Optimization culture, which is kind of the software that we implement, forces false choices and de-emphasizes the existential and creative aspect of being human.
Optimizer-influencers tend not to say that you can really blend or blend values, extend and mold values. They tell you there’s an exact, specific way of doing things that’s objectively best.
And that metaphysics—the metaphysics of the optimized human/product—is how you end up with a progressive and ultra-modern form of feminism, on one hand, which totally de-emphasizes the value of family and motherhood AND the supposedly trad, Pearl Davis, women-shouldn't-vote version of civilization anti-feminism on the other hand, where you're an old hag at 25.
This is also how men end up funneled into a version of the Soyjak meme-type who's terrified of Trump—or a college Republican type trying to finally get jacked at the gym in order to impress his trad wife.
The prosaic truth, however, is that there is no formula for happiness, or rightness.
Not everyone is going to be happy with six children and a doting spouse in DeSantis' Florida—or mid-50s poly in Carroll Gardens or San Francisco or Austin.
Genres of lifestyle are just that,—genres, fantasies, fictions, which presuppose a kind of behaviorism in which we change our environment slightly and our mental states will happily follow along.
It's very possible to have achieved the fantasy of the blonde wife in Greenwich and find yourself divorced in two years. It's very possible that the polycule will destroy your marriage. It's very possible that being single on Tinder sucks. It's very possible that having a long-term partner and a dog and a great Criterion Collection collection is also a kind of lame.
It's hard to not have a lame, predictable, unconscious, unartistic, routinized life—whatever that life is.
Rules and values have to have exceptions, need to have exceptions (but these can be sensible exceptions). The fitness bro who doesn't make a distinction between Bud Light and an amaro or between tobacco and a Camel isn’t really thinking clearly; neither is the vegan who thinks everything that comes out of an animal is poison. They’ve narrowed their worldview to feel safe and in control.
Life is dialectical; we learn from experience and experience produces strange, contradictory results. The free love movement of the late 60s, for instance, was a reaction to how stifled people felt with their happy families in the suburbs in the 50s and 60s. It didn't come from nowhere. It was a dialectical turn. And the conservatism of the Reaganite 80s was another dialectical turn away from the crystals cult mentality of the 70s.
Are the suburbs bad and free love good or is free love good and the suburbs bad? The answer is neither. People are good or bad in specific contexts in specific moments. Someone might be a happy parent for 20 years and then fall in love with their new neighbor the next day. The dutiful priest might be defrocked in a moment because a latent atheism leaks up from the bottom of his consciousness. Faith is never guaranteed. Marriage is not guaranteed. Great sex is not guaranteed. The gym rat might drop dead of a heart attack after an extra rep.
Maybe what I'm arguing for is that we embrace existentialism and not ‘influentialism’1 (the philosopher of the influencer)—that we embrace the idea that our lives are creative acts which require constant creativity and rational reflection and constant re-evaluation… that we have to bind together different values that might not normally be part of a conventional set of values (in order to have robust, fulfilling, beautiful in a Platonic sense, sensual in a platonic sense, intelligent in an Aristotelian sense, faithful in a Kierkegaardian sense).
I miss writing letters regularly. It's something I used to do regularly in my early 20s. Now, it's harder. Maybe a few letters can be exchanged, but it's rarely maintained. It's harder for me to something in my brain de-prioritize anything that's free and purposeless, that's not connected to creative production, output, content. But that's exactly why I miss letters. I miss the free expression of intellectual power.
Why is there very little good conservative, culturally conservative art? One potential answer: