This is 74.

PREACHING

Unless it’s to the choir, preaching is the sort of thing people don’t like, but in a good way. Good preaching makes you uncomfortable enough to remember it. The best preaching draws a full circle from that discomfort all the way to some kind of earned insight, so that you go from squirming in the pew to jumping up with pure heartfire by the end.

But good preaching is hard to do, and dangerous, because not only is it difficult to *choose* to make people uncomfortable, it’s dangerous to offend them to the point that they abandon or attack you.

Jesus, of course, is the best example of a Good Preacher. He offended pretty much everyone. Some of them filled up with heartfire. Some of them decided to kill him.

PANDERING

Wouldn’t it be great if we could do the preaching without the bad feelings? Shouldn’t good preaching just make people feel good? How can we do that?

Easy, just tell them what they want to hear, in the way they want to hear it. Bingo bango, you got yourself some fans.

Except oh, whoops, turns out that without the pain, preaching is just pandering. The only way to the heartfire is through the squirming.

PORNOGRAPHY

But hey, maybe you’re fine with that. There’s a healthy market for good feelings, after all. Why not give the people what they want?

In fact, why not strip away anything and everything that does not precisely stimulate good feelings in your audience?

Then, in order to reliably increase shareholder value, you’re going to need to calibrate your content to dial up those target feelings as much as possible -- let’s shoot for a minimum 2% increase every fiscal quarter.

Leave the collection plates to the preachers, and the book deals to the panderers. For the pornographer shall never thirst.

This is 73.

Political Technology

When technology doesn’t work, it’s because it fails to understand or respect the natural laws of the material world. When political philosophies don’t work, it’s because they fail to understand or respect the natural laws of the human soul.

We live in an era of immense technological power over the material world. So much so that scarcity has shifted from a material problem to a political one. In other words, we have the technological means to meet the basic needs of every person in the world: food, shelter, rudimentary healthcare. The fact that we are so demonstrably failing to accomplish this proves that what we lack is the necessary political philosophical wisdom. Hunger is a political problem. Poverty is a political problem. WAR is a political problem.

We obviously and desperately need better politics. Unfortunately, the dominant cultural assumption for the past several hundred years has been that all these problems only needed sufficient advances in material science, as though humans were just a different sort of manipulable material.

But now that we’ve got all the technology we need, we’re stumped. Where’s the utopia we were promised? We’ve over-indexed on math, and chemistry, and physics, and computing, as though we could solve war with science.1

We have become philosophically idiotic. Why else would Marx be coming back around in popularity? We’ve allowed our collective, hard-won spiritual wisdom to wither on the generational vines. The bad news is that once lost, this wisdom can only be won back as hard as it was the first time.

The good news is that all wisdom starts in the same place: right at the center of your own dumb soul. In other words, you’ve got to get your own life in order. Then, once you’ve got some discipline, some self-knowledge, and the confidence that you are capable of basically taking care of yourself without having to be babied by your parents or the state, you can start reaching outward to take care of other people who haven’t quite gotten to that point yet. Maybe your actual children, maybe your trainwreck brother or deadbeat sister, maybe your aging parents, maybe your bookclub or D&D bros.

And so it goes. One person at a time, one family at a time, clawing back the wisdom of ages to recapture and rebuild the political technologies that can actually start to solve the political problems that material science never could, and never can.

This is 72.

Wedding Night

Say you’re a virginal young Jewish woman two thousand years ago. You and nine friends have been invited into the bridal party for a wedding. Yay! Easily the most action you’ll see all year. Which, incidentally, is about how long you’ll have to get ready for it.

Back then, understand, weddings happened in two stages:

First, a betrothal, which was pretty serious business, basically legally binding the bride and groom to the point that they would need a divorce to get out of it. Presumably this was to give the families and everyone else time to prepare for not only the big event, but for the birth of a brand new family in the village. Maybe helpful to think of this as the exact opposite of getting drunk hitched in Vegas.

Anyway, the second stage, the actual event of the wedding is gonna happen up to a whole year later. This is when the groom will come pick up his new missus and lead the first-century Hebrew equivalent of a conga line to the feast.

So now word’s gotten out that today’s gonna be the day, everyone’s doing last minute prep, including the families of the bride and groom, who are still haggling over the dowery and other boring business, and you and your gals are hanging out and waiting for the show to get started.

As one of the the ten virgins, you are part of a *minyan*, the number necessary to form a quorum for a proper Jewish ceremony (and it’s hard to get more proper, or more ceremonial, than a wedding). The ten of you have one job: light that bride up like the queen she is.

For this, you all brought lamps.

Five of you were based enough to bring extra oil, too, because how cringe would it be if you ran out before the bridegroom rolled up? Unfortunately, the other five of you didn’t really think about it.

Well, no surprise, it gets pretty late (no one ever knows when the bridegroom will actually show up), so y’all fall asleep. Which is fine. Lots of people are sleeping at this point. You don’t want to power down when it’s time to get down.

Finally, around midnight, you wake up to the sound of people shouting that the bridegroom is finally on his way, and so you and your fellow pyt’s all trim your lamps, because you know you’re not getting into that feast without a big bright lamp to light up the woman of the hour.

Of course, by the point, whatever oil you had in the lamp is all burned off. Lucky for five of you, you brought extra, so no worries. But the other five are starting to panic.

“Hey can I get some of that extra oil?” They’re asking their based sistren.

Sorry Charlene, doesn’t work like that. It’s not like anyone thought, hey, I bet my friends are going to be stupid so I’d better bring extra oil for them *and* me. No ma’am. They start sharing, they all run out, and then that bride will be walking in the dark.

So what are the Cringe Five (as their friends definitely don’t start calling them behind their back) going to do? Well, they’re gonna run back into town and hope they can go buy some oil from someone in the middle of the night.

Meanwhile, the bridegroom comes through, the whole wedding party lines up with their lamps, and the five virgins with bright burning lamps join the procession they’ve been looking forward to all year. Everyone files into a great big room set with tables and a frankly silly amount of food and wine.

The Cringe Five manage to get more oil, but by the time they get back, the doors are shut.

They cry and bang on the doors until the Bridegroom cracks it open and says who are you, I don’t know you, get outta here.

Cold.

But also: these chicks had one job. They were supposed to light up his bride. But they weren’t thinking about that, obviously, even though *literally everyone knows* how long it takes to burn through the oil in a lamp, so the bride only had five out of the ten members of her entourage she was supposed to have.

So how do you think the groom feels about these young ladies?

The lesson here is, figure out what matters, and prepare accordingly.

This is 71.

Remember this girl?

Fifteen years ago, she put a song she wrote on the internet.

Oo-ooh-ooh, hoo yeah, yeah
Seven a.m., waking up in the morning
Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs
Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal
Seein’ everything, the time is goin’
Tickin’ on and on, everybody’s rushin’
Gotta get down to the bus stop
Gotta catch my bus, I see my friends (My friends)

It proceeded to go bonkers viral in a way most people have nightmares about. Absolutely everyone ridiculed this silly teenage suburbanite, who wrote a song about being, in the vernacular of the time, “a basic bitch who hangs out with her basic bitch friends.”

Kickin’ in the front seat
Sittin’ in the back seat
Gotta make my mind up
Which seat can I take?

It also had the most annoying hook you could possibly imagine.

It’s Friday, Friday
Gotta get down on Friday
Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend, weekend

There was a homemade music video and everything.

Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah)
Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah)
Fun, fun, fun, fun
Lookin’ forward to the weekend

As of this writing, the song has 181 MILLION views on YouTube. Fifteen years ago, I did not know one single person who didn’t think it was both embarrassing and maddening, and you could not get away from it.

7: 45, we’re drivin’ on the highway
Cruisin’ so fast, I want time to fly
Fun, fun, think about fun
You know what it is
I got this, you got this
My friend is by my right, ay
I got this, you got this
Now you know it

And you only really had to hear it once to guarantee that you’d hear the chorus whining through your brain at least once every Friday for maybe the rest of your life.

