The Way We Live Now

Discussions

• Does atheism make you more rational, or just leave a void you fill badly?

  One of the common atheist temptations is to confuse unbelief with clarity, to assume that religion is the irrational part, so removing religion must leave behind a cleaner and more rational human being. But human beings do not work that way, human beings operate through beliefs, emotions... We do not stop wanting ritual, purity, moral tribe, sense of sacredness or transcendent meaning just because we stop using religious language for those desires.

• Is rural resentment self-inflicted?

  Large parts of rural America depend heavily on federal spending through farm programs, highways, Medicare, Social Security, and infrastructure support while voting for politicians who perform anti-government identity politics. That is not simple hypocrisy. It is the contradiction the political product is built on. The mythology is anti-government. The economy is federally underwritten.

• Is there any conservative ideology left to recognize in the Republican party?

  I used to think I understood what I was part of. Not in a blind, devotional way, but in the sense that there was a rough consistency to it. Free markets, free trade, small government. Respect for institutions, personal responsibility, suspicion of concentrated power, especially when it showed up in Washington. Remember that? You didn’t have to agree with every position, but you could at least recognize the shape of the ideology.

• Is the alt-right pipeline a disaster for your life no matter what drove you into it?

  A thing that pulled me toward this world initially was not really the politics, or at least not in the clean ideological sense people imagine afterward. It was the feeling of recognition. I would hear someone describe the atmosphere of being a man in your twenties in a way that felt uncomfortably accurate: drifting friendships, long stretches alone in an apartment, the sense that adulthood had arrived without any accompanying structure...

• Does the state corrupt the Church more than the Church ever corrupts the state?

  Constantine's church became an instrument of imperial politics within a generation. Franco's bishops became collaborators in child theft. Patriarch Kirill blesses wars. The question is not whether you will gain political influence. The question is what will be left of what you started with once the people who wanted the influence are done with it.

• Did old heroes inspire us while modern superheroes just make us feel weak?

  The old hero was not another kind of being. He was a human being at heroic scale. Achilles, Odysseus, Heracles: greater than you, but made of the same material. Even Captain American, Batman, John Wick. That form of story invites aspiration. The modern superhero more often invites spectatorship and a feeling of inadequacy.

• Are companies now incentivized to sell subscriptions instead of products?

  The HP printer example is still the nuts to me. To many users, it stops working, not because anything inside it broke, but because the ink subscription lapsed and the manufacturer's software disabled cartridges you already owned . The printer is physically there and it just stops working

• Does being entertained all the time make ordinary life feel dead?

  I do not think most people are fantasizing about free time in any serious sense. They are fantasizing about free time available for consumption. That is a different thing. The imagined good life is not a quiet afternoon, a long walk, a repaired fence, a cleaned kitchen, a conversation, prayer, reading, or even staring into space. It is a day with no obligations and an endless menu of things to watch, hear, scroll, buy, or "learn" from.

• Is Citizen the most competent watch brand nobody wants to admit loving?

  Citizen is the most competent watch brand on earth and absolutely nobody wants to admit it because competence is boring. Rolex sells aspiration and fantasy. Omega sells history, even if it's all the same event over and over again. Tudor sells “I’m not like other Rolex owners.” Citizen sells a watch that survives fifteen straight years of abuse inside the glove compartment of a Honda Accord and then asks if you’d like the correct time in Tokyo too as soon as you land.

• Does your G-Shock secretly think you're soft?

  The G-Shock is what happens when a watch is designed with open contempt for the concept of damage. Every luxury watch brand talks about durability like it’s a romantic character trait. G-Shock treats durability like a baseline expectation for existing on Earth. This thing survives construction sites, military deployments, skateparks, engine bays, and being launched across rooms by toddlers with absolutely no interest in receiving credit for it.

• Is there any way to wear a Rolex and actually look good?

  I genuinely think Rolex may have achieved the impossible: becoming a luxury brand that makes everyone look worse, while getting them to pay thousands of dollars. Which sucks, because a lot of their watches are beautiful. The Submariner is basically a perfect design, iconic for a reason. But the second that crown logo enters the equation, your entire aura changes like you equipped a cursed item.

• Is Joshua Tree just desert spirituality for people from Los Angeles?

  Joshua Tree feels less like a national park and more like a place where someone’s ex moved to “find themselves.” The landscape looks exactly like what happens when a desert develops opinions that used to be mocked before cancel culture. Weird twisted trees. Piles of giant round rocks balanced at angles that look cool on Instagram. Every single corner of the park looks like it’s either a U2 album cover or the background of an overpriced skincare ad.

• Were the Romans far more progressive than we give them credit for?

  There is a common trend of young men being interested in the Roman empire out of movies and populat history, and imagining it as a militaristic, right wing hyper-masculine empire that was great for men. Spartacus, Rome, Gladiator... to different degree all give a perception of Rome being a sort of warrior-culture, sometimes bogged down by decadence. Gladiator II takes this to a ridiculous extreme. For that particular movie, I recommend reading Brett's, from acoup.blog , critique:

• Shouldn't cultural criticism go both ways?

  I had one of those big-tech team dinners. The conversation turned to how people met their partners. A few of my Indian coworkers talked about arranged marriage, family involvement, and how much more normal it is in India for marriage to be treated as a family matter and not just a private romantic choice. That part is ok, different cultures and all. It was interesting to see their perspective, even though I wouldn't share it. The problem started when one of them stopped describing the custom...

• Does Indiana Dunes deserve to call itself a National Park?

  I don’t dislike Indiana Dunes. I resent that it calls itself National Park. I guess someone had to give a National Park to Indiana so every state feels included. You hear “national park” and your brain starts preparing for something mythic: towering mountains, ancient forests, landscapes that fundamentally alter your relationship with geology, God and yourself. Then you arrive and realize you are at a reasonably nice beach near Gary, Indiana.

• Remember the Coldplay Kiss Cam? You could be the next victim.

  I watched that video too when it went viral. Laughed, moved on. But today I watched Kristin Cabot's interview with Oprah and man, the internet is horrible.

• Did tragedy in stories teach children an empathy we've now removed?

  Removing tragedy from stories does not protect the audience. It removes one of the oldest ways human beings have practiced feeling fear, pity, and loss inside a form that can be survived.

• Can AI make you lose your mind, and are you more at risk if you doubt it?

  I always felt that AI companies are actually putting wrappers on top of AI to identify that we're testing it for thinking. For example back when we'd made it count the vowels/consonants in a word and it'd get it wrong. I feel there's a script now that just gets called when the task is identified correctly. I also feel that it gets trained on these memes. Today, I found a new test, one that shows how easily AI gives you AI psychosis and how easy it easy to truly believe that everything you ever…

• Were people really any dumber in the past?

  There is a habit in modern thinking that treats the past as a kind of half-awake state, as if the Age of Enlightenment woke us up. People imagine ancient societies as crowded with superstition, as if belief itself was less disciplined before modern science arrived to rescue it. It is a comforting story because it makes the present feel like an intellectual peak rather than just another arrangement of limits and assumptions.

• Is Christ's message eternal, but never meant to be read literally?

  Christians rightly say that the truth revealed in Christ is not temporary, but rather eternal. That is true, but it does not mean literalism and it does not mean that we are to drop interpretation. The mistake comes when some believers quietly turn that into a different claim: because the truth is eternal, every biblical utterance should be treated as though it arrived outside history and therefore needs no interpretation any longer, but rather has to be taken literally in the same way...