foolosophy

Beyond the Dust

By in alan watts, books, foolosophy

That’s why the images of the Buddha always present him as looking blissful. Cats look like this, too, because they can sit for ages and simply watch. You might say it’s because they have nothing better to do because we think we’re supposed to be constantly improving somehow or doing something beneficial for the world. But hermits who live solitary lives and meditate all of the time are doing an enormous amount for the world, and just the suspicion that people such as that still exist today is marvelous for everybody. The contrast of their presence reveals how the rest of us are so busy raising so much dust. We think we’re going somewhere, but we’re already there. Meanwhile, all the dust we kick up rushing about everywhere is getting in everybody’s nostrils and polluting everything. So to know that there are hermits deep in the forest is like knowing there’s a world beyond the dust — a world of streams and flowers that few of us ever see.

— Alan Watts, Just So: Money, Materialism, and the Ineffable, Intelligent Universe

Every day I heroically refrain from founding a movement. Please, no applause. I’m merely performing my civic duty by staying out of your hair and out of your feeds. I’m practicing radical inaction so you don’t have to. While lesser spirits churn the great particulate cloud of Progress, I nobly remain indoors, filtering the noösphere with my quiet studiousness. History will not thank me, because I will stay beneath its notice.

Long Distance

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

The telephone upheld a certain formality, it contained within it a permanent distance, and since this was owing to its shape, which even frequent use was powerless to overcome, the shape had to be changed, since the times were trending towards greater informality. The same thing happened to the letter. Old people, into whose lives the stationary telephone had sunk deep roots, treat the mobile phone just as formally and with the same respect, which gives them an air both ridiculous and touching. Distance, which was formerly a means to control reality, so as not to appear awkward and inept, has now itself become awkward, and while the two are hardly comparable, I find myself thinking of the figure of the dictator, one day all-powerful and controlling every aspect of life, the next, when the people revolt, naked and exposed.

— Karl Ove Knausgaard, Autumn

When the phone rang in the era of “long distance,” the house changed temperature. Your mom hushed the room, because money and miles were suddenly in the wire. The TV would be turned down or off. You were aware the call was an event. The cord kept you within a couple-foot radius. Once the receiver was in your hand, you’d entered something you couldn’t casually leave.

As I type, I’m in the middle of an ongoing email chain with my oldest friend from high school, making plans to get together soon. She and I have exchanged many phone calls, letters, and postcards over the years, but no text messages as yet. When we were teenagers, a phone call was a small performance. Even the risk felt ceremonial: a father’s voice might answer first, and you’d have to present yourself before you reached the person you meant to speak to. You chose your moment (not during dinner, not too late), rehearsed a topic so the silences wouldn’t stretch too long, hoped your voice wouldn’t pick that moment to crack, and braced for the disappointment of a parent telling you to call back some other time. Letters shared much of the same gravitas. You shaped paragraphs because the blank page asked for form. You arranged your thoughts and presented them in an order that wouldn’t waste the reader’s time. We weren’t writing literature, but we were writing to someone, and that made all the difference.

Nowadays, a conversation mediated through technology is more like food stuffed with preservatives. It never truly goes stale; it waits in the pantry of the messaging app until someone remembers to take another bite. The etiquette has inverted: it’s not interrupting that’s rude anymore, it’s leaving someone “on read.” Where the call demanded readiness and risk, the thread promises availability and delay. We used to drop what we were doing and rush to answer the ringing phone; now we casually glance at our screen as messages arrive, and vaguely resolve to get back to them at our convenience.

Knausgaard is right about distance as a kind of dignity. The old distance let us compose ourselves; the new nearness lets us postpone ourselves. Less ceremony, less gravitas, and far more ways to fail each other slowly. Now the old distance has vanished. We can reach anyone, anywhere, at any hour — no miles to pay for, no gatekeepers to pass. But a second distance has opened: indifference. Availability replaces readiness; presence gives way to drift. We keep each other at arm’s length by refusing to make an occasion of our speech and attention.

Mihi Ipsi Scripsi (In the Age of ‘Doing Numbers’)

By in books, foolosophy, nietzsche, the geist of the zeit, writing

On the other hand, just as many pronouncements may be found that attested to his disinterest in potential readers. “Mihi ipsi scripsi” — “I wrote it for myself” — was the motto he had selected for himself, perhaps also to prevent disappointments, while working on Zarathustra. The same ambivalence emerged from the fact that he had addressed the book to “everyone and to no one.” “How could I write for readers?…Rather, I make notations for myself,” can be read in a notebook from the late 1880s. The question of Nietzsche’s audience was further complicated by the fact that he was convinced he was ahead of his age by a generation, if not by several.

— Philipp Felsch, How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold: A Tale of a Redemption

In 2005, a couple friends and I started a short-lived blog to join the general conversation. I didn’t have a voice yet, so my efforts were mostly derivative. By the time I finally started to write things that didn’t suck, the crowd had drifted to newer platforms and shorter attention spans. It didn’t matter; writing turned out to be intrinsically rewarding. The bargain I made with myself was simple: keep the work addressed to one exacting reader —me— and let others overhear it if they like.