It’s Friday, Friday
Gotta get down on Friday

Fifteen years ago, no one had any respect at all for

Rebecca Black

A few days ago, Tidal (an I-hate-Spotify music streaming alternative) served up a new song by Rebecca Black in my “Discover Daily” playlist. It turns out she’s making music in the heavy hyperpop genre I often dip into. I like the song enough not to skip past it right away, and absolutely did not recognize who it was I was listening to.

In fact, I never would have realized it if I hadn’t liked it enough to go take a look at some of her other tracks, which I do so often from “Discover Daily” that it’s become muscle memory.

Anyway, imagine my surprise.

So am I a fan of Rebecca Black now? I dunno, not really. The song wasn’t that good.

But that’s so very much not the point, is it? It doesn’t matter if you think she’s talented. It doesn’t matter if you think her new music is good or bad. It certainly doesn’t matter how you felt about her back in 2011.

What matters is that even after the whole fucking universe made fun of her (including me and probably including you) and tried to bully her back into suburban obscurity, she kept making music.

And she’s still making music.

That’s what matters.

Happy Friday.

This is 70.

You missed it.

There was a time, earlier in your life, when things were all lined up like little duckies, cute little flippered fowl, waiting expectantly for you to knock them down, one by one. But you didn’t, and so they waddled away.

Then there was that other time, the phone was ringing and ringing in the other room. You heard it, even though you pretended you didn’t. You heard it ring and ring and you knew who was calling, and that the call was for you, and that if you picked it up, you wouldn’t be able to go back to your spot, all cozy by the fire. You knew things would change. So you didn’t get up, you didn’t go into the other room, you didn’t pick up the phone, and then eventually it stopped ringing.

Just the other day, the planets, or whatever, aligned, or something -- anyway the point is all of the cosmic forces were arrayed in your favor, waiting for you to do the thing, the thing you felt, the thing that got pulled on by all that woo-woo gravitational energy. But you sort of leaned the other way instead and called it indigestion. So eventually all those celestial bodies drifted into a configuration to pull on someone else. Someone not you.

And surely you remember that other time, a long time, when your heart was filled with some kind of divine power, some kind of immaculate map to a treasure only you could find? You looked inward at it many times. Looked, and then folded it back up and tucked it away again. Each time you looked, the way was clear, but frightening, and you couldn’t hold it all in your head. You poked around a bit at the edges, but ultimately, what? Well you chickened out. You were a little chicken shit. Then one day you reached for that map and it wasn’t there anymore, was it? Maybe you forgot to put it back and it blew away. Or maybe the delicate, shimmering parchment crumbled inside the hardness of the heart you stored it in. Anyway, it’s gone now, and there’s no getting it back.

You don’t like to be reminded of these things, but you can’t help remembering. They haunt you. Sometimes at 2am, when you get up to pee, sometimes in the middle of a stressful day at a job you hate, sometimes in the shower, always after the second piece of cake. They keep their own schedule, but they never fail to visit you with a special flavor of despair, all your own, that no one else can ever taste.

But it’s worse than you think. There are, unkept by your own flawed memory, countless others: the chances you failed to take, the invitations you turned down. And an even greater number still: opportunities of which you were never aware, but would have easily seen had your heart been open, and not closed.

You have left great work undone, work that only you could do. There was a time, there was a chance, there was an opportunity, an invitation, a calling, and you missed it.

You missed it.

So what? Tough turkey. Boo hoo.

For God’s sake, don’t miss the next one.

This is 69.

The cure for a crappy worldview

I first heard the term “ontological shock” from on her excellent UFO Rabbit Hole Podcast (which is now called — that’s her Substack, but you can and should find her show wherever you listen to podcasts).

It’s a relatively new term — as in, if you don’t run in the UFO/UAP/High Strangeness cultural domains, you might not have heard it before. So, for the uninitiate, ontological shock is a profound psychological state of disorientation, specifically when it is caused by an event, discovery, or experience that shatters a person’s core assumptions about reality, existence, and how the universe works.

To put it more simply, it is the foundational disruption of a person’s core beliefs.

Many people in the high strangeness communities of interest have gone through what they would call ontological shock. For many, maybe most people, this process is deeply uncomfortable, if not outright terrifying and painful.

We build our core assumptions subconsciously, based on the sum of our experiences throughout life. They help us orient ourselves within our physical environments and communities. They help us make sense of our own selves. So it makes sense that ontological shock would be somewhat traumatic for a lot of people. No one likes to feel lost.

But what if your core beliefs suck? Not as in, what if they are morally bad and wrong, but as in, what if they consistently make you miserable?

Once again, I will resort to an absurd illustration.

Say one of your core assumptions is that only the strong and/or lucky can find happiness, and that you are weak and ill-favored….

Shoot, I just described the black-pilled manosphere. Let me try again.

Say you’ve been brought up to believe in a cruel and capricious god called Moloch, who is all-knowing and all-powerful, and delights in human suffering. Further, you believe that after you die, you are fated to either torture or be tortured for eternity, depending on how well you satisfy Moloch’s ugly demands over the course of your short and frightful life.

Then, one day, you have an experience that shatters your core assumptions about reality, existence, and how the universe works.

Does it seem like maybe this would come as, I don’t know, a relief?

An ontological relief, even.

I’m going to pull on this thread just a bit more, mmkay?

Many or most of the people who experience ontological shock as painful and/or scary are being disrupted out of a materialist paradigm, or what I’ve called the dead universe cosmology. For instance, before her own ontologically shocking experience, Kelly was a committed atheist, which is one of the things that made her so relatable to an audience of (predominantly) educated and privileged1 millennials and gen-xers.

What this suggests to me is that the dominant paradigm among educated Western elites — strict materialism and a knee-jerk rejection of the numinous as backward and superstitious — is comfortable. This goes a long way toward explaining how well and widely it spread. People tend to gravitate toward beliefs that feel good and demand as little as possible from them.2

This also gives the lie to the idea that “religion is the opiate of the masses.”3

While I’ve never experienced ontological shock, per se, my own exploration of so-called high-strangeness has consistently helped me shrug off the strict materialism that had been threatening, at one time, to suffocate my soul. Thus, for me, every event, discovery, or experience that challenges the core assumptions of the dead universe cosmology comes as a profound ontological relief.

3

Inquiry with Kelly Chase

Atheism Is The Opiate of the Masses

Inquiry with Kelly Chase is also a podcast. Watch/listen and subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube…

Read more

6 months ago · 232 likes · 89 comments · Kelly Chase

This is 68.

The “stakes” of belief

This morning, as my 8 and 4-yr-old ate breakfast, I found myself repeating an injunction that has become very familiar in our household: “Stop arguing. Let it go. Eat your oatmeal.”

This time, though, the 8-yr-old had a very compelling argument. “I just need to finsih saying what I was trying to say.”

“No you don’t,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”

I proceeded to (very calmly) explain that when two people start arguing, and get upset, neither of them is really listening to the other anymore. So that’s why it no longer matters what you say. You could be 100% correct, with a perfect explanation, but it will only make your sister angry.

One of the most interesting things about kids is how purely human they are. It is easy to see basic psychology play out in their behavior because they haven’t learned to hide it as well as adults usually do. We become very convincing to ourselves and sometimes (but less often) others, that the defense of our beliefs has something to do with facts or truth or moral superiority.

But what’s really going on is that we automatically, from pretty much day one in our little fleshy bodies and brains, associate what we believe with who we are. In other words, our beliefs are tied into our identity.

This is a problem for us if we hope to learn anything.

Case in point: my very own children. It’s astonishing to me how doggedly my son will insist upon his own rectitude, even as he is faced with overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It is with the utmost reluctance that he’ll cede a given position — one which he may have held for only a few minutes! And this has been happening for years, since he first started being able to have actual conversations.

But a brief glance at public discourse will reveal that this is not unique to my kids. It is a human thing. We will deploy every possible tactic to defend the things we believe, because the possibility that what we believe might turn out not to be true terrifies us.

Why?

Well, if we confuse our beliefs for our identity, then if something we believe is wrong, it means we are wrong. Fundamentally.

