November 2025

We See Things They’ll Never See; You and I Are Gonna Live Forever

By in foolosophy, technology, the big sleep

I think he’s overstating it. Even with strong life-extension, you don’t actually get rid of finitude. You get increased odds and longer runs, but there will still be accidents, resource limits, and eventual failure modes. The horizon moves out, but it doesn’t vanish. There will still be a market for philosophies that say, “You have to die sometime; here’s how to make that tolerable.” If anything, the more people fear death and cling to their extended lives, the more counter-arguments in favor of limits will develop: death as relief from exhaustion, as release from stasis, as the only way for new people and new cultures to arise. Not to mention that there’s no reason to suppose the human affinity for murder will fade away; if anything, it might become more widespread as people refuse to take nature’s hint.

How death is valued might change. I can easily imagine a scenario: a hyper-managed majority trying to defer death indefinitely, and a Romantic counter-culture that treats dying “on schedule” or even early as the last authentic gesture in a world obsessed with self-preservation. “Live forever” becomes the bourgeois norm; “die young” becomes the punk move. We already have micro-cultures that romanticize early death: the 27 Club, “live fast, die young,” the Romantic poet dying of consumption, the political martyr. In a world where the responsible default is “continuous optimization and health-span management,” checking out early becomes an even louder counter-signal. Voluntarily refusing life-extension (or just living recklessly in a world built for safety) would start to look like a kind of aristocratic gesture: throwing away what everyone else is desperate to buy.

But that Romantic status will be very selective, the way it always has been. When Keats dies young, it’s a legend; when some anonymous factory worker dies at 42, it’s a statistic. Any future cult of “beautiful early deaths” would probably attach itself to glamorous artists, influencers, or ideological die-hards, while the vast majority of premature deaths from poverty or addiction stay as unromantic and invisible as they are now. Life-extension tech would sharpen a class line: the long-lived, medically managed overclass; the involuntarily short-lived underclass; and a small self-conscious minority that chooses not to cash in the extra decades and makes a whole aesthetic out of that refusal.

Nietzsche worried that one immortal man would make the rest of us long for death out of sheer boredom with him. He didn’t live to see the prototype: tech billionaires livestreaming their biomarker readouts into eternity. The problem with immortality isn’t just that it’s arrogant to inflict yourself on the universe forever. It’s that most people already don’t know what to do with seventy years. Isaac Brock asks, “You wasted life, why wouldn’t you waste the afterlife?” and he’s right. If you’ve spent half your current allocation staring at your phone, why assume the next hundred years will be different? At that point, “life extension” risks becoming the metaphysical version of a gym membership: not something you seriously intend to use, just a comforting receipt you can wave around to prove you’re not really frivolous, you’re just getting ready. But time doesn’t care about your intentions. If you need an extra century before you can suck the marrow out of life, the odds are you’re going to spend the bonus years the same way you spent the base model: thinking you’ll start tomorrow. Many people don’t want more life; they want more wiggle room to avoid living.

Distinct Observations

By in aphorisms, books, nietzsche, writing

This difficulty is compounded by the fact that, while a good many of the numbered sections in which most of his books consist have the compactness and epigrammatic quality supposedly characteristic of aphorisms, a good many others do not. They instead are paragraph-length or even page-length reflections of a frequently related but also relatively self-contained nature. Yet even these longer reflections share with genuine aphorisms the characteristic of being distinct observations, rather than clearly connected sequential paragraphs in a sustained line of thought. They typically make (and sometimes elaborate) a point of some sort on some topic, but need (and are intended) to be thought about in conjunction with other points on the topic, both in the same book parts and elsewhere. This makes reading most of Nietzsche’s books a very different experience — and challenge — from reading chapters in a typical philosophical monograph. And what makes understanding both his kind of philosophy and his philosophical thinking even more challenging is that he wrote no definitive treatises, and instead gives us almost nothing more than these bits and pieces, leaving it to us to try to figure out what to make of them collectively.

— Richard Schacht, Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy: Finding His Way

Nietzsche was my first experience of “aphorisms,” so I’m afraid I’ve imprinted on him to the extent that it’s hard to read other, more traditional versions without seeing them as lacking. The ones that are brief often seem too shallow to me, little more than quips. Others rely on rhetorical symmetry, like a tweet I saw at random this morning: “The left wing view of human nature is rosy and idealized while left wing art is grim and ugly. The right wing view of human nature is grim and ugly while right wing art is rosy and idealized.” The effect relies on the neat inversion of chiasmus, which can lull the reader into accepting the premise without thinking, “Wait a minute; is that really accurate in most cases?” It seems to me that many of Nietzsche’s best aphorisms are too long to be rhetorically tidy like that (while still displaying genuine rhetorical skill), but not so long as to outgrow the “aphorism” designation.

