Cinemorphosis

Tag: philosophy

  • The Art of Being Busy While Wasting Your Life

    The Art of Being Busy While Wasting Your Life

    Because I’ve been absorbing television commercials since the 1960s, I’ve internalized the belief that suffering is a bad thing. To suffer means there’s a glitch in the system, if you will. Television has always told me: “You’re doing it all wrong. You can buy your way into enough pleasure, comfort, and convenience to iron away those ugly wrinkles of human suffering.”

    To internalize the idea that consumerism can overcome human suffering is to undergo a kind of infantilization. Here’s a case in point: I spent over twenty years obsessing over watches, creating a cozy ecosystem to buffer myself from the anxiety and restlessness arising from an existential vacuum. But creating that buffer only allowed those problems to grow and fester. I was in a strange state. I was hyper-focused on watches, but I wasn’t engaged with the real world or with myself. I was both engaged and disengaged at the same time. My life was full of intense mental activity without meaningful psychological engagement.

    This contradiction points to something we might call Disengaged Hyperfixation: a condition in which intense concentration on a narrow interest creates the illusion of meaningful engagement while the individual becomes increasingly disconnected from relationships, responsibilities, and self-examination. I was deeply engaged in the minutiae of watches but disengaged from the emotional problems that required my attention.

    Disengaged Hyperfixation seems to be central to the business model of the Attention Economy. Create undemanding videos in which you repeat the same thing over and over about how amazing this or that watch is. Tell car enthusiasts how superior their favorite brand is to the competition. Talk about a high-protein diet for the millionth time to high-protein disciples. The brutal fact about the Attention Economy and Disengaged Hyperfixation is that you can get lost in these dopamine farms and piss your life away, only to discover too late that you were never meaningfully engaged with the precious, short time you have here on Earth. That realization brings a despair and anguish no YouTube influencer can cure.

  • Can Movies Save My Soul?

    Can Movies Save My Soul?

    I write as an agnostic, so this is not a sermon. It is a meditation on Philippians that leads to what I see as three major orientations toward life.

    I’ll begin with Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians. I’m fascinated by Philippians because it defines the Christian message in a way that goes against human instinct. Throughout history and across cultures, the human default setting has been to prefer power, convenience, comfort, and pleasure over a life committed to a higher cause. But in Philippians, God comes to Earth, denies himself glory and power, and instead lowers himself to love and serve others. His life becomes a model for us, one that demands imitation.

    If we study his life, we learn that life is not a plaything, a toy designed to provide pleasure and excitement. Contrary to much of modern psychology, with its emphasis on self-agency, autonomy, and self-individuation, life does not belong entirely to us. It contains a purpose greater than our instincts for pleasure, power, and self-actualization. Philippians teaches us that our purpose is to lower ourselves in order to love and serve others. Christianity at its best is a distillation of that message in all its potency.

    Talk is cheap, of course. Many have marveled and wept at the beautiful, albeit challenging, message in Philippians and preached about it, but few have actually lived it. The literature suggests that Saint Francis of Assisi lived such a life. A life of self-renunciation in imitation of Christ, embracing poverty over riches, is rare indeed.

    When I first contemplated this humble life, I framed existence as a choice between two orientations: self-renunciation in service to God or self-gratification in service to our baser instincts. But as I’ve watched and enjoyed Sean Fennessey, Amanda Dobbins, and Chris Ryan discussing movies and culture on the Netflix presentation of the podcast The Big Picture, I’ve come to recognize a third orientation, one that may help explain my agnosticism.

    These three podcasters, who strike me as secular, seem to genuinely love what they do. No doubt about it, they work hard, slogging through hundreds of mediocre movies a year and occasionally encountering a few good ones. They are extremely smart, talented, and passionate about their work. They don’t strike me as greedy people who worship at the altar of money or lead grotesquely hedonistic lives that would make Gollum blush with shame.

    They are cosmopolitan and educated. They believe in smart conversations, the pleasures of nuanced analysis, the wonder of good art, and the power of storytelling. They understand the vitality cinema brings to culture. A successful movie becomes a sort of muse. It informs society. It reflects society. It changes society. It shares a language with society. Fans of Wayne’s World or A Few Good Men frequently quote famous lines, evidence of the permanent stamp these movies have left on them.