Let’s illustrate with absurdity: if you believe in Santa Claus, and that’s part of your identity, well then what if it turns out Santa Claus doesn’t exist? Doesn’t that mean, by extension, you don’t exist?

If what we believe is tied into our identity, then the stakes for those beliefs are existential.

No wonder it’s so hard to keep a cool head during a debate. “I better not lose, or I’ll die.”

And then, if you lose… “I don’t care what anyone else says, I know I won.”

Translation: “I don’t care what anyone else says, I know I exist.”

For the most part, we don’t defend ideas, we defend ourselves. Which is a bum deal for ideas, let me tell you.

The antidote for this is, of course, to do your best to disentangle your self worth and very sense of personhood from whatever it is you may believe.

This is harder than it sounds.

You can carve out whole categories of things that you feel safe being wrong about, but deep down, you have beliefs you would die to defend, because you feel certain your life depends on them.

It might be hard to know what those things are off the top of your head, but there’s a pretty good way to find out. What are the ideas that make you angry? What do people say that makes you recoil in disgust, or fear? Dig underneath those emotions, and you’ll probably find the beliefs that are wrapped tightly around your heart.

What happens if you loosen those bindings? What happens if you let them go?

It turns out you can keep believing something without needing it to be true to survive.

Or anyway, that’s what I believe. I could be wrong.

This is 67.

I’m reading Will Smith’s autobiography.

Unsurprisingly, it’s great. Not least because he very smartly hired Mark Manson to help him write it. So it feels and sounds like Will Smith, and it’s all about his life and experiences, from his own memory, but the material is both well-crafted and wildly entertaining. It’s honestly a very easy rec, so go check it out.

Anyway, I find myself terribly inspired by this man’s story. He was and is an exceptional human, a singularity of our species, but, like all real humans, the full story of his life, the decisions he made, the why’s behind them -- it all offers plenty of universal insight that is actually very useful and cool.

Here are two quotes from the chapter I read this morning:

Life is like school, with one key difference—in school you get the lesson, and then you take the test. But in life, you get the test, and it’s your job to take the lesson. We’re all waiting until we have deep knowledge, wisdom, and a sense of certainty before we venture forth. But we’ve got it backward—venturing forth is how we gain the knowledge.

And then, a few pages later...

It’s better to die than to walk around scared.

I guess I could write a whole post breaking that down, but I don’t think I need to. What I’d be trying to say is already right there.

This is 66.

A pen and a piece of scrap paper

I’ve used probably every type of productivity tool there is, all the way from formatted physical journals to AI-enabled smart calendars. I’ve used GTD, pomodoro, MITs, time blocking, Eat the Frog, BuJo, kanban, deep work, 1-3-5, mind mapping, PARA, and The 12 Week Year. For most of the last 15 years, I’ve used some combination of at least three or four of these together.

But lately, the only thing I’m using is a pen and a piece of paper. In the morning, I write down whatever happens to be clawing at the walls of my brain, and then add to the list throughout the day, as needed.

You may wonder what magical methodology I employ to determine which thing to focus on first, and so on.

I will share with you my secrets.

First, triage

Triage: the medical process of sorting and prioritizing patients based on the severity of their condition when resources or staff are limited. The goal is to maximize survival rates by treating the most critical cases first

Once the things have been carted out of my brain and onto the paper, like casualties arranged on cots in a gymnasium, it is very easy to see which one needs the most attention in that moment. Once that’s taken care of, I move on to the next, and so on.

At a certain point, though, all the tasks in critical condition have been treated, and I’m left with a list of things that would be good to do, but won’t ruin my life if left undone today.

That’s when I initiate…

The YeeHaw Protocol

As I described in my recent post, “A naughty way to beat procrastination,” basically, I just pick the thing that I actually want to do the most.

But what about when I run out of yeehaw? What if all that’s left are things I should do, things that are important to do, but that I don’t feel like doing?

It turns out that yeehaw energy can carry me through at least a couple of these sorts of things before it’s truly all gone. In other words, if I’m feeling all good and productive after crossing off a bunch of triage and yeehaw tasks, well then shoot, I might as well go track down that form my accountant asked for to help finally finish my 2025 taxes.

Do all the things get crossed off the day’s list? No sir. But if they’re important, they’ll make a pilgrimage to tomorrow’s list, so no worries.

Have I finally mastered project and task management? Am I one of the ascended masters of productivity? Will this method solve all my problems and yours, forever?

I dunno maybe.

My meta-philosophy is that you need to approach productivity tools and/or frameworks in one of two ways:

1. Pick one thing, and stick with it forever

2. Try out a hundred things, and don’t expect any of them to work forever

The approach that will work for you probably depends on a whole lot of factors that are way outside the scope of this short essay, but it comes down to what kind of person you are. And frankly it probably comes down to whether you are monofocal or polyfocal. I’m definitely the latter. Which means I will likely abandon this wonderful, simple, pen-and-paper method before you’ve even had a chance to read about it.

But that’s okay. I’ve used it before, I’ll use it again. In the meantime, I’ve got a dozen other tools and frameworks to promiscuously pick off the shelf of my wide and wandering experimentation.

This is 65.

I hate social media.

But why?

I’ve basically been completely off Facebook and Instagram for many years, and I never got into TikTok. Or, more accurately, I avoided TikTok like the plague. The couple of times I gave it a shot, I observed hours melt away like they never existed, and there was no comedown. I thought, “This is the most perfect digital drug ever invented.” And I’ve got plenty of addictions already, thank you.

Most people have at least one digital vice, and my most persistent one, over the years, has been YouTube. For this reason, I have to keep it off my phone, and every once in a while I have to engage some very stern blockers on my computer to keep myself from sliding over to the homepage, perpetually tiled with infinite delights.

This happened recently, when I found myself spending progressively more time scrolling Shorts, which is basically just YouTube’s TikTok clone, every day getting better at mimicking that special sauce. If I hadn’t thrown the blocker back up, I’d probably be watching Shorts right now, instead of writing this essay, and I’d find myself either missing another day (which is basically what happened last Friday, the first time I broke my streak), or scrambling to finish a post before going to bed, instead of spending that time with my family.

So why do I hate social media?

Well, it’s not because it’s addictive. I don’t hate Oreos, even though I can’t keep them in the house. I don’t hate Dr. Pepper, even though it took me years to stop craving it so hard I wanted to cry. I still love those things, even though they are obviously engineered to maximally hack my nervous system and kill me. I’m human, I can’t help but love a superstimulus.

I hate social media because I’m bad at it.

Way back when I quit Facebook and Instagram, it wasn’t because I was addicted to scrolling (although I was), it was because I was addicted to the engagement notifications on my own damn content. Or, rather, I was perpetually disappointed in how few of those notifications I received. I wanted likes! I wanted comments! I wanted shares! And I wasn’t getting nearly enough of them to satisfy my cravings, so I picked up my ball and left.

Since then, I’ve found a lot more satisfaction sitting astride my high horse, judging the entire ecosystem as being unworthy of my preciously guarded attention.

And then along comes .

I’ve been a fan of her work on for a while now, and I was one of the people who preordered her book “You Can Just Do Things.” Since it arrived a few weeks ago, I’ve been slowly working my way through, trying to carefully digest the high density of wisdom she’s crammed into its pages.

Yesterday, I read the chapter called “Cross the Cringe Minefield.” A few pages in, she lays out a few scenarios that illustrate “being limited by existential cringe.”

Then, she writes:

In my experience, people in situations like these don’t think “Ah, I’m out of the good ideas that will be easy, perhaps I should consider the ideas that are more difficult to stomach.” They simply reject all the difficult ideas out of hand, slapping them away with pat dismissals. Or they don’t even really see the options that are ruled out by their core fear—those options live in a cloud of aversion that strategically obscures them.

I’m a writer, and there are two things every writer needs:

1. To write

2. To be read

I’m (finally) doing a pretty good job on the first thing.

But the second thing has been a problem.

