How to Journal Like the Martian

This fictional story about an astronaut is better than any self-help book.

There is a novel about an astronaut stranded in space that has helped me solve more problems in my life than any self-help book I’ve ever read. That book is The Martian by Andy Weir.

On the surface, this is strange. The Martian is a novel. It was written for entertainment. And I did not read it because I was looking for advice. I read it because I wanted to escape my problems by disappearing into somebody else’s that had no relation to my own, which seemed like a pretty safe bet, considering the book literally takes place on another planet.

But whenever my life falls into disorder, it’s the book I come back to.

The main character, Mark Watney, is facing problems that make most of mine look embarrassingly small. He is stranded alone on Mars. He is running out of food. His equipment keeps breaking. For much of the book, Earth either cannot reach him or cannot help him. And yet, somehow, he keeps moving forward.

What makes the book useful is that Andy Weir¹ doesn’t simply tell us that Watney is clever enough to survive. He shows us exactly how Watney thinks. The story unfolds largely through Watney’s journal entries, so we get to watch him encounter a problem, panic about it, swear at it, write it down, pull it apart, and slowly turn it into something he can actually work on.

And what’s great about it is it doesn’t position him as some sort of brooding genius with a super high IQ. He’s the lowest-ranking member on the team. He’s able to survive not because of a superior intellect, but because of the approach he uses to solve his problems. An approach that can be used by anyone facing a difficult problem. It even has a name: computational thinking.²

The basic idea is: take something complicated, break it into smaller parts, look for familiar patterns, remove information that doesn’t matter, and then turn your solution into a sequence you can test.

It sounds sterile when you describe it like that. In The Martian, it feels more like watching a clever man repeatedly refuse to die. But we’re not just watching him. We’re seeing how he does it. We’re hearing his thinking happen out loud in his journal. And we can do the same thing in our own journal.

The book opens with his very reasonable assessment of being abandoned on another planet: “I’m pretty much fucked. That’s my considered opinion. Fucked.” Dude, tell me about it. When something goes badly in my own life, my first analysis is never more sophisticated. A relationship ends and the problem immediately becomes: My life is over. I’ll never meet anyone again. I will die alone and my neighbors will discover my body because of the smell.

Panic is a blinding experience. It compresses everything happening to us into one enormous emotional object. Not having enough food, having no means of rescue, having no communication with Earth, and nobody knowing you’re alive all become: I’m fucked.

The first part of the process is reverse engineering the I’m fucked. What are the separate problems that created that sentence? What questions can we then ask about those problems?

For Watney, it becomes: What equipment survived? Does he have oxygen? Does he have water? How much food is left? How long will it last?

Suddenly, he is no longer solving Mars. He is solving food. Which then requires him to solve soil, which requires him to solve water. You get the point.

This part of computational thinking is called decomposition: breaking a bigger problem into smaller, manageable parts. It sounds simple and obvious. But when the problem is our own life, some of us, and not pointing at anyone in particular, especially not the author of this essay, can be remarkably bad at doing it.

In my mid-twenties, I decided I wanted to write a book. At the time, I had a full-time job, and I became increasingly convinced that the job was why I wasn’t writing. The logic seemed airtight. I wanted to write. Work took up most of my day. Therefore, if I removed work, I would write.

So I quit. I had saved enough money to live for about a year, moved away, and gave myself almost unlimited time to work. A year later, most of the money was gone, I had picked up debt, and I still did not have a finished manuscript.

Ooooooooooooops.

The strange part was that I had successfully solved the problem I thought I had. I had time, more time than I had ever had before, and it hadn’t fixed anything.

The danger of trying to solve enormous problems is that they invite enormous solutions. How do I become a writer? felt like a life-sized question, so it seemed reasonable that the answer might involve quitting my job, moving, and restructuring my entire life. When you misdiagnose a problem at that scale, you can make mistakes at that scale too.

I never stopped to ask what the problem was actually made of. Did I really need eight free hours a day? Was time actually the limiting factor? How many good hours of writing could I realistically do? Do I need to be writing a book? Do I need to be trying to make it my full-time job?

Dramatic problems invite dramatic solutions. These questions are much less dramatic than How do I become a writer? They are also much more useful.

When I was asking How do I become a writer?, I had bundled a dozen different things into the word writer. To me, at that time, it meant writing a book, making money from it, and eventually doing it full-time. But if I had actually broken the problem apart, I think I would have realized that what I wanted was much simpler. I wanted time to follow my own train of thought, connect ideas together, and make something out of them. A book was one way to do that, but so was an essay. So is a YouTube video. And neither of them would require me to have more than a few hours a day.