In his book The Long and Short of It: From Aphorism to Novel, Gary Saul Morson — who pleasingly agrees with me that Oscar Wilde’s witticisms are formulaic and shallow, a charge I might extend to La Rochefoucauld — classifies and examines several varieties of short-form writing, from aphorisms and maxims to apothegms and dicta. He categorizes “thoughts,” which he names in honor of Pascal’s Pensées, as belonging to “the family of short genres while more closely resembling an unfinished longer one.” He adds, “It is hard to say just where the thought as a genre ends and the essay begins. Many resemble the germ, or else the residue, of an essay.” He names Lichtenberg and Nietzsche as the other two masters of the form. I like the cut of his jib here, but I fear that “thoughts” is too generic of a term to describe a specific style of short-form writing. Same goes for “reflections.” If I were forced to choose a term, I might go with “reflective fragments.” Maybe even “assays,” just so I could say, “Outis Niemand: putting the ‘ass’ in ‘assay’ since 2005.”

I Am All That Is Man

By in battling personal entropy

Deadlifted 510 last night. My trainer and I had been talking about people who ask for a spot while deadlifting for fear of passing out, so we decided that it would make a better picture if I collapsed after the lift.

Livin’ La Vida Contemplativa

By in books, foolosophy, montaigne, nietzsche, who's žižoomin' who?

In the end, however, the Nietzsche of Human rather surprisingly accords the highest rank—among levels of Cultur of humanity and sensibility in both a society and a human being—to a quite different kind of spirituality he envisions. He introduces it by way of the classical expression vita contemplativa — the “contemplative life,” which rises above involvement in all things human, reflects upon them, and endeavors to comprehend them.

— Richard Schacht, Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy: Finding His Way

The phrase vita contemplativa may suggest incense and monk’s cells. I take it more pragmatically: the practice of standing far enough back from the day’s noise to see the pattern in it. Not otherworldly “spirituality,” just disciplined perspective — history when it helps, psychology when it helps, a scrap of everyday conversation when it helps, all woven into a view of how to live. And the contemplative life is my summum bonum. I’m one of those “whose only aim is to observe how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of other men’s lives, in order to judge and regulate their own,” as Montaigne put it. A life spent reflecting and endeavoring to comprehend is a life well-lived.

I Googled “vita contemplativa” to remind myself what Aristotle originally said about it. The first page of results were mostly for a recent book of that title by Byung Chul-Han, “the Internet’s New Favorite Philosopher,” as he was dubbed by the New Yorker. Knowing that “the Internet” has previously been infatuated with that flatulent, fraudulent pufferfish of a self-promoting provocateur posing as a philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, I went to the “read sample” page on Amazon with low hopes. They were not subsequently raised. Within the first four pages, we’ve already been treated to mentions of Guy Debord, Theodor Adorno, and “capitalist relations of production.” Well, thank goodness I didn’t waste any money on more grad-student seminar bullshit, at least.

The Fool Hath Said In His Tweet

By in atheism, nihilism, ohferfucksake, religion

It is untrue that religion should have provided morality — the converse! We prove religion true or untrue with morality.

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881)

1. “The universe is cold and uncaring” — True, but melodramatic and self-pitying. Warmth and caring are social traits, so, as the cosmologist Johnny Lee noted, expecting “the universe” to relate to you in that manner is looking for love in all the wrong places.

2. “Just animals like all the others” — Again, true in a banal sense, in that we are biological beings, products of evolution, sharers of DNA with other animals, but still melodramatically dismissive. There are clearly relative differences between species, and even between individual members of species. The phrase implies it’s some kind of demotion or degradation to be “merely” an animal. The whining tone is undignified.

3. “And therefore” — I wince whenever I see a moron preparing to draw sweeping conclusions from dubious premises.

4. “There can’t possibly be anything like Right and Wrong” — Well, true in the sense that morality is not a gift from God, but egregiously stupid insofar as moral instincts are present even in “mere” animals; as Nietzsche wryly noted above, they predate religious concepts. Right and Wrong” with capital letters is just a demand for moral bullion from the Cosmic Treasury; alas, all we’ve got is the fiat-morality standard, backed by the full faith and community credit of our neighbors. Luckily, that functions well enough for our purposes.