And the truth is, building an audience has been a problem with every single one of my creative endeavors. I self-publish a book, send an email to my friends and family, and then call it a day. I start a podcast, set up the RSS, and then bemoan the impossibility of growing a listenership in a saturated market. I’ve even explicitly structured my production agency to exclude marketing. I tell prospective clients, “We all gotta pick a lane, and we picked this one.” And I know this has cost me business on multiple occasions.

A few weeks after starting this very 100-essay series, I essentially opted out of putting any effort whatsoever into getting the word out about it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I believe I have identified my cringe minefield.

I don’t know what to do about this. But if I hope to do anything about it, I suppose the first step is recognition.

When it comes to social media, I’m not going to get all the way off my high horse. I still think it’s pretty evil. But if I’m going to be honest with myself, and with you, I need to admit that its evilness is not the main reason I hate it. I hate it because it is shrouded by my very own existential cringe.

Perhaps it is time to “set off some mines in [my] emotional core.”

PS Cate’s book is amazing everyone in the world should read it.

This is 64.

I ❤️ SPIDER-MAN

Earlier today, I discovered a good friend of mine hadn’t seen a single Spider-Man movie since the first three starring Tobey Maguire.

I needed to fix this.

So I listed, in order of release, the eight installments he hasn’t seen, including a short note of introduction for each one.

I thought to myself, this is very good work, but why stop there?

You see, Spider-Man has become the most consistently entertaining and artistically successful comic book movie franchise in history. Even as the IP has pingponged between Paramount, Disney, and Sony, and even across four different actors portraying four different versions of the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, all eleven films have been, at worst, solidly entertaining, and at least a couple of them happen to be among the greatest movies of all time.

So here is my authoritative breakdown of all eleven Spider-Man movies.

You’re welcome.

1. Spider-Man (2002)

Few people remember how big of a deal this movie was when it came out. In 2001, after the Twin Towers fell, they decided to delay the release in order to surgically remove the towers from the film. There was even a teaser, in May of 2001, that ended with this shot:

When it finally came out, it broke all kinds of box office records, and I’m pretty sure every single living person loved it.

Let it be known that I do not like Tobey Maguire. But he was a great Spider-Man.

2. Spider-Man 2 (2004)

Widely regarded as not only the best Spider-Man movie, inspiring comparisons to other critically and popularly adored sequels like The Empire Strikes Back, The Godfather Part II, and Hellboy II: The Golden Army, it is also often in contention as the best comic book superhero movie ever made. My own wife argues this, and who can blame her? It’s a wonderful film. This scene?

Come on.

3. Spider-Man 3 (2007)

K, this movie has a lot of problems. The main issue is that it was stuffed with way too many villains. It should have just been a movie about Venom. Cutting out the Sandman and James Goblin Franco would have easily doubled the quality, to the point that people might have even gotten on board with this:

Which, to be perfectly clear, was straight Raimi fire.

But yeah, it was a hard landing after the absolute triumph of the second movie.

4. The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

The choice to reboot a franchise a mere five years after it had ended was viciously ridiculed when the first trailers for this movie dropped. But this was before Warner Brothers got their hands on Batman, so…

Anyway, Andrew Garfield is wonderful, and put a spin on the character that you could argue hewed more closely to the source material than Tobey’s did. Oh and Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy. Yes. And directed by Marc Webb, the same guy who did (500) Days of Summer. This might seem weird, but you get equal parts comic book action movie and high school romantic comedy, and it’s delightful.

5. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

This one gets pretty silly. Jamie Foxx hams pretty hard, and Dane DeHaan has never done any movie any favors. But it’s still a whole lot of fun, and the end is utterly devastating.

(I won’t spoil it.)

6. Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)

The first one with Tom Holland was, and still is, a HUGE breath of fresh air in the Marvel movie morass. Michael Keaton chews up every scene as a wonderful, complex, sympathetic villain. This one also does its turns as a high school romantic comedy, and manages to feel like an authentic Gen Z story.

And it should be acknowledged that as good as Tobey and Andrew were, Tom seems to have been born to play Spider-Man.

7. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

I have to be careful not to launch directly into hyperbole over this movie. It is one of the best movies ever ma — dammit. I’m sorry, it’s true. Just unreasonably excellent along pretty much every axis. Miles Morales is an exceptional character, the whole voice cast just crushes every role, the animation was revolutionary, and the storytelling is as tight and satisfying as I’ve ever seen. The movie is hilarious, exciting, emotional, and deeply artful.

This movie came out the year my first kid was born, and eventually became his favorite movie (natch), so it played every few days for…I dunno, a year? More? I must have seen this movie twenty times, and I’m telling you, it doesn’t matter, if it’s playing in a room, I can’t tear myself away. At some point, I realized it had shouldered it’s way into my top ten movies of all time.

So yeah.

8. Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019)

Tom Holland’s back, but I’m in love with Jake Gyllenhaal. Just try not to get lost in his sad, soulful eyes, just try. Anyway, I don’t remember a whole lot about this movie, other than that he played the villain in a very silly looking costume that was I’m told faithful to the comic book.

I only saw it once, and it was messy. I should give it another shot sometime, but I think it ranks right around Tobey’s 3rd.

The ending is important to the Holland timeline, but also recapped in...

9. Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)

This is the one where they bring back Tobey and Andrew to reprise their roles as elder Spider-Men.

Dr. Strange is involved. It’s very fun, very funny, and surprisingly affecting. The script has a good handle on what makes Spider-Man such a great character, regardless of who’s playing him.

I rewatched it in preparation for the one that’s in theaters right now, with my wife and 8-year-old son, and no, my eyes did not stay dry. But you should have my kid’s face. Sheesh. What am I made of stone?

10. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

Remember how I said that “Into the Spider-Verse” was one of the best movies ever made?

Somehow, impossibly, this one is better. How it works is this:

The first one was basically perfect. Everything it tried to do, it basically pulled off flawlessly. The sequel was dramatically more ambitious, in almost every way, and…also pulled all of it off flawlessly.

This movie is breathtakingly good. I laugh, I cry, I jump to my feet and punch the air.

I cry some more.

Thankfully, it doesn’t have to take up another spot on my Top Ten Movies of All Time, it can just share a spot with the first one.

11. Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)

You should go see it. Based on the trailers, based on the reviews, I went in with pretty high expectations, and they were exceeded.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but I think it gives Spider-Man 2, the reigning champion of live-action Spider-Man movies (it’s not fair if you include the Spider-Verse movies, which are in another league) a pretty good fight.

Tom Holland has melted into this character, and the script makes pretty much all the right moves. It’s exceptionally funny, delivers well-earned emotional punches, and showcases some of the most creatively crafted shots and sequences I’ve seen in any Spider-Man movie, occasionally on par with the animated ones, which…is really impressive.

Like I said. Go see it in theaters if you can. There are plenty of showtimes. I don’t want to hear any excuses.

This is 63.

I am a hopeless romantic.

I always have been, and I’d better always be.

But the flavor of it changes with age. Or, I should say, the dominant notes change, while all the flavors of past selves keep riding underneath, like a wine profile growing more complex with time.

(Listen to me talking about wine like I know anything. I don’t drink wine, I eat single-origin chocolate and eat medium-strength cheeses from Trader Joe’s. But I’m pretty sure it’s the same principle.)

Before I got married, my relationship with romance was mostly based in fantasy.

“I saw her from across the room, and I knew she was the one.”

I collected stories of this happening in real life like a little bird, and made a nest of them in my heart. Like a guy I worked with in college who told me about how he’d dated a lot of different girls before he met the girl he would marry, and that the first time he kissed her, it was like an electric shock went through his body. Or the friend who started talking to a girl he met at a party, left with her to walk around town for four hours, and ended up engaged before going home that night.

My favorite romantic comedy was Serendipity, except that I hated watching it because I felt like I could never be truly happy unless that exact thing happened to me, with Kate Beckinsale.

I’m embarrassed to admit all of this because of course I felt that way. It’s like how people say that annoying thing, when they’re sitting around a campfire and throwing in little things to burn, “I’m such a pyro.” You’re not a pyromaniac, you’re a human being. Show me a human being that is not fascinated by fire.

