“The future is fixed, dear Mr Kappus, but we move around in infinite space. How could things not be difficult for us?”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

There are days when I believe I’m choosing my life and there are days when I’m less certain. Most days are somewhere in between. You wake up and have a banana. You decide what to wear. You take one road instead of another. You answer one message and leave another unanswered. You buy a book. You miss the train. Perhaps because you missed the train you meet someone, and years later you cannot imagine your life without that person. Then you think of the train again. It’s difficult to know where your choosing ended and everything else began.

Rilke wrote something about this in one of his letters to the young poet Franz Xaver Kappus. He said that the future is fixed but that we move around in infinite space. Then he asked a simple question: how could things not be difficult for us? I’ve been thinking about that because there is something frightening in the idea of a fixed future. We prefer the future open. We like it when it’s waiting for us like an empty street. We want to believe that somewhere ahead there are many roads and that our great responsibility is to choose the right one.

But Rilke’s image is pretty strange if you realize. We are moving. We feel ourselves moving. There is enormous space around us and within that space we make decisions, fall in love, leave cities, begin books, abandon them, take jobs, lose people, change our minds and sometimes change them back. Nothing about the experience feels fixed. It feels almost unbearably open. Yet somewhere beyond what we can see, the future already stands.

I don’t know whether I believe this literally. I’m not sure Rilke wants us to. What I find interesting is the feeling of it because I know that feeling very well. You can make a thousand choices and still arrive somewhere you never chose.

The Stoics had a harsher image for the same problem. There is an old thought experiment, associated with the early Stoics: a dog tied by a long leash to a moving cart. The leash is long enough for the dog to move about. It can walk to one side of the road, sniff the earth, stop for a moment, look at the trees. There is some freedom in the length of the rope. But the cart keeps moving. The dog may follow it willingly or it may resist. If it follows, it walks. If it refuses, eventually it is dragged. The cart doesn’t stop to settle the argument.

I used to find this thought experiment terribly bleak. Maybe I still do. There is something almost cruel about it. The animal (us) feels free because the leash is long enough for it to forget the cart for a while. It wanders. It investigates the world. It chooses where to place its feet. Then the rope tightens.

We know this. A parent grows old. A relationship ends. A body that once seemed inexhaustible begins to fail us. Someone you love leaves. You leave. A city changes while you are living in it. One morning you look at a photograph taken ten years ago and realize that everyone in it believed, at the moment the photograph was taken, that their lives were still ahead of them. They were right, of course. They simply did not know what ahead meant.

This is where Rilke and the Stoics seem to meet. The future is fixed and the cart moves, but the leash is long. Perhaps much of our unhappiness comes from confusing the leash with the cart. We spend enormous amounts of our lives pulling against things that were never ours to move. We replay what has already happened. We negotiate with absence. We imagine conversations in which we finally say the perfect thing. We resent time for behaving exactly as time has always behaved. Meanwhile the cart moves.

There is an old Stoic thought that fate leads those who are willing and drags those who are not. There are things one should resist. There are injustices that demand resistance, circumstances that can be changed, lives that become better precisely because someone refused to accept what they had been told was inevitable. Acceptance can easily become cowardice when applied to something that still lies within our power. So the difficult thing is learning what deserves our resistance.

That distinction has become more important to me as I have grown older. When I was younger I thought freedom meant having no leash at all. I wanted life to remain open in every direction. Every decision felt dangerous because choosing one thing seemed to murder all the other lives I might have lived. Perhaps that is one of the peculiar anxieties of being young. We mistake possibility for freedom.

But a life cannot remain possible forever. Eventually it must become particular. You choose one city and therefore do not live in another. You love one person and close certain doors. You take one job. You acquire one body and one history. Your parents age. Your friends scatter across countries. The years begin accumulating behind you and the number of lives you might still live quietly becomes smaller. The leash shortens.

Strangely, this doesn’t always feel like imprisonment. Sometimes it feels like relief. The dog cannot determine where the cart is going. But within the radius of the rope there is still earth to smell, water to drink, another dog to notice, a patch of sunlight in which to walk. That small territory matters.

I cannot decide that the people I love will never die, but I can decide to call them. I cannot recover years already spent, but I can decide what to do with this afternoon. I cannot make another person love me, understand me or remain beside me, but I can love them well while they are there. I cannot stop the cart, but I can choose how I walk beside it.

This is where I find Rilke more moving than the Stoics. Rilke leaves room for bewilderment. How could things not be difficult for us? There is tenderness in that question which I don’t find in the dog and the cart. He doesn’t tell Kappus that difficulty can be reasoned away. He seems instead to say that difficulty follows naturally from what we are.

We are creatures who can imagine infinity while living inside time. We can conceive of a thousand futures and receive only one. We love things we know we cannot keep. We remember what no longer exists. We know that the cart is moving and still, sometimes, we plant our feet in the earth and pull. There is something very human in this refusal. There is nothing shameful in being dragged for a while too. Wisdom may not mean walking willingly at every moment.

A fixed destination does not make the journey towards it empty. We still encounter things along the road. We still love people. We still make promises, break them, regret them and sometimes make better ones. We read books that alter us. We get things wrong. We begin again.

The cart keeps moving through all of it. Perhaps freedom has always existed in the length of the leash, in that strange and temporary space between necessity and ourselves, where there is still enough room to look around, to choose where we place our feet, and to decide, for as long as the road allows us, how we will walk.

Share

Shoutout to my wonderful friends Joy and Ketan, who gifted me Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which eventually led me to write this essay.

The Underground Man (Notes from Underground) is perhaps the most obvious example. Every time you think you have diagnosed him, he seems to overhear the diagnosis and immediately contradict it. Call him spiteful and he admits to being spiteful. Call his spite a defense mechanism and he begins analyzing the defense mechanism for you. Try to stand outside him and explain him, and somehow he is already standing there beside you.

It is exhausting. And according to Mikhail Bakhtin, that’s precisely the point.

In Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin argues that Dostoyevsky created something fundamentally different from the traditional novel: the polyphonic novel. Polyphony literally means many voices. But Bakhtin means something more specific than a novel simply containing many characters with different opinions. Almost every decent novel does that.

His claim is that Dostoyevsky allows his characters to possess something close to the same intellectual freedom normally reserved for the author. The characters seem like they’re independent consciousnesses allowed to speak in their own right.

And that distinction changes everything.

A Character Who Can Answer Back

Most novels quietly establish a hierarchy between the author and the character.

A character may misunderstand himself, but the author understands him. We might watch someone behave arrogantly while the novel gently reveals the insecurity underneath. The character possesses only his limited perspective whereas the author possesses the larger truth. There is, so to speak, a final word. Bakhtin thought Dostoyevsky resisted this.

Raskolnikov is not simply an illustration of a philosophical error. Ivan Karamazov is not placed inside The Brothers Karamazov merely so that Christianity can defeat atheism in some fictional debate tournament. Even characters whose ideas Dostoyevsky clearly distrusted are permitted to articulate those ideas with extraordinary force. The author does not stand above them holding the answer key.

Imagine the novel as something similar to a room full of people arguing.

Each voice encounters another voice. One consciousness presses against another. Ideas become things people live through, defend, abandon, contradict, and occasionally destroy themselves over. This is what Bakhtin calls dialogism.

We Do This to People Too

I think this is the part of Bakhtin that interests me beyond literary theory.

We are constantly turning other people into monological characters.

Someone is selfish. Someone is insecure. Someone has commitment issues. Someone behaves a certain way because of their childhood. Once we have assembled enough evidence, we feel we have understood them.

I have done this countless times. Especially with people I love. Perhaps love even makes the temptation stronger. You spend years learning someone’s habits, their vocabulary, the subtle differences between the silence that means anger and the silence that means exhaustion. Eventually you begin carrying around a small theory of them.

