January 2026

A Revenue-Shaped Silhouette of a Person

By in foolosophy, ohferfucksake, socmed, the geist of the zeit

A couple things here. First, I love that the quote-tweet scolds Bier for being rude to his long time “power users” — as if we’re talking about forklift operators or electrical equipment, not people compulsively pressing a little glowing rectangle to satisfy their incessant yearnings. The phrase makes me laugh and retch at the same time. “Power user” is a compliment only in the same sense that a casino might praise a “high-value customer.” It doesn’t describe a person; it describes a revenue-shaped silhouette of a person. And once you accept that vocabulary, the rest follows automatically: writers become “content creators,” readers become an “audience,” attention becomes “engagement,” and the whole human exchange gets translated into a spreadsheet dialect.

Secondly, I love the stereotypical autistic tech-dork attempt to capture “quality” in a mathematical formula (Bier is Twitter’s “Head of Product,” by the way). It’s not just wrong; it’s wrong in a very specific, very modern way. It tries to answer a question of taste — who is worth reading? what is good? — by reaching for the kind of proxy that makes sense to a product dashboard. Instead of the barbaric old method (read a person, notice whether you want to keep reading), we get a “definitive measure” that sounds like it came from an A/B test doc: followers divided by output, carry the remainder, declare the higher number “quality.”

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig spends a long, maddening, strangely compelling time wrestling with what “Quality” even means, and one of his central claims is that quality is recognized before it’s defined — a “preintellectual reality,” the “knife-edge” of experience that precedes the neat categories. You can analyze it later, argue about it later, build critical vocabulary around it later. But the recognition comes first. Bier’s formula is the exact inversion: skip the recognition, skip the reading, skip the actual encounter with the work; go straight to the numeric proxy and call it truth.

What’s most depressing is how easily everyone speaks this language now, even when they’re resisting it. “Power users.” “Account quality.” “Follower count.” “Engagement.” It’s a whole metaphysics of shallowness: not “writer” and “reader,” not “artist” and “viewer,” not “craftsman” and “student,” but accounts and metrics, like we’re all inventory in a warehouse and the only sacred thing is throughput.

Meanwhile, I’ve written roughly 3,500 posts over twenty years and had maybe a dozen or two steady readers at any given time. By Bier’s formula, that makes me some kind of low-quality account: too many words for too few head-nods. Fine. That’s the part the metrics obsessives can’t model anyway — the satisfaction of the thing done for its own sake, in obscurity, because it’s a practice and not a performance. Not everything is a growth funnel. Some of it is just the quiet pleasure of putting the next sentence where it belongs, and letting whoever finds it find it honestly.

The Mundane Comedy

By in books, history, literature as moral fiber supplement, the statusphere

Roman Helmet Guy:

But if this answer is correct, it leads us to a troubling conclusion: New books are not worth reading. Why? Because everyone alive today has the same perspective, and none of us have experienced a wide breadth of anything. Especially not those of us who are likely to get platformed by a major publisher.

…In conclusion I leave you with a rule of thumb for actually understanding the human condition by engaging deeply with a wide breadth of human experience and perspectives: Half the books you read must’ve been written before WW2, half of those must’ve been written before the American Revolution, and half of those must’ve been written before the fall of Rome.

Ten or fifteen years ago, the fashionable line among the cognoscenti was that reading literary fiction makes you “more empathetic.” Whatever the research actually said, the audience mostly heard the part it wanted to hear: Look at how admirable I am — so sensitive, so intelligent, so morally improved by my refined tastes. Now we get “long-ago-ism,” the mirror image of presentism: read “the classics” because modern culture is all groupthink, and old books will make you wiser and set you apart from the ignorant mob. And again, you can watch the audience seize the incentive: Look at how amazing I am for doing this.

It’s a perennial spiritual comedy. The self is infinitely adaptable. It can turn romance novels into “self-care,” and it can turn Thucydides into a caste marker. Either way, the point isn’t the book; it’s the glow. “I only read dead authors” can become its own Reddit — a pre-approved identity with pre-approved contempt.

The sober objection isn’t that old books are bad. It’s that they’re being sold, explicitly or implicitly, as a way to graduate from the human condition: read the right authors and you’ll become less stupid, less credulous, less vain, less herdlike. But no matter whether you read J. D. Robb or Herodotus, you’re still a confused animal, prone to the same rationalizations, the same fits of resentment, the same stupid mistakes, the same posturing and self-deception that humans have always practiced. Reading Thucydides won’t prevent you from wanting to be admired; it may simply supply better words for the desire.

