You can see why Nietzsche detested the newspaper. It chains you to the moment. And X is, for instance, just a hyper-newspaper.
The world has become a giant TV show. Everyone's life is a potential program. TikTok is just TV made by people. A horizontal, global, fractalized TV. Just like X is a global, fractalized newspaper.1
The culture of a hundred years ago produced more geniuses. Simply. A hundred years ago, we had Proust and Einstein, Joyce and Wittgenstein, Roca and Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Niles Bohr, Charlie Chaplin; I could go on and on.
Genius doesn't seem to be located in individuals anymore. Our great totems of genius now are CEOs like Elon Musk, but they're more like military generals than artists, marshaling resources: visionaries who wield global capital to produce things.
This is a matter of education, atmosphere, tools. The more wired to electronics, neurons and brains have become, the less capable they've become. I've often said that we've gotten dumber as phones have gotten smarter. We've poured our intelligence into machines.
The simple explanation for the rise of obesity is the loss of, decline of physical labor. The same thing can be true of intelligence. As mental labor gets easier, we get mentally obese.2
It's hard to imagine that the education system will exist in a meaningful way in 10 years. I don't mean that education will disappear, but rather question whether the systems of education in the United States will survive the many disruptions and transformations they're currently undergoing. There's also the question of whether education will continue to be handled by formal institutions instead of shifting towards kinship and cooperatives. There's a diminishing level of trust required for parents to send their children off to a third party for 14, 16, or even 18 years.
The aura of a studio. Just the eucalyptus on the table that matches the green candles, and the old wood, the old table, and the matching stools. The old Persian rugs my mom got from an estate sale. It's not very big, but it's so peaceful. It's mine.
Focus is such a sweet thing: to know exactly what your life is about, to pursue it. Not to be motivated by fear, but by a sense of what might lie at the end of a process.
The rise of meditation in the West is connected to specific historical shifts in how the brain is wired. Transcendental meditation (as a fad) and TV (as a mass phenomenon) coincide (1960s). The second wave of transcendental meditation and the smartphone coincide (2010s).
Meditation is a desperate ritual to reset a besieged and broken down mind, an attempt to feel like a mind again and not just a vector for information. I think it would be better if we were more explicit about this—and discard self-help positivity.
Meditation is really about a deep grief for what could be, or for who one was, what's been lost, for a deep kind of metaphysical pain caused by distraction.
But at the point at which we become media, we cease to be people. In a traditional sense, we cease to be animals.
There are exceptions, but the rule is decline and despair. Stupor.