Then one afternoon they say something you could never have imagined them saying.

And suddenly you are reminded of an uncomfortable fact: the person standing in front of you has an interior life that exceeds your interpretation of them.

Bakhtin had a word closely related to this: unfinalizability.

A human being cannot be completely finished by another person’s description of them. There is always some remainder, some possibility of response, some capacity to become otherwise.

Dostoyevsky’s characters feel unusually alive because he grants them this privilege. They are allowed to surprise even the structure trying to contain them.

The Novel as Conversation

This is why Dostoyevsky can sometimes feel chaotic and hard to follow, at least for some readers.

His novels overflow with arguments, interruptions, confessions, humiliations, sudden reversals, people talking past one another and then understanding one another for approximately thirty seconds before everything falls apart again.

A polyphonic novel cannot be too tidy because people are not tidy. If the author reconciled every contradiction into a single final worldview, the voices would cease to be genuinely independent. Dostoyevsky instead lets incompatible consciousnesses remain in the same room.

Faith speaks.

Doubt answers.

Reason speaks.

Desire interrupts.

Someone makes an airtight philosophical argument and then behaves in a way that completely betrays it. Which, frankly, sounds much closer to ordinary human existence than most philosophical systems do. And perhaps this is why reading him can feel so strangely intimate. His characters are never entirely reducible to what has already been said about them. They remain capable of answering back.

The more I think about it, the more this seems like something worth carrying outside literature too. To know someone should perhaps not mean arriving at the final explanation of who they are.

Maybe it means learning to leave a little space inside our understanding of them.

Space for another voice.

Space for contradiction.

Space for the possibility that, after all these years, they might still say something that surprises us.

Subscribe now

Honestly, if this essay doesn’t convince you to pick up a Dostoyevsky novel, I don’t know what will.

Books mentioned:

1. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

2. Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics by Mikhail Bakhtin

3. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

4. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Jacques Derrida called this assumption logocentrism, and he argued that it is wrong.

His reasoning is simple. Everything that supposedly makes writing untrustworthy, its dependence on absence, on repetition, on being usable in contexts its author never intended, is already true of speech. Even spoken words only mean something because they draw on a shared language that existed before the speaker and does not depend on the speaker’s presence at all. The voice in your head is no more self-sufficient than a page. Speech was never the pure origin that Plato and Aristotle took it to be, and writing was never merely its degraded copy.

Derrida’s point is not that writing is superior to speech. That would just repeat the same mistake in reverse. Speech is not more direct, more natural, or more true than writing. Both depend on the same thing: signs that work without any single speaker or writer standing behind them to guarantee their meaning.

I have grown tired of watching Spider-Man, and Marvel heroes in general, get shoehorned into somebody else’s plot, existing only to service the next crossover or multiversal cliffhanger. Brand New Day understands its multiversal context, it doesn’t pretend the last few years didn’t happen, but it refuses to let that context swallow the film. It still manages to feel like a standalone Spider-Man story, told on its own terms.

Nothing feels like it exists purely to set up the next film or justify a cameo. Every beat is in service of character, of growth, of Peter actually changing across the runtime. It is the closest thing Marvel has produced to Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films, and I mean that as the highest compliment I can give. Since Raimi’s trilogy, no live-action Spider-Man has been given a story arc you could genuinely empathize with. This film finally understands that spectacle or fan payoff isn’t a substitute for an emotional throughline.

The boldest choice the film makes is one I didn’t expect to enjoy as much as I did: it largely does away with a traditional villain as the engine of conflict. That took some adjusting. We are so conditioned to expect a big antagonist reveal or a climactic supervillain payoff that a film without one initially feels like it’s withholding something. But once I let go of that expectation, I found the absence refreshing rather than deflating. It let the story stay human-scaled.

Too many recent superhero films have turned their heroes into something closer to shounen battle protagonists: fighting to “protect innocents” in some broad, abstract sense, without ever really putting themselves in danger for a specific person. Brand New Day keeps circling back to ground level, to actual people, actual consequences. Jon Bernthal and Tom Holland have a real rapport on screen, understated and sincere, and it’s genuinely sweet to watch. For once, the film doesn’t undercut its sincerity every few minutes with reflexive quips. The humor is still there, but it’s placed with intention, and it never drains the seriousness out of a scene the way Marvel’s house style so often does.

That’s what baffled me most, actually: how far this film sits from Jon Watts’ trilogy. Those films always felt like they were straining to be something else, an Avengers movie, a Ferris Bueller riff, anything but a Spider-Man story confident in its own identity. It knows exactly what it is. And I’m genuinely glad for the distance.

Destin Daniel Cretton deserves real credit here. This feels like a fresh beginning for the character, an actual recalibration of what a Spider-Man film can be when it trusts its own story enough to slow down. After ages, it’s a relief to watch a Spider-Man movie that lets you feel something.

He was reserving himself. For later. And later has arrived, and there is nothing left to bite with. The waiting was the life. The waiting ate the life.

It reminded me of Saajan Fernandes (Irrfan Khan), the widower at the center of Ritesh Batra’s film The Lunchbox, who writes something similar in one of his letters to Ila: “I don’t know when I became an old man.” It lands differently from Mathieu’s monologue: quieter, more bewildered, but I believe it is the same reckoning. You add up the years and realize you were not living them so much as surviving them, conserving yourself for a future that kept receding. And then one morning, you are old, and you don’t know how.

Georges Bataille's general economy offers a diagnosis: the problem of surplus energy. After a system has put enough energy to productive use for maintenance and growth, the surplus must be spent unproductively. The system always generates more than it needs. The accursed share, Bataille calls it, that excessive portion which must either be spent luxuriously and knowingly, in the arts, in non-procreative sexuality, in spectacles and sumptuous monuments, or it is obliviously destined to catastrophic outpouring. War. Self-destruction. Slow internal collapse.

Mathieu’s error, then, is not that he wasted his energy. It is that he deferred its expenditure indefinitely. He saved it. He was prudent with himself. And what happens to savings that are never spent? They do not compound. They curdle. It is the result of a life lived in permanent reserve, a self perpetually held back for an occasion that never quite arrives.

We do this because postponement feels like some form of profound wisdom. Waiting feels like some strategy. I will travel when I have more money. I will write when I have more time. I will bite into things when conditions are more favorable. Conditions are never more favorable. The teeth go quietly while you are being sensible.

I recognize Mathieu in myself, or I did until recently. The reserved life. The careful life. Not reckless enough to lose anything, not present enough to gain anything either. A life conducted at arm’s length from itself. Breaking the shell does not guarantee anything beautiful. It might just be gum, oozing, leaving a glistening trail in the dust. But even that is preferable to the shell. The shell is the life you did not live. The gum is at least something that moved.

What I am learning is that Bataille’s surplus energy must be expended now. What remains has to be thrown at something: at a conversation that goes too long, at a film that wrecks you, at a friendship that costs you sleep, at a morning in a city where you have no agenda. They are the only honest use of the excess.

Saajan Fernandes almost does not make it. He spends most of The Lunchbox conserving himself, tending his retirement, preparing to vanish quietly from his own life. It takes a wrong address, a misdirected lunchbox, a stranger’s handwriting, to interrupt the reserve. Even then he hesitates. He is very good at hesitating. Most of us are.

The shell, if I am being honest, is still mostly intact. But I am less interested in protecting it than I used to be. May we all learn to bite into things before the inventory of what's left becomes too painful to take.

MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

There is a scene early in In Bruges where Ray (Colin Farrell), a hitman who has just accidentally shot a child dead during a job in London, is standing in a church staring at a painting of the Last Judgment. He is sullen, rude, and has spent the previous twenty minutes being openly obnoxious to everyone around him. And yet, when you are watching him. You start to feel a little worried for him. You want things, somehow, to work out for him.