Then came the metricized web. In 2006 I was uploading obscure musical tracks to YouTube and getting DMs like, “love this!! hey subscribe to my channel!!” I’d check their page: a few shaky cam clips and nothing I’d ever want to see again. I kept wondering, like an overly-rational Vulcan, why would I volunteer to be notified every time this dork posts? Eventually I learned that this was just the new etiquette: don’t offer value, collect it. The request wasn’t transactional (“here’s something you’ll love in return”); it was numerical (“help me inflate this meaningless metric so that I can pretend my inner self is something other than a howling wasteland”). Today’s creator programs formalize it: payouts and promotion tied to “engagement,” with replies and outrage acting like adrenaline. If ten thousand people rage-reply and thirty thousand boost it, the algorithm pays out, and discourse tilts toward provocation. It’s not about conversation; it’s a slot machine that rings louder the more you debase yourself to pull the lever. Now, I feel an irrational rage every time I see an ostensible adult boast about achieving a particular round-number follower count, or about a viral post “doing numbers.” How many of these “followers” are real people who actually read each post carefully and comprehend it? How many of these “content creators” even care, though? Numbers are all that matter, like insecure teenagers in a perpetual dick-measuring contest. I want to charge into the Temple of Elon and overturn all the payout tables. “My blogosphere was to be called a house of conversation, but you have turned it into a den of shitposters.”

I’m Gen-X, and the old ethos still feels right: strive for status if you must, but don’t pant for it in public. Obsession over “selling out” could get precious, and of course it was largely hypocritical, but it kept dignity within reach, at least. Even a “too cool for school” stance like ours was still a tribute to an established norm: it would be pathetic and undignified for an adult to chase after mere popularity for its own sake. By the early ’00s, I was belatedly realizing that no such restraint existed anymore. Empty affirmation was all anyone seemed to care about. I’d rather stick with the Nietzschean attitude — a book for all and none — and use outdated measures of value instead: posts reread, saved, passed along from one person to another. If the age needs me later, it will find me; until then, I’ll keep making notations for myself — several generations ahead, naturally.

The Trouble With Being Supercilious

By in books, foolosophy, nietzsche

A privilege to live in conflict with one’s times. At every moment one is aware one does not think like the others. This state of acute dissimilarity, however indigent or sterile it appears, nonetheless possesses a philosophical status which one would be at a loss to seek in cogitations attuned to events.

— Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

I’ve sometimes fancied myself a courageous lone freethinker — but then again, who doesn’t? Everyone’s a hero in his own story. No one considers himself part of the bovine, slack-jawed masses. Cioran’s supercilious stance flatters that vanity a little too neatly. It’s rebellion as mood lighting. I too say many bold things, provided they scandalize only people I don’t know. If the pose requires only attitude and no losses, it’s just adolescence with better prose.

By contrast, there’s Nietzsche the considerate: in Sils he asked his friend, the devout Emily Fynn — reportedly with tears in his eyes — not to read his books because he feared the anti-Christian parts would hurt her feelings (Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin, 134–35; corroborated in Gilman, Conversations with Nietzsche, 195). And years earlier he told Peter Gast that being “right” is a poor trade if it costs love: “It seems to me so foolish to insist on being in the right at the expense of love…”. That is not the voice of a man preening in opposition; that’s someone counting the cost of speaking forthrightly.

The point isn’t to be “out of step with one’s times,” much less to chase the cheap high of looking down on the herd. The point is to keep truth and tenderness in the same orbit, and to accept that real independence sometimes loses you applause from your own “side.” If your nonconformity never risks friendship, it’s just fashion; if it never revises itself after “one hour’s sympathetic intercourse,” it’s just pride. Better, then, to be occasionally right, frequently kind, and suspicious of any heroism that comes with universal approval.

Would You Not Throw Yourself Down and Gnash Your Teeth and Curse the Demon Who Spoke Thus?

By in extraordinary popular delusions, foolosophy

Joseph Heath:

All of this is to explain why the young philosopher Kōhei Saitō’s most recent book, Slow Down (a massive bestseller in Japan, recently translated into English), has pushed me to the brink of despondency. Not only is it a compendium of seemingly every bad idea that has fixated the left for the past century, it reproduces, again almost verbatim, the same ecotopian fantasy that I was raised on in the 1970s. The fact that Saitō’s book has been so well received raises extremely troubling questions about the dysfunctionality of the epistemic ecosystem of the left. Why are progressives, who are supposedly in favour of progress, incapable of making any progress when it comes to the formulation of progressive ideas? Why do we insist on recycling bad ideas, rather than embracing new, better ones?

…So when I read Saitō, I evaluate his view based on what he actually wrote in the book. And what he wrote in the book is that we should abandon our efforts to create a sustainable, carbon-neutral market economy, and instead plump for a hazily sketched out ecological utopia, where people just magically cooperate with one another, and we get to keep all of the good parts of the modern economy without having to endure any of the bad parts. Okay, sure, whatever. But here’s the part that troubles me: I’ve heard all this before. Do we really have to have the same debates, about the same self-evidently unworkable ideas, again and again? Maybe I am just revealing weakness of character, but I’m having trouble summoning the requisite amor fati in the face of this latest recurrence.

I keep telling myself I’m done with misanthropy, that I’ve matured into a serene connoisseur of human folly — then along comes the 976th reinvention of Marxism, and I’m back to shouting at the screen like a sports dad who swore he’d be chill this season. “Not this again,” I groan, as if history owes me something new and improved. It doesn’t. History is a rerun channel with better graphics.