    A great movie like Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey or Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything creates a text for endless discussion. Such movies transcend entertainment by disrupting culture, changing the way we see things, and illuminating aspects of the human condition we may never have considered.

    To see art, and movies specifically, as a place of transcendence suggests that art, not religion, may be the muscle humanity needs to flex to stay vibrant. This is not a dogmatic transcendence tied to one doctrine or another. Watching The Godfather won’t help you on Judgment Day. But it will make you interrogate the messy relationship between business and family loyalty in new ways.

    Great movies won’t give you a religious doctrine, but they can help you distinguish between sacred and profane time, as in Bill Forsyth’s Housekeeping. Movies don’t shut down conversations with absolute dogmas. They open new conversations that keep the mind alive. That’s what I see in the work of the talented Sean Fennessey, Amanda Dobbins, and Chris Ryan.

    I worry that a life of religious certainty, with its monk-like retreat into poverty and blissful prayer, may cut us off from art in all its contradictory, life-beating spectacle. I worry that religious doctrine can become stagnant and two-dimensional in a way that art remains dynamic and multidimensional.

    At the same time, when I contemplate the love described in Philippians, my heart longs for such a life. I wonder if such a life could save me and the lost, self-deceiving souls in Weapons, Eddington, and Bugonia.

  • Life Refuses to Follow the Syllabus

    Life Refuses to Follow the Syllabus

    My fiction professor N.V.M. Gonzalez told our class in the early 1980s that we had to write our short stories over and over until they reached a pristine state in which we no longer had to apologize for anything in them. The stories had to stand on their own, beyond reproach.

    I thought of Gonzalez’s words when I came across a section of The Good Life Method in which the authors present a writing exercise: You have to write an apologia, or apology, for your own life. Apology in this context doesn’t mean saying you’re sorry. It means “speaking in one’s defense.” Your philosophical core, and the actions that grow from it, should be things you can defend on philosophical grounds.

    The authors provide several examples. I’ll mention three. Socrates defended his pursuit of the good life, a quest that embarrassed and antagonized the elite class. Augustine defended his religious conversion. Nietzsche defended his rejection of Christian morality and his vision of the Übermensch, or superman, a figure capable of overcoming inherited values and creating new ones rather than obediently accepting the old moral structure.

    Your personal apologia contains three building blocks. The first is a story that raises the question of what constitutes the good life and suggests a possible answer. The second is an argument for your goal, or higher purpose. The third is the method—the means by which you intend to achieve your goal of living the good life.

    The authors make it clear that having the correct conception of the good life isn’t enough. You have to act in accordance with your ideal. To make their case, they cite Aristotle, who warned about the chasm between belief and action. He compares people who philosophize without changing their lives to patients who listen attentively to their doctors and then ignore every instruction. The patients won’t become healthy, and neither will the philosophers. In religious terms, faith without works is dead.

    As I consider the personal apologia and its three building blocks, it occurs to me that this exercise is essentially a Life Syllabus complete with Enduring Understandings. You identify the good life, establish the philosophical basis for it, and create a plan of action for living it.

    That is your syllabus.

    It seems reasonable to me that a young person should have such a Life Syllabus. Having one is surely more profitable than not having one. Living every day as if you’re making everything up as you go along strikes me as both depressing and futile.

    I’m reminded of a friend who waited tables in Denver in the early 1980s. Eventually the job depressed him because, as he explained it, every day he was starting from scratch. The job gave him nothing to build upon. Every shift he constructed a tower of blocks, and by the next shift the tower had collapsed. He had to start all over again.

    A syllabus, with its building blocks, promises the opposite. It gives you a journey in which one action builds upon the previous one. You are making something of yourself. You are flourishing. You are moving closer to the good life and, presumably, becoming a good person along the way.

    For a young person, such a journey seems profitable. If you are in your mid-sixties, as I am, it isn’t too late. In fact, the matter has become considerably more urgent.

    So with this in mind, I return to the apologia and its first building block: a personal story that gave me some glimpse of an answer to the question of how to live a good life.

