foolosophy

Test the Smallest Thing

By in books, foolosophy, nietzsche

All habituations (e.g., to a certain food, like coffee, or a certain timing) in the long run have the result of cultivating a certain kind of human being. Therefore look around you! Test the smallest thing! Where does it want to go? Does it belong to your kind, to your goal?

— Nietzsche, The Joyful Science / Idylls from Messina / Unpublished Fragments from the Period of The Joyful Science (Spring 1881–Summer 1882)

Another day, another viral video. Like a moth to a flame, someone else decides to blow up their life and career for a moment of attention on social media. I don’t believe most of these people sit down and choose ruin in cold blood. What they choose, over and over, in tiny doses, is something smaller: the little performance, the little outrage, the little “say the thing” that gets rewarded. Then one day the habit reaches its natural conclusion, and the person who hits “post” is already doomed.

Aristotle and Nietzsche agree on one blunt point: you become the kind of person you practice being. Aristotle says we become just (or not) by doing just acts (or not), until the repetition hardens into character. There’s something liberating about this. It loosens the superstitious grip of “That’s just how I am” and even “That’s what my upbringing made me.” But it also hands you the responsibility: if you can be formed, you can be reformed — and that means noticing which habits are shaping you into someone you don’t actually want to be. As Unamuno said, we should aim to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past.

Nietzsche’s advice is almost insultingly practical: test the smallest thing. Not your grand ideals; your reflexes. What do you do in the ten-second gaps? What do you reach for when you’re bored, or annoyed, or lonely, or pleased with yourself? Those are not neutral gestures. They’re the training regimen.

Take This Heavy Burden

By in ai, foolosophy, technology

Blair Effron:

There is little doubt A.I. will be transformative. And yet, for all the disruption it promises, I am struck by how much will remain unchanged. The most consequential decisions in business have never been about processing information faster or detecting patterns more efficiently. The most salient concerns are questions such as what kind of enterprise a firm should aspire to be, what culture it should embrace, what risks it should tolerate and how its leaders can plan when the path forward is unclear. These are questions of judgment, and judgment cannot be automated — at least not any time soon.

True. But it can be abdicated instantly, and there’s nothing people like more than handing off responsibility for judgment. They’ll love a machine that makes decisions feel inevitable. AI doesn’t replace judgment so much as provide a frictionless way to dodge it: the model recommends… and suddenly nobody is choosing, they’re “following the data.” If things go well, leadership “leveraged cutting-edge AI.” If things go badly, “the model was wrong.” Judgment won’t be automated. It will be subcontracted, with plausible deniability baked in.

The Chair Repair Republic

By in books, foolosophy, lin yutang

When a man gets frightened or unhappy about the United Nations or the problems of world peace, and wants to recover his happiness, the best thing to do is find some choked kitchen drain and try to clear it. There is hardly a man on earth who is not proud when he sees the water go down the sink smoothly with a clear gurgle as the result of his morning’s labor. Or, instead of committing suicide over the tragedy of Czechoslovakia, one should find out if there isn’t a shaky chair in the house and see if he can’t fix it and make it safe to sit on again. After all, one can save the future of Czechoslovakia only by saving oneself and keeping oneself happy and alive first. The sovereign remedy for world chaos seems to be to provide every household with a hammer and a monkey wrench and a plentiful supply of nails.

— Lin Yutang, The Best of an Old Friend

A man who can’t unclog a sink but is “following world events closely” is basically worshiping abstraction. He has outsourced his sense of agency to headlines. You could substitute Czechoslovakia with Gaza or Greenland, and world peace with ICE, and the lesson stays the same. If we’re realistic about our position in the world, most have us have no power, influence, or money to “change the world” with. As individuals, we can at best be a perfectly placed rivet in a skyscraper, and that doesn’t seem like much, but you might notice a dramatic difference if it weren’t there.

