February 2026

All the Bubbles That We Live In, All the Bubbles I Want the Pin to Pop

By in extraordinary popular delusions, non compos mentis, socmed

I’ve always said you should be careful in conversation, because most people are nuts once you scratch the surface. Not “clinically ill” nuts — just the ordinary human kind: a tangle of superstitions, pet theories, private mythologies, and emotional loyalties. But “nuts” isn’t one thing. There’s low-stakes woo — crystals, tarot, astrology, the I Ching — that functions less as a truth-claim than as a way of goosing the subconscious, enabling lateral thinking, or mapping suggestive symbols onto your life the way you might use a writing prompt. Most “irrationality” is benign and doesn’t interfere with our ability to hold jobs, raise families, and operate heavy machinery.

Then there’s high-stakes craziness: paranoid conspiracism, totalizing world-models, politics-as-gnostic war. That isn’t merely “believing something unscientific.” It’s our pattern-seeking software going haywire. It’s apophenia and pareidolia — the brain frantically connecting dots because uncertainty is unbearable, because a bad explanation feels better than no explanation, because “someone is in control” is less frightening than randomness. And even here, there may be differences of degree. Unlike the perennial, bipartisan obsession with Jews and Israel, there aren’t any organized movements demanding, say, the arrest of the Bush administration for engineering 9/11. There’s just a bunch of weirdos, content with having “figured out” the secret levers that move reality.

Social media, however, is the accelerant that turns craziness into something qualitatively different. Offline life had a kind of federalism built into it: local friction, social veto points, separate contexts, and the discipline of embarrassment. The town crank could bore his family, write letters to the editor, or hold court at the diner, and reality would keep him contained. Now the crank finds ten thousand other cranks by lunchtime and gets algorithmic reinforcement.

Social media is responsible for what I think of as “context collapse” — the erosion of the ability to tailor one’s conversation depending on the listener. Normal people speak differently to their friends as opposed to their acquaintances, colleagues, or strangers. Online, though, posts and videos are addressed to a mass of faceless followers, and the style follows suit. Now, it seems like the online style is bleeding into real life. More people walk around “posting out loud,” with no consideration for the listener, and a decreasing ability to read the cues that say, “I’m not interested, and frankly, you’re making me a little uncomfortable.” People have always been a little nuts; what’s new is that the nuts can organize, scale, and colonize every room with the tone of a comment section.

The Call to Battle

By in conspicuous crusading, the geist of the zeit, the madness of crowds

“One of the most effective means of seduction that Evil employs is the call to battle.”

“It is impossible to pay Evil in installments — and one never stops trying to.”

— Kafka, The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka

In most of the ways that matter, linear time is a myth. Entropy has its arrow, sure: we are born, we age, we die, in that order, never in reverse. But moral life runs in circles. The calendar flips, the technology gets more impressive, but the human temptation stays put. We’re still the same animals, still drawn to the same pleasures: the pleasure of certainty, the pleasure of punishment, the pleasure of calling our appetite “principle.” Tenderness and cruelty are Siamese twins, never far apart. If you like religious language, call the recurring temptation the Devil: not a horned monster, but a patient solicitor who never tires, who never stops coming back, each time with a new pitch, each time asking you to sign the same contract — just this once, just this time, for a good cause, with an easy installment plan included.

The Devil doesn’t need you to become a villain in one grand gesture. He only needs you to get used to small exceptions. He only needs you to stop flinching. That’s why the call to battle is so effective: it dulls the nerve endings of conscience and fills your ears with a drumbeat. And the world will always supply new drums. New scandals, new enemies, new emergencies, new reasons you “have to” be hard, “have to” be ruthless, “have to” stop worrying about the “edge cases.” There is no finish line where you can finally relax into goodness, no historical utopia that vindicates all your choices. The test returns in different guises, over and over, asking the same question with new vocabulary: Will you bend the rule? Will you take the shortcut? Will you let the ends justify the means?

You’re never finally safe from it. You can only hold out as long as you can. The only victory available is the stubborn refusal to sign. The world will remain mixed and your crusades will not purify it. But you can keep your own hands clean. You can insist that a “false positive” is not an acceptable rounding error because it is a person, and a person is not collateral. You can refuse to let the battle-frame make you stupid and cruel. Because the real danger isn’t that you’ll one day wake up believing in Evil like a mindless acolyte; it’s that you’ll get used to the bargain, that the shrug will become second nature, that “Who gives a shit?” will start to feel like maturity. To quote Kafka one more time: once you have taken Evil into yourself, it no longer insists that you believe in it.