This is bizarre. He is, by any reasonable measure, not a good person. He is a murderer. He punches a woman in the face in a restaurant. He says awful things about nearly everyone he encounters. And still, you are rooting for him. How does that happen?

It’s worth thinking about, because the answer tells you something important about how films actually work.

Robert McKee, in his book Story, makes a distinction that seems obvious but is actually underappreciated. He separates sympathy from likability. A character doesn’t need to be likable for us to care about them. What they need is for us to identify with them. And identification happens when we recognize something of ourselves in a character, not their virtues, but their inner life. Their fears, their desires, their contradictions.

Ray is full of contradictions. He is loud and boorish on the surface. Underneath, he is a man collapsing inward with guilt. What distinguishes Ray from a psychopath is precisely that he doesn’t attempt to rationalize his sins. He knows what he did. He can’t unknow it. Every time he remembers the moment, he breaks down. A man trying to outrun his own conscience in a city with nowhere to run to. That gap between surface and interior is where sympathy lives.

Martin McDonagh gives Ray something that is almost a screenwriting cliché, but which he handles with unusual delicacy: a wound. Not a metaphorical wound. An actual one. Ray killed a child. This is the event that precedes everything in the film, and its shadow falls over every scene. You never see him not carrying it.

McKee would call this the backstory, the wound that the character brings into the present tense. But the difference between a backstory that works and one that doesn’t is how it’s revealed. McDonagh doesn’t explain Ray. He shows you the weight. The “boy” has a devilry about him, but this is all a front for the hurt that lurks inside. The front is funny. The hurt is real. The audience registers both at the same time, and that double register is exactly what makes a character endearing rather than merely watchable.

There is also something important about the nature of the wound itself. It was a mistake. Nothing malicious. And there is something unbearably human about having made a mistake you can never undo. We don’t need to have killed anyone to understand that feeling. The scale is different. The structure is the same.

Ken (Brendan Gleeson) is the other half of the equation, and he works differently. Where Ray earns sympathy through guilt, Ken earns it through integrity. Gleeson, by the director’s own account, brings natural warmth and humanity to the role, and his joy of life shines through. Ken is a professional killer who is also delighted by medieval architecture. He reads. He is the kind of person who thinks it matters how you behave even when no one is watching.

And then, he makes a choice. Realizing that Ray has a bright future ahead of him despite his shortcomings, Ken offers to sacrifice himself to give Ray a second chance. This is a man who kills people for money, and he is one of the most morally serious figures in recent cinema. A character is revealed not in talk but in choice, especially under pressure, especially when the stakes are real. Ken’s choice is made under the highest possible stakes, and it reveals everything.

What McDonagh understands (better than most filmmakers) is that you don’t make characters endearing by making them good. You make them endearing by making them complex. As producer Jim Broadbent put it: “You don’t expect to embrace these characters, to care what is going to happen to them.” But you do. Because McDonagh gives every character, including Harry (Ralph Fiennes), the unhinged gangster boss, a coherent moral logic. They all believe in something. They all have a line they won’t cross. Even Harry, who orders Ray’s death, kills himself at the end because he believes he has accidentally shot a child, holding himself to exactly the standard he held Ray to.

That consistency, villain included, is what gives the film its moral weight.

Films don’t ask us to approve of characters. They ask us to accompany them. And we will accompany almost anyone if we believe that what we’re watching is true. Not factually true. Emotionally true. True to the way people actually carry their worst moments around with them. True to the way guilt works, the way loyalty works, the way the desire to be redeemed without quite deserving it works.

In Bruges is a film about purgatory, literally and structurally. Two men stuck in a beautiful city that one of them hates, waiting to find out what happens to them. We root for them because we know that feeling too. Most of us are just waiting in a slightly different city.

Someone, in some century, felt exactly what you’re feeling. Kafka’s Gregor Samsa woke up transformed into something unrecognizable and the first thing he worried about was being late for work. Dostoyevsky’s lonely dreamer in White Nights spent his nights constructing entire love stories in his head and his days not talking to anyone. Rousseau’s Julie ached with a love that was real and ruinous and completely impossible to explain to the people around her. Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund pulled in opposite directions their whole lives, each secretly envying what the other had. Proust remembered a childhood bedroom and needed forty pages to do it justice. Hemingway sent people to war and let them come back changed in ways they couldn’t name. K. stood before a court that never explained its charges, and somehow that felt more logical than the alternative.

It’s the same confusion, the same low-grade hunger, the same exhaustion with performing a version of yourself you didn’t audition for. The reason these books survive is because they’re accurate and they named something true at a time when people had no other word for it, and the name still fits.

You are not too sensitive. You are not too much. You are not the first person to feel bored by the life you’re supposed to want, or hollowed out by love, or quietly certain that something essential keeps getting lost in translation.

You’re just late to a very long conversation. Pull up a chair.

Hermann Hesse wrote it in 1930, set it in medieval Europe, and somehow made it feel like some questions addressed directly to the present. What do you do with beauty when the world keeps insisting on its own ugliness? What do you do with God when the plague is filling mass graves and nobody is intervening? And perhaps most pressingly, the question Hesse actually cares about: how do you live a life that is worth having lived?

He answers it with two men. They are, by design, a duality so clean it should feel schematic but somehow doesn’t. Narcissus stays. Goldmund wanders. Narcissus contemplates. Goldmund consumes. Narcissus reaches for the eternal. Goldmund keeps stumbling into the infinite. One of them, I will argue, has the better answer. But only just.

(A word of warning: I will be discussing this novel in full, including its ending.)

Narcissus is a young teacher at the cloister of Maribronn, and he is magnificent. Brilliant, ascetic, precise. He has arranged his inner life into something approaching architectural perfection. He thinks clearly, speaks carefully, and has identified his vocation so completely that there is almost no gap between who he is and what he does. His entire framework, for art, for God, for what it means to be human, is organized around the concept of the eternal: the complete, the static, the perfected, the atemporal.¹ When Goldmund arrives at the cloister as a student, Narcissus immediately sees something in him that Goldmund himself cannot yet name: a nature built for the world, not the cloister. He allows Goldmund to get away. This is, in its way, an act of love, though it is also an act of control.²

Goldmund wanders for years through a medieval Europe that Hesse renders with such ferocity: peasants dying of the plague, Jews being burned for it, a girl Goldmund has sheltered nearly raped by a man he kills in her defense, only for her to die of the plague anyway. He seduces women. He commits violence. He finds himself before a statue of the Madonna and becomes, almost against his will, an artist. He trains under Master Niklaus, creates work of staggering beauty, and then leaves, because he always leaves. He is constitutionally incapable of rest.

This is the novel’s structural engine: a mind that achieves perfection through stillness set against a soul that achieves meaning through motion. Hesse is not subtle about his sympathies (he clearly loves Goldmund more and so do I), but he is honest enough to give Narcissus the better arguments. This tension is what makes the book worth arguing with.

Goldmund’s wandering life is not a philosophical programme. He goes because something in him requires it, and the novel is largely honest about the ugliness this produces. He is frequently selfish. His relationships with women are shallow by his own admission. He participates in violence. He abandons every community that offers him shelter.

And yet.

Something happens to Goldmund in the world that could not have happened to Narcissus in the cloister. He sees the face of the dying. He watches the plague work its way through bodies he has loved. He kills a man and has to live inside the fact of having done it. He looks at the daughter of his master, disfigured beyond recognition by the same disease that once made her the embodiment of beauty for him, and he has to hold both images simultaneously: the beautiful face and the ruined one, in the same person. He cannot aestheticize his way out of this. He cannot reach for the eternal because the eternal, as Narcissus defines it, has no room for the kind of knowledge Goldmund is accumulating. The eternal demands a pure form. What Goldmund keeps finding is that the pure form and the broken form belong to the same body.