Show me the teenager who doesn’t secretly hope that one day they’ll meet some beautiful stranger and be swept away by the cosmic revelation that they are soul mates?

Feeling this way does not make a person unique or special. It is, rather, a wonderful universal. We can’t help but feel this way because it is the simplest answer to a hunger for connection that we are born with.

Perhaps the thing that differentiates us a bit from one another is what we do with this deep intrinsic desire. Even people who seem to actually find a soulmate will also find that one person cannot fully fill the hollow core of their personal humanity.

I love my wife more now than I ever have, but it was never and will never be the way I fantasized it would be. It took me close to two years to come to my senses and ask her to marry me. I was so blinded by the countless little cinematic moments I had contrived in my own imagination that it took me that long to recognize I had stumbled across a winning lottery ticket. All I had to do was go cash it in.

Back when I was compulsively pining for love-at-first-sight magic, I also worried about how that could be sustained for a lifetime. What will happen when I’m old and tired? What will happen when she isn’t young and hot? What about when there are kids and work and bills and sickness and death?

So, mixed into my cup of steaming romantic hunger was a strong shot of anxiety. Can that magic even last? I wondered. At the time, in actual (retrospectively cringe) conversations, I would hypothesize that even the memory of being overpoweringly in love would be enough in the hard times. As though it were a trip to Disneyland that could be remembered fondly as one trudged the muddy road of regular life.

Thankfully, I’ve grown up and learned some things. Doubtless I’ll learn more.

What I know now is that love is only ever about today. When I married my wife, it was because, at the time, she had become my best friend. There was no one else I wanted to hang out with more, in any context. She was the coolest and most fun person I knew, and she was also hot. (Like I said, lottery ticket.)

Today, thirteen years later, those things are still true. She is still my best friend. She is still hot.

Tomorrow?

Well, tomorrow doesn’t matter. I mean, I’m married, and that’s a commitment that I take more seriously than any other I’ve made, but none of my intentions to keep it matter further than today.

It’s hard to communicate this the way I mean it, the way I’ve discovered that it matters. I’m not saying that maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and things will be different. What I’m saying is that whatever happens tomorrow cannot matter today.

The fantasies I had when I was younger, about soulmates and love-at-first-sight, were really fantasies about magically solving the whole future in one day, in one moment. It was the thirst for a happily ever after. Life is hard, and complicated, and scary, and full of pain, so wouldn’t it be just lovely if, in one beautiful moment, all of life from that point forward would be nothing but joy? Love conquers all and forevermore, amen.

Anyone who’s fallen in love, soulmate or no, and anyone who’s lucky enough to be in a good marriage (yes, it comes down to luck), knows that happily ever after isn’t, like, a thing. There is no moment after which all life’s problems are solved and joy spools out uninterrupted.

The grand revelation, which comes sometimes slow and sometimes fast, and is, at least for me, hard to hang onto, is that eternity is just today, and today can be full of joy, if you just open up to it. That revelation doesn’t require love-at-first-sight, or a dream job, or any other fantasy fuel. It just requires being alive today, and hearing it, and believing it.

This is 62.

I’ve written about this a hundred times.

I’m doing too many things. Too many creative projects, too many professional pursuits, too many personal relationships. Too many commitments, too many tasks.

It is not a coincidence that I ran out of time to post an essay on Friday, the same day that I recorded the first episode of Gods, Ghosts & UFOs in two months. It’s also probably not a coincidence that I started my 100/100 challenge right around the time that we decided to put the show on a summer break.

Neither is it a coincidence that I’m scrambling to write something today, after a live conversation with my fellow Substacker ,1 also for GGU.

At 9am, after I had worked on my novel for an hour, made the kids breakfast, and got myself showered and dressed, I sat down to list out the things I needed to get done today. After I’d written down nine things, I became concerned about how I could do all of them with the time I had. But before I could worry for long, I had to add five more things to the list that needed my attention right away, before the first nine, which included a couple of errands, and a long phone conversation.

If you’re wondering, it’s 4pm, and if I’m not fussy about this, uh, essay, I think I’ll be able to cross off all but one of those tasks before 5pm, and the last one can realistically be done tomorrow with no problem.

And no, not every day is like this one. Some days I take breaks to watch the latest episode of House of the Dragon.2 Sometimes I spend those breaks on YouTube.

Anyway what’s the point of this. The point is the word “too” that I used over and over to clichéd effect.

I PROBABLY NEED TO QUIT SOMETHING.

Or, more likely, some things.

But I don’t want to. I am kicking and I am screaming that I don’t want to. I want to do all the things. Every time I search my heart to discover what I could do without it shouts back at me “NOTHING!” I’m greedy with my pursuits. I always have been. Sometimes life conspires to eject me from some project or commitment, and sometimes I lose interest. But always, always there is some glittering new thing to fill whatever little bit of space those quit things leave.

So here, by the end of today’s harried and hurried installment, I have resolved nothing. I am still overcommitted, still feeling stalked by a still, small voice whispering what I don’t want to hear.

The thinner my focus is spread, the weaker it becomes.

Listen, here’s my compromise. I’m not going to be writing an essay every day forever. I’m not Seth Godin. It’s a challenge, not a way of life. So when I’m done, when I hit #100, that’s it. No more daily essays. I mean sure that was always the plan, but can I wait until then before I have to go murder another one of my precious babies?

Please?

This is 61.

I’m a busy boy. A busy, busy boy.

I don’t say this to brag. In fact I hate it. Well, no, I don’t hate it, I just miss my younger years, when I could binge watch six episodes of Breaking Bad while I put off working on some college paper I would forget immediately after turning in. Those were the days.

The point is, at a certain age, you wind up with an endless list of iMpOrTaNt ThInGs tO Do. You’ve probably already reached that age. Prioritizing tasks and projects, I’m convinced, is a skill that I’ll spend my whole life failing to master. But I’m not sure what else to do but keep trying.

In that ongoing effort, I have come up with a very transgressive method that I’ve been practicing lately, and that is to do the funnest thing. So if I’m looking through an overwhelming list of things that are whining and screaming and throwing toddler-tantrums for my attention, it’s possible, nay likely! that the one I should focus on is the one that makes me sort of go yeehaw1 in my heart.

The truest truth of typical adulthood is that you will, eventually, do all the boring shit that will ruin your life if left undone indefinitely. So why not just follow the joy more often? (This is a question I am asking myself.) In moments of decision paralysis, maybe just look through all the things, maybe even jot down the ones shouting the loudest, and then just do the one that feels real good.

The alternative to this, for inveterate procrastinators such as myself, is probably YouTube (or something even dumber). So I’m over here asking, which is better: YouTube or YeeHaw?

Giddy up, folks. We’re getting things done.

This is 60.

Let me tell you how I’m editing my book

A hundred years ago, new authors would submit thousands of pages of manuscript to literary agencies, sometimes in wooden crates. Many times these pages would be handwritten, scrawled on whatever type of paper the starving writer could afford. It would be the grueling and thankless responsibility of junior staffers to sift through this blizzard of words for evidence of money-making talent. Upon finding such evidence, the author would be called in to discuss a potential contract.

Promising manuscripts (aka crates full of sprawling prose) would then be handed off to an editor, whose job it was to carve marketable products out of hunks of granite, often dragging the authors kicking and screaming through the process.

I hear it still works this way sometimes. But if you want to be an author, if you want to publish a book, especially a novel of fiction, you probably better not send in a crate full of pages. In fact, you probably better not send in a pdf of all those pages, either. In fact, the closer your book can be to a finished, gleaming product, the better. Which means you’d better do your own editing.

The reasons for this are obvious. Not only is the market for actual books vastly smaller than it once was, and vastly less profitable, there are also vastly more would-be authors. This makes for a fiercely competitive publishing environment, in which you must find any advantage you can to earn the attention of publishers, few of whom are making enough money to qualify as anything more than hobbyists.

