Why subscribe?

I currently plan to offer all my articles for free for the foreseeable future. In the words of Arthur Schopenhauer: “Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain.”

The primary goal of this publication is to improve my ability to write and think, as well as share what I have learned on my language learning journey, to which money is at best, irrelevant. However, if you’d like to buy me a coffee, want me to write about something in particular, or want to express gratitude for the work I’m doing, that’s what the subscribe option is there for.

History of Deus ex Vita and I

Rousseau: 'Every honest man puts his name to what he writes'

I’ve had an anonymous blog on Medium since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, under the pseudonym Deus ex Vita. Although I will still be cross-posting on Substack and Medium for the foreseeable future, I’ve decided to leave both Medium and anonymity behind. The content of Medium no longer fits with my blogging interests, which are now mainly focused on book reviews, amateur philosophy, and cataloguing my Spanish learning journey. Medium favors much shorter, more clickbait-y articles which are not suited for the message I’m trying to cultivate. Medium also does not effectively allow for very good organization of past posts, meaning the site has become less useful as I’ve written more.

I originally choose the name Deus ex Vita, which means God from Life in Latin, for my blog because of how it nicely encapsulated my religious and ethical beliefs, as well as my profession (biologist). Although I still love the name, I’ve decided that I can no longer support being anonymous. The excuse I used was that anonymity would allow me more intellectual freedom to post controversial things without fear of backlash in real life. This was a load of horseshit. Not only did I never post anything controversial, but I also shared this blog with too many people I knew in real life for it to be actually anonymous. Anonymity was actually limiting because I almost never shared the full truth of personal stories and opinions for fear of doxing myself. Reading Schopenhauer’s aphorisms on writing, in which he quoted the above statement by Rousseau, was the final straw for my anonymity, and I moved my medium back under my real name in Late June 2023.

My real name is Joshua Derrick, and I’m currently a graduate student in the Johns Hopkins Cellular, Molecular, and Developmental Biology program. I work with bacteria and fruit flies, and am attempting to understand how the microbiome impacts how we absorb fat. I attended MIT from 2016-2020 where I ran on the cross country and track teams and obtained degrees in computational biology and creative writing. I’m still running competitively, and I hope to qualify for the Olympic trials in the marathon in 2028. I published my creative writing thesis, after extensive editing, on Amazon in 2021.

Intellectually, my long term goal is to become a “Renaissance Man”, or 19th/early 20th century scientist. Scientist and intellectual are almost non-overlapping phenotypes now, for a number of reasons1, but it doesn’t have to be this way, and in fact I think science produced better results when you had to learn three languages2 to be a competent scientist, and when it was not unusual for someone like Niels Bohr, the father of quantum physics, to be a fan of Søren Kierkegaard.

I’m a recent convert to Catholicism, but my spiritual philosophy is probably much closer to Origen and other early Christians. I’m still a philosophical amateur, but I’ve really become enamored with the subject over the past few years. Economically, I believe degrowth and living within planetary limits is absolutely necessary. This also necessarily means that I think that almost all players in modern politics are completely off the rails crazy, and our discourse around how to govern society is also completely broken. You won’t be getting any political commentary from me.

What this blog will be focused on

Consider this blog an attempt to keep track of my journey of theosis (moving closer to God). Currently I’m focused on improving my Spanish, one of the most beautiful and important languages on earth, via the comprehensible input method. You should also expect to see content around gardening, the science of learning, book views, and philosophical musings.

To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.