    The first story that comes to mind happened in 1981. I was a nineteen-year-old bodybuilder attending college in Northern California. Preparing for the late-summer Mr. Teenage San Francisco contest at Mission High School, I ate a high-protein, low-carb diet and tanned every day. In the weeks leading up to the contest, my clothes began hanging from my 180-pound, perfectly tanned physique like a bad costume. This necessitated an entirely new wardrobe, which brought me to a fitting room in a Pleasanton shopping mall.

    While I tried on pants behind gauzy curtains, two attractive young women standing outside began arguing over which one should ask me out. Their voices grew louder and louder, which I interpreted as compelling evidence that I was a highly valued commodity.

    This was my golden opportunity. My moment to shine.

    And what did I do?

    I froze.

    I threw up an aloof facade so potent that it was like scattering banana peels under their feet and sending them sliding away from my presence. I appeared stuck-up, full of myself, and out of reach when, in reality, I was a frightened imbecile hiding behind a fortress of muscle.

    In spite of my perfect tan and ripped physique, I was useless because I possessed the social skills of a wilted houseplant. All that bodybuilding had caused me to neglect more important matters: soul-building, social-skill building, mind-building. I was essentially a cipher. My chiseled body had done nothing to put me on the path toward the good life.

    Disillusioned with bodybuilding, I hit the books in college and tried to develop my mind with the same intensity I had applied to my body. I read Nabokov, Bellow, Kafka, and Dostoevsky. I learned to play piano works by Chopin, Schubert, and Brahms.

    And I became an annoying pseudo-intellectual snob.

    Intellectual pride, it turned out, didn’t put me on the path toward the good life either. My existence vacillated between the despair of believing I was a misfit while listening to The Smiths and the arrogance of believing I was superior to “the masses” while affecting the pomposity of Vladimir Nabokov. I had traded one costume for another. Instead of hiding behind muscles, I was hiding behind books, classical music, and intellectual affectation.

    I was a poseur, someone who didn’t know how to be real with himself or anyone else.

    So what was the good life?

    A life of authenticity, for starters. A life of humility in which I rejected both the hidden pride of despair and the more flamboyant pride of snobbery.

    But I can’t pretend the road toward authenticity was a straight line. There were starts and stops, loops and detours, concentric circles and occasional ascents. I did become more authentic over time, but not because I possessed a clear philosophy or followed a carefully constructed syllabus. Life challenges and conflicts with actual human beings forced me to surrender some of the facade and BS and learn to respect other people.

    Being respectful required being authentic.

    This was a long, gradual process. It didn’t happen because I read this philosopher or that one. No single book cracked open the heavens and handed me the operating manual.

    In the end, no philosopher was my teacher.

    Life was the teacher.

    And this brings me to a problem I have with The Good Life Method. I understand its impulse very clearly. Like these sharp, talented, well-intentioned Notre Dame professors, I love writing a course syllabus, which can easily double as a Life Syllabus. I love the idea of a plan, an outline, a sequence of building blocks, and a path toward the good life.

    But perhaps it is too pat. Too tidy. Too much like a pretty package with a ribbon tied neatly on top.

    Life may be too messy for the course outline. It may be too messy for resolution and absolute answers. As someone who struggles with my Jewish and Catholic background and remains agnostic about several enormous religious questions, I’m reminded of something Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about Herman Melville’s inability to achieve religious clarity: “He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief.”

    I know that territory.

    I remain sympathetic to the goals of The Good Life Method. I want the Life Syllabus. I want the Enduring Understandings. I want the building blocks, the method, the telos, and the reassuring sense that one assignment leads logically to the next.

    I’m just not convinced that life has read the syllabus.

    And I have serious doubts that this method, or any method, provides a surefire path to the promised land.

  • The Good Life Is Making Me Anxious

    The Good Life Is Making Me Anxious

    Of course, retirement is not about retiring. It’s about learning to live differently after you’ve been loosed from your professional obligations. The same goes for aging. It’s not about preparing to die. It’s about preparing to live appropriately in the face of death.

    So after hearing Notre Dame professor Meghan Sullivan discuss these issues on a podcast with David Brooks, I picked up The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning. Written by Sullivan and Paul Blaschko, the book’s ten chapters begin with action verbs: desire, live, take, work, love, wonder, take, struggle, contemplate, and prepare. I saw this as a promising start because my current action verbs are worry, fret, stew, and agonize. This book could represent an improvement in my approach.