Carry On Perpetually

By in conspicuous crusading, the geist of the zeit, the madness of crowds

Yet that is what romantic philosophy would condemn us to; we must all strut and roar. We must lend ourselves to the partisan earnestness of persons and nations calling their rivals villains and themselves heroes; but this earnestness will be of the histrionic German sort, made to order and transferable at short notice from one object to another, since what truly matters is not that we should achieve our ostensible aim (which Hegel contemptuously called ideal) but that we should carry on perpetually, if possible with a crescendo, the strenuous experience of living in a gloriously bad world, and always working to reform it, with the comforting speculative assurance that we never can succeed. We never can succeed, I mean, in rendering reform less necessary or life happier; but of course in any specific reform we may succeed half the time, thereby sowing the seeds of new and higher evils, to keep the edge of virtue keen. And in reality we, or the Absolute in us, are succeeding all the time; the play is always going on, and the play’s the thing.

— George Santayana, “Josiah Royce”, Character and Opinion in the United States

The modern citizen lives with a rectangle glowing in his palm like a little oracle. From it comes a constant stream of emergencies, outrages, villains, heroes, and urgent calls to prove you are one of the good ones. The world is always ending; the stakes are always infinite; the moral pressure is always immediate. And because it’s immediate, it feels intimate, right here, right now, in your face, as if the drama on your screen were the whole world instead of a curated sliver of it. This is how you get the weird inflation of self-importance: people acting as if they’re standing at Thermopylae when they’re actually standing in a yoga studio lobby.

Here we are, then: the yoga studio, some staff behind a counter, a handful of righteous scolds demanding their due. The charge is grand: complicity, collaboration, silence in the face of evil. It has the romance of clandestine resistance — Vichy collaborators, secret police, the brave few defying the grey mass. It even flatters the accuser with historical resonance: I am not merely a petty bitch; I am fighting fascism. And then the “resistance” takes the form of… piling dumbbells on the floor for low-level employees to clean up.

It’s impossible not to notice the mismatch. If your cause is world-historical, why does your bravery so reliably select soft targets? Why does your fury funnel itself toward people who can’t meaningfully answer back — front-desk staff, service workers, the human beings stationed at the end of institutional pipelines? The pattern is predictable: the higher the rhetoric, the smaller the actual stakes of the chosen battleground. The nobility is abstract; the punishment is concrete. The moral grandeur is vapor; the mess on the floor is real.

People will tell you — always — that they are motivated by principle. But even if the principle were genuine, the conduct still betrays something uglier: the constant temptation to treat other people as props. You are not persuading anyone. You are not changing policy. You are not speaking “truth to power.” You are simply enjoying the privilege, for a moment, of being the kind of person who can make a mess and watch someone else clean it up, while calling it righteousness.

What is the reward? Not the stated reward — the utopia at the end of history which never arrives — but the actual reward, right now, in the nervous system. The reward is the intoxicating relief of moral permission. You get to be harsh without being harsh; you get to be cruel without being cruel. Your anger becomes virtue, and virtue becomes an alibi. You break the ordinary norms of civility, restraint, proportion, mercy, and you call the breach “courage.” Better still, the audience claps. Thousands of strangers give you a little pellet of approval: stunning, brave, truth-teller. Forbidden fruit is always sweet, but it’s even sweeter when you can call it medicine. It’s a powerful seduction for anyone who has been simmering with resentment, boredom, loneliness, or a need to feel consequential.

The tragedy is not that the world is evil, but that the world is mixed. It has always been mixed. It will remain mixed. There are genuine horrors and genuine beauties, and our small lives brush against both. But most of us will never be world-historical individuals, and the universe does not grant us sainthood as a consolation prize. The yoga studio refusing entry to federal agents would not rewrite national policy. A tantrum in the lobby will not cause the President to reverse course on immigration. Nothing in these little dramas carries the weight the actors pretend it carries.

The world does not move in a straight line toward Good or Evil like a train running on tracks. It lurches, compromises, repeats itself, forgets, remembers, repeats again. And that’s why the temptation is so persistent: because you will never be “done.” There is no final victory, on earth or in heaven. There is only the daily test, administered repeatedly: will you keep faith with the basic rules of civilized life even when you have a rationalization that tells you you’re exempt?

