How to learn about people in art galleries and smoking areas

June 2024

Philosophy

both are a matter of life and death

warning: long

(thank you to everyone whose work I reference in this. most images are taken from the beautifully curated resources of their respective subjects.)

"Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse."

I.

When you walk into the John Singer Sargent exhibition at the Tate Britain this spring, the first sensation is scale. The canvases are huge and the rooms are white and the lighting is gallery-perfect. You walk in not quite sure what to expect and you're immediately in front of a painting so alive that it takes a moment to remember it isn't moving.

John Singer Sargent not only painted his sitters — he directed and styled them as well. He may have been the first person to understand that image and reality are related but separate, and that image is more powerful. The subjects of his portraits look back at you with an authority that outlasted them. Something was captured there that they themselves barely understood.

As I realise that I'm not quite sure what that means, the exhibition almost immediately peaks. Because you reach Madame X, and you stop. She's not even facing you. And yet her profile commands the room. There's something genuinely unsettling about how real she feels. You understand that what you're looking at is not a painting but a document of a person.

Much of the rest of the works on display had some diet version of that same effect. Regular scenes, regular people, and yet something underneath them that refused to settle. I ended up spending two hours there, longer than I've ever spent in a gallery. I wasn't entirely sure what was holding me.

I struggle to explain why I like looking at paintings at the best of times. The best I can currently offer is that good paintings are honest about their subject in a way that photographs usually aren't. A photograph captures a moment. A painting captures an interpretation. You are seeing the subject through the eyes of someone who looked at them for long enough to understand something.

But as you can tell, I've never been educated on fine art. So when something does move me, I have to work it out myself. I go home and I do what any self-respecting millennial does. I google it. And I read what people who know better think.

So I go searching for reviews when I get home from the Sargent exhibition that evening. My demographic's outlet of choice for this kind of thing is The Guardian. I find the review. One star.

Hello, hello. Dangerous territory for the ego here.

Being told something you thought was cool and interesting was, in fact, shit gives you a couple of options. You can conclude the critic is wrong. You can conclude you were wrong. Or you can try to understand how both things can be true at once, which tends to be the more interesting path.

First address of this critic's issue:

This daring artist of modern life is turned into a stuffed shirt by a show that puts the dress before the man.

OK. A few words there. I have no idea what any of them mean. I don't think his paintings were altered by the exhibition. The show has some props and display cases alongside the work. If you want to claim that changes what you see when you stand in front of Madame X, I would ask you to say that again slowly.

Throughout this show, Sargent's scintillating works are wretchedly displayed. There are clothes in glass cases. There is backstory written on placards. There is fashion history.

Instead of letting this fascinating portrait speak for itself, it is displayed next to a case containing a corset and some evening gloves, along with a long note about the dress she was painted in.

Hmm. Weird to see art described as 'scintillating' and 'fascinating' in a one-star review. But we're reading on.

It's the way he paints that makes his art breathe. Yet here it's hard to see that. The canvases are overwhelming by clothes in glass cases and didactic panels on either side of them.

Wow I really am an amateur consumer of painting as it turns out. I didn't even notice the rooms were arranged this way. I was just looking at the paintings.

Dad jokes aside, there's something interesting here. Because this critic really means it. He clearly loves Sargent. And he can't understand why they would put anything in the room that wasn't the painting itself.

You know what, here's an admission: I also thought the props and their backstory were pointless. Me and the Guardian critic agree on that. everything in an art gallery that is not art is pointless. It is not worth your time. If Sargent needed me to have historical context to enjoy his paintings then he would've painted me some historical context.

So this is where we diverge, because this critic isn't just annoyed that the context is there and in the way — he's angry it exists at all. He quotes Susan Sontag approvingly. Haven't the Guardian also (pretended to have) read Against Interpretation? Sontag would tell them not to give a shit about the hats in glass cases. Or the people Sargent met in Paris. However, that doesn't fit as a satisfying takeaway either.

Because the plaques are there. And I saw everyone read them. And the Guardian gives a big shit about what's written on them. So what's going on?

Hypothetical: An alien arrives at your door tomorrow. Says they've been sent to find out what this thing called art is all about.