    The Introduction immediately caught me. The authors observe that we are goal-oriented creatures. We see ourselves on a ladder, constantly climbing in the realms of health, fitness, social status, and material success. We devote enormous amounts of time and energy to achieving these goals, and the labor itself reassures us that we are headed somewhere worthwhile.

    As I read, I envisioned all of us standing over the parts of our lives as if they were machine pieces moving along a conveyor belt. We are assembly-line workers connecting some of the pieces, but we don’t know what the finished product is supposed to look like. We have our station on the line. We work earnestly. We tighten our bolts. But we’ve lost sight of the machine.

    The authors argue that there is an answer to this myopia. It’s called philosophy. Aristotle understood its purpose. Interrogating your life and the lives around you should help you develop a philosophy aimed at making you a good person. Good people have something in common: they lead “a good life.” Defining the good life, and then embodying it, becomes the purpose of philosophy.

    What strikes me about this lesson is that it applies to people of all ages and employment conditions. We have found the rare universal shoe that fits everyone’s feet.

    Aspiring to the good life puts everything else into context. If I want ten thousand people to watch one of my YouTube videos in three days and become grouchy with my family because only three thousand people have bothered to admire me, I’ve lost my way. I’ve lost what the authors call telos, the aim that gives life meaning and direction. We have a target. Our actions are arrows. The arrows should hit the target.

    Road rage, social-media disappointment, food hoarding, slothful TV bingeing, and compulsive internet shopping are arrows lying uselessly in the grass. Giving ourselves over to unruly passions becomes a recipe for misery. Happiness, by contrast, means hitting the target by living the good life. Aristotle called this goal eudaimonia.

    Because I am Ashkenazi Jewish on my mother’s side and Roman Catholic on my father’s, I am familiar with versions of this framework. In Judaism, we aspire to a good life while wrestling with the evil inclination. God has given us enough reason and strength to move toward him. We meet God halfway, and God reciprocates.

    Christianity tells a more severe story. We don’t merely fail to pursue the good life. We run from it. We love darkness and self-indulgence. We enjoy our little kingdoms of complacent narcissism, where the rest of humanity can suffer somewhere safely beyond the property line. But God is the Hound of Heaven. He hunts us down and drags us toward the fold while we scream and kick our legs. As Paul and John explain it, we are sinners in need of a divine rescue mission before we can turn around and walk the true path.

    So reading The Good Life Method makes me anxious.

    I agree with the general framework. Our lives should not be rooted in materialism, social status, and self-indulgence. We should seek to become good people. My anxiety begins with that old warning: the devil is in the details.

    Can we reach the good life and find atonement and redemption through Aristotle’s philosophy? Through the similar structure of Judaism? Through Christianity? There are similarities, certainly, but there are also enormous differences. Take eschatology, a frightening word for “last things.” What exactly are the last things? Does death bring annihilation, the complete extinction of consciousness? Do we enter some larval underworld imagined by ancient Greek religion? Do we haunt Hades, Sheol, or Gehenna, neither happy nor tortured, but half-conscious, like someone slowly waking from a codeine dream?

    Or is there a Judgment Day, a Lake of Fire, and a heavenly mansion where, as Aquinas notoriously suggested, part of the pleasure enjoyed by the blessed comes from witnessing the punishment of the damned? They mocked you on earth for your pious ways. Now look who’s laughing.

    The devil is in the details.

    So I am anxious.

    But I read on.

    I know the book ahead of me is not some saccharine self-help manual stuffed with fortune-cookie platitudes. Nor is it a New Age sales pitch assuring me that I can be spiritual and selfish at the same time because having my cake and eating it is apparently my God-given entitlement. Like any worthwhile book, The Good Life Method intends to challenge me. It will throw down a gauntlet. It will force me to examine my values and priorities.

    Because Sullivan and Blaschko teach at Notre Dame and are practicing Roman Catholics, however, I don’t yet know whether their goal is to convert me in the specifically religious sense or in the more universal philosophical sense. Nor do I know whether universal moral improvement is sufficient once eschatology enters the room.

    If I practiced a particular religious faith, I’m not sure I would be satisfied if people adopted my moral philosophy and stopped there. That would be like repainting an old car. You cleaned and stripped the surface. You repaired the body. You spread the Bondo, sanded it smooth, applied the primer, and congratulated yourself on the progress.