I keep fantasizing that we’ll finally refute bad ideas with one knockout blow — Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell videos on loop, eyelids clamped open, Clockwork Orange-style. In reality, ideologies retire the way old tools do: not by refutation, but because a new machine makes them pointless. Witch trials didn’t fade because fearful peasants became better angels; they faded because of unrelated developments such as printing presses, legal procedure, and barometers. If Marxism fades, it won’t be because the intelligentsia finally noticed its track record in reality; it’ll be because some unrelated development makes class-revolution talk feel like explaining a Wi-Fi outage with humors and phlogiston. And since envy and resentment are fundamental human appetites, the hunger that currently fuels Marxism won’t vanish; it will just find a new justification. Ploosa shawnje, ploosa la memshows.

If I’m honest, I’m not just judging the kids; I’m catching my own reflection in the glass. I’ve got my loops too. My particular loop is despairing at other people’s loops — a perverse little perpetual-motion machine powered by indignation. I roll my eyes at utopians promising “radical abundance” without markets or specialization, and then I go right back to hoping for “radical learning,” in which the species notices the last century’s faceplants and decides, collectively, to stop following the same script. Reader, we do not stop. I don’t either. Human, all too human: I keep expecting mankind to become the adult I still aspire to be. Apparently, I still want progress. Intellectually, I know better, but I still half-believe in it, like a lapsed believer who keeps lighting candles “just in case.” But maybe the adult response is smaller and more local: not to cure history of its amnesia, just to carry a pocket notebook of reminders for myself.

A Valid Tribute to Thought Such as Nietzsche’s

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

All this talk about fasting from information presumes two things. First, that we want to be alone with our thoughts. For many of us, constant information has become mental junk food that we consume precisely to avoid our own mind and its anxieties. Second, that we have the mental resources to make solitude productive rather than boring.

— Nate Anderson, In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World

I blame the publisher and that cloying title. I’m pretty sure the Lady of the House sent me something about this book some time back, but I assumed it would be simplistic and self-helpy, so ignored it. But I found it at the library the other day and decided it was worth reading for free. To my surprise, it turned out to be very good.

The only worthwhile thing Foucault ever said, in my opinion, was that “the only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche’s is precisely to use it.” That’s exactly what Anderson does — uses Nietzsche to address the fundamental philosophical question of “How should we live?” He’s not offering yet another academic hair-splitting analysis, nor even a general summary of Nietzsche’s entire oeuvre. He read him intelligently and noticed that much of what he had to say was useful to us in a, well, tech-saturated world. Best of all, he keeps dragging the discussion back to ends, not means. The temptation is to fiddle with “hacks” — screen-time meters, no blue light before bed, whatever — and thereby mistake technique for substance. Anderson asks several times, echoing Nietzsche: What are all these optimizations for? Do the means ever lead to an end, or is “incremental improvement” just a way to stay in motion so we don’t have to ask where we’re going and why?

Our natural state is to be divided against ourselves, a battlefield of conflicting motives and desires, not sure what we want and often not enjoying it when we get it. The missing foundation is self-knowledge. Start with an hour alone — no inputs — long enough to hear what you actually want. Perhaps you must change your life; that begins by refusing the bad-faith alibi that “the internet rewired my brain.” Maybe your supposed goals don’t survive contact with quiet contemplation. That’s fine. Render a verdict, then change what must be changed to serve it.

Elegy for the Mall

By in foolosophy, the geist of the zeit

Harris Sockel:

People need imaginative, beautiful places to exist, with each other, in public. We need more Garden Courts of Perpetual Spring. What Gruen did, on a core level, was worldbuilding. He created a universe where life was fundamentally pleasant, and beautiful, with majestic fountains and ornate statues and arcing skylights. Millions of years from now, when an alien civilization discovers the ruins of America, they’ll probably wonder what went down in these marble halls. I wouldn’t be surprised if they think they were temples, sites for sacred rituals and ceremonies, the pinnacle of our civilization — and in a way we barely realized while we were living through it, they kind of were.

On Halloween of 2021 we walked into the mall to pick up a pair of pants from Eddie Bauer — discovered and ordered online, of course. The corridors were mostly vacant; only a few stores still clung to life. It was like visiting an old neighborhood after a fire — recognizable in outline, emptied of its noise. I’d spent half my youth here. It used to hum.

As a kid, the first stop was Kay-Bee Toys, where every aisle felt like a dare to your allowance. Fun-N-Games was the arcade, darkened like a cave, lit only by the glowing screens of the video game machines, where you’d swap your quarters for tokens. Spencer’s Gifts came a little later, with the forbidden “18+” shelf we tried to side-eye without getting caught. Our mall was rich in paper: B. Dalton at one end, Waldenbooks at the other, where I bought my first Nietzsche and my first Forgotten Realms novel — two roads out of town, in different directions, both beginning under fluorescent light. There was Harmony Hut, later Sam Goody, where my friends and I learned to weigh a choice: ten dollars for a cassette you might love forever or regret by dinnertime. Sbarro was there too, reliably uncool and reliably satisfying. And there were the big anchors — Leggett-then-Belk, JCPenney, Sears, Miller & Rhoads—where my mother shopped and I drifted through racks like a clownfish through reefs, half-bored, half-content to be among things, amusing myself with my child’s imagination.