5. “You genuinely are permitted to do whatever you want” — “Permitted” by whom? “Everything is permitted” equivocates between metaphysical permission (no cosmic judge) and institutional permission (what people, laws, and norms will tolerate). Technically, you’ve always been free to “do whatever you want,” but it has never been the case that you are therefore free from earthly consequences.

6. “There will be no final accounting.” Yes, that at least does follow from disbelief in monotheism.

7. “And yet almost no atheists admit to it.” Strange; I can’t imagine why anyone would object to being caricatured.

And this is the “tamest, most obviously true thing” he’s ever posted.

Here the Ways of Men Divide

By in atheism, nihilism, religion

Leaving aside the ridiculous absurdity of trying to force the ancient debate over the God of monotheism’s existence onto the Procrustean bed of post-1789 politics, both Ash and Heiens are trying to wring a should out of metaphysics. Ash: if there’s no Creator, evolution is the only engine of value, therefore you should accept Social-Darwinist hierarchy. Heiens: if you oppose a world of Socialists and National Socialists exterminating entire populations of racial or class enemies, you should accept Christian metaphysics. In each case, a contested premise about atheism is smuggled across the is/ought bridge and cashed out as duty.

Underneath is the same motivation: the submission impulse. If Christian dogma won’t do, we’ll substitute Nature, History, or any other proper noun of our own invention. What’s being sought isn’t truth so much as guarantee: a rule outside the self that absolves the self of agency. “Tell me what binds me — God, Cosmos, the Law of the Jungle — so I can stop weighing, considering, judging and choosing, and simply obey.”

This is why so much self-described “nihilism” is only inverted universalism. When “God’s word” can no longer legislate everywhere for everyone, some people simply replace the regent: now Nothing legislates everywhere for everyone. They reify the void and enthrone it. The middle ground — meaning as contingent, plural, revisable — is skipped because it offers no total guarantee, only the work of fallible judgment. Adult life is precisely that: living without a cosmic permission slip, accepting that our “shoulds” are stitched from experience, memory, and bargaining, and that responsibility can’t be outsourced to a grand axiom. “Here the ways of men divide. If you want to achieve peace of mind and happiness, then have faith; if you want to be a disciple of truth, then search.”

Obiter Scripta, no. 148

By in books, history, obiter scripta

History, consisting mainly of diabolical cruelty—why do I read it if I have nothing in common with any of its cruelties—torture and killing, killing and torture, and I keep rereading it in myriad ways; always the same. Without the dates that stick in it like pins, you could never tell all these things apart.

— Elias Canetti, The Human Province

As much as I enjoy reading the Durant’s Story of Civilization series, I have to take a break from it occasionally because of exactly that — one instance after another of a nation rising to prosperity on the back of merciless conquest, only to slouch into decadence and get overrun by invading barbarians. Maybe history is best taken as microdoses, not mainlined. Big narratives blur into the same triptych of despair — war, famine, societal collapse — until the cerebral nerves go numb. Small, regular hits work better. Think of the genre known as “microhistory.” Each small-scale event or story is a pinprick of light you can actually look at rather than the atrocity-sun that burns your retinas.

Autotelic

By in books, foolosophy, writing

His notion of happiness: to read and write quietly for a lifetime without ever showing anyone a word of it, without ever publishing a word of it. To leave in pencil everything one has written down, changing nothing, as though it existed for nothing; like the natural course of a life that serves no confining purposes, but is fully itself, and records itself, just as it proceeds and breathes, by itself.

—Elias Canetti, The Human Province

A monastic ideal: writing as a near-religious practice, refusing the market’s demands, even the demand to “matter.” “Pencil” signals provisionality and humility; “changing nothing” rejects the sculptor’s pride in revision. The paradox: he prints this in a published book. So I read it as a corrective rather than a commandment — a way of disciplining the eyes to not wander toward an audience. The point isn’t literally never to publish; it’s to write as if no audience were owed anything. It remains true, however: sharing things we love is rewarding.

 

Intellectual Kindling

By in aphorisms, books, foolosophy

Which of the sentences in an aphorism collection does one write down? For one thing, the sentences that confirm one: things that one feels are right, that one has often thought, that go against conventional opinion, that justify one. There is much dogmatism in this urge to be confirmed by great or wise men. But it can also be more: a pure joy in meeting a truly congenial mind. For if many sentences by a single man accord with one, then mere dogmatism turns into astonishment: in a totally different time, among totally different people, a man sought to grasp himself in exactly the same way as oneself; the same form, the same definiteness and definition came to him. One would be happy if one’s best were equal to his best. Only timidity keeps one from falling into the arms of the older brother: the feeling that many things in one could frighten him.