But even Lin’s point isn’t “don’t care about the world,” it’s “stop confusing agitation with agency.” World-scale crises can matter deeply and still be beyond your reach. If you let your nervous system live on a steady diet of catastrophe, you end up trading responsibility for spectacle and calling it virtue. The drain and the shaky chair are a kind of triage: they pull you back into a realm where cause and effect are real, where competence is measurable, and where you can actually keep yourself steady, functional, and sane. Attention isn’t power, and outrage isn’t influence; but a household, a neighborhood, a job done well, a person helped — these are places where your actions register. Get your own water running cleanly first, and you’ll be in a position to be the symbolic rivet you can realistically be, instead of the trembling spectator of events you can’t change.

Cultivate Our Temperament

By in books, foolosophy, nietzsche

It is in our hands to cultivate our temperament like a garden. To plant experiences in it, to strike out others: to found a beautiful quiet avenue of friendship, to be conscious of secret views upon glory — to have ready paths to all these good spots in one’s garden so that it may not fail us when we need it!

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

I like that he envisions an active role in what most people treat as a given. Temperament not as a horoscope, but more like a landscape — worked, shaped, improved. You don’t have to deny what happened to you, but you also don’t have to treat it as your permanent job title. The modern temptation is to explain yourself until the explanation becomes the self: “My father was aloof, my mother was manipulative — therefore this is what I am.” That story may be true as history, even useful as diagnosis; but it’s a terrible constitution. It turns causes into fate. Nietzsche’s instinct is to demote the past from sovereign to raw material: what can I do with this? what can I plant? what can I prune? what paths should I keep clear so I can reach the good places when I’m under strain? Some experiences you cultivate because they make you steadier: friendships that calm you, habits that keep you sane, small “views” that restore perspective. Other experiences you strike out — not by pretending they never happened, but by refusing them unlimited squatter’s rights. And even the worst things are still compostable. They can become material that, once broken down, feeds something better.

Tomorrow Answers Everything

By in battling personal entropy, books, foolosophy, nietzsche

The unfortunate who all at once want to attain virtue through a transformation! And despair at a relapse! Whereas practice makes perfect.

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

January is when my gym turns into a little Ellis Island of self-improvement. New faces. New vows. The staff gives tours to people interested in signing up. I’ve seen a fair amount of them these last few weeks.

I’m glad people are trying. I mean that. But I also start from a skeptical stance, because the whole thing is so heavily scripted. The cultural calendar has a “New Year, New Me” plotline built into it, and plots are hypnotic. They lend borrowed conviction. They make you feel like you’re already halfway changed, just because you’ve announced the intention to change.

I’m not proud of it, but January brings out my inner Snafu from The Pacific — the guy who tells Sledge not to bother learning the new replacements’ names because “they’ll be dead in a few days.” The gym translation is obviously less tragic: most of them won’t be dead, however much they feel like it after a few hard training sessions. They’ll just be gone by February, evaporated with the resolution-enthusiasm. And I hate that this cynical little reflex exists in me, because the decent response is the opposite: be friendly anyway, and help the ones who end up staying.

Transformation is a romance-novel word. It promises a before-and-after montage. It suggests that what you really need is not a new habit but a new identity — some sudden moral molt where you wake up and discover you have become the kind of person who loves broccoli and Bulgarian squats. Relapse, in the transformation story, isn’t “part of training.” It’s “proof you are who you always were.” One missed week becomes an existential referendum. The spell breaks, and the old self trudges back in. But relapse is only catastrophic if you were depending on feeling to do the work.

That’s why I trust the April or September sign-up more than the January sign-up — maybe irrationally. The April/September person doesn’t have a national chorus chanting behind them. No “fresh start” motivation. No holiday guilt. Just an ordinary Tuesday and a decision that doesn’t come prepackaged with fireworks. I could be wrong about this (the calendar is a convenient on-ramp, and I’m sure plenty of January people stick), but the vibe is different: April/September feels like someone quietly taking responsibility rather than auditioning for a reboot.