For years the clever take was that malls were vapid cathedrals of suburban capitalism. Maybe. They were also clean, bright, and, most importantly, kid-friendly. They gave ordinary people a safe, all-in-one place to do the practical chores of life without braving the weather or the “gritty” atmosphere of downtown. You could meet there without an appointment. You could be there without a plan. Even a shy kid could practice a kind of ambient social life: part of a crowd, no performance required.

That’s what I miss most: the unforced togetherness. The escalator choreography. The mall-walker covens at 9 a.m. The smell of pretzels and fabric and new rubber soles. Window displays as seasonal theater. Benches positioned like little harbors where you could sit, watch, and be watched, gently, by everyone and no one. You learned how to be around people before you had to be with them.

It’s different now. We carry our shops in our pockets and our music in our ears. Our parents would never have allowed us to listen to our Walkmans around other people; that would have been aggressively rude and anti-social. Now, in public, the new etiquette is autistic — air-buds like little white corks sealing our heads shut, screens glowing like votive candles on an altar to the self. Even the cashier at the grocery store today kept his ears plugged while dinging-and-slinging, present and yet not. I’m not romantic about the past; I’m honest about the loss. The mall wasn’t just consumption; it was choreography and commons, a climate-controlled rehearsal for civic life.

When we left that day in 2021, bag in hand, I felt the melancholy pride of someone who’d known a place at its peak and the hush that follows. The concourse held our reflections in its polished floor like a memory trying to keep us. Somewhere behind a gate, the old Kay-Bee footprint still existed as a shape in drywall. Somewhere, a dead Sbarro oven cooled for the last time. I don’t need the mall back exactly. I want what it gave even to the shy: a place to be lightly together, to browse our way into taste, to discover ourselves between Waldenbooks and B. Dalton, halfway from childhood to whatever came next.

If there’s a heaven for such places, I hope it smells faintly of cinnamon and shrink-wrap, and the Muzak is better than we remember.

Pasture On Little Joys

By in books, bricolage, foolosophy

Anyway, give me the Past, give me solitude, give me a dog. The past smells of eternity, in solitude only I have dignity, from a dog alone I get unadulterated love.

— R.H. Blyth, Poetry and Zen: Letters and Uncollected Writings of R. H. Blyth

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People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. Give me a bed and a book and I’m happy.

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

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I derive a subtle pleasure from the conviction that the world does not owe me anything. I need little to be contented: two good meals, tobacco, books that hold my interest, and a little writing every day. This to me is a full life.

— Eric Hoffer, Working and Thinking on the Waterfront

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Plain fare gives as much pleasure as a costly diet when the pain of want has been removed, while bread and water confer the highest possible pleasure when they are brought to hungry lips.

— Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus

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He who can pasture on little joys, and gather in his heart the little pleasures he has experienced during the day, and give importance within himself to his little strokes of good fortune passes easily through life, and if he is not happy he can believe he is, and be unaware that he is not.

— Leopardi, Zibaldone

The Motion Is the Meaning

By in books, foolosophy

The birds and I both needed the berries for the same reason—because winter strips the woods. Their need was the need of all animals, hunger. My need for the berries and the attempts to preserve the “rural character” of Chatham were the special needs of the human animal. John Keats caught it in his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ the poem that contemplates the painted figures of happy Greeks about to eat grapes and make love, and of a musician playing a tune that can only be imagined:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare….

Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Preserve this moment forever. That sentiment brought out the supporters of the new land-use plan. The vision fills environmental books and films and turns citizens into lobbyists. Keep this species or that species. Maintain these forests as they are for us. Forget that this forest has been this way for only an instant of geological time. It is our time that counts. Keep the red berries, at least through the winter until we desert them for the carnival of spring. I will not stop reading the brilliantly expressed lines of Keats, but I am glad I stopped believing his conclusion: Beauty is truth, truth beauty. No. Beauty is pleasure, not truth.

If we are going to extend our survival on this planet, we must be sure not to equate truth and beauty. If the robins are going to survive, I must let them have the berries. If I am going to get through the winters of life that surely will be colder and darker than any at Morgan Branch or on the arctic shores, I will have to let go of the red berries and understand that my life will continue to change. I will continue moving on through success and failure, not like the people frozen in their beautiful lives on the Greek urn, but like the birds moving through my woods to avoid freezing in winter.

— Wallace Kaufman, Coming Out Of The Woods: The Solitary Life Of A Maverick Naturalist

If Plato braided the True, the Good, and the Beautiful into a single rope, lived reality tends to fray it. In one sense, Beauty lies — it edits, frames, and pleases even when it misleads. In another, Goodness curdles into zealotry when severed from facts. And Truth, absolutized, can turn cruel or sterile — “nothing but the facts,” even where the facts alone don’t tell us how to live with one another. Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism gives us the vocabulary for this: there are genuine, objective human values that are often incommensurable — they cannot be ranked by a common metric or harmonized without loss. Tragic choice is not a bug in the system; it is the system.