This is the novel’s most philosophically serious claim: that suffering, genuinely encountered rather than intellectually processed, produces a kind of knowledge that the contemplative life systematically forecloses. Goldmund does not become wise in the conventional sense. He does not arrive at clean conclusions. But he develops the capacity to hold contradictions without resolving them, to live in the tension between beauty and devastation without demanding that one cancel the other out.

If God is the kind of artist Narcissus imagines, then creation is a completed work, and evil is either an intentional feature or a flaw that implicates the creator’s goodness. But if creation is infinite rather than eternal, then evil is something that arises from the potential of created things. It was not designed. It emerged from the same freedom that made goodness possible. This is not a theodicy that satisfies everyone. It is, however, a theodicy that keeps God’s hands clean without requiring us to pretend evil is illusory, which is more than most theodicies manage.

What it demands in return is that the responsibility for evil shifts. Not to God, and not to some abstract principle, but to the individual, and to the obligation they carry toward every other person they encounter. Narcissus understands this intellectually but simply declines to feel it.

Narcissus and Goldmund belongs to a specific and underappreciated literary tradition: the novel of suffering as education. The organizing principle of these books is that a person cannot understand anything of genuine importance without first being comprehensively disabused of their original assumptions about how the world works.

Voltaire’s Candide (one of my absolute favorites) is the founding text of this tradition. Candide begins the novel as a committed Leibnizian optimist, convinced that this is the best of all possible worlds. He ends it having witnessed earthquake, war, rape, slavery, inquisition, and various philosophical frauds. His conclusion, famously, is that one must cultivate one’s garden: a modest, finite, practical engagement with what is immediately in front of you. Voltaire offers reorientation instead of consolation. The unpleasantness was not incidental.

Dickens, in both David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, works in a different register but toward a similar end. Oliver’s innocence is what the world keeps trying to destroy, and the novel’s moral gravity comes entirely from the reader’s awareness of the gap between what Oliver deserves and what he receives. David Copperfield is Dickens’s most autobiographical novel, and its emotional power derives from precisely the way its protagonist is formed, rather than simply informed, by suffering. David does not emerge from his childhood with theories. He emerges with scar tissue, and Dickens insists that scar tissue is knowledge.

What all these novels share with Hesse is a refusal of the idea that the good life is the sheltered life. Narcissus is sheltered. He is learned, disciplined, even wise. But there is a category of experience he will never have access to, and Hesse is ruthless about naming it: Narcissus cannot love without a mother. Cannot die without one either, as Goldmund says in his final, piercing observation. The cloister protects Narcissus from the worst of the world and, in doing so, protects him from a portion of what the world actually is.

I think this is why books like these shake you in ways that more comfortable novels cannot. They require that you sit with the evidence of how much damage life causes and ask yourself what that damage is for, if it is for anything at all.

Here is where I want to push back gently against Hesse’s own framing, and against the way the novel can often been read as a celebration of Goldmund’s vitalism over Narcissus’s austerity.

Goldmund’s life is not, in the end, a model. He wanders until he can no longer wander. He creates beautiful things and then abandons them because completion unnerves him. He reaches the threshold of a genuine ethical encounter with the world and then retreats into himself rather than crossing over. He moves toward society, but never quite moves out of himself. He recognizes the face of the other but does not act on that recognition with any consistency. His suffering educates him without fully transforming him. He dies, having glimpsed something extraordinary, without having found the form of life that would let him sustain it.

The failure is instructive. A life organized entirely around sensation and wandering does not produce the fullest version of the knowledge Goldmund was seeking. He needed some Narcissus in him: the capacity for stillness, for consolidation, for the patient interior work that turns raw experience into something one can actually live by.

And Narcissus, for all his luminous intellect, needed some Goldmund in him: the willingness to be disturbed, to let the face of the other penetrate his carefully organized inner life, to accept that knowledge bought at the cost of safety from experience is knowledge with a significant blind spot. The answer the novel keeps approaching but never quite states directly is not either Narcissus or Goldmund but a life that holds both principles in productive tension. The contemplative and the active. The interior and the exterior. Neither the monastery nor the road as a permanent address, but some more difficult arrangement that requires you to keep renegotiating the terms.

This is not a Buddhist answer. Nirvana is the extinguishing of desire, the dissolution of the self into something prior to individual wanting. That is Narcissus at full extension, and I personally find it genuinely unconvincing as a prescription for human living, however intellectually tidy it may be. The self is not at all some problem to be solved. It is the instrument through which experience happens. To extinguish it is to extinguish the very thing that makes the encounter with the other possible.

Equilibrium is something different. It is the development of a relationship with suffering that does not annihilate you and does not harden you either. It is, to borrow a phrase Hesse would have appreciated, the overcoming of the transitory without pretending the transitory never mattered.

I recognized in Goldmund’s restlessness something I know from the inside: the sense that one is always slightly past where one meant to stop, that the next experience will be the one that finally resolves something, that settling would mean missing whatever is just around the corner. Wandering, however beautiful, is incomplete as a life philosophy. At some point you have to stop and look at what you have accumulated and ask what it means.

I want my foundations shaken, regularly. I seek books that refuse the comfortable architecture of reassurance. Narcissus and Goldmund does this. So does Candide, so does David Copperfield, so does The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which is the bleakest possible version of the argument that love survives even when everything else does not.

I believe it’s important to be in the middle of things, uncertain and partly formed, capable of beauty and not immune to damage, wandering without a fixed destination but not without direction. To be, in other words, incomplete.

¹ Hesse’s Narcissus is drawing on something close to Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover: a God who is pure actuality, with no potentiality remaining unrealized. The problem, as the scholastics discovered, is that such a God has no motivation to do anything, including create the world.

² It is worth noting that this act of insight, identifying Goldmund’s nature and sending him toward it, requires profound attentiveness to another person. Narcissus is considerably better at recognizing the infinite in others than he is at living in it himself.

The lyrics are about the choice she made to pursue the career of a rock star and the misunderstanding she had with her parents regarding that choice. She left at 18, hungry in the literal sense for a year and a half, chasing a life her parents had not mapped out for her. And then she made it, spectacularly, and found that success had not quite resolved the ache of the distance. It had deepened it. The song’s chorus, calling out to her mother and father with a directness that carries the weight of someone who has everything the world calls success and still wants, above all else, to be held. After her father died in 2011, she was unable to perform the song throughout thirty-two European tour dates, saying “I hope to be able to sing it back one day, but for now, it’s too soon.” That detail alone tells you everything about what the song actually was to her.

I did not hear the Cranberries’ version first. I came to this song through Radical Face, which is the project name of Ben Cooper, a singer-songwriter from Jacksonville, Florida, who grew up in a family of nine siblings and states his family as his biggest influence. I have been listening to him for roughly ten years now, and the relationship I have built with his music is the kind that grows quietly over time, like a tree, each listen adding a layer that the previous one had not yet earned. His cover of Ode to My Family strips the original down to its skeletal emotional core, removing O’Riordan’s keening Irish wail and replacing it with something quieter and more interior, a voice that sounds more like a private admission. It is the difference between grief performed and grief overheard. I prefer it, and I think I know why: it sounds like a thought you are having, not a song you are listening to.