Motivation is what you have when the gym is new and the possibilities are infinite. Practice is what you build for the day when the gym is crowded, your sleep was trash, the parking lot is icy, your knees feel 10 years older, and your brain starts bargaining: You can go tomorrow. Tomorrow will be better. Practice is what happens when tomorrow comes and is not better.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We Made Ourselves a Pillar, We Just Used It As a Crutch

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

James Geary:

This is the awesome power of aphorisms, and it is what sets them apart from the trite sound bites of social-media influencers and the platitudes of self-help gurus: Aphorisms do not make you feel good about yourself. That Burrill saying doesn’t offer an easy fix or a neat solution. In fact, it doesn’t offer a fix or a solution at all. It is a great example of aphoristic intelligence at work. It makes us reconsider what we’re doing, or not doing, with our lives.

I’ve enjoyed Geary’s books about language in general and aphorisms in particular (here and here for those interested), and I certainly don’t begrudge the man for promoting a reissued edition of one of them, but this is The Atlantic, whose audience proudly sits right on top of the bell curve, so of course the topic has to be pre-chewed and spooned out in the consistency of Gerber’s baby food. Hence, “Aphoristic Intelligence Beats Artificial Intelligence.” You like to read literature, and maybe aphorisms? You feel anxious about AI? You’re a subscriber to the premier magazine for the stupidest smart people in the professional-managerial class? Well! Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly…

I love aphorisms, and I would agree that the best of them have a compressed depth that lends itself to different interpretations as opposed to pat answers, but this kind of framing is itself simplistic and, well, platitudinous. Not all aphorisms are about confronting us with our shameful failings. Gary Saul Morson, for instance, uses “Yogi Berra-isms” as an example of what he calls “wise folly,” sayings that sound dumb on the surface but contain surprising depths. And personally, when I read La Rochefoucauld skewering courtly-salon society, I come away thinking less about my own moral culpability and more about how maybe the French Revolution had some good points. Either way, the point is, this quasi-macho attitude — “I read difficult, confrontational literature; I shine the light of moral interrogation into the dark, wretched corners of my soul” — can itself be a form of self-flattery, and self-flattery is what we should be on guard against, in whatever guise it presents itself. The Devil can cite The Atlantic for his purpose too.

Solzhenitsyn famously said that the line dividing good from evil runs right through the heart of every human being, and that this is why schemes which promise to neatly divide vice from virtue and quarantine the former are doomed to failure. Everything in life can present a choice between honesty and self-flattery. You can read aphorisms for shallow reasons and retain nothing; you can use AI intelligently and creatively. In fact, most if not all of the moral sorting mechanisms we come up with are complicated by messy reality like that. There’s no sanctuary from shallow thinking, only the necessity of vigilance. The minute you start congratulating yourself on being immune to shallowness is usually when it has you by the throat.

I’m Not Locked In Here With You; You’re Locked In Here With Me

By in books, bring me the head of nicholas carr, foolosophy, technology

I know I was just complaining about how people don’t write letters anymore. But at the risk of sounding difficult to please, I have to say that when people did write letters they often weren’t very interesting. College students wrote to mom and dad, but just as an excuse to ask for money, and don’t get me started on the literary merits of the average love letter. The letters of Italian humanists are another case in point. Elegant though they are, they tend to follow predictable motifs. There’s the epistle of consolation, sharing in the grief of losing a loved one before saying it’s time to pull oneself together. There’s the letter in which the recipient’s eloquence is extravagantly praised, and the answer to such a letter, where the done thing is to respond with even more extravagant false modesty. Closely related is the plea for patronage, a showpiece of verbal dexterity in which fulsome praise of some rich person is used to entice that rich person to pay for more of the same. Most characteristically, there is the letter that is not about much of anything, apart from the fact that one is writing a letter. It begins by apologizing for not writing sooner and goes on to apologize again for having to be brief, before closing with the admonition that the recipient should reply as soon as possible. Renaissance rhetoric is at its purest when it uses beautiful, well-balanced, Ciceronian sentences to say nothing.

— Peter Adamson, Byzantine and Renaissance Philosophy

In other words: the human talent for self-evasion doesn’t need modern technology. It never did.

That’s what I want to use as a moral reminder — not “mindfulness” (that word now comes with incense and merch), but something simpler and harsher: there’s no real escape from yourself. Wherever you go, you bring the same appetite for ease, the same ability to drift, the same knack for making excuses sound principled. Every day offers small temptations to take the shortcut and call it “self-care,” to slide into a warm bath of self-centeredness where your obligations dissolve and your ideals become decorative.