How, then, to act without a master value? Aristotle is helpful here. In Nicomachean Ethics II.6 he defines virtue as a mean relative to us — too much courage is rashness; too little is cowardice. Translate this into Kaufman’s terrain: too much Beauty (as preservationist fixation) becomes a vice when it freezes a living forest to satisfy our taste; too little Beauty becomes a grey utilitarianism that leaves nothing worth loving. Too much Truth (as disenchanted bravado) becomes cruelty; too little Truth becomes fan-fiction. Too much Goodness (as purity politics) becomes inquisitorial; too little Goodness devolves into cynicism. The point is not to split the difference mathematically, but to tune three dials in light of the concrete case: what is true here, what harms or helps whom, and what forms of order/fitness/proportion (i.e., beauty in a broad sense) are we protecting or destroying?

That tuning presupposes a further lesson from Kaufman’s winter: movement. The desire to conserve a scene “forever” is aesthetically understandable; in practice it often means starving birds. In morality, a pure rule held too long becomes cruelty to exceptions. Keats’s urn immortalizes a moment by arresting it; the woods live by change. The moral is not “beauty is bad,” any more than “truth is bad.” It is that life keeps moving, and values must be re-balanced as the situation changes. What was fitting at noon may be unfit at dusk. To demand that the trees “never be bare” is to miss what winter is for — and what berries are for. The wiser stance is Aristotelian and Berlinian at once: acknowledge the plural ends we pursue, accept their occasional collisions, and cultivate the judgment to steer among them. Let truth correct us; let goodness constrain us; let beauty inspire us — but never allow one to conscript the others.

Hellmouth

By in foolosophy, religion

David Polansky:

There is an old medieval Christian concept called “hellmouth,” for which one can still find graphic illustrations in old prints, stained-glass windows of European cathedrals, and the like. The great novelist Norman Rush describes it thus:

“…[it] was the opening up of the mouth of hell right in front of you, without warning, through no fault of your own. It was the mad gunman shooting you at lunch and it was the cab jumping the curb and crushing you. It was Aids and it was the grandmother, the daughter, the granddaughter tumbling through the air, blown out of the airplane by a bomb, the three generations falling and seeing one another fall, down, down, onto the Argolid mountains.”

An attack like the murder yesterday—or like that of the young woman on the train in Charlotte, or the insurance executive in New York, or the female real estate investor who wasn’t even the intended target of her deranged killer—feels like hellmouth, and I can only imagine how it could feel to the bereaved in such cases. In the end, it is not possible to conceive of a world where such events are completely absent. It is too big, there are too many variables, and like the man said, time and chance happen to all.

I had not ever heard of this, and wondered why such a striking metaphor hadn’t become general-use in popular culture for sudden, senseless disasters. The Lady of the House informs me that most people probably know of it through Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where Sunnydale High literally sits on a “Hellmouth,” a gateway that attracts evil. Ah. Well, yes, it’s probably too franchise-specific at this point, then. What a shame.

Nonetheless, what came instantly to my mind was a brief aside in Daniel Kalder’s book Strange Telescopes:

It was in the summer of 1998 that the depths began eating the city. The process started slowly at first—a small section in the suburbs gave way and swallowed a man as he was walking home with his dog one night. That’s how it happened—one minute he was walking along the surface and next he wasn’t; he was below, boiling to death in an upsurge of water, his dog’s yelps mixing with his screams as they both became broth.

This has stuck with me more than anything else in the book (which I don’t mean as a criticism). Whatever it may say about me, I’m more inured to the horrible results of human intention. But something about the simple ordinariness of this is disheartening to contemplate. It’s not the banality of evil; more like the banality of disaster. “Normal accidents,” as Charles Perrow called them — catastrophes baked into highly complex systems. Atrocities, being choices, invite counter-choices: blame, trial, resolve, political energy, even the cheap solace of calling a death “not in vain.” Accident offers no such handles. No villain to defeat, no moral to extract — only a hole in the ordinary day where a person used to be. Theodicy falls silent before scenes like this. It’s the insult of gratuitous cruelty added to the injury of life in an amoral universe.  Like Ivan Karamazov, I refuse the apologist’s alchemy that transmutes contingency into necessity.

The Still, Small No

By in books, foolosophy, nietzsche

Those thoroughly informed about North Americans say that “the ruling opinion in the United States declares itself against everyone who refrains from striving for the highest that is attainable for him. To stay behind from free will is actually considered a disgrace, as a sort of crime against society.”

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Human, All Too Human I (Winter 1874/75–Winter 1877/78)

I’ve been told several times that I coulda/shoulda been a writer. I don’t take it seriously; I think it’s just one of those rote things people say to anyone who can string sentences together. In any event, my response has always been that, one, that’s about as realistic as saying that I should’ve tried to be a rock star since I love music so much, and two, that I’m already happy writing as a hobby, and I’m self-aware enough to know that turning it into a job would kill a lot of what makes it enjoyable. Like Bartleby, I simply would prefer not to.

Christopher Knight vanished into the Maine woods for three decades just because he felt like it. Ivan Karamazov stands at the ticket window of paradise and pushes the stub back: even if the ledger balances, one tortured child’s tears are not acceptable to him as the price of admission. Milton’s Satan, tragic and resplendent, would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. I’m fascinated by these acts of refusal, this resistance of something — will, soul, sheer cussedness — against the inhuman harmony of logical or moral necessity. I would rather keep shouldering my burden of agency than accept the undignified relief of handing it over.