Easy. You show them some famous paintings. They look at them. They ask why those paintings are famous rather than others. You explain. They ask what the rules are. You start to explain.

You read that Sargent review aloud, and almost make it to the end, before the Alien demands you stop. Asks what that has to do with painting. You try to remember. Alien is growing impatient. You scramble to recall what art is about in the first place.

(Aliens speak in italics, btw)

"Well .. the whole point is .. eh .. exposing yourself to things. Shit you haven't seen before .. the unknown.."

"And you expect the unknown to have narrative logic?"

"Yeah well I mean there needs to be some order to stuff .. you can't just waltz into an exhibition and .."

"But you just told me the whole point was that you don't know what you're looking at!"

"Yeah but well some people do ok .. and that's why you follow the right order .. that's the way you're supposed to approach .."

"But who are these people? Why do they know the right narrative logic? They must have known the artist?"

"Well no, I doubt it. They're just experts."

"Experts in what exactly? Where did they study? And their teachers, how were they experts?"

You walk in the entrance, you read the blurb on the wall, you look at the first thing, and you follow the arrows. You let someone else tell you how to feel about what you see.

"It's really not that deep, you know. Stories just make things nicer. Every marketer in the world knows this."

"I'm just saying, you seemed to be all into art a minute ago. Now you're telling me you need a sign to tell you where to stand. Seems a bit unlike you."

"I mean knowledge for its own sake is worth something, right? I can't just throw myself into shit without understanding it."

"Hmm. Wasn't expecting you to pull a good point out of that. Let's call it there."

* Alien teleports back to home planet *

Is there a resolution in there somewhere? It's hard to say. Every experience in society is guided somehow. Knowing nothing about what you're entering into is its own kind of prison. Plus, the paths are designed by experts. Even if we don't know them. It's better than them not being designed at all, right?

I mean, wouldn't something like wine collecting be less fun if you didn't get to learn why some soils and climates produce the best grapes?

As I manage to bore even myself with that last question, I close the Guardian tab and move on with my evening.

II.

It's later that night and I'm out in East London. House white in my hand, and in my general disposition. We're in a beer garden. Someone I know has brought some people I don't.

Trev is the one with the mullet. Says he's had a mental week in work and it's great to blow off some steam. Classic opener. Before he slides back through the bar to spend some time in a toilet cubicle, I ask him what it is he does for a living.

In an attempt at being as nonchalant as possible, he utters ..

'Oh yeah, so I'm a Creative Director'

Down to three of us.

French crop is Leon. Leon says he doesn't come out this way much. He's spent the last few weekends mostly in Mayfair and Notting Hill. Tells me he's actually heading there now. I'm half wishing for an invite. Doesn't come.

As he leaves me with the last of their trio, I at least ask him to tell me what the spot is called.

'Oh, it's called Soho House'

Alfie must have lost all his hair by the time he was 25. Makes up for it with a strong beard though. Ooh, hello. Didn't see that one coming. I ask why he thinks that.

Says he's been reading a lot about modern society. Says men's place is being undermined, and that the traditional role they played in the world is being taken from them. As I suddenly sober up, I decide it's probably time to get out of here. But before I do, I ask where he gets this reading from.

"Well, you have to pay to access it, but it's called Hustler's University."

Now you may ask why these three guys are friends. They don't seem to be that similar. They're coded in slightly different ways. But they're all after the same thing.

Let's take a closer look at Trev the Creative Director first. What kind of person is he going to be, now that he's a Creative Director? Still has that spark inside though, and is ready to work hard to let it shine through. Pays his dues. Becomes a Creative Director.

Then we had Leon. Let's guess about him. Grew up in a smaller city, or maybe a big town. Always felt like he was meant for something a bit more exciting. Came to London to find it. Only when he gets there, he just finds other people doing the same thing. And they all listen to artists he'd never heard of and talk about things he'd never considered, so he starts to do the same.

Lastly, we had Andrew Tate sympathiser Alfie. This is the trickiest one to work out. He doesn't like being told what to do by people who haven't earned the right to tell him. And he keeps watching. Until he's invited to the inner circle, where his man card is finally issued by someone he respects.

Our joke is almost over. No, they still haven't realised who it's on.