What makes Radical Face the ideal interpreter of this particular song is that family, in all its complicated, intergenerational weight, is essentially his entire artistic preoccupation. His Family Tree trilogy follows four generations of a fictional family called the Northcotes, spanning the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, detailing lives confronting war, death, progress, and the supernatural, with Cooper using only instruments that would have been available at the time the stories take place. It is one of the most ambitious projects in contemporary folk music, and its central conviction, running beneath every arrangement and narrative choice, is that families leave marks on each other that persist long after the people themselves are gone. Welcome Home, Son, his most well-known song, captures the specific bittersweet quality of returning somewhere deeply familiar and realizing you are now a visitor in it. Always Gold is about a sibling relationship so precisely observed it functions almost as anthropology. The whole body of work is saturated with the understanding that the people we come from are a permanent condition.

I’m writing this in my third year living away from my parents, in a foreign country, in a language that is not mine, in a life they can follow from a distance but cannot fully inhabit alongside me. My parents and I are the kind of family around whom worlds revolved mutually: their days organized themselves around me, and mine around them, with the total unselfconsciousness of people who have never had to think about the arrangement because it has simply always been the arrangement. Distance has made that visible in the way that removing something makes its outline apparent. I now know the shape of what I took for granted because I can see the space it occupied.

The first year you are surviving. The second year you are adapting. The third year you know exactly what you have traded and for what, and you hold both things simultaneously, the life you built and the life you miss, without the consolation of novelty to soften the weight of either.

Dolores O’Riordan passed away in January 2018 at forty-six. The Cranberries were one of the most emotionally honest bands of their generation, and she remains one of the most distinctive voices in any genre.

Radical Face’s Family Tree trilogy, beginning with The Roots (2011), is the kind of project that rewards the kind of attention most contemporary music does not ask for. Start with Welcome Home and let the rest follow.

About Time, written and directed by Richard Curtis, is categorized as a rom-com, which is accurate in the way that describing Proust as a novel about memory is accurate: technically correct and almost entirely insufficient. The premise is familiar enough: Tim, a young Englishman, discovers on his twenty-first birthday that the men in his family can travel back in time, returning to any moment in their own lives and living it again. He uses this ability, as any reasonable young man would, to improve his romantic prospects. He meets Mary, played by Rachel McAdams with the kind of warm specificity that makes even minor choices feel inhabited, and the love story proceeds with all the tenderness and occasional farce that Curtis does better than almost anyone working in commercial cinema.

But I would argue, the love story is not what the film is actually about. Or rather, it is the vehicle through which the film arrives at something considerably more serious, which it then delivers with such lightness that you are halfway through grieving before you realize you have been ambushed.

What Curtis understands, and what most writers in any genre fail to understand, is that endearment is not a function of screen time. Almost every character in About Time, including those who appear for thirty seconds, carries a complete interior life that you somehow intuit without being shown it directly. The eccentric playwright, the quietly devastated sister whose storyline runs alongside the central romance like a shadow it refuses to acknowledge, the mother pottering at the edges of scenes with a cheerfulness that only retrospectively reveals itself as a chosen response to things she has had to accept. Curtis writes peripheral characters the way Chekhov wrote peripheral characters: as though the story is also theirs and the camera simply happened to point elsewhere.

But it is the father who breaks you. Bill Nighy plays him with a restraint so precise it constitutes a kind of acting philosophy, a man of enormous warmth and quiet wisdom who has spent his life doing exactly what the film eventually teaches Tim to do: paying attention. His relationship with his son is not dramatized through conflict or the conventional apparatus of father-son narrative. It is dramatized through presence, through the specific texture of two people who genuinely enjoy each other’s company and know, somewhere beneath the daily pleasantness of it, that this will not go on forever.

When Tim makes his final journey back, returning not to fix anything or change anything but simply to stand one more time in an ordinary afternoon with his father, to walk across a beach in the grey English light doing nothing of consequence, I was not prepared for what it did to me. I watched it for the first time in 2015 when I was twenty, and I felt it as something poignant but still somewhat abstract, the way you feel things that you know will matter more later. When I returned to it in more mature phases of my life, it had become something else entirely.

I will not be coy about this: it changed something in my relationship with my own father. Not dramatically, not through any single conversation or declared resolution, but in the quieter and more durable way that a shift in perception changes things. I began to notice the ordinary afternoons more. The phone calls that were really just check-ins, the comfortable silences, the repeated stories I had heard enough times to recite myself. The film had instilled in me what Tim’s father tries to articulate in words but really communicates through the way he moves through his days: the idea that the extraordinary is almost never where you think it is, that it is usually hiding inside the ordinary, waiting to be noticed by someone paying sufficient attention.

This is, of course, a Proustian idea. It is the central idea of In Search of Lost Time: that experience contains more than we extract from it in the moment, that the past holds riches we failed to collect when we were living it, that consciousness applied retroactively to time already spent reveals dimensions that were always there and always missed. Proust’s solution is involuntary memory, the madeleine, the sudden ambush of the past arriving unbidden with its full sensory weight. Curtis offers something warmer: the decision, made daily and deliberately, to live each moment as though you are already living it for the second time. To bring to ordinary Monday afternoons the quality of attention you would bring if you knew you were returning to them.

The film’s closing monologue, in which Tim describes this practice, is so quietly radical that it tends to pass as sentiment. It is rather a phenomenological proposal: that the texture of your experience is not fixed by the events that constitute it but by the degree of attention you bring to it. That a life fully inhabited is available to everyone and requires no time travel whatsoever. Just the decision, renewed each morning, to notice.

I took that message to heart. I found it again on each rewatch, always slightly richer, always landing somewhere different depending on where I was in my own life and what I had in the intervening years learned about time and fathers and the specific weight of ordinary afternoons. That is what the best films do: they do not deliver their meaning all at once. They give you what you are ready for, and they wait, patiently, for you to come back for the rest.

Share

He called this the Double Empathy Problem. The core claim is: empathy failures between people with autism and neurotypical people are mutual. Neurotypical people are not, in fact, naturally gifted at reading people with autism. They are gifted at reading other neurotypical people, which is a different skill that happens to be treated as the universal standard because it belongs to the majority. When a person with autism struggles to interpret neurotypical social cues, this is called a deficit. When a neurotypical person fails equally to interpret the communication styles of people with autism, this is called normal. The asymmetry in how these identical failures are categorised tells you something important, not about autism, but about power.

The research that followed Milton’s proposal has been fairly consistent in supporting it. Studies have found that people with autism communicate effectively and fluidly with other people with autism, and that the social difficulties reliably observed in mixed neurotype interactions diminish significantly or disappear when both parties share a neurological style. The problem was never one-sided. It was always interactional, always produced by the encounter between two different systems, neither of which is inherently deficient and both of which are genuinely limited in their ability to read the other without effort and without awareness that effort is required.

I care about the corporate implications of this which are quite significant and almost entirely ignored. Management culture is saturated with empathy as a virtue, with frameworks for emotional intelligence, active listening, and reading the room. And virtually all of these frameworks are built around a single implicit model of how social interaction works, which is the neurotypical model, codified, packaged, and sold back to organizations as universal human skill. A manager praised for their emotional intelligence has usually demonstrated an ability to read neurotypical signals fluently. Whether they can read an employee with autism, an employee with ADHD, or anyone whose social cognition diverges from the median, is a question most performance frameworks do not think to ask.

What double empathy demands from management is a more honest account of what empathy actually requires. It requires knowing that your social intuitions are calibrated to a particular kind of person and are unreliable outside that range. It requires treating communication failures as joint problems rather than individual deficits, which changes who is responsible for solving them. And it requires building structures, meeting formats, feedback mechanisms, ways of communicating expectations, that do not assume a single social operating system and penalize everyone running a different one. Most organizations are nowhere near this, partly because it is genuinely difficult and partly because the people designing the structures are usually the people for whom the existing structures work fine, which is a bias so total it rarely registers as a bias at all.