Still, pride left to ferment turns caustic. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man shows how a life organized purely around “no” corrodes from within. He sacrifices health and love to his perverse notion of freedom, until refusal is his new slavemaster. The lesson, as always, is the golden mean. Say no judiciously, so your yes can mean something.

Clean Shirt, New Shoes, And I Don’t Know Where I Am Goin’ To

By in foolosophy, the geist of the zeit, the statusphere

Magnanimous as I am, I will start by conceding the obvious: there is such a thing as being aggressively anti-social, or provocatively slobby, almost as if daring you to have a problem with it — letting one’s pants sag halfway down one’s hamstrings, showing off one’s boxers and buttcrack, for example. Less aggressive, but still wince-inducing: pajama pants, tattered t-shirts, and slippers/flip-flops. Even dedicated athleisurists like me have standards.

Still, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg if people want to model homeless chic in public. As an orangutan in spirit, I’m more concerned with urging all the busybody chimpanzees to go fuck themselves and each other and leave me alone. These shallow complaints aren’t about taste; they’re about legibility. They pine for uniforms that sort people at a glance — age, class, occupation — so the scold doesn’t have to think. In the nostalgic fantasy, suits and cocktail hours are the default adult costume, and anything outside that script is arrested development. But most adults don’t spend time in boardrooms. They wear company-issued shirts with nametags, drive forklifts, stock pallets, juggle gig-work, chauffeur kids, lift weights after work, and relax at home. They dress for the life they actually have.

What you see at Walmart is downstream of bigger forces: the work-life blur; car-errand culture; fabrics that wash and stretch; the decline of dry cleaning; post-pandemic norm collapse; orthopedic reality; climate-controlled interiors; and a retail loop that sells what people actually buy.

We’ve done worse for status. Before A/C (praise Willis Carrier), people literally cooked in their clothes because etiquette demanded it — wool and flannel undergarments in July, corsets and multiple petticoats for women, dark frock coats and gloves for men; even “summer furs.” Doctors warned against drinking water or removing layers. I prefer the supercilious scorn of some jerkoff stranger to the wrath of Sol Vindictus in a southern summer.

Standards still matter, but the adult rule is simple: the 3 C’s — Clean, Coordinated, Context-aware. Clean: no stains, no holes. Coordinated: neutrals, one or two colors, clothes that fit — not painted-on, not sagging. Context-aware: sweatpants to the grocery store, fine; an “I Got Crabs at Lucy’s” t-shirt at a funeral, no. That’s just maturity. Presentation without artifice. If you want castes, say so. Otherwise, judge people by how they look after their clothes and how they behave.

Corrosive Arenas

By in alan watts, books, foolosophy

The real work of Epicureanism, then, is cataloguing, organizing, and minding the store of our desires. Remember that Epicurus doesn’t think happiness results from mere subtraction of corrosive desires. We must keep the store stocked with necessary items, which means devoting the time and energy we once expended in corrosive arenas to cultivating the prudence, habits of mind, knowledge, virtuous dispositions, and close relationships with like-minded people that make tranquility possible for creatures like us.

— Emily A. Austin, Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life

I was reminded of this passage by way of a couple tweets I saw earlier:

Emily Austin’s point about Epicurus is bracingly simple: happiness isn’t produced by piling on ever more interventions; it comes from limiting desires to what can be satisfied without strain, and cultivating the few practices that reliably quiet the mind. Bryan Johnson’s project runs the other way. To feel “healthy,” he must live like a medical experiment — protocols, machines, basically an entire wellness ICU in his home. Underneath is an immortalist itch: not just wanting as much time as a human life can reasonably hold, but wanting time without end. As Alan Watts warned, those are different things; the second is an appetite that can’t be fed.

Epicurus’s reply is commonsense: prefer pleasures that have a natural stopping point — sleep, simple food, movement, sun, study, friendship. Accept finitude; it’s what makes sufficiency possible. Enjoy extras when they appear, but train yourself not to need them. If a “health” practice breeds dependency, anxiety, and constant escalation, it isn’t health; it’s a new form of sickness.

Epicurus again: some desires end in contentment; others are a carrot dangling from a stick attached to a bridle. Chasing audience size, likes, and huzzahs belongs to the second kind. It produces a few brief waves and a long undertow of restlessness.

The alternative is ordinary and durable: do the work you can stand behind, cultivate a few like-minded friends, and let that be enough. Fame is optional and unstable; friendship and steady practice are necessary and within reach. An old Epicurean motto puts it plainly — lathe biosas: live unnoticed. I write for a handful of regular readers and would do it in private if I had to. That’s not settling; it’s refusing to let my contentment be held hostage by the whims of a fickle mob. Digital autarkeia. Epicurus called this self-sufficiency: being able to enjoy bread and water, so that luxuries, when they come, are gifts rather than requirements. Apply that to attention. Let praise be pleasant, not enslaving.

I Could Have Done Other

By in foolosophy

Remember that you are an actor in a play determined by the author: if short, then short; if long, then long. If he wants you to act as a beggar, then act even that with excellence, just as a cripple, a ruler or a citizen. Because that is your objective: to act the role that is given to you well. To select the role is up to someone else.