III.

I can't help but think about power a lot nowadays. Seems like every country in the world is going to collapse in on itself at some point. And yet, we aren't. We're all getting on with it. Trying to exact our own will onto the world anyway.

Nietzsche's 'God Is Dead' is what philosophically kicked off the modern era, but to get there he laid out a vision for what should replace religion's monopoly on morality. He believed that the strongest amongst us would step up and fill the void. That they would impose their own values on the world from the bottom up. That they would not merely adapt to life, but affirm it.

But Nietzsche was compelled to write because things weren't turning out like that. He wasn't seeing people step up and fill the void. He was seeing people shrink.

Given that those not interested in power were sticking around and not moving to another planet, something else had to fill their moral vacuum.

Power is a loaded word though. To some modern traditions, it's a dirty one. But it was a beautiful word to Nietzsche. Not power over others, but power over yourself. Not domination, but expression.

So Nietzsche was a fan of powerful people. Not because he supported people finding ways to dominate others — that, he found disgusting — but because he found it disgusting that people were willing to give up on themselves. On their own potential. On the infinite possibilities of a life lived fully on one's own terms.

Nietzsche didn't deal in definitions. He dealt in hammering the point home from 10 angles. And the point was this: if you have the capacity to be something, to make something, to do something — and you refuse to, out of fear or laziness or convention — then you are betraying yourself. And that betrayal shows up everywhere.

So power isn't control over others, it's control over yourself. Over your own life. And you do it by understanding what you actually want, not what you've been told to want, and then pursuing it without apology.

Working off this definition, suddenly a lot more people seem interested in power. Barely any of us want to control other people. But we all want to live the lives we actually want to live.

Also, you get to measure success however you want. For some people, success is not having to set an alarm. For others it's building something that outlasts them. For others it's the most incredible version of a quiet life. None of these are wrong.

Seemed like our three smoking area fellas had all made it in some shape or form.

Trev is now a Creative Director thanks to his grit and ambition. Leon is now a cultural insider because he was willing to do the work of becoming one. Alfie has found a community and a belief system that validates his frustrations and channels them somewhere.

I assume you see where this is going.

Trev has gained power in his career, but is stood there stressed and exhausted from overworking. Leon is now in the rooms he wanted to be in, but he doesn't feel any more at home there than he did before. Alfie has found his tribe, but the tribe just tells him to stay angry and keep paying his subscription.

And they are all bragging about it. Why?

The answer can be ripped out of Guy Debord: it is because during the technological development of modern economies, the lived experience of life was replaced by its representation. None of these three guys have gained any power. But they all gained a symbol that says they did. And the symbol is the whole point.

Trev has no freedom to choose when he gets up in the morning, or what he works on. The true artistic freedom he was chasing is further away than ever. But he has the title.

Leon will never be sure where the rooms that make a city tick really are. But the goal was to be cool enough to be in those rooms, and he's been told this is where the cool people are. So the goal is complete.

Alfie didn't want anyone to tell him how men should be acting now that it's 2024. And his solution, hilariously, is to pay someone to tell him how men should act.

The punchline is that none of them see it like this. And that's because the system has taught them to think in symbols. So they can only celebrate in symbols.

I mean, how come a guy that uses prostitutes to have sex doesn't get to consider himself a stud, but a guy who spent £30k on an online course gets to call himself a man?

The answer is because that is how modern power designed it.

Byung Chul-Han's most, and perhaps only, forgiveable book is Psychopolitics. Its central thesis is that modern power no longer operates through repression — what Han calls negative power — but through seduction and self-optimisation, which he calls positive power.

Negative power is authoritarian or Foucault-coded. Think violence, cruelty, policies, punishment. You do what you're told or consequences follow. You are shut out.

It's been a long time since I've even been threatened with a whip, though. Which is to Han's point. The old version of power is inefficient. You can only push people so far before they push back. You have to keep enforcing it. And it makes the power visible, which invites criticism.

Positive power, on the other hand, is discipline achieved not through oppression, but seduction. Power operates not by excluding you but by including you — on its own terms. You are invited to optimise yourself, to achieve your potential, to succeed, to be the best version of yourself.