The rot begins with the easy little indulgence: this person “deserves” it. The staff deserve it. The bystander deserves it. The wrong tribe deserves it. The “complicit” deserve it. And because your cause is righteous, your petty vengeance is transmuted into justice like lead into gold. You learn to enjoy the taste of your own anger. You learn to confuse the stimulation of drama with the seriousness of truth.

Zoom out far enough and it’s laughable. The banners change. The hashtags change. But the human pattern doesn’t: give ordinary people an excuse, and some will use it to act out the small cruelties they were already inclined toward. They will call it activism. They will call it accountability. They will call it “speaking out.” But the constant feature is the pleasure of being allowed to do what you wanted to do anyway. “The joy of violent movement pulls you under.”

If you’re fortunate, you may find yourself reflecting at the end of your life, when the volume is turned down and the stage lights go out. The slogans evaporate. The causes blur together into a collage of righteous poses. The algorithm is gone. The audience is gone. And what remains is not your intention but your residue — what you did when you could have done otherwise.

You may see, with a clarity you avoided for decades, that the world is still its familiar mixed bag. It did not become heaven because you were furious. It did not become hell because you were silent. It simply remained what it always was. And against that unchanged backdrop, you finally confront the only thing that was ever really up for grabs: the self you made.

A ledger opens. Not a cosmic ledger; just the plain memory of choices. The times you used sanctimony as a weapon. The times you chose humiliation over persuasion. The times you unleashed chaos and congratulated yourself for doing it. The times you took pleasure in spite and called it sanctity.

And the worst part is that you knew. Deep down, you always knew. You felt the little recoil of conscience and you smothered it with a pillow: this is different; I’m different; they deserve it; history is watching. History wasn’t watching. Your followers weren’t watching, not really. Only you were capable of watching, there in your own soul, and you turned away like a coward.

Fast and Furious at Books

By in books, macho macho men, the geist of the zeit

Don’t worry; I’ll transcribe it for you:

“Reading books…is a very cheap way to, I guess, entertain, I wouldn’t call [it] entertainment because my brain is far too advanced…I’m too smart to read. I know you’re sitting there going, ‘Smart people read!” No. I need action. I need constant chaos in my life to feel content, I need to be driving a supercar, and fucking fighting, and fuckin’ a bunch of hoes, champagne, and goin’ crazy, I can’t just sit there, ‘Oh! And the pirate, on the boat…’ it’s just, it’s for people with slow brains.”

If you were to reinvent the “Dawn of Man” scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey for the social media age, I suppose you couldn’t do better than this. A book looms like a monolith as this balding, chinless, degenerate chimpanzee hoots, leaps around, and flings feces at it. All we need is Richard Strauss for the soundtrack.

Baudrillard wrote about a world where images and signs don’t represent reality so much as replace it. That’s what this is: “masculinity” as pure sign-value — supercars, chaos, fighting, hoes and champagne — cardboard props arranged around a human-shaped void to suggest an essence that never needs to exist. Reading is intolerable not because it’s “for slow brains,” but because it’s one of the few activities that can’t be faked by posture; it demands the humiliating possibility of understanding something you didn’t already know. And a life modeled on action movie trailers and gangsta rap videos can’t afford that kind of reality.

This kind of man has to sneer at reading because books are indifferent to charisma and slogans. A book doesn’t care how loud you are. It doesn’t care what car you rented. It doesn’t care how many people you can frighten, flatter, or herd into agreement. The page just sits there, silent and patient, waiting for you to either do the work or admit you can’t.

“I need constant chaos to feel content” isn’t a flex. It’s the equivalent of a car alarm — loud, easily triggered, and convinced the world is impressed by the noise. The only “advanced” part is the sophistication of the spin: a puffed-up fraud tries to shame you for having the kind of attention span that makes civilization possible, a civilization expansive and generous enough to allow worthless pimps like this to exist and thrive.

Donnie In Motion

By in poetry

Donnie’s voice is always a little ahead of him
like a video you forgot to slow down,
that banjo-quick cadence
trying to fit a whole day into one breath.

If he’s not on the forklift
he’s on the skateboard,
rolling down the long aisles
like a thought that can’t sit still.

Visitors see him blur past pallets
word balloons trailing in his wake
and think: What the hell
but we just smile.

A 1.5-speed man
in a 0.75-speed world,
trying to keep time
from catching him.

Feeding the Birds On a Winter Morning

By in poetry, seasonal

Ice on the fence.
Wind in the bones.
A long hour since the last sunflower.

We keep watch on the holy place:
the pole, the tray,
the little swinging box of mercy.