None of this is news to anyone, I’m sure, least of all you who read these here Dispatches. I relate it only as context for what I’m about to reveal.

Which is that I’m using Claude as my editor.

No no! Please let me explain. AI is not writing any part of my novel. Not a single word. What it’s doing, is parsing huge amounts of information to deliver an intelligible, actionable stream of editing tasks. I want to tell you about it, because I’m thrilled with how it’s going.

Over a year ago, I marshaled a bunch of test readers (suckers1) to give me feedback on what I believed to be the first readable draft of my novel. At around 140,000 words, it was a big boy, and I got a lot of very valuable notes from very smart people. I even processed all those notes into organized reference documents that I intended to use while I worked on the next draft.

But then, friends, I stalled out. I couldn’t bring myself back to the book. The notes were great, but the editing process felt monumental. There were too many questions, too many threads, too many little nuances to keep in my head.

So the novel and those compiled notes mostly sat in a drawer for a long time.

Until, just a few weeks ago, I had an idea. What if I fed everything, everything to Claude? It turns out that the last few models have had such a large context window that they could successfully process a manuscript as large as mine, along with all the compiled notes from my readers, and still have plenty of tokens leftover to help organize it all into something coherent and digestible.

The first thing I did was ask for a thorough review of the manuscript itself -- things like loose ends, character inconsistencies, plot holes, and other mistakes, as well as anything Claude (in its infinitely derivative wisdom) what was working well in the current draft. I must admit it spat out an impressive breakdown. Some of its feedback mirrored things my readers had told me, some of it didn’t. Of the “fresh” material, about half of it struck me as valuable insight, while the other half was...well, what you’d expect from an unselfaware bag of words.

Anyway, I basically asked it to distill all the stuff I wanted to keep into a comprehensive reference document, then fed it the compiled notes from all my readers and my own self, and started interrogating the shape of all that material. What were the commonalities and differences, where were the deepest contradictions, etc.

Finally, based on all of this, I had it create a thorough summary of everything I needed to change in the next draft, including a chapter-by-chapter breakdown, which would internally reference the higher-level notes.

And it worked.

I’ve got the closest thing anyone could hope for to a step-by-step guide on how to write the next draft of my novel. Sort of like an underpaid editor at a publishing house in the mid-20th century.

I’ve been referring to this document often over the past week, as I’ve been waking up at 5am to write, and so far I’ve made progress at a rate of one or two chapters per day. Already, I’ve been able to hack the first 15 chapters down to 10, and the book is much better for it. I’ve got a dizzying amount of work left to do, but Claude has helped me hack the whole elephant into bite-sized chunks.

My goal is to finish this draft by or before the day that I publish essay number 100 in this 100 essay challenge. You can wish me luck, but I need less of it than I did before. I’ve got confidence and momentum. Now all I need is a nap.

This is 59.

Also, this one accidentally went out early yesterday, so some of you got a sneak peak. Don’t get used to it!

A fiction win vs nonfiction

Probably six months ago, my dad raved to me about a book he was reading called Youngblood Hawke. I’d never heard of it. But my dad is terribly hard to please, so I tend to pay attention to his recommendations. I put it on the list, where it very well could have languished forever.

Some time went by, and I got back into the habit of reading fiction. Suddenly, I had made it through two whole books back to back and was looking for my next read. I’m not sure how it got there, but there was Youngblood Hawke, already on my Kindle.

Oh look! It was written by Herman Woulk, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Winds of War and War and Remembrance, two books that absolutely dominated the mid-twentieth century bestseller lists. I remembered having read at least the first one way back in college, and I also remembered really liking it.

That said, I decided to read Hawke blind, and was hooked immediately. Basically, it’s about a young author from Kentucky who shows up in New York with a comically large manuscript and winds up becoming a worldwide literary phenom. Not too unlike Mr. Woulk himself, although purportedly the book is more loosely based on the life of Thomas Wolfe, with whom I’m ashamed to say I am totally unfamiliar.

Anyway, it becomes obvious pretty early in the story that one of the primary characteristics that makes Arthur Youngblood Hawke mythically compelling is that he writes at a stunning pace of 15 or more pages per day, usually in the middle of the night, and pretty much never misses his self-enforced quota. Naturally, I’m reading this book, and the quiet voice in the back of my head that just repeats “you need to finish your novel” over and over and over again all day long starts getting louder and louder and louder. Until finally I’m pacing the floor of my bathroom while the shower heats up in the morning and thinking, “do I need to write in the middle of the night?”

But no, I’m no good at that hour. But I’ll tell you what I am, is a morning person.

Alright, I thought, I’ll get up at 4am, every morning, and work on my novel for the first two hours of the day. Sure, that means I’ll be exhausted by 9pm, but what else is new? I’ll probably just have to take more naps.

I recognized this by the fire it lit in my veins as the kind of inspiration that I should take seriously. So I told my wife, I think I’m going to need to start getting up at 4am to finish my novel (and then write more).

And she said okay how are you going to make that sustainable without trashing your life?

And I said well I’ll probably have to take naps most days, in the afternoon.

And she said why don’t you just write in the afternoon?

But that’s what I’ve been trying to get myself to do for...ever, and it never happens, because in the light of the day, with the thousand little distractions and responsibilities vying for my attention and energy, WRITING A NOVEL THAT NO ONE IS ASKING FOR never wins.

I finally know, in that way you can only know after decades of experience, that if I’m ever going to finish this book, and then write more books, I’m going to have to do it before the day piles up on me. And this is what I told my wife.

And she said okay well how about you start with 5am and go from there.

And I said yeah that’s probably a good idea.

So that’s what I’ve been doing. And guys, it took exactly one day for it to become my favorite thing. To the point that I look forward all day to going to bed so that I can wake up and work on my book for an hour. Even better, that voice in the back of my head has finally gone quiet.

This is 58.

Disordered

Three to four times a week, your friend Billy dances naked on parked cars and humps mailboxes at three in the morning. No, Billy doesn’t have schizophrenia, and he doesn’t need a prescription for clozapine. He needs to stop drinking alcohol.

What does this have to do with ADHD?

According to the DSM-5-TR, ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by persistent and impairing levels of inattention, disorganization, and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity that directly interferes with a person’s functioning or development.

Here are a list of symptoms that a clinician will look for in making a diagnosis:

• Frequently missing details or making careless mistakes in school, work, or other activities.

• Struggling to sustain attention in tasks or play activities.

• Appearing not to listen when spoken to directly.

• Failing to follow through on instructions and failing to finish schoolwork, chores, or professional responsibilities.

• Having difficulty organizing tasks, activities, and belongings.

• Avoiding, disliking, or being reluctant to engage in tasks that require sustained mental effort.

• Frequently losing things necessary for tasks or activities (e.g., keys, wallets, glasses, assignments).

• Being easily distracted by extraneous stimuli or unrelated thoughts.

• Being forgetful in daily activities, such as paying bills, keeping appointments, or running errands.

Apparently, you can be diagnosed with ADHD if you suffer from five or more of these symptoms for six months or more.

That seems like, I dunno, a pretty low bar, if you ask me.

But the real bone I brought with me to pick is that pretty much every single one of those symptoms “also” applies to screen addiction. I could tediously run through each one, individually, to draw correlations, but I don’t need to do that, do I? You can do it yourself.

Ascribing the symptoms of screen addiction to a “neurodevelopmental disorder” is a preposterous misdiagnosis.

So may I suggest, dear reader, that before you conclude you have a clinical disorder, try ditching your phone for a month, and see what happens?

Trust me, it’s not a mystery. I’ve tried it, and so have countless other recovered addicts who share their stories on the internet, many of which you’ve probably seen while scrolling! (Hello, vicarious asceticism.)

Here’s a quick rundown of what you can expect if you can stay sober for a month:

1. Withdrawals. For the first three days, you’ll get really anxious or really bored really fast and be pissed off at everything. You’ll reach for your phone a hundred times an hour. You’ll feel like you’re the most ADD person who ever lived.

