transitional hinge in the standard nonfiction lament. It is the moment when the author—that’s me, the exhausted narrator of this meta-textual collapse—admits their own complicity in the system. I am performing the exhaustion I am complaining about. The pixels are wet with the very malaise I am attempting to diagnose. I need a detox. I need analog silence.

I keep thinking about the heroic overproduction of nonfiction on Substack and Twitter and everywhere else. Everyone is explaining everything. Everyone has a framework. Everyone has a grand unified theory of why the world feels thin, fake, accelerated, lonely, decadent, captured, infantilized, financialized, feminized, masculinized, secularized, re-enchanted, atomized, tribalized, automated, bureaucratized, deranged, or just tired. Some of these theories are brilliant. Some are deranged. But taken together they form something like a low-frequency hum, buzzing like a fridge. Like a detuned radio.

I am implicated. I have written the diagnoses. I have enjoyed the little click of recognition when an abstract social problem suddenly arranges itself into a sentence. I have taken the messy, contradictory, half-comic material of being alive and converted it into “a piece.” I have used structure to imply mastery over things I have not mastered.

That is what bothers me. Not that I have nothing left to say. Worse: I have plenty left to say. I can generate the list. I can make the callbacks. I can move from capitalism to technology to human nature to family to meaning to attention to some half-earned candle of hope in the final paragraph. I can do the trick. The trick is useful. The trick is sometimes beautiful. The trick may even be necessary.

But I do not want to become someone who mistakes the ability to diagnose for the obligation to diagnose.

So maybe what I am saying, Ben, is not that I have nothing left to say. That would be melodramatic and probably false. It is more that I distrust the part of me that is always ready to say something. I distrust the little internal essay engine that takes any input—a conversation, an abandoned mini golf course, a bad mood, a new technology, a family dinner, a 3% move in QQQ, a dead mall, a weird phrase on Twitter—and immediately begins sorting it into premise, development, reversal, conclusion.

So here is my case, Ben, against writing too many nonfiction essays for Panoptica: I am the original screenwriter of Toy Story being asked to write a script for Toy Story 7. And I know it will be good and people will like it. But what if I don’t like it? I want to spend more time thinking and dreaming and writing cleverly worded love letters to my wife and less time diagnosing and attempting to solve the problems of the world. I am not an expert on life! IRL I need everyone to like me. I am an addict. My first thoughts are frequently insane!

And now—you know what time it is. You feel it coming; I feel it coming; we are both professionals…

It’s time for The Turn. The genre demands it. The train goes where the train goes. We are now 70% of the way through this essay, which is not an essay but a letter, and here is the situation. This is the point in the essay, sensing the reader's despair, we must execute The Turn. This is where we get optimistic. It is mandatory. The architecture of the genre demands it. The However. The And Yet. It requires that obligatory moment where the weary author pushes their glasses up the bridge of their nose, clears their throat, and offers a bulleted, three-point salve for the fatal wounds they have just spent eight paragraphs describing. The Turn says: and yet. And yet there is hope, and yet community, and yet love, and yet make, protect, teach, if we choose, log off and touch grass and rebuild the local and the slow and the real. So here, in the spirit of The Turn, I offer two solutions.

Two solutions? What are you doing? Everyone knows that the genre demands a list of three.

A better essay would have three solutions, but this one has only two.

First: fewer essays, better aimed. I will write only when I am inspired. Instead of worrying about a deadline for Panoptica, I should write dystopian novels or let my brain soak in some silence. When I feel so strongly about a topic that I can’t help myself, I will write.

Second: more negative space. Not every Panoptica contribution has to be a cathedral of explanation. Some pieces can be fragments, letters, field notes, failed starts, dialogues, jokes, lists that admit they are lists, essays that stop before pretending to solve humanity. A shorter piece can be more honest than a complete one.

Ah, fuck it. I can’t help myself. Let’s do three.

Third: the acceptance of the void. I will allow myself to have absolutely nothing to say and feel no guilt in the silence. I will not commit to a deadline just because I want you to like me and you are my writing hero and you pretty much launched this whole genre with Epsilon Theory in 2013. You are the best in the world at this genre. You showed me what this kind of writing could do, back when the form was still genuinely new.

To see the machine clearly is not the same as refusing to serve it. There is no moral credit for understanding incentives while obeying them perfectly. If the casino is bad, the first act of resistance is not writing a brilliant essay about the casino. It is leaving the table for one afternoon.

So, Ben, this is my letter explaining why I do not want to write too many nonfiction essays for Panoptica. It has become, inevitably, a nonfiction essay for Panoptica. It has listed the problems, distrusted the list, mocked the solutions, offered solutions, circled itself, found the middle late, and is now pretending the end was there all along.

Maybe that is fine. Maybe the point is not to stop writing essays. Maybe the point is to write fewer pieces that know what they are doing, and more importantly, know what they are not doing. They are not saving civilization. They are not solving capitalism. They are not defeating the algorithm. They are not purifying the human heart.

I wanted to write this so I could discover the more accurate thing underneath: I do not want to become a person who only knows what he thinks after he has packaged it for strangers. I do not want every unease to become content, every doubt to become an angle, every sorrow to become a paragraph with a callback. I know that writing these essays on a schedule was partly my idea; but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea!

Or write differently. Or write only when the sentence has survived a walk, a night’s sleep, and the suspicion that the world might not need it. That sounds pessimistic, but I don’t think it is. There is optimism in restraint. There is faith in letting some thoughts remain unfinished. There is love in refusing to convert every living thing into a lesson.

Which is another way of saying: I’ll write. But I’ll also disappear sometimes. I’ll detox. I’ll leave space. I’ll try not to turn every silence into an essay about silence.

Thanks for understanding.