Nostalgia is one of the warmest baths. It whispers that authenticity was easy back then. If only we could return to the mid-90s — before algorithms, before smartphones, before social media — then of course we’d all be living in authentic reality: long conversations, meaningful relationships, handwritten letters, depth everywhere. But those of us who were actually there know what that’s worth. People frittered away their time just fine back then. They dodged hard conversations. They postponed letters. They did the minimum and dressed it up. They simply had fewer gadgets to blame.

If you think “people” should take the time to write more personal letters, what’s stopping you? Not the era. Not the medium. Not the loss of some vanished social grace. You can do it today. You can even do it on a laptop — if you’re willing to pay the real cost, which is attention. Renaissance humanists could produce elegance on command. That was the problem. Elegance became an alibi: proof that something had been done, without the discomfort of actually saying something. And that temptation hasn’t changed. We can all “compose” our way out of sincerity, whether with Ciceronian balance or a perfectly-toned text message. But we don’t like to pay attention, because we’d rather spend our time fantasizing, as people have always done.

Praise You Like I Should

By in books, foolosophy

We always suppose that others possess great powers of acute penetration thanks to which they will discover our worth, whether real or imagined, and that they will then devote considerable attention to these merits of ours, even when we refuse to recognize such qualities in respect of any other object.

— Leopardi, Zibaldone

It’s funny, because most of us recognize our own narcissistic tendencies here, especially from our self-involved adolescence (mine, at least). To be recognized by others as being smart, sensitive, and talented, and to be marveled at! Of course, he’s talking about the ways we daydream about other people paying close, positive attention to us, captivated by our awesomeness. The flip side of that is the equally-narcissistic fear that they’re paying close negative attention to us, seeing every flaw and judging us harshly. The deflating truth is, most people are as wrapped up in their own personal soap opera as we are and probably hardly think about us at all. Likewise, we are often guilty of the same self-absorption. How often do we hand out affectionate compliments to people who are, after all, just doing their job?

A small episode at our doctor’s office reminded me of that.

My stepson and I have been going in weekly for testosterone injections for about a year now. Our nurse is a young woman, reliably conscientious and caring, and we always look forward to chatting with her. The appointment is ten minutes long, but repetition turns ten minutes into a kind of ritual. You get familiar. You pick up conversational threads where you left them the week before. It becomes, in miniature, a friendship.

So we decided to get her a little Christmas gift: a gift card to a local coffee shop. Nothing grand, just a thank-you for being consistently cheerful, kind, and competent while doing something for us that’s pure convenience.

We stopped by the clinic’s open-house Christmas party that weekend and gave it to her. Easy. Done. Good deed logged, Christmas cheer spread.

Then we came in several days later for our injections, and my stepson was curious to see if she’d used it yet.

“Did you get any coffee today?”

She said her sister had brought her some that morning. She didn’t seem to pick up on the hint, though.

He tried again. “From [redacted]?” he asked. (The shop’s name withheld to protect the not-so-innocent.)

No, she said. She doesn’t like [redacted]. Apparently they’d pulled some underhanded move against another local coffee place — reneged on an agreement, stole floor plans, something like that. Her sister is a barista, so she’s up on the local bean-water gossip.

Uh-oh.

Then it occurred to me: she might not even have looked at the gift card yet.

So I gently said something like, “Well, if you’d prefer, it’s no trouble to get you a different gift card. We can use that one ourselves…”

Horrified comprehension dawned on her.

“OHMIGOD, you guys!!”

She was profusely apologetic. Flushed and perspiring, she explained she’d gone straight from the party to her other job where she worked all weekend, she’d put the card in her purse and forgotten to look at it, she really was grateful, she didn’t mean to sound rude — on and on. The poor woman was mortified, and my stepson and I started laughing, partly because it was genuinely funny and partly because laughter is the quickest way to say, Please stop punishing yourself. We’re not prosecuting you.

