All
People sometimes ask me why I care. “Why do you care if a 38-year-old woman has a Squishmallow collection?” “Why do you care if a grown man cries over finally deciding on his Hogwarts House?” And I admit that this is a good-faith question. There are many things I don’t care about. If you’re not hurting anyone, if your regression is private, if you want to let your inner child out to play on weekends, go with God. But when the collective orientation of a society shifts away from maturity, and when entire media ecosystems are devoted to protecting people from the experience of being challenged or confronted, we don’t just lose some abstract dignity. We lose the capacity to solve real problems. Adults who refuse to be adults leave no adults to run the world. And somebody has to.
I discovered that the initial trauma of Arthur’s death was the coded cypher through which God spoke, and that God had less to do with faith or belief, and more to do with a way of seeing. I came to understand that God was a form of perception, a means of being alert to the poetic resonance of being. I found God to be woven into all things, even the greatest evils and our deepest despair. Sometimes I feel the world pulsating with a rich, lyrical energy, at other times it feels flat, void, and malevolent. I came to realise that God was present and active in both experiences.
From an essay I wrote four years ago recommending our attention to an idea in Hesse's The Glass Bead Game:
To imagine yourself as you might have been in another place and time is to practice the dialectic of sameness and difference in a way that enhances your self-understanding, your experience of the human lifeworld, without risking damage to a neighbor. As I argue in my book Breaking Bread with the Dead, one of Thomas Pynchon’s characters was right to say that “personal density is proportionate to temporal bandwidth,” and reading works of the past is an excellent way to increase that bandwidth without suffering from the tensions associated with projects like John Howard Griffin’s. But to imagine yourself into another life can be a powerful application of the argument I make there, and I am tempted to argue that the writing of a Castalia-style Life would make an excellent senior project for every university student.
How Kyoto, Japan Became the World’s Loveliest Tourist-Trap:
Julia Maeda, who runs a high-end travel company in Japan (she recently helped plan a honeymoon for a billionaire’s daughter), said she sometimes struggles with clients who treat a trip to Kyoto like a safari. “You want to bag the big five,” she said. “You want to see the lion and the elephant, and you want to go to the Golden Pavilion and Fushimi Inari,” as well as Arashiyama, Kiyomizu-dera, and Nijo Castle. Maeda often asks clients if they’re “strong enough” to come home from Japan and tell their friends they bagged only one or two. “A lot of people are not strong enough,” she said. “They want the selfies.”
A definition of moral and psychological strength for our time.
Anthony Lane on Elmore Leonard:
Has anyone listened more intently than Leonard to the infinite bandwidths of spoken English? So sharp are his ears, when pricked up, that somebody, way back in the Leonard genealogy, must have made out with a lynx. That is why he earns his slot in the Library of America: he turns the page and starts a fresh chapter in the chronicle of American prose. His genius is twofold; he is unrivalled not only as a listener but as a nerveless transcriber of what he hears. No stenographer in a court of law could be more accurate. His people open their mouths, and we know at once, within a paragraph, or even a clause, who dreamed them up. Many folks, in many novels, might remark, “You certainly have a long winter.” But only someone in a Leonard novel would reply, “Or you could look at it as kind of an asshole spring.”
I believe the catastrophes caused by AGI will be consequential but not agentic. By that I mean that AGI will feel about humans the way a tornado feels about houses it destroys: nothing at all. The harm to us will be an incidental effect of obstructing an irresistible force. So when AGI optimists say “These systems have no desires of their own; they’re not interested in taking over” — we shouldn’t be comforted. Both things can be true: no intention of domination, yet domination nevertheless.
Kieran Healy has just become a citizen of the U.S.A.:
I know the nationalities of my fellow oath-takers because of the next stage of the ceremony. This was the Roll Call of Nations. I did not know this was going to happen. Every country of origin represented was announced in turn. As your country was named, you were asked to stand up, and remain standing. Afghanistan came first. Then Algeria. The last person to stand, immediately to my left, was from the United Kingdom. There were twenty seven countries in all, out of only fifty or so people. For me this part in particular was enormously, irresistibly moving. It perfectly expressed the principle, the claim, the myth — as you please — that America is an idea. That it does not matter where you are from. That, in fact, America will in this moment explicitly and proudly acknowledge the sheer variety of places you are all from. That built in to the heart of the United States is the republican ideal not just that anyone can become an American, but that this possibility is what makes the country what it is.
I understand that many people work in soul-sucking corporate jobs that remind you of the uselessness of your efforts while keeping you shackled to doing them. And that sucks. But that’s a symptom of a much larger toxicity within late capitalism, and I can assure you that figuring out how to just do nothing is not going to fix your feelings of purposelessness and malaise. Indeed, many people find that they achieve escape from the drudgery of contemporary white collar existence through finding avenues to actually work in more intuitively meaningful and purposeful ways. Sometimes that means leaving their actual jobs for other types of employment that are more tangible and satisfying, oftentimes at the expense of making less. For others, this means embracing hobbies enjoyed in their off-hours that look an awful lot like jobs — building things, crafting things, fixing things. People get through “work” to then go engage in activities that many human beings once regarded as enervating labor. We’re a funny species like that. And yet alongside this persistent human attachment to various forms of effort and creation that sure do resemble an unpaid job, you have this seemingly limitless ambient sense that all forms of effort are best avoided, that if you can find a way to fob work off on someone (or some algorithm) else, you should, that we are all looking to find more time in which to be in a state of total leisure. But leisure is only really satisfying when it exists in contrast with purposeful effort.
A couple of years ago I wrote something along these lines.