In Cultural Amnesia, Clive James notes the deeper difficulty: the apparently unexceptionable call to support the classics against the fashions conceals a dilemma, because all the classics were fashions once; new classics have to come from somewhere, and may arrive disguised as fashions when they do. That should be enough to ruin any attempt to outsource discernment to a publication date. “Old” is not a sacrament, and “new” is not a sin. Time may alter the odds, but it doesn’t relieve you of judgment. You never get to stop weighing, measuring, and deciding what’s alive and what’s dead.

In fact, the fetish for old books can produce its own refined version of cliché. We mock the man for whom every political event he dislikes is Hitler; the helmeted antiquarian can fall into a classier variant, where every modern event has its precursor in Herodotus. The past becomes a stencil. You get the pleasure of analogy without the burden of particulars. But the particulars are precisely what matter: technology, scale, speed, institutions, incentives — everything that makes this moment different from the ones you’ve read about. The classics are not an answer key; they are lenses, and lenses can distort as well as clarify.

There’s also a more mundane point: the raw material of “human nature” isn’t scarce. You can find it in Target as easily as in Tacitus. The difference is that the Target experience doesn’t come with an introduction by Penguin Classics. Vanity, cruelty, tenderness, boredom, status games, self-serving moralism, genuine decency — the whole human condition is on display in the food court and in the Facebook comments for anyone who cares to look.

But the mall and the timeline don’t arrive pre-sifted. The chaff is still attached to the grain, and the sorting has to be done by you. That’s exactly what the would-be aristocrats resent. They prefer the fantasy of sitting in a chair with a pipe, imbibing the “best of” insights through a curated narrative, spared the indignity of wading through the unwashed muck of reality where the same human motives appear without a classical frame. But if you can’t find human nature in the mall, you won’t find it in Plato either.

So yes: read old books. They puncture the spell of the present. They remind you that your era’s obvious ideas are contingent, and therefore questionable. But don’t read them as a way to feel inoculated against folly. The past is useful precisely because it shows how little we change — and how easy it is to tell ourselves that we have.

Angry at Numbers

By in fresh hell

Kindergarten teacher: “Butt-head, are you angry?”
Butt-head: “I’m, like, angry at numbers.”
Beavis: “There’s, like, too many of ’em and stuff.”

— Beavis and Butt-head, “Held Back“

Rachel Sugar:

As nutritional trends go, there are worse obsessions than protein. Even if there is still significant debate about how much protein one needs, you are unlikely to send yourself into kidney failure because you protein-maxxed too hard. But the fanatical focus on protein as the true answer, the universal key to transforming the body you have into the one you want—7 grams, 28 grams, 11 grams, a chicken smoothie—feels eerily familiar. We counted calories, grams of fat, carbohydrates, trying to distill the messy science of nutrition into one single quantitative metric. Protein, for all its many virtues, is just another thing to count.

This is basically “I bought a thing; the thing has numbers; numbers are everywhere; counting is stressful” stretched into a lifestyle vignette. This thousand-word article could have been a tweet without losing any substance.

I See the Better and Approve It, But I Follow the Worse

By in books, bring me the head of nicholas carr, ohferfucksake, socmed

Michael Sebastian:

I don’t advocate ditching podcasts, ignoring the videos on your phone, or deleting all your social-media apps (though showing some self-restraint would help me). But the decline in literacy, and its many symptoms, should worry all of us. “As you have probably noticed,” James Marriott wrote in his 2024 essay, “the world of the screen is going to be a much choppier place than the world of print: more emotional, more angry, more chaotic.” Such a world surely encourages the rise of authoritarianism and an illiberal society.