This isn't power exorcised with a whip. This is power exorcised with a pat on the back, and a 'Good work, kid. You're really getting somewhere.'

This feels good, makes you think you're on the right track. Just, it's a track designed by someone else.

Which paints a picture not of a system retaining its power and preventing change by shutting people out, but of a system that achieves that by shutting people in.

This is a smart play, because when you think about it, negative power almost guarantees itself being overthrown. Suppress something hard enough and you guarantee it comes back with more force than before.

But positive power? It prevents the powerless from ever fighting their way out from being shut in. Because they don't know they're in. Because their excitement at getting a seat at the more premium table blinds them from asking the most obvious question of all:

"Why were we allowed to do that?"

Or at the very least, if that gain of power was so meaningful then ..

"Why the hell was that so easy?"

IV.

We all know what it feels like to be indecisive, right?

I don't mean on the micro level. Are we doing starters, do we get the 3 for £10 etc.

I mean the meso and macro level. Real life decisions. Potentially stress inducing. Usually taking the form of:

Option (a) — The surer bet i.e. "I'm pretty certain this is going to work out alright for me. At the same time, I'm not entirely sure why I'm doing it, or who I'll be once I get there."

Option (b) — The less known i.e. "Something in me is telling me to go for it, but fuck knows what's waiting on the other side, and I know it could go badly."

Seems strange that your brain is telling you two completely opposite things at the same time, no? What gives?

Well, you may say the uncertainty over these things is because they both have genuine attractive properties, and you just need more information. I just don't think that's right. Hmm. Yeah. I do know. And I also know it's 2024, when you can get any information you want in about 40 seconds.

No, most of the time these aren't information problems. Especially if the information on outcome doesn't change the fact that both options still feel plausible. These are action problems. Where getting pulled in two directions at the same force creates a net movement of zero. We all know what it feels like to be indecisive.

OK, so how can you want two opposite things at the same time? Surely evolution took care of that one?

But living as a human for approximately one day is enough to dispel that. As an easy proof, consider this choice:

If you pick Sam, I honestly sort of respect it. But most people say they would rather carry on. Which is to say: most people, when confronted with perfect pleasure with zero effort, would rather remain in a world where suffering is possible. Hmm.

Remember when you saw the hierarchy of needs for the first time in secondary school?

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Your teacher probably pointed out how lucky you are to consider the bottom two rungs ticked off by default. They pointed out that accomplishment doesn't have to mean money or gold medals, and that accomplishment depends on your goals. Then once that is all sorted, you get to pursue whatever self-actualisation is. You end the class assuming you'll figure it out.

What that secondary school class robbed you of was something much more uncomfortable. Because Maslow had a problem with his own hierarchy.

Because as clear as the logic of the hierarchy is, it doesn't seem to come with instructions. You know that thing where you see something you've built or achieved and think 'why doesn't mine look like that'? That's kind of what happened with Maslow.

In that, as much as he believed humans were naturally drawn to actualisation, achieving full self-expression and realising their potential — he looked around at actual human beings and didn't see that happening. More disconcertingly, it didn't even seem like anyone was trying. I guess the real Pyramids had weird puzzles guarding each deeper layer too.

That's something that didn't come up in secondary school. If only you would have thought to ask your teacher why.

School ended and you went to college. Which is where, in many ways, you find out that civilisation has questions it never worked out the answer to.

One of the first things you learn about there is Asch's conformity experiments. Your professor engages the class and you think: this is it. We're getting somewhere.

In Asch's experiment a group of people get shown this:

Before getting asked which one of these they just saw:

The famous finding is that when everyone else in the group is a stooge that is told to intentionally give the wrong answer, about 75% of real participants will give at least one wrong answer at some point across the trials, just to conform with the group.

What's strange, though, is that no one ever bothers to speak about the results in a full sentence:

"Over the 12 critical trials, about 75% of participants conformed at least once, and 25% of participants never conformed at all."

Yes, 75% absolutely murders the 1% getting questions wrong in the control group. But what about the 25%? Who are these people? And more pressingly: are you one of them?