We reassured her: it was just a comedy of errors; we weren’t upset or offended; it was fine; all’s well that ends well.

The next day I went back for a blood draw. She came out to go over last-minute details and joked, “Can’t be too mad, I guess; you came back!” I told her, honestly, that I hoped she hadn’t gone home feeling bad about it.

She admitted she had. Worse, it had become a topic of conversation at dinner. She told her dad and he said, “That’s terrible!”

This is the part where I risk sounding like I’m polishing my halo, but I promise, the point is really about how easily we imagine we’re being judged, and how strangely rare it is to tell someone, plainly, “I see what kind of person you are.”

We know you better than that, I said. We know you’re not the kind of person who’s capable of being rude about a Christmas gift. And I reminded her of something she’d done that she probably thought no one would remember.

In autumn of last year, a hurricane came up from the Gulf and, rather than continuing up the coast, veered inland and tore through parts of the South. We lost power here in central Virginia for about 24 hours, but western North Carolina got severely devastated. Our nurse posted a note online saying she wouldn’t be available the following week because she was going down there to volunteer her nursing services for hurricane victims. I told her that that’s the sort of thing that shows who she really is, not an awkwardly-timed honest opinion.

She smiled and lowered her eyes, and we neatly segued back to talking about blood tests. I like to think that maybe I did my part to disprove the general truth of Leopardi’s observation, and I hope that maybe I gave her a little bit of an inner glow by making her feel unexpectedly recognized and praised for something she would never dream of boasting about.

This comes up in a smaller way every time we visit. If we have to wait, she always apologizes. But this is a tiny private practice; she’s the only nurse on staff; they offer the injections for free; we show up whenever it’s convenient for us and they fit us in as soon as they can, using their own supplies — gloves, syringes, alcohol pads, band-aids. So one day when she apologized, we told her the truth: you guys are doing us a favor; how on earth could we complain about sitting for fifteen minutes? She gave this wistful little smile and said, “I wish everyone felt that way!”

That stuck with me. To us, it’s obvious she’s a good person who deserves appreciation. But she’s probably dealing with a steady trickle of people who treat “free” as an entitlement and still find something to gripe about. And those are the people who give the loudest feedback. If you’re the one who only speaks up to complain, you end up training the world to expect complaint. Which is one reason it feels worth setting aside a little time and money, to say, formally and out loud: we notice you, and we appreciate you.

Evergreen Findings

By in foolosophy

I’ve never read any of Oliver Sacks’ books, so this doesn’t mean much to me. It’s just the latest episode in the long tradition of pop-science giants with clay feet. The public buys a voice that sounds like knowledge, preferably delivered as a memorable anecdote with a moral. Then, years later, we learn the anecdote was polished, the edges sanded down, the details enhanced. There’s nothing new under the sun here; you can run the lineage back at least as far as Freud. I joked to the Lady of the House that my rule of thumb is that once an author reaches the Sacks/Gladwell/Lehrer/NPR/Ted Talk/airport bookstore level of fame, they’re probably frauds.

I bought a Robert Fulghum book way back in the day, and the cashier said she’d tried reading him but it “just seemed to be a lot of stuff I already knew.” Even then, I remember thinking, well, yeah; why would you assume truth should always feel innovative? Why should wisdom have to be counterintuitive to count as wisdom? Most of what matters in life isn’t obscure. It’s obvious. That’s precisely why we spend so much energy avoiding it.

This is where the old moralists hit different, as the yutes like to say. I’ve been reading La Bruyère via Isaac Waisberg lately. Reading a writer from over three centuries ago, you’re confronted with the evidence, almost insulting in its clarity, of how little we change. He writes about vanity, ambition, self-deception, envy, the delusions of status and display, and you recognize the faces immediately. Worse, you recognize your own. It’s humbling, almost depressing, to be reminded that you, too, will probably die partly deluded and foolish. If La Bruyère lived nearby, you might end up as one of his “characters,” filed neatly under a folly you thought was unique to everyone else.