This compact nugget of clichéd anti-thought appears in an article titled “The Lost Art of Reading an Actual Book.” Yes, God forbid you actually stop the behaviors you claim to abhor in order to make time for the ones you claim to adore! You don’t want to read more; you want an alibi for not reading, served with a side of moral credit. Your revealed preference is perfectly clear: you prefer the algorithmic pacifier, the hyperkinetic feed that makes your brain dribble out of your ears, while you narrate your own surrender as if it were a weather report. “We should worry,” you say, as though the problem is ambient, like humidity, rather than the result of a hundred tiny daily choices you keep making on purpose. And the most embarrassing part is the adolescent tone: this airy, shrugging helplessness, like it would be extreme or weird to close the apps that are devouring your capacity for sustained attention. Do you even hear yourself? If you can’t resist the world’s gaudiest digital harlots, you don’t have a literacy crisis; you have a self-respect crisis. I swear, social media is the whiskey-and-smallpox of intelligent reflection.

His concluding sentence is, “The postliterate age is going to be super lame.” Jesus Aitch. The art of reading an actual book wasn’t lost; it committed suicide.

To the Mind Through the Stomach

By in books, education, foolosophy, lin yutang

A “scholar’s” writing consists of borrowings from other scholars, and the more authorities and sources he quotes, the more of a “scholar” he appears. A thinker’s writing consists of borrowings from ideas in his own intestines, and the greater thinker a man is, the more he depends on his own intestinal juice. A scholar is like a raven feeding its young that spits out what it has eaten from the mouth. A thinker is like a silkworm which gives us not mulberry leaves, but silk.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

Lin wrote before we started talking about the gut like a parliament of microbes, but the metaphor only gets nastier and better. Most minds are ecosystems: some are rich with good flora, others are overrun with citation-bacteria that turn every sentence into gas. The difference isn’t whether you borrow. Everyone borrows. It’s whether you ferment. The scholar tends to preserve: he jars the past neatly and labels it. The thinker allows a controlled spoilage. He leaves ideas in the dark long enough for them to change, for sweetness to become bite, for borrowed sugar to turn into alcohol. That’s why some writing tastes “alive” and some tastes “safe.” One has a living culture in it; the other has been sterilized to survive committee review.

He mentions raven and silkworm; you can think of others. There is the ruminant scholar, solemnly chewing the same cud until it becomes an approved doctrine; there is the tapeworm scholar, living off other people’s meals while contributing nothing but appetite. But there is also the bee-scholar, worth defending: he gathers widely and gives honey.

I’m not a great thinker by any means, but I’ve found meal-planning essential if I want to keep up any decent supply of “intestinal juice.” Left to myself, I’ll snack on whatever’s loudest and sweetest and call it dinner. So here’s a sample menu for humane digestion and steady mental recomposition. For protein, a small serving of Nietzsche — spicy meatball material, best taken in bites, not by the bowl, unless you want to be up at 3 a.m. arguing with God — followed by Isaiah Berlin as the corrective salad that keeps you honest and un-drunk on your own rhetoric. Tolstoy is the slow-cooker stew: a once-or-twice-a-week meal that leaves you full, moral, and slightly inclined to judge your own life. Eric Hoffer is plain, sturdy carbs: beans-and-rice prose. Not fancy, not frosted, but it sticks to the ribs and does what it came to do. Montaigne is the daily bread and cheese: steady, companionable calories that keep you from getting weird. Henry James is the fibrous greens: you chew longer than you think you should, and then you notice your attention has gotten stronger. Samuel Johnson is roast beef and strong tea, for days when your mind needs to sit up straight. Proust is the weekend prix fixe: you don’t do it on a rushed Tuesday, but when you do, the aftertaste lasts for days. And Wodehouse — Wodehouse is sponge cake and champagne. Almost no nutritional claims, just joy and fizz and impeccable timing: a palate-cleanser that keeps the whole regimen from turning into a penitential diet.

Sharing a Silent Look

By in conspicuous crusading, fresh hell, socmed, the geist of the zeit, the madness of crowds

This is exactly what I was talking about the other day. Something awful happens; a video circulates; and within minutes the event stops being an event and becomes a proxy for everything else. People aren’t really arguing about what happened; they’re arguing about what they already believe about the world, using the footage as a Rorschach blot. And I’m supposed to join in? I’m not a forensic analyst. I’m not a lawyer. I’m not on the scene. What earthly good would it do for me to watch a terrible clip frame-by-frame and then add my priceless contribution — “Bad things are bad and shouldn’t happen” — to the pile? Congratulations, here’s my Nobel Peace Prize. I treat discourse scrums the way the Romans treated victory: with a servant whispering a corrective in your ear. Only mine is: remember, you’re just another idiot. Your opinion is cheap, your information is thin, and your “engagement” helps no one. You can simply not perform. You can just do something else. You can just post something interesting about Lin Yutang instead of regurgitating the day’s pre-chewed cud.