Firstly, if you're fresh out of Research Methods and Stats I, you can relax. I know we can't know who the 25% are from this data alone. But it's still worth asking: what psychological profile resists pressure to conform even when the social cost is isolation? Looks like Maslow wasn't the only one with an incomplete theory of motivation.

People don't realise that even Freud had a pretty basic outlook on humanity for the first chunk of his career. He also wouldn't have been able to explain you not wanting Sam Altman's machine, or Asch's 25%.

So in 1920, he publishes 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', where he plays with two terms: eros and thanatos. He now claims these are the two drives underlying all human behaviour. And the reason there are two is because they push in opposite directions.

Eros refers to the life drive, which encompasses instincts for survival, reproduction, and creativity.

Thanatos, on the other hand, is the death drive, which Freud posited as an instinct towards aggression, self-destruction, and a return to an inorganic state.

In terms of your own life experience, Eros is easy to accept. Think 'damn it feels good to be alive'. Thanatos is harder. Self-destruction as a fundamental motivator? Feels wrong.

At the same time, it's hard to get away from, as Adam Phillips found when he recently wrote 'On Giving Up':

The death instinct, I want to suggest, was Freud's way of broaching the part of the self that wants, less life rather than more life; the part of the self that wants to give up, to give up on, perpetually attempting and achieving a more minimal existence.

So, it has nothing to do with dying. It has to do with how you choose to live.

Which means its rational basis becomes clear pretty quickly. Ironically enough, the death drive is the comfortable one. Less risk of failure if you never really try. Less chance of rejection if you never really put yourself out there. Easier to manage the terror of freedom if you let someone else make the decisions.

Conversely, the life drive is about imposing yourself. Not denying who you are. If you disagree with something, you say so. If you want something, you pursue it. If you are capable of something, you do it.

As the best to ever do it once noted: "the advantage of laying on the floor, is that there is nowhere left to fall."

Which takes us back to Maslow and his self-actualisation problem. When people were on the precipice of doing the difficult thing, the meaningful thing — they turned back. Not because they couldn't. Because they were scared of what it would mean if they could.

Freud suggests this isn't weird at all. Because this push-pull creates the core tension in the human psyche. The drive to be more — and the drive to be less. The life drive and the death drive. You feel both. All the time.

Because while his first big idea was that people wanted to reach their full potential, his second big idea was that what people fear most is their own potential. Or allow me to make it simpler: a fear of your own power.

Ayn Rand in 1971, on the Apollo 11 moon landing:

Harry Reasoner summed it up by saying simply, quietly, a little sadly, that if the moon is found to be worthless, man will return to Earth and never go back to the moon. And that, that this is the whole shabby secret: to some people, the sight of an achievement is a reproach, a reminder that they haven't achieved it.

So to sacrifice some nuance, I'm going to present to you two selves.

Self 1: Characterised by a cosmic lovechild of Nietzsche's will to power, Freud's Eros, and Maslow's self-actualisation. The self that affirms life. The self that pursues. The self that wants power.

Self 2: Birthed by Thanatos, the Jonah Complex, and a Nietzschean will to be controlled. The self that denies life. The self that gives up. The self that's scared of gaining power.

The question is not which self represents you. They're both reading this.

The question is which one you are going to let dominate.

Well, come on, which one is it gonna be?

We all know what it feels like to be indecisive, right?

An immediate question is to what extent you get full ownership of that choice at all. Because what Marcuse understood, in One Dimensional Man, was that you are not operating in a vacuum. The death drive is useful to the forces of modern power. It keeps you passive, manageable, consuming rather than creating. The system doesn't need you to be maximally unhappy. It just needs you to not be a threat.

I almost agree with his mission. Because I think Marcuse does accurately diagnose domination. But where he goes wrong is in where to look for the way out.

V.

Nietzsche used to say he could write in a sentence what others would need a book to say. Still unsure about that, but let's try the following:

Leopards break into the temple and guzzle the chalices empty; this happens repeatedly; eventually one can predict that it will happen again, and it becomes part of the ceremony.

That is the entirety of his parable 'Leopards In The Temple'.

Post-game recap: The leopards want whatever sustenance is in those chalices. So they defy authority and enter the holy temple. They drink. They leave. They come back. Until, at some point, someone decides that the leopards are part of the ceremony now.