The double empathy problem is, in the end, a specific instance of a much more general truth: that the failure to understand someone is almost never as one-directional as it feels from the inside. The question worth asking in any persistent communication breakdown, whether between a manager and an employee, a team and a stakeholder, or any two people who cannot seem to get through to each other, is not who is failing to communicate. It is what the gap between them is made of, and which of them has been told, so far, that the gap is entirely their fault.

Further reading:

Milton, D. (2012). “On the Ontological Status of Autism: The Double Empathy Problem.” Disability and Society.

Sartre introduces this type in The Age of Reason with great precision. Jacques, when confronted with anything that demands honest engagement, instinctively reaches for altitude. He revolves around the situation rather than entering it, searching eagerly for an eyrie from which he can take a vertical view of other people’s conduct. This is practiced, almost enthusiastic withdrawal that seems like perspective.

What makes the type interesting is that the eyrie feels like wisdom from the inside. The person who climbs above a conflict genuinely believes they are seeing it more clearly than those still standing in it. And in a narrow technical sense they are right: altitude does produce a kind of overview. What it surrenders is everything only visible from ground level. The texture of the thing. The actual stakes. The specific weight of what is being asked. None of that survives the ascent. But the person in the eyrie remains unaware of the loss, because what they have gained feels like the more valuable possession.

There is also a moral convenience to the view from above. If your primary relationship to any conflict is analytical, if your first move is always to rise above and observe, you are never quite responsible for what happens in it. You were watching. You were thinking. You were, in your own account, the most reflective person in the room. The eyrie is not only an epistemological position. It is a way of keeping your hands clean.

What this produces in practice is a particular kind of exhausting interlocutor. Someone who cannot be argued with directly because they are never quite where the argument is. Someone whose response to your most urgent claim is a remark about the nature of urgency. Someone who, when you are trying to resolve something real, offers you instead a typology of people who want to resolve things. You are talking to someone who is not there, and who considers their not-being-there a form of superior presence.

Sartre’s verdict is unsympathetic, and deliberately so. He is, for my money, one of the rare writers whose moral judgments feel earned precisely because he understands the psychology of the people he is indicting from the inside. The vertical view Jacques prizes is, in the novel’s moral framework, a refusal to accept that you are in the situation, that you are of it, that no amount of clever repositioning places you outside it. The eyrie is an illusion. Everyone is always on the ground. The only question is whether you are honest about it.

Reference:

Sartre, J.P. (1945). The Age of Reason. The first volume of his Roads to Freedom trilogy, and the most psychologically immediate of the three. Jacques appears briefly but leaves a long shadow.

But the question underneath my rambling is genuine: why does it matter if something is old? Why does age, in and of itself, produce in me something that I can only describe as reverence? A new café serving equally good coffee at an equally pleasant counter does not produce the same feeling. The coffee is identical. The counter is identical. The experience, in every immediately measurable sense, is the same. And yet something is different, and I feel the difference before I can articulate it, which is usually a sign that aesthetics is involved.

The philosopher who thought hardest about this particular feeling was probably Edmund Burke, who distinguished between the beautiful and the sublime: the beautiful being that which pleases through harmony and proportion, the sublime being that which overwhelms with scale and power and the sudden awareness of our own smallness. I believe old things produce a version of the sublime that Burke did not name. Standing beneath the vaulted ceiling of the Panthéon, or sitting on a bench in the Arènes de Lutèce where Romans sat two thousand years before me, I am experiencing beauty in the serene, proportional sense but also something more vertiginous: the sudden, visceral comprehension of duration. Of how much time has passed and how little of it I occupy. The old Parisian structures are evidence that things persist, that human effort can outlast the humans who made it, that the world was happening, richly and complexly, long before I arrived and will continue long after I leave. This is not even nostalgia, which is a sentimental attachment to a past you actually lived. I believe it’s an aesthetic response to continuity itself, to the fact that a thing has survived the attrition of time and is still here, still functioning, still gathering new people into its orbit.

Culturally, this matters in ways that go beyond individual aesthetic pleasure. A city that has preserved its physical history has preserved a form of memory that no archive can fully replicate. Paris does this better than almost any city on earth because it has refused, against considerable pressure, to become entirely new. Walking from one arrondissement to another you move through centuries without quite meaning to. This is what culture actually is, and it requires the old things to remain in order to function. Without them you get only the present, talking to itself, which is both lonelier and less interesting than it sounds.

Living inside a city with this much accumulated duration does something to your sense of your own place in time. It makes you feel correctly proportioned. One person, in one century, in a story that was already ancient and will continue long after everyone who remembers you is also gone. This is not at all a depressing thought. In the precise Burkean sense, it is a sublime one.

¹ Burke, E. (1757). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.

² The idea of cities as repositories of cultural memory is developed most rigorously by the architect Aldo Rossi in The Architecture of the City (1966), where he argues that urban form is itself a form of collective consciousness. Worth reading if you find yourself, as I do, unreasonably moved by old streets.

I was wrong in a way that I find almost embarrassing to admit, and that I’m going to admit anyway because intellectual honesty is apparently one of the things that arrives in your thirties along with the ability to say no to things you do not want to do and the mild but genuine pleasure of going to bed at a reasonable hour.

Thirty has not felt like a closing. It has felt, with a consistency that still surprises me, like a clarification. Not wisdom, exactly. I am not wise. But I am wiser than I was two years ago in ways that are specific and measurable and mine: stricter with my time, more honest about what I actually want from other people and what I am willing to offer in return, more capable of sitting inside a difficult feeling without immediately trying to exit it through distraction or performance. The interpersonal relationships I have now are fewer and better. The occupations I give my hours to are more deliberately chosen. The noise has not disappeared but I have gotten considerably better at not confusing it for signal.

There is a version of the turning-thirty essay that ends here, on a note of serene arrival, the narrator having reached a plateau of hard-won contentment from which they survey their past foolishness with fond condescension. That is not this essay, partly because I am not built for serenity and partly because the thing I feel most strongly at 30 is not satisfaction but anticipation. The best days are not behind me as some nostalgia. They are ahead of me, and I intend to be awake for them in a way that I was not always awake for what came before. Proust’s narrator went to bed early for a very long time. So, in my own way, did I. The difference is that I know it now, which is not a small thing. Knowing it is, in fact, almost everything.

What we call imagination, what we call creativity, is merely the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing those traces. Combining them in new configurations. Rearranging their components. But the components themselves were always delivered by experience first. This is Hume’s Copy Principle, and it is a rather startling claim about the limits of the human mind.

What about a golden mountain, or a red dragon? Surely those are original ideas, produced from nothing? No, Hume says. A golden mountain is gold, which you have seen, plus mountain, which you have seen, combined. A red dragon is a lizard, which you have seen, plus wings, which you have seen, plus red, which you have seen, scaled up and breathing fire you have also seen, fused into a single creature you have not. The novelty is in the configuration, not the elements. And the history of creative genius bears this out rather mercilessly.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is lifted from a twelfth-century Scandinavian legend, filtered through a French retelling and possibly an earlier lost English play. Romeo and Juliet is a 1562 narrative poem wearing new clothes. Dante's cosmology is Aristotelian theology plus Virgil's Aeneid plus the political violence of Florence, assembled under personal exile. Dostoevsky's tormented heroes are Hegel and French utopianism run through Siberian suffering and a faith that kept collapsing and rebuilding itself. Kafka's dreamlike bureaucratic dread is the Habsburg Empire he grew up inside, recombined with Kierkegaard's existential anxiety and his father's suffocating authority. What separates these writers from the rest of us is just the fact that nobody has ever recombined inherited material with greater precision, pressure, or feeling. The Copy Principle, in this sense, is an honest account of what genius actually does.