Charm and Flavor

By in books, foolosophy, lin yutang

The best formula for the object of reading, in my opinion, was stated by Huang Shanku, a Sung poet and friend of Su Tungp’o. He said, “A scholar who hasn’t read anything for three days feels that his talk has no flavor (becomes insipid), and his own face becomes hateful to look at (in the mirror).” What he means, of course, is that reading gives a man a certain charm and flavor, which is the entire object of reading, and only reading with this object can be called an art. One doesn’t read to “improve one’s mind,” because when one begins to think of improving his mind, all the pleasure of reading is gone. He is the type of person who says to himself: “I must read Shakespeare, and I must read Sophocles, and I must read the entire Five Foot Shelf of Dr. Eliot, so I can become an educated man.” I’m sure that man will never become educated. He will force himself one evening to read Shakespeare’s Hamlet and come away, as if from a bad dream, with no greater benefit than that he is able to say that he has “read” Hamlet. Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading. This type of reading with a business purpose is in no way different from a senator’s reading up of files and reports before he makes a speech. It is asking for business advice and information, and not reading at all.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

When I don’t read (and write) at least a little, I start to feel stale like week-old bread. In some sense, then, it’s a selfish compulsion, but few if any human activities are completely selfless. It’s more realistic to harness vices to better ends than seek to eliminate them.

At first glance, reading for “charm and flavor” can sound shallow, like reading as a way to pick up chicks, or make yourself more interesting at parties. But the common alternative isn’t so much reading for the “right” reason as something even shallower: reading as a grim self-improvement chore, a dutiful march through the “important books” so you can feel properly educated.

“Charm,” in his sense, isn’t really performance. It’s closer to presence: keeping your sensibility limber, so you notice more, say truer things, tell a story better, listen better. There’s a little aspiration in that, sure, but it’s the kind that’s hard to dislike. Like dressing decently, or having good manners. Not a claim to superiority, just a way of being easier to live with and more pleasant to be around. And if reading gives us a bit more flavor, then recommending a book you love is a small way of sharing the meal.

Repaying a Teacher Badly

By in identity, nietzsche

Richard Hanania:

Still, there are few books that I am certain changed the path of my life, and Zarathustra was one of them. I discovered Nietzsche in an era before iPhones and ubiquitous social media, when something closer to the kind of solitude Zarathustra experienced was still possible. If my feelings of superiority were at first unjustified, over the years, I did develop a genuine — and, I like to think, well-earned — understanding of myself as a lone hero willing to stare down the mob. Seeing myself through the eyes of Zarathustra stamped out any fears of social isolation and rejection, and has allowed me to withstand — and even enjoy — the frequent demands for my banishment from public life.

There’s a certain genre of essay that pretends to be about an author but is really about the narrator. The author is a mirror, held at a flattering angle, so the reader can watch a man become the kind of man who writes essays about becoming the kind of man who writes essays. Hanania announces he’s “outgrown” Nietzsche, and the essay ends with…Hanania as lone hero, proudly savoring the mob’s demands for his banishment. Nietzsche isn’t useful to him as a philosopher with arguments, contradictions, and a very specific historical location. He’s useful as a personality test young men take when they’re trying to decide whether their contempt for the herd is a virtue or a coping mechanism. Nietzsche becomes a kind of cologne: spray it on, feel sharper, walk taller.

Then you remember he did the same thing to Shakespeare. “Shakespeare is Fake” isn’t an argument that Shakespeare is bad. It’s an argument that you’re a sheep if you think Shakespeare is good — and, by implication, that Hanania is the rare non-sheep who can see through the spell. He explicitly calls the pro-Shakespeare response “the kind of argument made by people who are such sheep that they can’t imagine a non-sheep existence,” and says the reader is a “conformist.” Shakespeare is a foil so Hanania can play the role of brave iconoclast who might, in a controlled lab setting, dethrone the Bard. (Reach out, psychology professors! Let’s do a randomized controlled trial of my greatness.)

His “elite human capital” theme is where the self-narration becomes a full brand. It takes the old “smart people should run things” assumption and gives it an air of social science, so it can mingle at better parties. In his essay “Elite Human Capital Is Always Liberal,” he treats the association between intelligence/education and political orientation as a kind of hard political reality.