Let's ask the internet what it's about. From The Atlantic: "Change happens incrementally. Even disruptive forces eventually become part of the system."

And from Adam Phillips: the leopards' rebellion is ultimately absorbed. What seemed like an intrusion becomes ritual. The institution bends around the disruption and survives.

But here's the reread I can't shake: the leopards think they won. They broke in, they got what they wanted, they came back again and again. To them, they conquered the temple. They never wondered why they were let in so easily. They never noticed that the ceremony changed around them rather than because of them. They're too neck deep in chalice to even think about it.

This is not a story about how change happens. It's a story about how change is prevented.

The symbolic disruption is absorbed and the underlying power structure is left entirely intact. Actually — it's stronger now, because it has visible proof of its own tolerance. Look how flexible we are. Look how much we've changed.

Our three guys from the smoking area are all leopards. They each found their way into a temple. They are each drinking from a chalice. And they each think they've won something.

VI.

So what are the options? What does modern submission look like, so we can at least see it for what it is?

I think there are four main categories worth knowing.

The first is the kind we've already been talking about: celebrity rebellion theater. This is the mode where the system offers you a packaged form of resistance, complete with its own aesthetics, language, icons, and tribal affiliations — and you buy it whole. You get to feel like you're on the outside while being, definitionally, inside. Trev's creative rebellion, Leon's cultural membership, Alfie's manosphere initiation — all of it. The system profits from the performance of opposition.

The second is what Zvi has written about extensively under the name the Immoral Maze. The premise is this: in sufficiently large and complex organisations, the skills required to reach the top are not the same as the skills required to do the job well. The skills required to reach the top are: loyalty signalling, blame deflection, credit claiming, and the slow abandonment of any principle that would make you difficult to manage. Picture this: you're a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed new hire at some big shot company. You're thinking, this is where I prove myself. This is where the best rise. Turns out, the people who get ahead in this place aren't necessarily the most skilled or hardest working. Zvi breaks it down like this: in an immoral maze, the path to success is paved with deception and brutal competition where you have to destroy others to advance. And here's the thing: once you're in the maze, it's near impossible to get out. Because the skills you develop to succeed inside it are precisely the skills that make you useless and untrustworthy outside of it. They couldn't pay you enough. Even if they could, they definitely don't. If you end up CEO, you still lose. You think you're making it. You're ruining your chances of ever being free again.

The third is the fetishisation of knowledge without action. 'Knowledge is power', there's a thing people say. And it seems pretty logical. When psychotherapy began as a concept, the various different troubles people needed help with could be summarised as: stuck. Stuck on something. Stuck in something. Stuck with something. That was causing them pain. And they wanted to become unstuck. Becoming unstuck requires movement. Requires action. But this action needs to be informed, to make sense of what's happening. The problem happens when the system learns it can use this to its advantage too. Knowledge is power? Here, have unlimited knowledge. Don't worry, the unlimited power is coming. Just keep watching.

The Last Psychiatrist puts it this way: "Your thesis is that the system is oppressive, and that's what you're fighting against. Then why was your Master's thesis on the system being oppressive? I learned how things really work." Did you learn that they can work without you? Knowledge is only useful if it informs action. If there is no action, and just more knowledge, then knowledge is just another way to stay still. And in terms of the total fetishisation of knowledge over pursuing true power, this is pretty much standard now. Here's a rule: if you ever hear someone explain an idea or argument for something using words or a tone that you barely understand, check if you trust them. Because people use complexity to signal expertise, and expertise to claim authority, and authority to prevent you from asking the obvious questions. Knowledge is power is a thing people say. Probably wrong. Probably dangerously wrong. Because in 2024 information is the most abundant thing on the planet and yet nothing seems to be changing. Downstream of active knowledge champions are the passive knowledge champions. The ones so smart they've realised that taking action is for idiots.

The fourth is ironic distance. Over a decade ago, the NYT published a piece on the hipster as a generation living ironically. It contains a strong description of the modus operandi of those that live with irony. Essentially, ironic living is portrayed as a self-defensive mode of dealing with the world. Stemming from a genuine discomfort with sincerity.

