I'm craving a Depth Year

What would it look like to go deeper instead of wider?

Your Five-Year Plan is a newsletter about embracing life’s profound uncertainty.

Maybe your own plans went up in flames; maybe you’re considering a big, scary leap. This is your trusty companion while you’re writing the next life chapter.

Welcome to the conversation—and to the adventure that unfolds when your plans go sideways. This is letter #48. ✨

I’m craving a Depth Year

The shoreline at Golden Gardens, captured on Kodak Portra 400 film

The focal point on the main floor of my mom’s townhouse was the wall of floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookcases. Almost a third of its shelves were devoted to her cookbooks.

I wouldn’t call it a collection, exactly, because that word makes me think of pristine items kept behind glass; she treasured, but never babied, them. She regularly pulled out one oil-stained book or another to try something new for dinner, always taking notes in the margins about what worked and what didn’t. “Needs more salt,” she scribbled on one, “incredible!” on another. Her three-ring recipe binder, the one stuffed with clippings from Gourmet and index cards with handwritten family recipes, was no exception.

After she died, the process of going through her belongings—flipping through each cookbook to gather every scrap of paper she’d touched—reminded me that my own cookbook shelves held more eye candy than workhorses. Sure, I was cooking every night. But I was drawing from the same dozen recipes, all saved in my meal planning app. With each passing year, I touched my own beloved cookbooks with decreasing frequency. They had begun gathering dust.

A few years ago, I stumbled across David Cain’s blog post, “Why the Depth Year Was My Best Year.”

A year before it was published, another post of his had gone viral: a thought experiment in which he explored the concept of a Depth Year. After swaths of people actually committed to their own Depth Years, he decided that he would, too.

Here’s the idea, as he put it:

I keep imagining a tradition I’d like to invent. After you’re established in your career, and you have some neat stuff in your house, you take a whole year in which you don’t start anything new or acquire any new possessions you don’t need. No new hobbies, equipment, games, or books are allowed during this year. Instead, you have to find the value in what you already own or what you’ve already started. You improve skills rather than learning new ones. You consume media you’ve already stockpiled instead of acquiring more. … The guiding philosophy is “Go deeper, not wider.” Drill down for value and enrichment instead of fanning out. You turn to the wealth of options already in your house, literally and figuratively.

He explored the reasons we avoid going deep. “We stop digging because we find something extremely painful about working past a certain point, and we don’t want to sort it out,” he wrote. “We don’t want to run into our limits, we don’t want to feel dumb, we don’t want to get rejected. We don’t want to put our hearts on the line if we don’t have to, and all the important things involve our hearts.”

I was hooked by David’s explanation of what might happen if we push through those fears and go deep anyway. In his words:

The unread stories on your bookshelf alone could change your life—if you read them. You could spend the next few decades enjoying ever-new breakthroughs in a single hobby, such as drawing, writing, piano, or yoga—if you went deeper with those pursuits rather than taking on new ones. Cultivating that dormant value, however, requires us to stay the course through certain dry and tricky parts where we once stopped and did something else. It is at those moments, those forks in the road between breaking new ground falling back on convenience and predictability, when we can choose depth.

From where I’m sitting today, I find myself surrounded by all the tools and resources I’d ever need to create any of the beautiful, useful things I want to make. The only roadblock is my own penchant for acquisition and breadth—and, let’s face it, distraction—over depth.

When I bought my house in late 2019, I transitioned from a period of minimalism—a necessity when your rental is 450 square feet—to one of acquisition.

A lot of that acquisition was necessary. Suddenly, I was the caretaker of a lawn, which called for a mower, edge trimmer, hoses and hose caddies, then various gardening tools to keep the weeds (somewhat) at bay. I needed shelving for the bathroom; who wants their face wash to sit on the toilet tank? I bought window treatments for the bedroom to block the sunlight that poured in early each morning and lingered on summer nights.

Some of that acquisition happened naturally, as it does when you have empty rooms to fill. Some of it went to fixing nagging aesthetic problems. Other acquisitions I inherited, like the thirty boxes of keepsakes from my mom’s house.

Some seasons are for acquiring, and others are for maintaining and shedding. I’m no defender of our consumer culture, but I have learned that acquisition is a natural part of different life stages.

The insidious thing about acquisition seasons, though, is the mindset that accompanies them. When the time for acquiring stuff is over, when you find yourself in a house that’s equipped with everything you could ever need, there’s no “off” switch for the frenetic hunter-gatherer energy you’ve adopted in the process, or the problem-solving lens you’ve started to view everything through.

When I visited my family last month, my dad gave me an app recommendation.

“It’s called Merlin,” he said, describing how it identifies birds by their songs and calls. He’d learned about it from a friend, presumably also in his seventies.

Frankly, I didn’t seem like the prime candidate for an app developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, but when I got sick later that trip, one of two places I could spend my isolation period was the screened back porch. I made myself comfortable there, gazed out across the yard, and downloaded Merlin to pass time.

When I opened the app and turned on my mic, the cacophony of chirps, trills, and warbles came into crisp focus: apparently, these were Carolina wrens, cardinals, blue jays, and gray catbirds trading solos. And I learned that this was a symphony unique to a Maryland backyard; when I flew back to the Pacific Northwest, the app identified dark-eyed juncos, black-capped chickadees, and Steller’s jays outside my own kitchen window.

It’s funny how easily background noise can become an intricate tapestry worthy of center stage. All it takes is narrowing our attention.

My craving for depth started emerging in small ways, like when I traded all the mid TV of Netflix for the slate of editors’ picks available on the Criterion Channel: From Here to Eternity, On the Waterfront, The Manchurian Candidate.

Then, I started wondering about bigger experiments. What would happen if I cooked my way through one cookbook, Julie and Julia style? What skills might I acquire by the end of that project? By exploring a single cookbook in depth, what lessons might I learn about all the other undiscovered treasures in my house, hidden in plain sight?

I considered what kind of recipes might work. They’d have to be challenging enough to maintain my interest—though anything too fussy would invite burnout. They couldn’t be too rich for my regular rotation; The Cake Bible wouldn’t work here.

That’s how I decided on pizza and salad. Enter

Alexandra Stafford

’s Pizza Night, a compendium of (you guessed it!) pizza and salad recipes that—with its fifty-two pairings, one for each week of the year—felt designed to become my companion on a pizza-themed Depth Year.

Here we go!

Depth isn’t always a suitable goal; in the many months that followed my head-spinning life transitions, it certainly wasn’t for me. But now that I’m on the cusp of what’s next, depth feels like the right pursuit.

I have one test pizza under my belt, a simple one with store-bought dough that got me familiar with stretching the dough, selecting the right amount of toppings, and launching and turning the pie. As the year wears on, these things will become second nature; right now, they all feel awkward and stilted, just as I’d expect.

A year from now, I want to have a cookbook whose pages are stained by the tomato sauce and salad dressing I’m prepping off to one side, Sharpie at the ready to leave notes about what worked and what didn’t. I don’t expect to succeed with, or even like, every recipe. I do intend to learn a lot—definitely about pizza and salad, and maybe even a little bit about myself.

I’m craving the kind of easy confidence that’s only earned by working diligently on one area of focus, not allowing myself the option of ducking away to a novel interest or fun distraction when things get tricky. If I earn that, it’s possible I won’t want my depth year to end.

💬 What about you?

I’m curious. What does the balance between depth and breadth look like in your life right now?

Had your own plan-in-flames experience? Taking a leap into the unknown? I’d love to hear more. Just hit “reply” to get in touch, or introduce yourself here.

Warmly,
Maddie