Share

Reference:

Hume, D. (1748). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section II. The Treatise of Human Nature (1739)

That someone is, of course, the algorithm. And the mechanism is algorithmic profiling: the practice of building detailed predictive models of your preferences, dispositions, and psychological vulnerabilities from your behavioral data, and then using those models to determine what information you see. Not exactly what you asked for. What they have calculated you are most likely to engage with. These are, it turns out, not the same thing at all.

Algorithmic profiling works by treating your past behavior as a reliable predictor of your future behavior. Every click, every pause, every scroll that slows down fractionally on a particular kind of content is a data point. Aggregated across millions of interactions, these data points produce a model that can predict (with uncomfortable accuracy) what you will find outrageous, what you will find comforting, and what will keep you on the platform for another seventeen minutes at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday when you should really be asleep.

The philosophical problem is not simply that this is manipulative, though it is. The deeper problem for me is that the profile influences the person. The content you are served shapes the beliefs you form, the emotions you practice, and the ideas you would never otherwise encounter. Over time, the algorithm starts producing your preferences rather than just predicting them. You are being nudged, continuously and invisibly, toward a version of yourself that is maximally profitable to someone else.

This is where cognitive sovereignty enters the picture. If your epistemic environment, the information landscape in which your beliefs are formed, is being curated by a system optimized for engagement rather than truth, accuracy, or your own reflective values, then in what meaningful sense are your resulting beliefs your own?

The Autonomy Problem

Philosophers have long distinguished between first-order desires, what you want, and second-order desires, what you want to want. A person with a smoking habit may want a cigarette while also wanting to be the kind of person who does not want cigarettes. The second-order desire is, in some sense, more authentically theirs. It reflects deliberate self-authorship rather than compulsion.

Algorithmic profiling is very good at satisfying first-order desires. It is arguably the most sophisticated first-order desire satisfaction machine ever built. What it is structurally indifferent to, and arguably hostile toward, is your second-order desires. You may want to be better informed, more exposed to views you disagree with, less reactive, more patient. The algorithm has no commercial incentive to help you become that person. Nope. It has every commercial incentive to keep serving the version of you that clicks. This is not at all a glitch or a bug. It is the product working as intended.

Cognitive sovereignty is not a demand for perfect rational autonomy, which is a standard no human being has ever met and none ever will. It is a more modest claim: that you are entitled to an epistemic environment that is not secretly engineered to exploit your psychological weak points for someone else’s profit. That the inputs to your thinking should not be curated by a system whose objectives are fundamentally misaligned with your own.

I have no clue if we can even build the legal, technical, or cultural infrastructure to protect that entitlement. The threat though is very much real. Your attention is a resource being harvested. The harvest is shaping what you believe. And the person who designed the system almost certainly has not thought very hard about your second-order desires at all.

The term “cognitive sovereignty” appears in various forms across digital rights literature. Luciano Floridi’s work on information ethics and the “infosphere” is a useful starting point for the philosophical framing. I was first introduced to the concept by Anna Riedl on Twitter.

For the behavioral mechanics of algorithmic engagement optimization, I would recommend Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Churchland is a Canadian philosopher who, starting in the 1980s, decided that philosophy and neuroscience had been living in separate apartments for far too long and that it was time they moved in together. She called the resulting cohabitation “neurophilosophy,” and she is widely considered its founding mother. Her core argument, put plainly, is this: the vocabulary philosophers and ordinary people use to describe the mind, words like “soul,” “free will,” “belief,” and “desire,” is scientifically empty. It refers to nothing neurobiologically real. And if it refers to nothing real, we should probably stop using it.

This, as you can imagine, went over pretty well with everyone.

What Is Neurophilosophy?

Before we get into why Churchland’s project is so controversial, it helps to understand what it actually is. Neurophilosophy is a strong claim that the right way to understand the mind is to look at what the brain is actually doing, and then rebuild our theory of mind from the ground up using that information.

If we take neuroscience seriously as a guide to what the mind actually is, we may discover that many of our ordinary mental concepts simply don’t carve nature at its joints. Let’s consider “belief.” When you say you “believe” that the coffee is too hot to drink, you are implicitly committed to the idea that there is some discrete, identifiable mental state inside you with a specific content that causes certain behavior. But when neuroscientists look inside your skull, they don’t find anything that obviously corresponds to that picture. They find patterns of activation distributed across neural networks, not tidy little boxes labeled “beliefs” and “desires.”

Churchland’s conclusion is that folk psychology, the commonsense theory of mind you and I use when we explain each other’s behavior in terms of beliefs, desires, and intentions, is a theory. And like any theory, it can be wrong. She thinks it probably is wrong, and that neuroscience will eventually replace it with something more accurate, the way chemistry replaced alchemy and astronomy replaced astrology. If you are currently insulted by the comparison of your inner mental life to alchemy, I’m afraid that is very much the point.

There Is No Soul, and Also No Belief

Churchland’s view is a version of what philosophers call “eliminative materialism.” The “materialism” part just means the mind is physical, which most people accept at some level these days. The “eliminative” part is where things get spicy. It means that certain mental categories we currently take seriously will eventually be eliminated from our best scientific picture of the world, not reduced to neural states, but simply dropped.

The soul is the obvious target here. Virtually everyone in the scientific community already agrees that “soul” picks out nothing in the physical world. But Churchland’s more provocative suggestion is that concepts like “belief,” “desire,” and even “pain” in its ordinary folk-psychological sense may be in the same boat. They are part of a theory that has served us reasonably well for coordinating social life, but that will ultimately prove too crude to capture what is actually happening in the brain.

This makes eliminative materialism extremely unpopular (and not just with religious people). It is also unpopular with philosophers who have spent entire careers analyzing the concept of belief, linguists who study how mental terms work in language, and basically any ordinary person who has ever been asked to describe their inner life and would prefer not to be told that their inner life is a theoretical fiction. That last group includes, I think, most people. In which case, my condolences.

The Objection

The most immediate objection to Churchland’s view goes something like this: “But I clearly have beliefs and desires. I know I believe it is raining right now. I know I want a cup of coffee. How could neuroscience possibly tell me I’m wrong about the contents of my own mind?”

This is a fair objection, and it deserves a fair answer. Churchland’s response is that introspection, our ability to report on our own mental states, is not infallible. There is now quite a lot of neuroscientific evidence that our introspective reports are frequently confabulated after the fact, that our brains make decisions before we are consciously aware of them, and that the story we tell ourselves about why we did something is often a post-hoc rationalization rather than an accurate causal account. The fact that something seems a certain way from the inside is not decisive evidence that it really is that way.

This is a such a fascinating point. It is also the kind of point that makes you feel vaguely nauseated once you really sit with it. The idea that your confident sense of your own beliefs and motivations might be a story your brain is telling you rather than a direct readout of what is actually happening inside you is philosophically exhilarating and personally destabilizing, which is exactly the combination that makes philosophy both valuable and universally dreaded.

So What Do We Replace It All With?

A reasonable follow-up question is: if we are supposed to throw away all our folk-psychological vocabulary, what exactly replaces it? Churchland’s answer is that we don’t know yet, and that this is fine. Science routinely works in the gap between abandoning an old framework and fully articulating the new one.

What neurophilosophy can do in the meantime is start building bridges. Churchland’s own work has explored how neuroscience might inform our understanding of moral cognition, decision-making, and social behavior. Her 2011 book Braintrust argues that our moral sense is rooted in neural mechanisms that evolved to support social bonding in mammals, and that oxytocin and related neurochemicals are doing a lot of the philosophical heavy lifting that we used to attribute to Reason, God, or the Moral Law.

A lot of philosophers feel that explaining where our moral intuitions come from does not tell us which ones are correct. Churchland is skeptical that the question “which intuitions are correct?” has an answer that floats free of biology entirely. This disagreement has been ongoing for several decades now.