The rhetorical advantage is obvious: if the “smart set” tends liberal, then any conservative movement worth taking seriously must either appease them, or explain why the smart set is wrong without sounding anti-smart. Hanania’s solution is to build a bridge that always leads back to Hanania: a conservatism that flatters elite cognition, calls itself empirical, scolds the populists, and stands ready to be adopted by credentialed liberals who enjoy the thrill of “I listen to edgy people, I’m not tribal.” Nonetheless, as Nietzsche might say, behold the man:

Like a cat landing on its feet, he manages to convince himself that his ineptitude at the sort of simple labor that countless teenagers can handle without a problem is actually proof that he was destined for greater things. Well, similarly, when Nietzsche retired from academia, he first aimed at becoming a professional gardener:

It’s a funny parallel: bookish, socially-inept man fantasizes about “real work,” gets humbled by the physical world. But then it splits at the exact point where character shows. Nietzsche’s response was: Fine — then overcome yourself anyway; turn weakness into a discipline; make your life a task. Hanania’s response is more modern: not “overcome,” but “rebrand.” Nietzsche wanted you to become harder on yourself; Hanania mostly wants the world to become softer on Hanania.

The Gods Love a Screenshot

By in books, jests japes jokes jollies, unintended consequences

Chuck Ross:

MacKenzie Scott, the billionaire ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, funneled millions of dollars to a left-wing nonprofit network that supports the nation’s most virulent anti-Israel and anti-Semitic organizations, including some that are under congressional investigation for their ties to terrorist groups, a Washington Free Beacon review found. Scott announced the grant in an essay that cites Hopi prophecy, bird flocks, and sex as inspirations for her latest round of giving.

I once read a fun book called Napoleon’s Hemorrhoids, a compilation of unintended consequences that developed from some of the seemingly-insignificant details of history. I wonder if Jeff Bezos texting pictures of his dingus to a woman who wasn’t his wife might qualify for an entry in future editions. You see, Ms. Scott has had tens of billions of dollars to give away, in large part because Mr. Bezos once trusted the persuasive power of “Little Jeff” more than he trusted cause-and-effect. Whatever you think of the downstream politics, you have to admire the trickster-god mechanism: a libido’s moment of confidence becomes a divorce settlement; a divorce settlement becomes a philanthropic weather system. And somewhere in the moral rubble, one of the richest men on earth can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with horny college students and average Joes everywhere and say, with perfect sincerity, “It seemed like a good idea at the time, bro.” It’s almost heartening, in a warped way: the once-richest man in the world is still spiritually eligible for the same dumb-guy support group as the rest of us.

Whaddaya Reading? Whaddaya Got?

By in books, jests japes jokes jollies

Adam Kirsch:

The problem with these kinds of arguments isn’t that they are wrong; it’s that they don’t actually persuade anyone to read more, because they misunderstand why people become readers in the first place. Telling someone to love literature because reading is good for society is like telling someone to believe in God because religion is good for society. It’s a utilitarian argument for what should be a personal passion.

It would be better to describe reading not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice. This would be a more effective way to attract young people, and it also happens to be true. When literature was considered transgressive, moralists couldn’t get people to stop buying and reading dangerous books. Now that books are considered virtuous and edifying, moralists can’t persuade anyone to pick one up.

I couldn’t decide which of these I liked better, so I went with both.

Detestable, Hearing Servants Moving About

By in the statusphere, work

Sian Cain: I would like to ask your opinion on five things. First of all, leaf blowers.

Fran Lebowitz: A horrible, horrible invention. I didn’t even know about them until like 20 years ago when I rented a house in the country. I was shocked! I live in New York City, we don’t have leaf problems. We have every other kind of problem. When I was a kid, we had leaf raking. Which is quiet. Leaf blowers are the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. First of all, they are incredibly noisy. And second of all, 10 minutes after you use it, that big leaf blower in the sky blows them all back. It’s a very stupid invention.

S.C.: What is the worst job you’ve ever done?

F.L.: Boy, I had a lot of bad jobs when I was young. New York City was full of bad jobs in the 70s. You could get a different bad job every week, and I did. I used to think, “I hate this job. I’m going to get a different bad job.” And then I would hate that job. Finally, I realized, and this is the truth – “Fran, you just don’t like to work”. I would have been a fantastic heiress.

