HeyJaredWhat Effort Reveals
Essays on effort, identity, fear, ageing, and the self beneath performance. Writing about what shifts when familiar roles no longer fit, and how curiosity, courage, and attention can keep a life open to change.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 6
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- Sep 17, 2026
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- Jul 26, 2026
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What Comes After Geography? (opens the original)
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Recently I published a piece called Was Geography Disguising Affinity?I was trying to make sense of why Ursula von der Leyen’s proposal, before the European Parliament, that Canada become the EU’s first associate member affected me so deeply.My argument, if I can call it that, was that our enormous shared border with the United States may have caused us to assume a degree of cultural and political kinship that geography alone could never really prove.Canada and the United States are neighbours.
Was Geography Disguising Affinity? (opens the original)
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Why men should learn to dance (opens the original)
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I struggled landing on a title for this article much longer than I usually do. It could just as easily have been titled The Freedom to Stay: What I Could Not Have Understood About Love at Twenty-Five, because that is the argument I eventually arrived at. Instead, I chose to name the invitation.Perhaps the two are not as far apart as they first appear. The freedom I am trying to describe is not abstract. Sometimes it asks us to give up some control without giving up ourselves. Sometimes it begins
When Glimpses Are Enough (opens the original)
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When I started What Effort Reveals, I imagined it would include a lot more writing about triathlon, training, endurance sport and the strange things we voluntarily do to ourselves in the name of becoming better.Instead, somewhere along the way, it became a place where I wrote more about identity, midlife, fear, relationships, leadership, disappointment and the quieter work of becoming ourselves.I am grateful it did.But every now and then, the athletic journey deserves a place here too. Not becau
The Things We Cannot Unsee (opens the original)
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This is so me. Picture a simple dinner table, good food, easy conversation, nothing particularly consequential happening. Then I notice a loose thread in something someone has said.I immediately want to pull it.Someone else sees the same thread and thinks: For God’s sake, Marc, we’re eating!That little difference in temperament may be as good a place as any to start this essay. Because I have been noticing something lately, particularly in what I read on Substack. I seem increasingly drawn to pe
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