Friday night. Back home after a night of playing poker with my friends and watching the NBA Finals. Not a drop of liquor in me—just two Red Bulls and sparkling water. I feel good, I feel fine. Maybe there could have been a higher calorie portion of my Friday night. Maybe this is just what I needed. I put the air conditioning on to cool down my 9th floor apartment a little bit. I'll probably turn it off before I go to sleep.
We create hell in our thoughts. We create paradise with our thoughts.
One view of literary culture today: too much talent and education is tied up in writers and editors who are afraid to stop acting like it's 2015 politically and socially, but are at the same time too horrified by the symbolism of the new right to embrace even the most pragmatic countervailing or counter-institutional opinions. And, unfortunately, the alternatives aren’t cutting it either, aesthetically: the old right is boring, and the new right often is vulgar and just not very good; low culture in the truest sense of the word. In other words, the left are self-deceiving cowards, and the right are self-deceiving vulgarians.
In New York, at least, I feel like most politics is really just an extension of the group you're trying to fit in with or get accreditation or money or work from. In private, people aren't as extreme one way or another as they might be in print.
Things the internet has been good for, for me, over the past five years: radically improving my diet and health, updating my political priors, meeting important new people during COVID, promoting my work, writing this writer's diary. What it's been bad for? Basically everything else. In other words, I've been able to give and receive new ideas, but that only seems like about five percent of the whole. Algorithms just make you stupid. They make you sound like everybody else. They make me worse.1
I'm still concerned about the direction the feedback chain—the algo of this app— pushes my mind.2
I'm starting to miss Nietzsche just two months after finishing the big Walter Kaufman anthology of selections from all his books. Nietzsche's one of those writers, along with Shakespeare, who punish you for leaving them for too long. I don’t need to think the same thoughts as Nietzsche, just practice thinking with that much style.
At poker we were talking about how some of the ridiculous and under-articulated proposals of Zohran Mamdani—free busing for everyone, state-run grocery stores, rent freezes—aren’t really about policy, but about holding up big symbolic signs that say "We're going to do housing socialists, we're going to do food socialists, we're going to do transportation socialists…”—and how this appeals to a lot of PMCs or wannabe PMCs in graduate school, the South Brooklyn literati, because it expresses a noble intent even while concealing an ignoble indifference to function: to what historical precedent would tell us about these boilerplate plans. Progressivism, unfortunately, is so much about signs and symbols, about giving affluent virtue-signalers working-class allies and by extension a sense of meaning. Zohran is a candidate for overproduced wanna be elites. And whenever a socialist mayor is elected, you know there are a lot of people who want to feel good about themselves, who are really anxious that they're not on the right side of things, in the electorate… Does anyone think social workers on the train or violence disruptors in East New York are actually going to reduce violent crimes? No.3 That’s not what it’s about at all. In fact, it’s about enjoying how much worse things could be very quickly on a practical level.
Now, granted, I do want to see progress in the city I live in. And I do think the city's elite have outrageous advantages that most of the rest of us don't have access to. But I don't believe in magic wands, or that the seat of government can be built on moral high ground, looking down on the rest of us poor unreconstructed virtue plebeians.
Unusually vivid dreams last night, which I think—I suspect—was because I took a lot of GABA. In one dream, it was closing night of Doomers, but it was in a big theater. And David Mamet, for some reason, was in the audience. We planned some elaborate skit at the end of the play that I was involved in. It was a joke. But somehow, the skit also involved the cast from Uncle Vanya and everyone was on stage. It was kind of ridiculous, but also, I wondered what David Mamet thought of it. I could see that he wasn’t enjoying the ridiculous performance. And then in another dream, which I remember fewer details of, I was talking to a woman who was telling me the only way to reverse your age is to get stem cells injected directly into your bone marrow, and was trying to convince me to do this. I found it just completely unbearable to imagine my bone marrow being opened like a vault. I refused, and then my alarm went off and I woke up.
"Take the understanding of the East and the knowledge of the West and then seek," says Gurdjieff. Take the understanding of the East and the knowledge of the West and then seek. Two questions. What do you think life is? And what do you want to know?
It's amazing how much food inflation, how much illness, how much alienation could be cured, so to speak, if more places and people had a cow or a goat—or both—and a garden. They could have these things attached to schools. Kids could be milking cows or goats or mowing the lawn, digging in the garden between classes. Animals could be attached to hospitals and to prisons and supply healthy food and therapeutic tasks.4
And I guess this is why I'm finding Zoran Mamdani's proposal to build a grocery store in every borough to be silly—because if we're going to do government intervention into the food supply, we're doing it at the wrong end of the pipeline; intervention is required to help us get back to the land, to nature and growth and ecological spiritually. If I were dictator of New York for a week, I would either convert marginal city and/or buy up land within a 300 miles of the city and lease it to the Amish to farm for cheap—with the stipulation they have to set up a school to teach people like myself how to live like them, and that they—as they already do, by the way—have to sell their products at city farm markets and open markets and schools, hospitals, prisons…
Wars, assassinations, protests, riots, elections, natural disasters, AGI—it’s really hard to ignore the reality show Earth, to turn it off. I have no proof that these things won’t invade my studio apartment or my city. They won’t disrupt my life. Not at all. But at the same time, to give so much energy to them, to this swarm of vaguely historical events—it feels like a desecration of my own life and spirit. Something is always happening somewhere. And the tragic condition of history doesn't seem to be quite a good enough excuse for not living more fully.
The ultra rich should fund eccentric projects—restoring old country homes, giving avant-garde artists lifetime employment and housing, funding inventors and gurus and farmers. There is so much money sloshing around America and indeed the globe. But why does it just buy superyachts and sterile mansions that look like hospitals? Why does it buy terrible mass pop art, which is really a form of money laundering.