— Elias Canetti, The Human Province

When I look through books that I read decades ago, I see that I used to mark the mirror-lines — the ones that provoked an exclamation of “Yes, this!” and made me feel intelligently vindicated. These days I hunt tinder-lines. They don’t just agree; they ignite. A good line carries a spark — an odd metaphor, a skewed angle, a question with teeth — that sets my own cerebral scrap-heap ablaze. Kinship is still important, but the point isn’t to fall into the arms of the “older brother.” A line has to resonate as being true or useful in some way, but it doesn’t have to simply affirm what I already think; in fact, it can be productively wrong, that is, wrong in such a way as to inspire a spirited response. I want to be stimulated to new and interesting thoughts. My simple rubric now: if a passage doesn’t sharpen my wits or start a fire, it stays in the book.

The Best of Times, the Worst of Timelines

By in books, foolosophy

The difference today is that everything gets photographed. There is no misery left that can be kept secret. All misery has gone public. But this merely signifies that everyone can more easily grow used to it. In the past, a man could pretend to know nothing. Today, he can pretend to be helpless, because he knows too much.

—Elias Canetti, The Human Province

That was from 1969. He thought people were living in the Panopticon then. Imagine him stumbling through a portal into our time and being greeted by Pinhead’s croak: “We have such sights to show you.”

“The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks,” said Randall Jarrell. Every era believes it’s the dull shadow of a golden age, and the next age will feel the same in relation to us. In 2075 they’ll call our period the “good old days” because you could still technically opt out — no cranial pingstorms, no brainwaving. I guess that’s good news, of a sort: however rotten you think things are now, people in the future will look back at us in envy. We may as well try to seek out the cracks and be grateful.

What If They Gave a War But We Didn’t Notice?

By in books, foolosophy

August Pfizmaier, the Viennese scholar, absorbed in his translation of the Manyoshu, knew nothing about the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 until a year after it broke out. He finally learned about it from a Japanese newspaper that reached him very belatedly in Vienna.

— Elias Canetti, The Human Province

“Life goals,” as the kids like to say these days. Adam Smith approached the epitome of the absent-minded professor when he wandered fifteen miles out of town in his nightgown while lost in thought, but this, this is the ne plus ultra of the laser-focused professor. Distraction used to be a horseman riding through town with a rumor. Now it’s an intravenous drip. We congratulate ourselves on “being informed,” which often means being agitated on schedule for no practical benefit. Pfizmaier’s ignorance looks, from here, like a kind of negative capability: the courage to let many things go unknown so one thing can be known well. It’s possible the middle path is not moderation but rotation: periods of deliberate non-knowing, followed by brief, surgical knowing.

Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears the Crown

By in books, foolosophy, jests japes jokes jollies

Will his unread books take vengeance? Will, they, neglected, refuse to follow him to the graveside? Will they pounce upon the sated, much-read books and tear them to shreds?

— Elias Canetti, The Human Province

Another birthday in the royal ledger, and I’m taking inventory. Not of titles or shelves, but of rule. Have I been a good sovereign or just a sentimental hoarder with a crown? I’ve kept order, mostly. I’ve granted audience to nearly all who came into the realm; only a few dozen still wait in anterooms, their spines patient, their pages untested. Do they resent me? I pray not. Neglect isn’t contempt; sometimes it’s the fear of not having enough future left to meet them properly.

What becomes of a kingdom without its king? I can already hear the gossip: the well-thumbed grandees — Nietzsche, Hoffer — murmuring about continuity; the cheap paperbacks, those border towns I annexed on a whim, wondering if they’ll be first on the cart when the brokers arrive. Perhaps that’s my unease: not death, but dispersion. Will the sentences that changed me be parceled out like furniture, their alliances broken, their marginalia stranded in exile with strangers? I quail at the thought of my loyal subjects collapsing into faction and civil strife in my absence.

If I were just, I’d write the law now: a brief edict, a clear succession plan, an aristocracy of titles to keep together, a vow to send each volume toward its likely reader. Mercy, too — release without bitterness for those who never found their hour here. Libraries are not mausoleums; they are waystations, and stewardship is sometimes a graceful letting-go.

And yet, while I’m still breathing in this room, I can make small amends. One unread summoned to the royal court each month. Three spines faced forward to remind me why I ever built a state out of paper. A little dust brushed off with the tenderness of apology. That’s all it takes to quiet a restless province: attention, light, a hand on the page.