And this, I suspect, is one reason we prefer “knowledge” in the idioms of social science. The moralists offer recognition, not rescue. But the modern conceit offers something far more consoling: the idea that some counterintuitive discovery just around the corner will finally redeem us from ourselves. The next paper will reveal the lever; the next protocol will rewire the habit; the next chemical will dissolve the defect; the next device will make discipline effortless; the next insight will make us new again. It’s a secular salvation story: deliverance without confession, transformation without the hard, thankless work of character. No wonder it sells. The old humanists tell us what we already know; the new priesthood tells us what we’ve always hoped.

In a Maggoty World

By in aphorisms, foolosophy, nietzsche

But is this struggle for a healthy mind in a maggoty world really after all worth it? Are there not soporific dreams and sweet deliriums more soothing than Reason? If Transmigration can make clear the dark Problem of Evil; if Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy can free us from Death; if the belief that Bacon wrote Shakespeare gives a peace which the world cannot give, why pedantically reject such solace? Why not be led with the others by still waters, be made to lie down in green pastures?

— Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections & Aphorisms

Strictly speaking, that’s the logical conclusion of seeing clearly in a world where nothing “matters” in any cosmic sense. If life is short and ends in oblivion, why not just believe whatever makes you feel good and be done with it? Why not take the spiritual fentanyl?

A thinker, Nietzsche says, is the creature in whom “the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors clash for their first fight after the impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power.” The old opposition — cold truth versus warm illusion — won’t quite do anymore. The appetite for truth itself can become a way of living, even a way of consoling oneself. You can take pride in being the sort of person who stares at the rictus grin on the face of existence without flinching, perhaps even while smirking. You can make a little ego-cult out of not needing the green pastures.

That, I suspect, is where a lot of unbelievers end up, myself included. I don’t believe in souls, afterlives, or a creator god keeping score, but I still behave as if there were such a thing as truth — lower-case and provisional, perhaps, but not wholly plastic — and as if harmonizing with it offered a satisfaction you can’t get from being your own sycophantic courtier. Even if “truth” isn’t another name for God, it serves much the same function: something that stands outside me and corrects me, something I can fail to live up to.

Of course that, too, may be one more life-preserving error. But if I’m going to live on stories, I’d rather live on the story that says: see as clearly as you can, refuse the deliberate lie, and then, knowing full well that nothing lasts, help build and protect a few small oases of decency and meaning anyway. Not because they’ll endure forever, but because a world of sand castles honestly built is still preferable to a Disneyland of comforting fables.

Our Own Prisons

By in books, foolosophy, lin yutang

The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighborhood.  From this prison there is no escape. But the moment he takes up a book, he immediately enters a different world, and if it is a good book, he is immediately put in touch with one of the best talkers of the world. This talker leads him on and carries him into a different country or a different age, or unburdens to him some of his personal regrets, or discusses with him some special line or aspect of life that the reader knows nothing about. An ancient author puts him in communion with a dead spirit of long ago, and as he reads along, he begins to imagine what that ancient author looked like and what type of person he was. Now to be able to live two hours out of twelve in a different world and take one’s thoughts off the claims of the immediate present is, of course, a privilege to be envied by people shut up in their bodily prison. Such a change of environment is really similar to travel in its psychological effect.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

Lin’s image of the non-reader as “imprisoned in his immediate world” can sound like the usual literary snobbery, as if people who don’t read are just empty rooms with the lights off. That’s not quite right. I’ve known plenty of people who rarely open a book and yet have an inner life that runs on talk, work, hobbies, family gossip, or just steady contentment. For me, though, the metaphor fits uncomfortably well. When I’m not reading or writing anything that grips me, I don’t become serenely Taoist; I turn into a zombie going through the motions of existence. Conversely, I can chase after new books or ideas with all the undisciplined joy of a dog after squirrels. Other people can happily spend the afternoon dozing in a sunbeam like a cat, or get their novelty from shopping, scrolling, or watching television. I seem to need a different kind of stimulus, the feeling of being led by a voice on the page into another mind, another time. It’s a difference of degree rather than kind. A man content to pass the time in a rocking chair on the front porch might see me as enslaved to my books and laptop, unable to sit quietly and just be.

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