At the time that article was written, irony was characterized by: nostalgia for times not personally experienced, appropriating outmoded fashions, mechanisms, and hobbies. Functioning as a self-defensive shield against criticism by pre-emptively acknowledging its own failings. Allowing people to dodge responsibility for their aesthetic and other choices. Stemming from the belief that everything has already been done and serious commitment to beliefs will leave you vulnerable.

That was 2012 and about Millennials. The 2024 Gen Z version: meme pages about middle class young people, making fun of middle class young people, followed exclusively by middle class young people.

Being able to laugh at yourself is great but .. what if your identity is the joke? is the meme? If you can only do/wear/care about something as long as you can do it with a hint of irony, and with full awareness of what it signals, then you aren't actually doing/wearing/caring about anything. Like, if you're scared of loudly saying you like something, that means you're scared of being you. You've ended up in the same place as the 17 year old who slams their bedroom door.

This may be a cultural response to being given no clear future as a generation but unfortunately, unlike slammed doors, irony doesn't actually change anything. You can still say you vaguely want things to get better for people and have it be true. You're just not going to do anything about it.

VII.

That last case study should draw an obvious question. If living ironically is a version of a complete abdication of self, what does the opposite look like?

Well, the opposite of being ironic is being serious, so let's start there. You've probably met a lot of people who seem very serious, and found them annoying or even frightening. Humourless. Inflexible. Unable to take a joke.

That's fair, but I invite you to change your definition, and get in line with the version in Visakan Veerasamy's writing on the topic. Here's the key point:

Good books are written by serious authors, and being deeply immersed in their work stirred something in me — it seemed obvious to me that a serious life is a life well-lived, and it's always been weird to me how uncommon this perspective is.

As I got older it became clearer to me that not many people are really serious about anything. Some people are actually serious, so they find it hard to believe that anybody could really mean what they say, since everything everyone else says comes from unserious places.

Looking back now I don't think I was entirely wrong, the issue was that I was overly fixated on unpleasant manifestations of this quality. And two examples of people who found something to be serious about:

Justo Gallego Martínez was serious. At about 36 years old, he got stricken with tuberculosis, got better, promised God that he would build him a cathedral, and then spent the next 60 years doing exactly that with no formal training, very little money, and no permission from the Church. He died at 91 having mostly finished it. That was serious.

Hokusai was serious. Here's him talking about his paintings after ~70 years of working on them:

"From the age of six, I had a passion for copying the form of things and since the age of fifty I have published many drawings, yet of all I drew by seventy there is nothing worthy of notice. At seventy-three years I was somewhat able to fathom the growth of plants and trees, and the structure of birds, animals, insects and fish. Thus when I reach eighty years, I hope to have made increasing progress, and at ninety to see further into the underlying principles of things, so that at one hundred years I will have achieved a divine state in my art, and at one hundred and ten, every dot and every stroke will be as though alive."

Obviously, building cathedrals or painting waves aren't inherently serious endeavours. The point is about the relationship to the work. The refusal to stop. The willingness to be measured by it.

It's a method of living you tend to see in every top level athlete, entrepreneur, artist, scientist or thinker. They saw something in themselves, and they tried to maximise it. They did maximise it. They couldn't have done anything else. And that's how you know they were serious about it.

They let the life-affirming self dominate. They weren't afraid of themselves. They became powerful because they were powerful already.

We're about 95% through this essay. And we've lost about 95% of readers by now. So it's time I can talk directly.

Everything you hope to come out of 80ish years of existence comes down to that at some fundamental level. Here's the deal: no one's asking you to change the world. The point is that you could at least try. And you don't need someone to ask you. But you do need to do it much, much differently to how people currently think change works.

But if you just don't see the point in that, I can't blame you. Leopards in the temple still get to drink.

You know what I'm going to say. When I hypothetically asked you if you wanted real life or Sam Altman's pleasure machine — most people said they'd stay.

And now it really should be obvious.

That everyone is actually faced with that choice everyday. And you can tell what option they went for by watching what they do.

The choice is yours, too. You just don't think about it.

The thing is, though, the less time you spend thinking about it, the more the world is choosing for you.

Good thing knowledge is power, right?

Hope you had a good summer everyone.

Your time is running out.