— “Fran Lebowitz Lays Down the Law“

This immediately reminded me of something Douglas wrote on the performative hatred of leaf blowers. There’s a certain kind of conscience that expresses itself as manual labor for other people. Like Virginia Woolf forgoing the corrupting influence of modern plumbing in favor of earth-closets maintained by an elderly servant, Lebowitz visits the countryside, discovers how the tidy-landscape sausage gets made, recoils in horror, and returns to the drawing room to demand the rest of us do it the hard way. Calling leaf blowers “the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen” has the faintly Bourbon tone of someone discovering during a brief country interlude that the world does not, in fact, maintain itself. You can dislike the noise; fair enough. But the tone is pure class tourism: offended that the labor required to keep things clean is not only happening, but happening audibly, with modern tools, in daylight. And half the neighborhood is wearing noise-canceling headphones anyway. Low-status labor is simply a socially-safe target, especially for would-be heiresses. Oh, for the days when we could openly enjoy knouting poachers and running down peasants in our coach and six!

The Fly On the Coach Wheel

By in books, extraordinary popular delusions, moralizing, the geist of the zeit

Nothing irks me more than the vocabulary of social responsibility. The very word ‘duty’ is unpleasant to me, like an unwanted guest. But the terms ‘civic duty,’ ‘solidarity,’ ‘humanitarianism’ and others of the same ilk disgust me like rubbish dumped out of a window right on top of me. I’m offended by the implicit assumption that these expressions pertain to me, that I should find them worthwhile and even meaningful.

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

On a brief-lived, long-defunct website called The Philosopher’s Mail, Alain de Botton once wrote, regarding our strange habit of news consumption:

For most of history, it was extremely difficult to come by information about what was happening anywhere else. And you probably didn’t mind. What difference would it make, if you were a crofter in the Hebrides, to learn that a power struggle was brewing in the Ottoman Empire?

Much of what we now take for granted as news has its origins in the information needed by people taking major decisions or at the centre of national affairs. We still hear the echoes in the way news is reported; timing is assumed to be critical, as it really would be if we were active agents. If you don’t have the latest update you might make a terrible blunder or miss a wonderful opportunity.

Ease of communication and a generous democratic impulse mean that information originally designed for decision makers, now gets routinely sent via the media to very large numbers of people. It is as if a dossier, with the latest news from Kiev, which might properly arrive on the desk of a minister has accidentally been delivered to the wrong address and ends up on the breakfast table of a librarian in Colchester or an electrician in Pitlochry. But the librarian or electrician might quite reasonably turn round and politely point out that they can’t do anything with this knowledge and that, surely, the files have come to them by mistake. They don’t, but only because habit has closed our eyes to the underlying strangeness of the phenomenon.

A lot of the loudest “global concern” is just misdirected energy: aspirational middling busybodies auditioning for moral significance because ordinary competence feels too small, too boring, too exposing. It’s easier to have a take on Venezuela than to be patient with your spouse; easier to denounce villains abroad than to stop being a minor villain at home; easier to refresh the outrage feed than to fix what’s right in front of you. We laugh at the absurd status and fashion competitions of centuries past, like coiffures de style pouf or crinolines. We haven’t yet learned to laugh at today’s equally frivolous, po-faced equivalents.

I’m not interested in what’s going on in Venezuela, any more than I was interested in what’s going on in Gaza, or Ukraine, or whatever came before on the revolving carousel of shiny objects for people too full of their own self-importance to get lost in a good novel. I don’t say that in an assertive way, as if to put my own egoistic stance forward in competition with the rest. I say it as a rebuke to the civic superstition that we’re obliged to register our solemn opinions for the greater good. I say it because the fact of my interest, or the lack thereof, is utterly irrelevant to any real-world consequences. Not just my interest — yours, too, and every other idiot’s. Online, we’re expected to cast moral votes all day long, as if the right opinion, stated on schedule, were a lever connected to the world. It’s not. Most of this is status competition disguised as conscience. I’d prefer it if people went back to weaving birdcages and model ships into their three-foot-high wigs for attention instead.