In fact, quitting made the problem worse. Once writing had to justify an entire year of savings, it stopped feeling like the thing I loved and started feeling like the thing that had to save me. I spent a year trying to become a writer when all I really needed to do was wake up a few hours before work and write.

And this is the real advantage of decomposition. You start with something enormous and vague like How do I become a writer? or How do I survive on Mars? and keep breaking it apart until the pieces are small enough to actually examine.

Survive on Mars is an impossible problem. Make water isn’t.

Once Watney breaks his situation into smaller pieces, many of those pieces start to look surprisingly familiar. He is no longer dealing with one completely alien problem. He is dealing with chemistry, physics, agriculture, rationing, and engineering, things he already knows something about.

That brings us to the next part of computational thinking: pattern recognition.

One of the best parts of The Martian is that Watney solves these bizarre problems with concepts that most of us learned in elementary school.

He needs to grow food on Mars, so he starts with the same basic question a farmer on Earth would ask: what does a potato actually need to grow? Soil, fertilizer, water, and seeds. He has potatoes packed for Thanksgiving. He has Martian soil. He can use the crew’s waste as fertilizer.

Later, he needs to get the heavy Pathfinder lander onto the roof of his rover. His solution is not some piece of futuristic NASA equipment. He piles up rocks and sand and builds a ramp.

Even making water follows the same pattern. Mars does not have the water he needs, but water is still just hydrogen and oxygen. So he stops thinking about the strange problem of finding water on Mars and starts thinking about the familiar problem of where can I get hydrogen and oxygen?

This is pattern recognition: looking at a problem you have never seen before and recognizing the shape of something you have.

When somebody else tells you about their terrible relationship, the pattern can be obvious immediately. They describe the same fight happening every week. The same apology. The same promise. The same fight again. From the outside, you can see the loop perfectly.

Then your own relationship starts going badly and suddenly you become a medieval theologian. Well, technically, what she said on Tuesday could be interpreted several different ways…

It’s really difficult for us to be objective in our own lives, which is why (and say it with me) journaling works so well.

Journaling or writing about our lives forces us to actually think about them in concrete terms. Once we do that, it creates a certain distance. Reading about your life, even if you’re the one who’s written it, makes you a viewer of that life.

Patterns that felt invisible while you were living them become almost embarrassingly obvious on paper. You notice that every time you sleep badly, you hate your job. Or that every ambitious project you abandon begins with three days of constructing an elaborate productivity system. Or that the same type of person keeps showing up in your dating history wearing a slightly different jacket.

The situation changes. The structure underneath it doesn’t.

But seeing a pattern is not enough. You also have to know which parts of the situation actually matter.

The difficult part is realizing that something can be completely true and still be irrelevant.

I once went on a Muay Thai trip to Thailand. One of the kids in the group was probably about 24, but he acted more like he was 19. One night after training, we all went out with some other people from the gym. One of the guys was from the Netherlands and was probably in his 30s.

The two of them got really drunk and got into some argument that I can no longer remember the context of. They started yelling at each other. Of course, this being a Muay Thai trip, eventually they wanted to fight each other.

One of the things the younger guy kept saying was, “You don’t know what I’ve been through. You don’t know how hard my life has been.”

The other guy looked at him and, completely earnestly, said, “Look at me. It does not matter. I don’t care. Nobody cares.”

It is an incredibly asshole-ish thing to say, but there’s also something useful hidden inside it. The younger guy’s past might have mattered enormously if the question was Why do I behave this way? But if the question was Should I fight this Dutch guy outside a bar tonight?, most of that history was not particularly relevant.

That distinction matters. Relevance does not exist on its own. Something is always relevant to something.

Imagine you hate your job. You sit down with your journal and start listing everything that is true about it.

A: The company isn’t particularly prestigious.
B: Your boss constantly messages you after work.
C: Your office is ugly and the commute is annoying.
D: You find the actual work boring.
E: One of your friends makes more money than you.

All five of those things are true. But once they are sitting separately on the page, you can ask a much more useful question: Which of these actually makes me want to leave?

Maybe you realize that you don’t really care about the prestige of the company. The commute is annoying, but you could live with it. And while you wish you made as much as your friend, you’re actually pretty comfortable with what you earn.

What you really care about is B and D. You hate having a boss who intrudes on your personal life, and you are bored by the work itself.

So the problem you started with looked like:

A + B + C + D + E = I hate my job

But the problem you actually need to solve is closer to:

B + D = I hate my job

A, C, and E have not suddenly become false. They just aren’t relevant to the thing you care about most.

And look how much more approachable the problem becomes. If A, B, C, D, and E are all the problem, quitting your job might actually seem like the only reasonable solution. But if the real problem is B and D, you suddenly have much smaller things you can try before blowing up your career.