2. Mild depression. After the first terrible few days, you’ll feel less insane, but you’ll also feel sort of tired and unmotivated. Your inner monologue will sound like it’s talking in ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME. You’ll probably get better sleep.

3. Oh look, attention. Over the next couple of weeks, you’ll notice that you can read, work, or sit through a conversation without getting all fidgety and distracted. Regular feels better. You realize you have more time, which is sort of disorienting. Your memory improves.

4. New (better) normal. After a whole month, you’ll feel calmer most of the time. Your priorities will align in a healthier way, and it won’t feel like a pitched battle every time you have something important to do. You’ll have real, bonafide hobbies.

Oh, are you missing all those ADHD symptoms? Not to worry! Pick the phone back up and you’ll be clinically disordered again in no time.1

This is 57.

Pleading Insanity

A family member shared this clip with me a few days ago, and my honest reaction was: “That’s cute.”

I’ve never been big into the Beatles, but I love some of their songs, and I can of course appreciate their generational talent and the titanic cultural impact of their music. As for John Lennon himself, everything I’ve heard about him suggests he was a true artist, with a true artist’s soul. Impossible for me not to respect.

But there are vanishingly few artists whose political opinions I want to hear.

What John’s saying here, that the governments of the world seem to be insane, is the kind of assertion that feels true from the perspective of sensitive individual operating outside of the systems he’s describing. And to his credit, and to the credit of everyone who agrees with him, the product of big governments (wars, famine, tyranny, etc) is often, even very often, BAD.

In an interview I heard recently with Michael Shannon (another artist I love and respect immensely), he suggested that taking another life is so obviously, incontrovertibly wrong that in order to do it you have to, in some sense, be lying to yourself.

Again, this is something that feels true.

The truth, though, is that it is very easy for people to develop a taste for violence. We are incredibly fortunate to live in a society of people who are under the influence of enormous civilizing pressure to not physically harm each other.

But back to John’s take. If it feels true that the only explanation for most government action is insanity, it is only because the behavior of extremely large organizations become increasingly difficult to understand from an intuitive perspective. Great artists rely almost entirely on intuition to do their work, and therefore are often blind to complex political realities.

This is because intuition operates subconsciously, and on lived experience. We could call this intuition bias.

It follows that extremely wealthy people basically live by an entirely different set of norms and customs, and so do very politically powerful people, and so do incredibly famous people, in comparison with communities of people who have dramatically less of those things. What seems “sane” to normal people leading normal lives (ie not endowed with or in pursuit of immense, generational wealth and/or political power), stops being natural and obvious at those larger scales.

This is also why extremely rich and/or powerful people tend to look at normies as deficient or even crazy, because they literally cannot intuit what it would be like to live that way and make those kinds of decisions.

At base, we all share the same basic firmware. Call it human nature. But how it manifests depends so totally on our given context of circumstances and communities (aka nurture) that people within sufficiently different contexts will read one another’s behavior as the product of insanity.

It is incumbent upon the artists, a community to which I feel I belong, to seek to deeply understand the firmware. And then, if some group of people seem insane to me, it just means I need to go study out the context. Because we all share so much of nature, we can assume that pretty much all human behavior is comprehensible. To label a group of people as insane is just to admit that you don’t understand them. Yet. And there’s your invitation to try.

This is 56.

“Objective Morality”

This morning, I read an article from called Misanthropic Altruism, which inspired today’s post. (I promise this is not a new habit, but if I riff on PW content a third time within the next week, please send me hate mail and unsubscribe.)

Effective Altruists believe that every conscious creature carries a moral relevance that can be quantified and measured against a given action or set of actions. The popular argument against this peculiar calculus is that it would weight the lives and happiness of a billion shrimp as obviously and overwhelmingly greater than the life and happiness of, say, your infant child.

This sounds like a joke, and it sort of is, but it’s not far off from the actual debates that rage within EA communities.

That these debates tend to feel intuitively repugnant to so many people is evidence, by the dictums of EA, that the moral circuitry of the average person is defective.

Which is, if you really think about it, quite a claim.

The question that EA should beg but will never answer is: who establishes moral value? To quote Fred Savage from The Princess Bride, “Somebody’s gotta do it!”

An Effective Altruist would argue that there is inherent moral value in every living creature. Sure, good, agreed, but like, who determines that value? Morality, unlike, say, a big ol’ bag o’ money, is not something that can be objectively measured. There is no such thing as a foot, or liter, or banana equivalent dose of morality.

Moral value, as it were, only exists in one of two places:

1. The eye of the beholder

2. The eye of God

Some secularists adamantly insist that there’s such a thing as objective moral facts that are mind-independent and not based on some higher authority,1 but, again, based on what? You can’t escape the need for someone to determine something. Otherwise the very idea of morality loses all meaning.

So, like it or not, if you don’t believe in God, you’re left with the lonely eye of the beholder, which unfortunately yes does boil down to moral relativism. Within the shifting sands of that relativism, everybody’s job is basically to try to reach as wide a consensus as possible on what the metrics of morality are or ought to be. And no matter how successful you are, those metrics will continue to change.

So what EAs are doing is basically declaring their own moral calculus superior by fiat, and pretending that anyone who disagrees is broken.

Which, I dunno, sounds mighty religious for a supposedly secular philosophy.

Perhaps we should revise the acronym

Altruism is defined as the unselfish concern for the well-being of others.

The origin of Effective Altruism was a utilitarian desire to transmute that concern into meaningful action. Great! But if you get lost in the arbitrary quantification of moral concerns, you’ll find yourself detached from the human experience in a way that can best be described by another definition: the inability to read body language or interpret social cues, with a strong preference for strict definitions and routines.

Maybe, at this point, EA actually stands for Effective Autism.

Listen, every type of person has their cognitive weaknesses, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that objective moral calculus could be a common folly among the autists. Sort of like armchair abstraction is the foolish indulgence of polyfocal people like myself.

For those scant few of you who are not panting with eagerness to watch or listen to the recording of our raw and uncut live performance, I’ve cobbled this together, which we’ll call #55 of my 100 essay project, because I’m not MADE OF TIME, folks.

Writing scared

Jordan PETERSEN: We’re in the age of AI, and I suspect the more genuinely you can show up as yourself, the more value you contribute. Anonymity feels like it’s becoming less valuable than it used to be.

Jordan CALL: Well, that validates my priors, so I like it a lot.

But then — sometimes I feel dumb that it’s my name and my face on the internet, attached to all this stuff I’m writing. Is this a terrible idea? Every time I think about starting an anonymous account, I ask myself what I’d even use it for. I feel a lot of hesitance. Shyness. I don’t want to offend people, so I water down my takes, try to see all sides. It would be freeing to write totally unfiltered — but I’m not willing to leverage my personal social capital to do it. It’s like I’d want the thing to exist in the world, I just don’t want me to be the one saying it. And then I wonder — would the anonymous version just be angrier, more bitter? Is that going to be nourishing my soul, or am I just finally getting to say the thing that isn’t very nice?

PETERSEN: I’m strongly suspicious of sensitivity to other people’s feelings. I think we fall back on it — “I don’t want to hurt anyone” — and it is true; I hate hurting people’s feelings more than almost anything. But I have to question how much of that is actual moral fabric and how much is just the instinctive fear of rejection. A lot of the time, when we’re avoiding hurting someone’s feelings, what we’re really doing is protecting ourselves. That’s very hard to admit, or even see.

So I try to run everything through one question: would it be better for this thing to be said than not be said? Not how it’ll affect me, not whether people will be offended or flattered — all of that is ego. Instead, is this useful? Will it help if somebody says it? My job isn’t to make people feel good about themselves. That’s fun to do — I’ve emceed, it’s great to gas a room up, you’re all so attractive for being here. But helping someone is a different thing from making them feel good or bad.

CALL: I think people’s feelings belong in the calculus, though. People change when they feel loved or cared for. It’s the Dale Carnegie thing. It’s the missionary thing — by the end of my mission I’d figured out you do so much more by genuinely loving and serving people than by teaching them doctrine. At the start I thought, if I can just explain it right, if they can just understand what I understand. But for most people that’s so many orders of priority down from am I feeling loved here? You say a true thing, it goes out into the world, and it knocks over zero dominoes because everyone’s put off by it. That feels like a Pyrrhic victory to me.