Too many people seem to believe in some primitive notion of sympathetic magic, as if emoting toward an issue or event affects it. It does not. Most of us, you and me included, are insignificant and ineffectual nobodies. At best, we could be useful friends, devoted spouses, diligent workers, or involved community members. We might even develop some kind of rich inner life that precludes empty gestures aimed to win the approval of distant strangers. None of us are worth a sputtering wet shit as pundits, prophets, or amateur Secretaries of State, and I refuse to dignify this ridiculous ritual with my respectful attention.

Then What Stands In Our Way Now?

By in foolosophy

Oliver Bateman:

We live in an age of self-help books. You buy a book like Atomic Habits, and instead of buying what you really want — the time to do the commonsensical things a book like that will tell you to do — you acquire another talisman that lines your shelves. These books are like New Year’s resolutions. The whole industry of happy, clappy, inspirational bloggers and YouTube/LinkedIn TED Talk influencers trying to sell you something that will give you everything.

In this world, it can feel like heresy to say you just do a thing without a clear goal. Goals are critical for success. Be clear about your goals. Every self-help guru says something like that. What if you applied yourself to doing something without a goal? Or if the only goal is simply that you continue?

Training, diet, writing — these aren’t “goals.” They’re disciplines. Practices. Closer to religious devotion than self-improvement. They aren’t things I’m trying to do; they’re what I do, which means they’re who I am. You’re not born knowing your disciplines, of course; you find them by trying things, quitting what doesn’t fit, and slowly creating yourself in the process. What I can’t stand is the aspirational version of this: the people who love the idea of being a reader, a writer, a healthy person, and then use a clever diagnosis as an alibi for never becoming one. “The internet rewired my brain — that’s why I scroll TikTok instead of reading.” Okay. Now that you know, what are you going to do about it? If the answer is “nothing,” then the explanation was just a excuse. January 1st or June 1st — doesn’t matter. Make up your mind and get to work.

Like a Bird’s Chirp

By in books, history

They say that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. But Machiavelli would say that this gets things backwards. The reason to study history is precisely so that you can repeat it, solving new problems with solutions that have worked in the past. As Machiavelli says in his Discourses on the Roman historian Livy, “he who wishes to see what is to come should observe what has already happened.”

— Peter Adamson, Byzantine and Renaissance Philosophy

Adamson’s phrasing is a neat flip, but it risks making Machiavelli sound like he’s pre-refuting Santayana. (To be fair, his “They say…” probably refers to the refrigerator-magnet slogan as it circulates, not at the original meaning.) Santayana’s point, in context, is about memory — retentiveness — as the condition for any genuine progress. Machiavelli’s point is what you do with that retentiveness: you study the past not only to avoid repeating disasters, but also to repeat what works, on purpose. And Santayana even anticipates the failure mode: when retentiveness is exhausted, memory becomes self-repeating, and “a vain… repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity and fertile readaptation.” In other words: not amnesia, but cliché; the historical analogy as nervous tic. “Everything I don’t like is Hitler redux.” It’s a small irony that the pull-quote about remembering is so often remembered without remembering what it meant.

The Brightness of a New Page Where Everything Yet Can Happen

By in battling personal entropy, music, technology

I was dabbling in music long before I dabbled in writing. About this time twenty-five years ago, I graduated from the classic old Fostex cassette 4-track to one of those early digital tabletop multitrackers. Big, heavy, and promising; a whole studio squatting on a desk. I recorded a dozen or so songs on it and still never really learned it.

A few months earlier, I’d been to the doctor with the first symptoms of what would eventually be diagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis three years later. Before long, my hands were increasingly incapable of playing guitar or drums. Most of my equipment gathered dust before regretfully being sold. My body recovered with the help of medication, but I never worked up the enthusiasm to tackle the learning curve of the quickly-evolving digital technology. Besides, I’d discovered that even if I couldn’t easily hold chords anymore, I could still peck away at a keyboard. Writing became the creative hobby, and the guitars sat in a corner, biding their time.

Time doesn’t only take; it also stores. It sets things aside like tools on a pegboard: not useful now, but not thrown away either. I didn’t keep the guitars because I believed I’d “return” someday; I kept them because I wasn’t ready to declare that part of me dead. That turned out to be enough. Sometimes hope is too dramatic a word. Sometimes you just keep something within reach, and let the years do what they do.

From a heavy box that needed a tabletop to a slab of glass that fits in my hands. It’s amazing what happens when you wait long enough: the body returns, the tools get smaller, and the page brightens again — new, blank, and full of everything that still might happen.

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