— Epictetus, Enchiridion 17

“We are left alone, without excuse,” Sartre says. Like his fellow quack of the intellect Freud, the repulsive little toad-man may have been wrong about nearly everything else, but he was right about this one thing. I have to grudgingly acknowledge that he names a reflex I recognize: the urge to outsource choice to a role, a type, a calling — anything that will let me say “I could do no other.” Sartre calls that “bad faith”: pretending we are only our circumstances or only our freedom, in order to dodge responsibility for the difficult middle where we actually live. When I hear fate/destiny-talk, I ask: what choice is being hidden here?

We have always wanted an preordained pattern for our lives. The ancients called it telos: a thing is fulfilled when it becomes what it was made to be (Aristotle). The Stoics scaled this to the cosmos — live “according to nature,” which is to say, according to Reason’s plan. Christianity moralized it: to whom much is given, much is required; your gifts are talents on loan. The Renaissance flattered us with dignity — “fashion yourself,” said Pico, but still under heaven’s gaze. By the Enlightenment, duty migrated inward: Kant told us we owe it to ourselves to develop our abilities. Romantics transposed destiny into genius. The message persists across the history of Western culture: there’s a right shape waiting for you out there — find it, fit it, fulfill it.

I don’t buy it. I think this is just another consoling myth. The honest condition is what I call the burden of agency: there is no prewritten answer awaiting discovery, only sources of wisdom to weigh and measures to adopt. Meaning isn’t found; it is made and maintained — then remade when circumstances change. To live well under these terms is not to maximize every gift into a brand or career; it is to choose constraints and create projects you can answer for. You listen to Epictetus, Aristotle, the Gospels, Kant — then you judge them, however unqualified you fear yourself to be, because none of them will live your consequences. You choose the craft you can sustain rather than the careerist striving that hollows you out. You accept that a small, coherent life you chose can be larger in meaning than a big one handed to you by the market, the tribe, or the muse. In the end there is no escape from the verb: you must choose — and then keep choosing — so that when the retrospective temptation to say “I could do no other” arrives, you can answer more truthfully: I could have; I didn’t; and I own that.

“A pity,” you were saying, “that N has never produced anything.”
“So what! He exists. If he had given birth to books, if he had had the misfortune to ‘realize’ himself, we wouldn’t have been talking about him the last hour.” The advantage of being someone is rarer than that of creating. To produce is easy; what is difficult is to scorn the use of one’s gifts.

— E.M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

Trust In the Fragmentary

By in foolosophy, work

Against the exclusiveness of the paradigm of work as activity, first of all, there is leisure as “non-activity” — an inner absence of preoccupation, a calm, an ability to let things go, to be quiet. …In leisure, there is, furthermore, something of the serenity of “not-being-able-to-grasp,” of the recognition of the mysterious character of the world, and the confidence of blind faith, which can let things go as they will; there is in it something of the “trust in the fragmentary, that forms the very life and essence of history.”

— Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture

We don’t inherit meaning the way dukes inherit acreage. Most of us are not living on rents with a private chapel for contemplation. We’re workers, owners of small shops and warehouses, parents with tight margins. If “leisure” means what Pieper says — receptive, unhurried attention — then the question isn’t “ought we?” but how people without estates can actually practice it.

Stuart Whatley’s essay on “the West’s boredom” describes the problem: abundance plus aimless free time invites worthless uses of attention and extremely-online identities that feel like purpose to lost souls. But he stops one step short. It’s not enough to say we need a “leisure ethic” cultivated from youth; once the skills are lost, you have to rebuild them with structures that ordinary people can use tomorrow morning.

Let’s be blunt: anyone reading thinkpieces at the New Statesman is already in the choir. The media-literate are inside a symbolic economy that rewards worry, nuance, and tasteful despair. They read, nod, share, and feel morally awake. Meanwhile, the people who most illustrate the diagnosis — the “underemployed pothead gamer” archetype — aren’t in that audience and aren’t interested. We’ve effectively got two nations of leisure who never meet. The audience for Whatley’s diagnosis is his peers — the already-attentive — who close the tab feeling confirmed that “someone ought to do something,” then return to their symbolic labors. Meanwhile, the attention-poor do the obvious thing: follow the path of least resistance that their apps, budgets, and peer groups make easiest.

Re-teaching a culture how to use leisure is not an op-ed project; it’s decades of patient effort. Schools can seed the canon, sure, but the heavy lifting will be done by households, shops, gyms, libraries, parishes, and clubs that refuse to cancel. If you want a rule of thumb: swap thirty minutes of nightly screen time for thirty minutes of practiced leisure for ninety days. Keep a journal. Rope two friends into it. Whatley’s right about the problem, and right that habituation is the remedy. But habituation doesn’t appear out of a thinkpiece. It appears when someone shows up at the same time week after week. A forklift driver who joins a book club, a shelf-stocker who records his own songs on GarageBand and sells them on Bandcamp, a parent who reads an hour at night and lifts weights twice a week — these are closer to Pieper’s spirit than a trust-fund “aesthete” doomscrolling on edibles at 2 a.m. We can make another path, built from thrift, craft, and micro-rituals, one hour at a time.