PETERSEN: The truth you’re circling is love. To be both courageous and loving isn’t about managing people’s feelings, it’s about doing right by them, whatever that means. Whenever I write anything, I’m trying to love whoever reads it. And you can read feelings-management in someone’s work. It’s the disclaimers and the hedging. “Before I say this, I really want you to know…” etc. I don’t think that’s a sign of love. I think it’s a sign of fear. If you actually love your audience, you treat them like grownups. You say: I’m going to tell you what I believe is true, in the most loving way I can, and then I have to trust you, and accept that your feelings are not my responsibility.

CALL: So you’ve conceded anonymity is purely fear-based and cowardly?

PETERSEN: Yes, absolutely. They’re all cowards.

No, I actually think there’s still huge value in it, even if it’s diminishing. Especially in cultural conversations where there’s real risk to saying something true. If you’ve got a valuable perspective but you’re afraid you’ll get fired for sharing it, then sure, open an anonymous account and find out whether people agree with you. And I speak from enormous privilege here: I own my own business, so it’s easy for me to gab on about being courageous. There are people facing genuine cultural and economic risk for saying the wrong thing to the wrong people.

There’s no such thing as a magical career

CALL: Tell me about your job. It sounds creatively fulfilling, which is the unicorn everybody’s chasing.

PETERSEN: I’m a producer. My company’s a white-label podcast production agency. We’ll work on anything someone will pay us to do.

I went to film school for four years, got a master’s in screenwriting in Boston, and then my professional life was pure chaos before I pivoted to podcasting, mostly because I loved the intimacy of the medium. My favorite thing to do is write, and I’m constantly hunting for ways to make money doing it, which is very hard in a world absolutely full of writers and writing.

CALL: My dad’s old roommate was a head animator at Disney. Prince Naveen’s design was supposedly based partly on him, based on the fact that my dad was one of the “lady’s men” that he knew. This is deep family lore I’m dropping, by the way.

Anyway, I asked him once if working at Disney was magic, and he said no, it was just his job.

PETERSEN: There’s no such thing as a magical career. There isn’t. No matter who you are or what you do, there’s a pile of crap you have to wade through, usually every day, to get to the thing you actually want to do.

When I started this business it was a dream come true. I was my own boss, we had paying clients, it was amazing! That honeymoon lasted maybe three to six months, and then it was: how are we going to pay the bills? I’m the guy who decides whether there’s money in the company, based on whether I can land clients. It’s a terrifying responsibility. And then when you do land them, every new client is another boss, except none of them pay your health insurance, and there’s no protection from getting “fired.”

We had a client, less than a year ago, which was a disastrous relationship we couldn’t afford to leave. We poured in time and energy trying to make it work, got treated terribly, and then they dropped us anyway. Horrible feeling. That’s not something you go through with a nine-to-five. So the business is wonderful, and it sucks. Just like every job.

“I don’t think what I’m doing is wise”

CALL: How does Substack fit into all this? I’m genuinely impressed and inspired. I keep trying to figure out how to copy what you’re doing without making it obvious.

PETERSEN: I should say right off the bat: I don’t think what I’m doing is wise. Not in terms of actually being successful on Substack. Right now every scrap of my creative time is going into two projects, about to be three. I’m finishing a novel, writing an essay every day, and I’m about to bring my podcast back from a two month break. Realistically I should quit all but one of them. I don’t have the courage, because I love them all too much and I can’t kill babies.

The daily-essay thing would only be smart if I were passionately promoting every single essay, and I’m not, because I have somewhere between thirty and ninety minutes a day to write and publish. That’s it. If you do nothing to grow your audience, it probably won’t grow. That’s a lesson you should know before you get on Substack.

And the essays themselves are okay. Some of what I publish, I look at and think, this could be really great if I spent a week on it. But I’m going to spend forty minutes, and that’s that. I have a bittersweet moment every time I hit publish: I’m proud of what I made in the time I had, and I know it would be a lot better if I gave it another couple of days.

So why do it? Because I needed it, personally. I needed to get back to a daily writing habit, and the only way I was going to do that was with extreme accountability. I also needed to get a lot less precious. I need to be able to throw something away and say, yeah, great idea, and I’m done with it now. My hope is that by the end of this hundred-essay challenge, I’ll won’t have to publish every day in order to be a person who writes every day.

Yes, writing is a disease

CALL: Why do you feel you need to be someone who writes every day?

PETERSEN: I wrote a little essay called “Writing is a disease,” and I’ve believed that for a long time. I’m not healthy unless I’m writing every day. It doesn’t matter if anyone reads it, if it’s successful, if it’s any good. If I’m not writing — serious, high-effort — I sort of go crazy.

And it’s not that I want to so badly and can’t. It’s the opposite. Most of the time I don’t want to. I’d much rather watch TV or hang out with people than put in the cognitive energy it demands. I don’t want to, but I have to.

I’m 41, and I’ve been making excuses not to write for about twenty-five years — ever since high school, where I used to do it compulsively, before my ego got involved and the whole thing picked up baggage.

When I’m not writing, every other domain of my life suffers. I make stupider decisions, start insane projects and don’t finish them, all kinds of weird OCD stuff crops up. When I am writing every day, I’m at peace, and everything else benefits. So I’ve learned to think of it as a disease that needs managing.

But even if I’m writing every day, I can’t guarantee any of it is valuable to anybody. That’s not up to me. So I have to sit with the fact that ninety-nine percent of the time, the product is useless. It’s just moving rocks around. It’s practice.

CALL: It’s like the gym. I used to think gym rats saying “I’m addicted to it” were being ridiculous. How is this additive? Now I get it. I don’t love it, but I crave it as part of the fabric of my life. Writing on Substack was the same for me. It felt like digesting. Instead of ideas rattling around giving me stomachaches, I could pass them through and out the other side, and I felt better.

Choose again

CALL: I constantly go back and forth on whether I should just write all the time and not be precious (high volume, low weight, a million reps), or spend three months on one thing I think is really meaningful. Most writers seem to lean hard one way. I don’t feel like I know my own personality here yet.

PETERSEN: Part that’s because the answer is all of the above. There are no right answers.

One of the ways we torture ourselves is by thinking, I just have to figure out what’s right, when there are all kinds of potential options and not a single correct one. You pick. And then you pick again.

Have you read Hyperion? There’s a young messianic character who feels pregnant with a message she has to get out into the world, and she keeps cutting it down. It starts out as a five-hour sermon, then it’s an hour, then its a page, a paragraph, a sentence, until it’s just two words: Choose again. A little self-important, the way it’s handled, but I love it.

It reminds me of my favorite novel, East of Eden, which is my favorite novel.

CALL: Dude. East of Eden. My guy. So good.

PETERSEN: So good. And it revolves entirely around human agency. The last word in the book is timshel, “thou mayest.” You can decide, if you want to.

That’s what I come back to whenever I hit a supposed dilemma of “what’s the right thing to do?” There isn’t a right thing to do. There’s a decision to make, and you’re going to make it, and it won’t be the right decision, it’ll just be the decision. Then you move on. And then you have to decide again, over and over. That’s life.

So if you want to pump out a hundred essays, go for it. If you want to spend three months on one beautiful thing, go for it. There are pitfalls either way.

In my case, I’m publishing a lot of essays that could’ve been better with more time. But you might take three months on something and get the same number of likes on it that I get on something I wrote in 40 minutes. That’s gonna hurt. I’ve published things I poured myself into that got five likes. Okay. Cool. Thanks. Honestly, that pain is part of what pushed me to just spam the essays. Maybe one of them hits, maybe it doesn’t, but at least I stop worrying about it so much. Now something gets one like, two likes, doesn’t matter. I’m just going to write again tomorrow.

We didn’t even get to mindfulness. Next time, on Two Mormon Jordans.