Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne died in 1592. That's over four centuries ago. The guy lived in a castle in France, served as mayor of Bordeaux, and survived the plague. We have almost nothing in common on paper. I don't even think he had a cat.

And yet, I've been reading his essays, and I keep running into myself.

Not in some grand philosophical way. More like, oh, this guy gets it.

Montaigne basically invented the personal essay. Not the five-paragraph thing your English teacher made you write. He just started putting his thoughts on paper. No thesis statement. No argument to win. He called them "essais." Attempts. He was trying ideas on for size, seeing what fit, changing his mind halfway through, and leaving the contradictions in.

That's how I write too. I don't sit down with a conclusion and work backwards. I sit down with a question and figure out what I think by typing. Most of what I publish started as me not knowing the answer. Even when I press publish, it doesn't mean I know the answer. The writing is the thinking.

Montaigne also had zero patience for credentials as a proxy for wisdom. He trusted lived experience. He trusted what he'd seen, tasted, tried, and failed at more than he trusted what some authority told him was true. That hits close to home.

Most of what I know, the stuff that actually matters, I learned by doing it wrong first. Not from a course. Not from some dude on TikTok. From showing up, trying something, watching it fail, and adjusting. The lessons that stuck came from the thing itself, not from studying the thing. Montaigne would've been into that.

Then there's the groupthink problem. Montaigne lived through religious wars. Catholics and Protestants were tearing France apart because each side was absolutely certain they were right. His response wasn't to pick a team. It was to step back and question the certainty itself. Not the beliefs. The certainty.

I think about that a lot. Especially now. Everyone's got a take. Everyone's got a side. The pressure to join the horde and signal your allegiance is relentless. But the most interesting people I know, the ones actually building things, tend to be the ones who aren't performing conviction. They're comfortable saying "I don't know yet" or "I changed my mind."

Montaigne wrote that his motto was "What do I know?" Which, for a guy who wrote over a thousand pages, is a pretty great bit of self-awareness.

Maybe that's why I keep coming back to him. He wasn't trying to be a guru. He wasn't trying to sell anything. He was a guy in a tower with a bunch of books, trying to figure out how to live well.

Four hundred and thirty-something years later, sitting in Montana with a laptop and a mortgage, I'm doing roughly the same thing.

Minus the castle. And the plague. Hopefully.

If you want a great entry point, I'd recommend Montaigne by Stefan Zweig.