If I have ruled well, it will show in their calm when I’m gone. If not, then let my last act be a good decree and a clear conscience. Tonight, at least, I can be the ruler I meant to be: choose one waiting subject, open to the first chapter, and listen. The kingdom sleeps easier when the king reads in plain view.

The Descent of Manners

By in moralizing, revillaging, technology, the geist of the zeit

To point out the obvious, the bystander isn’t witnessing a moral collapse; he’s noticing a new rule of attention: access is negotiated. People reading a book or a phone aren’t necessarily refusing to engage; they’re engaged already. What he wants is ambient availability — others to idle in neutral until he arrives, ready to drop everything and pay attention to him. If he truly values conversation, there’s a grown-up remedy that predates smartphones: be forthright and tell people that you want to set aside time for each other’s undivided attention. If you want to be unkind, you could say that his attitude is just narcissism dressed up as social critique.

There’s also a rhetorical sleight-of-hand here. Wanye’s framing invites us to see an inevitable connection in the evolution of private time from one stage to the next. What it ignores is is that each stage of the progression also brought new ways of interacting, not simply an inexorable decline from sociable creatures reciting family lore around the hearth to mute recluses grunting while pawing at their glowing screens.

Let’s start at the supposed root of decline: books. Far from turning readers into hermits, print built rooms — literal ones. Carnegie libraries put free civic space on Main Street where strangers mixed and clubs met; lyceum halls and Chautauqua tents turned reading into lectures, debates, and summer festivals; serialization synchronized strangers around the next chapter; and literary societies — from Baker Street Irregulars onward — gave readers rituals, calendars, and friends. Even the frequent claims about fiction sharpening our perspective-taking, while weak in reality, point the same way: text can widen the circle we can imagine. Even the first rung in Wanye’s ladder to the abyss doesn’t subtract sociability; it manufactures it. The same holds for the other stages. The penny press turned news into a shared daily event; general-interest magazines shaped national debates and helped create the middlebrow intellectual milieu; television and film created shared events and stories that “everyone” saw and talked about; and even the Pandora’s jar we call the Internet has facilitated real connections underneath all the superficial versions. Not every stage is a perfect balance of pluses and minuses — personally, I think that “news as a shared daily event” has been a disaster. But the point is, all of these developments bring us together in new ways even as they force us apart in others.

The eulogies for village hearth talk forget the cost of living in the village. Not everyone belonged. Many people had to flee to become themselves. Meanwhile, modernity invented new communal rituals that critics pretend don’t count. Sports fandom, for example, is a standing, rule-bound festival: seasons, epics, numerical folklore, a calendar of shared rites. Is it less “real” community than the harvest dance because jerseys come from a corporate pro shop? Tell that to the thousands who gather again when a certain game comes on, or the strangers who become friends by arguing about the same running back for ten years.

Likewise, the ability to make friends by interest rather than proximity is not a trivial gain. It redeemed entire lives. The bright kid alone in a small town could find a teacher, a collaborator, a bandmate, a spouse. The awkward adult could keep a craft alive by joining ten others on the Internet keeping it alive. How many people today would be merely tolerated eccentrics without the option of being fully themselves inside a niche? The map got bigger; the village got weirder; a lot of us survived because of it.

And yes, we lost things. We lost the steady rehearsal of family lore. We lost some of the built-in rhythm; we have to invent it now. We lost shared silence — being together without performance. We outsourced more of our attention to machines that will gladly sell it back to us at markup. But calling these changes a moral degradation is like scolding birds for not being tyrannosaurs. History isn’t a fall from grace; it’s a series of habitat changes. The climate shifted; small bodies with feathers were a better bet. Evolution, if not natural selection, applies to human societies as well. Human sociability isn’t decaying or perfecting; it’s adapting — new habitats select for different mixes of depth, reach, rhythm, and cost, producing trade-offs rather than moral victories or defeats. The only thing that remains constant is our conviction that we live in a fallen age.

Etiquette Calisthenics

By in ai, foolosophy, technology, the geist of the zeit

I have no idea if this particular guy is just kidding or exaggerating for effect, but we’ve already seen that there are plenty of people who say the same thing in earnest. O, the irony. Gratitude, especially the unearned, non-transactional kind, is one of the few things that redeems this sorry species. And yet some people are so irrationally threatened by machines that they want to dispense with gratitude, as if it’s a finite resource, and become more like…the machines they hate and fear. Well, I guess we’ve already ceded rationality to the bots, then.

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