We have heard the saying:
Consider the birds —
we do not sow, we do not store,
and still we are fed.

Truly?

Then where does the love go
when ice turns minutes into hours
and the feeder hangs empty
as a promise?

Hush —
there it is — the human again,
the Large One with the Bucket.

Sound the alarm! (Not the danger one —
the food one.)

Titmouse first, bold as a rumor.
Finches like falling beads.
Chickadees stitching the air with cheers.

Cardinal on the top branch,
a red exclamation point:

Brothers! Sisters!
The generous hand has returned!
Go, tell the sparrows;
tell that nervous wren;
tell the whole freezing world —

Today, we do not starve.

Talkin’ About Your Damage and You’re Wasting My Time

By in foolosophy, nietzsche, psychology

Where will we find, we loneliest of the lonely, we human beings — for this is certainly what we will one day become through the aftereffects of science — where will we find a companion for the human being! Formerly we sought a king, a father, a judge for everything, because there was a shortage of proper kings, proper fathers, proper judges. Later we will seek the friend — human beings will have become self-sufficient majesties and solar orbits — but lonely. The myth-building drive will then turn outward toward the friend.

— Nietzsche, The Joyful Science / Idylls from Messina / Unpublished Fragments from the Period of The Joyful Science (Spring 1881–Summer 1882)

Meghan Murphy:

As mentioned in my last piece, I am very Mean and Bad and Not Compassionate, unlike the Goods and Empathetics of the world. As such, it should come as no surprise to you that I am tired of your mental illness.

To be specific, I am tired of your labeling of every struggle and character flaw you have as a “mental illness,” with which you will be stuck with for life, and that impedes you from doing any normal thing humans have always had to do.

…You people are pathetic and ridiculous. I’m sorry. I realize this, again, sounds mean and uncompassionate and that I will be told I just don’t understand what it’s like to struggle with ailments like not being able to get places on time (or at all) or think about what food I might eat tomorrow or the next day.

Some mental illness is devastating, disabling, and not something you can shame people out of with a brisk pep talk. But her irritation isn’t pure cruelty. It’s a reaction to a culture that has turned “mental health” into the default explanatory language for a huge range of ordinary misery, often with a tone of grave sanctimony that leaves no room for distinctions. We all know people who act like a list of diagnoses is a substitute for a personality, or an excuse for multiple failures.

But Murphy is yelling at people who, in many cases, are merely doing what humans always do: responding to incentives. They’re lonely, anxious, and trying to gain approval in a culture that rewards visible suffering with sympathy. Under this climate of opinion, the safest way to ask for attention is to frame it as a diagnosis, and the easiest way to feel special is to feel wounded in a tasteful, boutique way. Indeed, where will we self-sufficient majesties, we moderns, find “the friend”? The tragedy is that many go looking for him or her in the comment section or among the followers, where “validation” is cheap, intermittent, and addictive, and where the one thing they actually need, a real person who cares enough to stay and help through hardship, can’t be manufactured. Even if the cure is as boring as good habits, physical movement, and a fuller social life, the lesson has to arrive as friendship, not as another angry performance on the same virtual stage.

And the friend really is missing, for a nontrivial slice of the country. Pew found 8% of Americans say they have no close friends. The Survey Center on American Life reports 12% with no close friends, and notes that in 1990 it was 3%. The Surgeon General’s advisory goes even broader: it cites survey evidence that only 39% of U.S. adults felt “very connected” emotionally, and that approximately half of U.S. adults report experiencing loneliness. If that’s even roughly true, then a lot of what we’re calling a “mental health crisis” is also, perhaps even mostly, a friendship and connection crisis.

Many people are overdiagnosed and overmedicated, but doctors aren’t necessarily stupid or wicked; the system just runs on what scales. A quick checklist can flag “loss of interest” and “low motivation,” but it can’t tell you whether you’re clinically depressed, merely demoralized, socially starved, or trapped in a life that has become frictionless and empty. The scalable outputs are predictable: therapy referral, a prescription, symptom management. Sometimes that’s the right path. Sometimes it’s just looking for your lost keys under the streetlight blocks away because the light is better there.

Viktor Frankl should be read more widely. For a lot of otherwise comfortable people, the problem isn’t a disorder so much as a lack of meaning: the absence of projects worth suffering for, relationships that fill the days, responsibilities that make life feel necessary. When meaning is missing, people still experience the ache; they just call it anxiety. They call it depression. They call it ADHD. They call it “burnout.” Then they shop for management strategies, because management is what modern life offers.