Conclusion

Churchland’s neurophilosophy is, at its core, a very simple idea with very radical implications: if you want to understand the mind, you have to look at the brain, and if what you find in the brain doesn’t match your pre-existing philosophical vocabulary, then the vocabulary has to go. Au revoir ! The soul, the will, the self as a unified rational agent, these may all turn out to be useful fictions rather than scientific categories.

This is either a liberating insight or an intolerable affront to human dignity, depending on who you ask. Most people, in my experience, oscillate between the two depending on how the argument is going for them at any given moment. Which is, come to think of it, exactly the kind of behavioral pattern that neuroscience is getting increasingly good at explaining, even if we haven’t quite agreed on what to call it yet.

What I absolutely love is how much the film trusts its supporting characters. Tom Cruise doesn’t have to carry the entire runtime on charm alone. Dorothy’s sister Laurel is a fully realized person with her own frustrations, her own wit, her own arc. Rod Tidwell’s marriage is more textured and emotionally honest than most films’ central relationships. Of course I have to mention the young Ray Boyd who is adorable and provides the emotional weight, grounding the film’s romance in a messy reality. Everyone on screen has a soul, a history you can sense without being told. That kind of quiet, distributed humanity is almost impossible to find today, and watching Jerry Maguire, you feel its absence everywhere else.

And yes, Tom Cruise. There is simply no one like him. Magnetic doesn’t even cover it. He is a different breed of movie star altogether, one that the industry spent decades producing and may never reproduce again. Every beat feels earned.

The film also moves slowly by today’s standards, and that slowness can be such a gift. Things breathe. Scenes are allowed to linger past their narrative utility because the film understands that emotion needs room to settle. It doesn’t panic and cut away. It lets you sit with people. I have missed that feeling.

That is exactly what modern filmmaking has largely abandoned. There’s a particular kind of film being made right now, engineered for half of our attention. Films designed to play in the background while you scroll, constructed with enough noise and momentum to register passively but not demanding enough to require genuine presence. You know the ones. They are sometimes technically competent, frequently expensive, but almost completely forgettable the moment they end.

Jerry Maguire is the opposite. Almost every scene pulls you away from whatever else you were doing and plants you there. The performances are authentic. The emotions are specific. The small moments, a look, a pause, a conversation happening in a car, carry as much weight as anything louder.

There are certain sequences that lean a little too hard into the era’s sentimentality but you know what, I don’t look at them as imperfections. I have thoroughly missed that. The imperfections are human ones, which makes them forgivable. This is a film that was clearly made by people who cared, for audiences expected to care back.

That social contract between filmmaker and viewer has quietly dissolved somewhere along the way. Jerry Maguire is a reminder of what it felt like when it was still intact. A rom-com that is cynical about the world but stubbornly optimistic about people.

I’ve been reading Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason, which might explain why I particularly fixate on those lines above. The novel follows Mathieu, a philosophy teacher drifting through 1938 Paris, paralyzed by his own freedom. He wants to be authentic, to live without self-deception, to make choices that genuinely express who he is. But every choice feels arbitrary. Every path equally meaningless. He’s trapped by the terrible realization that nothing compels him toward any particular way of being.

This is what Sartre meant by being “condemned to be free.” We don’t choose to be thrown into existence, but once here, we’re responsible for everything we make of it. There’s no instruction manual, no essential nature we’re fulfilling, no cosmic purpose we’re serving. Existence precedes essence. We exist first, then we decide what that existence means, if it means anything at all.

If nothing inherently matters, then I have to decide what matters. Every single time. I can’t fall back on tradition, divine command, what my mom said, natural law, or any other framework that would tell me how to live. I have to choose. And in choosing, I take responsibility not just for my own life but for the kind of world I’m endorsing through my choices. When I choose monogamy, I’m saying monogamy is valuable. When I choose my career over my relationships, I’m declaring that career is more important. When I stay in bed instead of helping a stranger, I’m announcing that comfort outweighs compassion.

Sartre calls the attempt to escape this responsibility “bad faith.” It’s when we pretend we’re not free, when we act as if our choices are inevitable or determined by forces beyond our control. The waiter who performs his role so perfectly he seems to become the role. The person who says “I had no choice” when they absolutely did.

Mathieu, for all his intellectual honesty about freedom, spends most of The Age of Reason in exactly this kind of bad faith. He wants to be free but won’t commit to anything that would actually express that freedom. He wants to be authentic but keeps waiting for some external circumstance to force his hand.

I recognize this paralysis. Once you truly accept that nothing has inherent meaning, that you’re the sole author of significance in your life, the question becomes: on what grounds do you choose anything? If it’s all arbitrary, why choose this over that? Why get out of bed? Why pursue any particular goal? Why care about anything at all?

What does it mean if it all means nothing? The question persists in the face of its own potential futility. Maybe that’s the actual insight. The question “what does it mean?” seems to be built into human consciousness at such a fundamental level that even recognizing the possibility of meaninglessness doesn’t make the question go away.

I wake up and immediately start constructing narratives. This day matters because I’m working toward this goal. This relationship matters because it’s teaching me this lesson. This setback matters because it’s building this quality in me. I can intellectually acknowledge that these narratives are self-created, that the universe doesn’t care about my goals or lessons or character development, and yet I keep narrating anyway.

Sartre might say this is bad faith, this constant meaning-making. But I’m not sure he’s right. Or rather, I’m not sure living in “good faith” is actually possible for creatures like us. We’re meaning-making machines. We can’t perceive raw, uninterpreted reality. We see patterns, stories, significance. Even when we try not to.

The existentialists say: accept that there’s no inherent meaning, then create your own through authentic choice and commitment. But what makes a choice “authentic”? What grounds could there possibly be for preferring one self-created meaning over another? If I decide my life is about art and you decide your life is about family and someone else decides their life is about accumulating wealth, on what basis can we say any of these is more or less authentic? More or less meaningful?

I don’t think Sartre is wrong that we’re radically free, that existence precedes essence, that we create ourselves through our choices. But I also don’t think we can simply embrace this freedom and move on. The vertigo doesn’t go away. We’re stuck in permanent dialectical tension between needing meaning and knowing there isn’t any, between making choices and recognizing their arbitrariness, between living as if things matter and suspecting they don’t.

This might sound bleak. It probably is bleak. But don’t you think there’s something comforting about it too? If nothing inherently means anything, then I can’t get it wrong. There’s no cosmic or divine standard I’m failing to meet, no essential purpose I’m betraying. I’m just here, making choices, constructing narratives, asking what it all means (even when it might mean nothing).

I simply couldn’t stop comparing it to Uncut Gems, which remains a far superior film in terms of structure and natural progression. While Marty Supreme has even more subplots or bigger scale than Gems, the development didn’t feel nearly as organic.

That said, the filmmaking itself is undeniable. It is shot in an incredible way that we simply don't see anymore. We often talk about wanting real, grounded stories that feel lived-in rather than grand "theme-park" spectacles, and this is it. Making a period film feel this tangible is extremely difficult, and it succeeds as a frantic, claustrophobic visual ride with an amazing score. The performances are absolutely stunning across the board, especially Kevin "Mr. Wonderful" O'Leary in his acting debut.

However, despite a phenomenal turn by Chalamet, I felt let down by the script. The story seemed carefully constructed for the Oscar appeal rather than for natural narrative flow. The ending, while beautiful, felt abrupt and unearned. The film simply didn’t do the emotional legwork to justify that final sequence.

If Uncut Gems had received this level of hype and the icon status Chalamet currently enjoys, Adam Sandler would have won an Oscar, and deservingly so. Marty Supreme just isn’t as well-rounded or tight.

An enjoyable ride nonetheless. I will always look forward to anything the Safdie universe produces.