Why can't our century produce an interesting aristocracy? And instead only a banal, brain-dead aristocracy with no taste and no vision?
I think about the brain-dead Zoomer hopped up on Sabrina Carpenter discourse. Or whatever bizarre, banal, over-caffeinated TikTok infomercial. Or whatever Reddit pain hole. They could be hungrily reading books, hungrily trying to understand the mysteries—that is themselves, that is life, that is nature—but they’re trapped on the outside of real things…
I also think about the millennial on X.com or Subtack (me); I think about the Boomer on Facebook. The Gen Xer watching Fox News. When I think about it, this might be the first time where there's no generation that holds any real wisdom. Something has vanished beyond the horizon of the past—centuries and millennia. The daisy chain of knowledge, of old people teaching young people little nameless things is broken. 5
My generation isn't really having many children, because… maybe… there's not much to teach children. And there lies the tragedy. It's not just DNA that gets passed down. It's the memetics of spirit. What is being passed down? Why is it being passed down? Why is it special? Why does it glow and radiate? What is mysterious? That’s what paternity is about on a spiritual level…
I don't think there's anything wrong with people having children later and later, because the fact is, life is getting longer and longer—at least if you can afford it. And so has youth span. The real evil isn't people having children at 40: it's people never having children because they don't have anything they want to share with the future; no message they want to pass into a thousand years hence. No legacy. 6
I think a lot about how children should be raised, but this leads to a lot of self-criticism. There is so much of a way of life that I detest in me, worked into my habits. I feel like I have to work through these parts of myself first, before I could ever be a father. I think it's not about just knowing what you want to pass into the future, but what you don't want to pass into the future. What memetic viruses you want to cauterize?
Youth is about making trouble, but not too much trouble. About irrigating channels in the soul so that some kind of genuine wisdom might flow through later.
It's very possible that spirituality is nothing no more and no less than the art of zigzagging. Of sensing when things are still and need to move. And spontaneously being able to plant new seeds of laughter and generosity.
What is my own greatest flaw? Morbidity and pessimism. And partly I write this diary to expel it. Like a kidney stone. I also have to get better at making sacrifices, at not trying to preserve everything. Not trying to keep everything together all the time.
One thing I've noticed is that having a pet has stood in for being good with animals and learning to attract and communicate with animals in a subtle, old-fashioned way. Some people can do both. They can have a cat or a dog in New York City, but also still be in touch with those ancient wavelengths. When people keep pets as surrogate children, they lose something fundamental on both sides—a relationship to children that's natural and a relationship to animals that's natural. They lose a sense of hierarchy because they're dominated by their pets. When in a sense, the pets—the animals—need to know who's in charge.
And the same is true when people trade their city dogs for their city children and are too afraid to actually parent their children and let the children run the show—or in many cases, both the children and the pets run the show—as they slowly disappear inside of the households that they are afraid to master and therefore to love. You see this all the time, in fact.
It seems that in the future we will have to do a great deal—many lifetimes worth—of relearning. That if anything approaching real life extension happens, the best use of it will be learning the wisdom of 12th-century monks and 17th-century Central Asian Sufi masters and old New England farmers and French nuns and sheep herders in the Pyrenees and Italian wine growers and Zen and Buddhist monks and so on; trhe wisdom of somebody's great-grandmother who's 100 years old and is old enough to remember life before everyone had TV and phones in their pockets.
I'm partly addicted to this app—though the less so lately because the relative quality of notes has fallen shockingly far, shockingly fast—and I need to rework my relationship to this tool. I enjoy public thinking in public, and I enjoy converting some comments into real life friendships. I enjoy engaging in dialogue about my book, when I scroll past the Sabrina Carpenter stuff, and the "I just finished my novel, yay" stuff. “I've gotten rejected by so many agents”—and the puppies, and the babies, and the pro and anti-Trump, and the pro and anti-Israel—endlessly—
The Socratic critique of the algorithm is the same thing as the Socratic critique of democracy. How can truth be a matter of impulse, mass impulse, and the averaged-out-thought be truthful?
for a certain set of people, you're not allowed to say that arresting violent criminals is what primarily reduces violent crime….
I saw a video a few weeks ago about a prison that introduced kittens into the worst wards of prisons as rewards for good behavior. And suddenly, the whole wing of murderers and rapists and tough guys was transformed. Everyone wanted a kitten. Everyone had something to care for.
And that, by the way, might be my biggest regret—not listening more to old people when I was a child. Because they had things to teach me. But it was the 90s and I wanted to play video games. I wanted to play Pokémon.
The tragedy of the 40-year-old millennial nerd whose deepest concerns are old episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and craft beer isn't the silliness of the artifacts they chose to organize their lives around. It's their implicit admission that those artifacts themselves aren't worth anybody in the future learning about. When I think about it, nerd culture is about finding other nerds, other friends—for instance—because of the secret understanding that these are not proper hobbies for the people of the future. And the darkest possibility is that all the proper hobbies, which is to say crafts, things that took care, attention, skill, learning, have just been almost entirely left behind. We've forgotten all the things, all the spiritualized tasks. We haven't bothered to learn them.
This one hit hard, you remain a master of saying difficult shit when it counts
even leaving politics aside, most literary critics are fundamentally dishonest. we have gut-level moral and aesthetic reactions to art and literature, and the critic then works backward to apply whatever academic lense is in vogue (at least within their circles) to dress up their subjectivity in purported objectivity.
I learned this the hard way as a litigator, judges do the same, but it's not even due to corruption or policies proper, it's just the nature of how humans make judgements. we just pretend it's quantities vs qualitative because that makes us feel better post-Enlightenment.