And so we get the “worried well” as a social type: healthy, wealthy, educated people treating therapy as routine maintenance, like a dentist appointment for the soul. The married couple with two personal therapists and a marriage therapist isn’t necessarily ridiculous; it may even be helping them. But it’s also a sign of the times: friendship professionalized, conversation outsourced, meaning handled by appointment. A paid hour of attention stands in for what used to come from a circle of friends, a congregation, a club, a shared craft, a common project.

If the deepest need is “the friend,” then the remedy won’t be found in a bottle, and it won’t be delivered by a social-media lash. Pills scale. Protocols scale. Even therapy, now, is being packaged, systematized, and app-ified. I personally know of people who use chatbots for therapists. But friendship doesn’t scale. Meaning doesn’t scale. You can’t automate the one person who knows you well enough to tell you, with affection, “Stop doing that. Come on. Let’s go do something hard and worth doing. I’m here.” Nietzsche is prophetic once again: we became self-sufficient solar orbits — and then discovered that self-sufficiency is a poor substitute for a steadfast companion.

A Man Keeping Cool

By in books, jests japes jokes jollies

Keep calm. Gaze coldly.

Why? — Because this calm and this cold represent the durable; time disengaged from everything.

A man keeping cool is on the scale of a century. Anger and all the added emotions in the end make up a level plane. In the long run, there never was anything. Don’t lose sight of this final, solid nullity. Let some sign, — an extended, horizontal line — underpin all your secret reactions and meteoric feelings.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 1

It May Be That I Am, Or Must Have Been, Or Seemed, Fairly Inhuman

By in books, foolosophy, identity

Confession. It was last year, when I was in bed at Montrozier, that I opened a Montaigne. I quickly threw it to one side. It bored me to death. Anyone can write such stuff.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 1

The reader has long since realized it by this point, but Valéry confirms it in so many words: we are very far from the genial, omnivorous humanism of Montaigne here. These notebooks aren’t essays in the Montaignean sense, meant to converse with a reader. They read more like laboratory notes: a mind watching itself, trying to turn experience into an instrument — impersonal, exacting, and deliberately uncharming. Montaigne can talk about digestion and friendship, cowardice and books, and somehow it all becomes thought. Valéry wants thought without digestion — mind scrubbed of the “mere human” that makes Montaigne readable, and lovable, and (contrary to Valéry’s sniff) almost impossibly hard to imitate.

The Lady of the House says that as a toddler, when adults tried to help her, she would glare and insist: “Me do!” That’s Valéry’s attitude — except he wants to “me do” his way out of the body itself. Feelings are dangerous because they give other people leverage; ordinary reactions must be repressed; calm and cold represent “the durable.” Even his reading preferences obey the same law: he doesn’t want to be “taken up and passively lived” by novels; he likes books that stimulate him to be more himself — which is to say, more active, more in control, more irreducible. The implied ideal is almost a brain in a jar: pure potential, pure mind, exempt from the petty biological impositions that make up the bulk of our existence.

He even records, with a kind of affronted amusement, that “a Japanese professor has, apparently, made me a Buddhist” — while insisting he knows nothing about Gautama Buddha or theosophy. But the funny part is that he doesn’t merely lack the tradition; he is temperamentally opposed to it. There are doors standing open — whole libraries of people who have examined the same questions of ego and identity for centuries — but for Valéry the point is not relief from suffering, it’s authorship. He doesn’t want the solution shown to him; he wants to derive it himself. And the deeper irony is that what gets called “Buddhist” about him is usually the cool gaze and the disidentification — yet he’s using those tools not to dissolve the illusory self, but to refine it and solidify it into an untouchable “I.”

Reading the Cahiers can feel like reading out of the corner of your eye, because you know Valéry would resent your attempt to see him clearly, to get a handle on him, to catch him in a conceptual net. Naturally you still try. You wonder about youthful crises, tragic love affairs, the whole human backstory that would make him make sense in the usual way. But that reduction is exactly what he’s refusing. He vehemently rejects the idea of being reduced to a single concept, a single role. He would rather be potentially many things than certainly one thing. And then, in spite of all that refusal, he gives himself away in a single sputtering sentence: “The most infuriating thing is to see that knowledge is powerless over pain. The intelligence encompasses it, describes it, possesses it and — can do nothing. Infuriating and scandalous.” That’s the closest he comes to passion: not tenderness, not gratitude, but rage at encountering an experience his mind can’t neutralize into disinfected understanding. It’s tragic, and — though he would hate the word — endearing: the great engineer of inner sovereignty discovers the one fact that cannot be made obedient. The man who wanted to be ungraspable is, at last, grasped — by pain.