The Liturgists of Retail

By in foolosophy, work

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. — Ecclesiastes 3:1

I saw the first maple, green-apple, and pumpkin caramels on the shelf in Aldi yesterday. They show up like migrating birds — unofficial heralds of the turn. You spot these seasonal harbingers in late August and feel the inner weather change: soon mornings will start getting chilly, dusk will creep forward, hoodies will be roused from their summer slumber. The sight is trivial and, somehow, restorative. A small ritual object appears on schedule, and the world clicks one notch closer to “as it should be.”

But behind that reassuring click is a crew of people living on a different calendar entirely. For them, “autumn” starts somewhere around June. While the rest of us are mowing lawns and swatting mosquitoes, they are tasting pumpkin spice variants, approving proofs for harvest-orange packaging, booking time on depositors and flow wrappers, arguing over whether the endcap will carry twelve PDQ trays or sixteen. Category managers sketch a planogram that won’t exist on your aisle for another ten weeks. Procurement calls a flavor house for another run of natural-and-artificial maple; logistics reserves dock slots; a production scheduler plays Tetris with batch sizes and cleaning cycles. Someone, somewhere, is chasing a delayed shipment of cellophane wrappers because the factory that extrudes the film had a maintenance overrun. And a store reset crew, working under the fluorescent midnight, will pivot a whole aisle in a single shift so that one morning you round the corner and, bam, there they are: the caramels of autumn.

If you took any of these people and forced them to live by the same sentimental calendar the rest of us enjoy, they’d never ship on time. That’s the rub. They keep the world on time by living out of time.

There’s a cost to the sainthood, too. Anyone who’s worked a seasonal production cadence knows the mild dislocation it brings. Your senses say “July;” your task list says “Halloween.” You’re packaging snowflake window decals while sweat runs down your spine. The mental trick is to cultivate a private liturgy: you learn to keep two calendars. The natural one tracks the weather and the leaves outside the window. The retail one counts down to ship dates and resets and ad weeks — its feast days are “Back-to-School,” “Harvest,” “Holiday 1,” and “Holiday 2.” You don’t get to be surprised by a season; you get to midwife it.

Maybe that steals some of the magic. But it also grants a different kind. To knock one domino at the right moment — so that miles away, weeks later, a stranger feels that small, grateful click — is its own pleasure. The line worker hitting rate on a caramel cooker, the QA tech with a refractometer, the buyer who fought for on-time PO approvals, the driver who babysat a load through a thunderstorm, the associate who hangs the clip strips straight on a wobbly ladder at 2 a.m. — they’re all advancing the liturgy so the rest of us can keep faith with our seasons.

That’s why I think of them as off-season saints. Not saints in the pious sense, but in the old sense: custodians of a shared order. They accept a little dissonance so that the rest of us can feel consonance. They live in September while it’s still July so that August can feel like August when it arrives. They know that “a time for everything” includes a time to prepare, a time to stage, a time to disappear from the scene so the scene can feel natural. We like to believe that the most “authentic” experiences are unmanufactured, that autumn is pure because no one scheduled it. Yet a surprising amount of what we mean by “it feels like fall” is choreographed: the color palette at eye level, the scent notes cued up in candy and candles, the endcaps placed just so. Nature writes the big score; people in hairnets and steel-toed shoes handle the arrangement.

So here’s a modest proposal for a new seasonal practice. When you see the first maple or pumpkin caramels, let yourself be cheered; let the inner weather shift. Then spare a thought for the people who celebrated this season months ago so you could meet it on time. Maybe even eat the first piece as a small Eucharist for the unseen: a communion with schedulers and stockers and drivers and line leads and proofreaders. You and I get to live inside the polite illusion that the world simply turns toward autumn of its own accord. They know better. They turn it.

There is, of course, a dark counterpart to the off-season saints: the calendar heretics. They’re the ones who looked at the careful liturgy of seasons and said, “Twice, please.” Thus the unholy abomination of Summerween — a gag holiday from Gravity Falls set on June 22 — escapes the cartoon and metastasizes into real-world parties and merch. Jokes that sell stop being jokes.

The doctrine is simple: abolish Advent. If peppermint cheers you in December, let peppermint reign in August. If pumpkins mean October, carve a watermelon in July. Entertainment brands now run “Halfway to Halloween” promos in late spring; bath-and-candle chains roll out Summerween collections in early July; mainstream retailers float mid-summer spooky endcaps. It deliberately unplugs the communal clock in favor of personal indulgence. A cousin heresy is perma-Christmas: keep the tree up “until March—or even May,” on the theory that prolonged festivity soothes anxious times. I get that slow children, or writers for the Atlantic (but I repeat myself), would be attracted to this idea. But the saints know what’s lost when everything is always Here, Now: surprise, and the sense that time has a shape.

Like the original Jacobins, these modern ones would overthrow the old calendar and replace it with their own — not with Thermidor and Brumaire, but with Constant October and Perpetual Noel. The first crew tried to erase the Christian week with a rational décade; today’s crew erases the seasonal week with a commercial one. Different motives, same impulse: remake time to suit the regime.

I’m not saying law enforcement should be involved in the sale of Reese’s skulls or monitoring how long you keep a slowly-dying fir in your living room (though I’m not not saying it, either). I’m saying the shared calendar is a commons. The saints bear the cost of getting the season to arrive on cue. The heretics privatize it. They worship Whim and Impulse — pleasant gods who never let the appetite rest long enough to ripen into joy.

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