You can have a conversation with your boss about contacting you after work and see if anything changes. You can ask to take on projects you find more interesting.

The solution just changed from “find a new job” to “have one conversation with my boss.”

Once you know what you are actually solving for, you can make smaller interventions and see whether they work before reaching for the enormous one.

And I think this is what makes abstraction much harder than simply “removing unnecessary information.” The challenge is not separating fact from fiction. It is separating truth from relevance.

But there is another difficulty here. Maybe you are actually lying to yourself about which variables actually matter

Maybe the real equation was never B + D. Maybe it was A + B + D.

But you actually excluded A because you were embarrassed that you cared.

Maybe prestige actually does matter to you. You care about being able to tell people where you work. You like the status that comes with a certain company or title. But admitting that feels shallow, so you quietly leave A out of the equation and tell yourself that you only care about the more respectable things.

The problem is that refusing to admit a variable does not remove it. It just means you are trying to solve the problem with incomplete information.

You might even decide that you shouldn’t care about prestige. Maybe you want to become the kind of person who cares less about it. But that is a different problem. You still have to be honest about what matters to you now before you can decide whether you want to change it.

This is where abstraction requires two kinds of honesty. You have to remove things that feel important but aren’t relevant, and you have to admit when something is relevant even though you wish it weren’t.

And this is also one of the reasons I think a journal is especially useful for this kind of thinking. Talking to another person can help enormously, but there are certain things that are difficult to say out loud. It is hard to tell a friend, I think I actually care a lot about status. It is hard to admit that jealousy, approval, money, attractiveness, or what other people think of you is influencing a decision when you know those are not the things you are supposed to care about.

A private journal removes some of that pressure. You can write down the embarrassing answer first and decide what you think about it later.

At this point, we have done most of the thinking. We have figured out what the problem is actually made of. We have looked for familiar patterns inside it. We have separated the information that matters from the information that doesn’t.

Now there is really only one question left:

What should I actually do about it?

This final part is called algorithmic thinking. The phrase makes it sound much more complicated than it is. What we are really trying to do is turn our thinking into an experiment.³

And experiments only work if you know what you are testing.

You need a hypothesis.

If your solution is I need to be more disciplined, there is almost nothing you can learn from trying it. What exactly are you doing differently? What would count as success? If it fails, why did it fail?

But say your hypothesis is: I think I can write consistently if I work for 25 minutes before work every morning.

Now you have something you can test.

You try it for a week. Maybe you discover that 25 minutes is plenty, but 7:00 a.m. is too late because you start thinking about work. So you move it earlier. Maybe mornings are terrible no matter what you do, but you write easily at a coffee shop on Saturday afternoons.

The point is not that your first hypothesis has to be right. The point is that it has to be specific enough to be wrong.

Because once the experiment fails in a specific way, it gives you information. Maybe you misunderstood the problem when you decomposed it. Maybe you recognized the wrong pattern. Maybe something you thought was irrelevant actually mattered.

Reality audits the thinking.

Then you go back to the journal, look at what happened, adjust the hypothesis, and try again.

And this is probably the thing I return to most often in The Martian. Mark Watney is not compelling because he never panics. He panics constantly. He gets angry. He swears. Things break. Plans fail.

What makes him effective is what happens after the panic. Eventually, he turns back toward the problem. He breaks it apart. He asks whether he has seen anything like it before. He ignores the information that does not help. He comes up with something to try. Then reality gives him an answer.

And boy, do I wish this came naturally to me, but it does not.

I have to really work at it. I have to give myself a place to practice. I need to write it out and put things on paper long enough so I can see that the problem is not as big as I thought. Sometimes a problem that looks like Mars is actually just potatoes.

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This essay originally began its life as a YouTube video you can watch here

1. This connection is not accidental. Before becoming a full-time novelist, Weir spent 25 years as a computer programmer. In a 2026 interview on The Book Review, the host suggested that the problem-solving structure of The Martian and Project Hail Mary seemed to reflect a “coder mentality.” Weir agreed, “Oh, absolutely. I was a computer programmer for 25 years, and so that approach to problem solving colors everything I do.” The interview appears in the March 20, 2026 episode, “Andy Weir on Writing the Hit Book Behind the Movie ‘Project Hail Mary”

2. Computational thinking is one of those terms that becomes less tidy the longer you look at it. I’m using a pretty elementary version here, consisting of just four pillars: decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction, and algorithmic thinking.

3. I’m stretching the computer-science meaning here. Algorithmic thinking means designing a sequence of steps for reaching a solution. For messy personal problems, I find it more useful to think of that sequence as an experiment: define what you think will work, try it, observe the result, and revise.