I Got a Worried Mind, Sharin’ What I Thought Was Mine

By in books, foolosophy

By dint of repeating my ‘ideas’ to other people, they detach themselves from me — or rather: I detach myself from them. I don’t think them any more. There’s no longer any intimacy between us and — however accurate they might have appeared to me, — I feel the need to find new ones, — even contrary ones — to replace these beloved mistresses who have turned into streetwalkers — in order to be myself.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 1

Paul, buddy, you need to have your priorities straight before you join an intellectual swingers’ club. It’s not fair to freely share your ideas with other men and then coldly disown them as whores afterwards.

But seriously, though, I know what he’s getting at. So does Fernando Pessoa: “No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it. Collective thought is stupid because it’s collective. Nothing passes into the realm of the collective without leaving at the border — like a toll — most of the intelligence it contained.” Many years ago, I coined the term noospheric entropy for this phenomenon: “ideas and concepts are forever decaying into clichés, slogans and buzzwords.” I still like it. I think it describes a real thing. But if my blackest nightmare should ever come to pass, and I hear of Malcolm Gladwell or Yuval Noah Harari citing me during a Ted Talk, you better believe I would disavow it, deny paternity, and delete my blog like a man fleeing a crime scene.

I Wallowed In the Blood and Mud With All the Other Pigs

By in ohferfucksake, socmed, the geist of the zeit, the madness of crowds

What do you mean “we,” paleface? Is someone holding a gun to your head and forcing you to comment on the latest viral outrage? You chose to talk about it in order to keep up with the “discourse.” This is what you do with your own free will and free time. You could change the subject, or if that fails to take, you could walk away and do something meaningful, like fix a wobbly chair in your house. I have no patience with this disingenuous passivity. If your water tastes like urine, stop pissing into your own aquifer.

I can’t even fault a media whore like Lemon for coming up with a cynical stunt to get more attention for his new Substack career. It wouldn’t work without so many willing marks playing their part. Political discourse on social media is nothing but professional wrestling for people who are too stupid to grasp the nuances of professional wrestling. The old stereotype was the toothless yokel screaming at ringside when the heel cracks the babyface over the head with a steel chair, but it’s been common knowledge for decades that pro wrestling is scripted, and most fans now know exactly what they’re participating in. The real marks in 2026 are the ones who yell at their screens about politics with all the earnestness of yokels yelling at the referee to turn around and catch the heel in the act of cheating. They should know, on some level, that the spectacle is fraudulent, and they still behave like the most gullible fan in the arena.

The point is never the “incident;” the point is the argument it manufactures. The boring baseline facts — private property, a religious service, people trying to worship in peace — get skipped like the opening act. Instead, everyone leaps straight to the proxy argument that never ends: immigration, ICE, Trump, “fAsCiSm,” the entire omnicause. The crowd doesn’t just buy tickets; it builds the ring, provides the refreshments, and generates the “heat” for free, then calls it “staying informed.” At least wrestling has the decency to wink. This stuff demands you keep a straight face while you’re being worked — and then applaud yourself for not being the sort of person who gets worked.

Obiter Scripta, no. 153

By in battling personal entropy, books, obiter scripta

My ‘scepticism’, my retreat from or disdain for real things, acts and so on, is without doubt linked to my muscular mediocrity. I’ve always had an intense dislike for any positive muscular effort and although physically fairly well-proportioned and having a certain ‘athletic’ disposition, namely a feeling for the elegance of movement — the feeling of muscular weakness, whether real or imagined, has played a significant role in my development. I’ve always attempted to replace an expenditure of energy φ by an expenditure of energy ψ.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 1

Many such cases. That’s a lot of fancy-schmancy words just to say, “I can’t squat 135 to below parallel.” It’s the old saw about doing vs. teaching, revised: those who can’t lift, cerebrate. Which would be harmless enough — everyone compensates somewhere — except the cerebrators so often feel obliged to moralize about it, as if the Meathead’s love of iron were a symptom of a stunted mind rather than the simple fact that some men are at home in their bodies. The propaganda runs one way because Eggheads own the printing presses: the strong are only strong because they can’t think. But the logic works in reverse too. A man who can move twice his bodyweight in plates has less need to flee into abstractions to feel potent.

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