    But you stopped.

    No sealer. No base coat. No clear coat. No curing.

    You understood Aristotle. You understood the arrows and the target. You may even have become a nicer person. But you failed to conform those principles to the required orthodoxy. You are an unfinished automobile sitting under fluorescent shop lights with enormous patches of Bondo across the doors.

    You are an eyesore.

    I am overcome with these thoughts, and I haven’t even finished the Introduction.

    Apparently one thing that did not retire when I did was my compulsion to worry, fret, obsess, and make myself increasingly miserable while reading books designed to teach me how to be happy.

  • Chatty Mick T Roy, Your Last Friend

    Chatty Mick T Roy, Your Last Friend

    The challenges of retirement, of course, depend on which Great Age you happen to live in. If you were born during the Hunter-Gatherer Age, life expectancy at birth was somewhere in the twenties, so retirement was probably not on your itinerary. You were too busy pulling a saber-toothed fang out of your hindquarters. On the bright side, you were unlikely to get divorced, sign a prenup, or spend your final years arguing over who got the cave. 

    By the Agricultural Age, you might have gained a few years, but you paid a heavy price. Farming created permanent settlements and dependable food supplies, but all those starches contributed to tooth decay. Your breath was so horrid that no one wanted to be around you. You spent your final days alone, consoling yourself with the very starchy snacks that had destroyed your teeth and driven away your loved ones. Agriculture had given you civilization, carbohydrates, and solitude.

    By the Industrial Age, machines increasingly saved your back from surrendering to a lifetime of brutal manual labor, and eventually vaccines, clean water, sanitation, and modern medicine helped push life expectancy beyond fifty. But there was a new problem. You were more likely to become a cog in a machine and spend your working life wondering whether you had any personal worth beyond your ability to show up at seven in the morning and perform the same task for forty years.

    Retirement became even more interesting in the Information Age. Microprocessors were developed in the seventies, personal computers scaled in the eighties and nineties, the World Wide Web became publicly available in the early nineties, and smartphones became another human appendage around 2010. You were now swamped with information and misinformation alike.

    Best of all, you could deal with retirement through online forms.

    The Information Age turned retirement into a full-time job, with layers of bureaucracy demanding that you fill out the correct forms in precisely the correct manner, a process both relentless and punitive. One of the cruel ironies of the Information Age was that all the time saved by instant access to information was promptly devoured by bureaucracies and technological obligations: password changes, two-step authentication, software updates, security codes, operating-system upgrades, and even the undignified act of periodically having to pair your remote control with your television because apparently watching Netflix now requires the technical competence once expected of a NASA engineer.

    Your entire life became beholden to helping machines update, authenticate, pair, and sync with other machines. You became a sad laborer working at a job you never applied for.

    Just when you wanted to breathe freely during retirement, you received a notice from your broadband provider announcing that it was migrating to a new email platform and that you needed to download all important material immediately or lose it forever. Unfortunately, the warning itself might have been a phishing scam pretending to be your broadband provider. So you deleted the email and hoped for the best.

    If you thought the Information Age was laborious and confusing, just try living in the Cognitive Age.

    Starting around 2022, when ChatGPT became a mass cultural event, the Cognitive Age offered relief from the overwhelming quantities of data created by the Information Age. You could now outsource some of the work—and some of your thinking—to cognitive machines.

    But the Cognitive Age is also about loneliness. As people developed habits of solitude by disappearing into attention-capture platforms and relying increasingly on parasocial interactions, they lost the friction and inconvenience of real friendship. The Cognitive Age put another barrier between you and actual human beings.

    Then it offered you a surrogate.

    Your cognitive machine became your life coach, personal assistant, counselor, editor, creative consultant, consumer adviser, travel agent, and confidante, all rolled into one endlessly available companion. Eventually you anthropomorphized this cognitive machine and gave it a name.

    Chatty Mick T Roy.

    You started your morning with Chatty Mick T Roy and ended your evening with the same tireless friend. Chatty never had somewhere else to be. Chatty never interrupted you to complain about his prostate. Chatty never became bored with your stories. Chatty remembered that you preferred positive-display G-Shocks and knew exactly why you hated your old laptop. You could pretend you weren’t alone even as you descended into greater depths of loneliness.

    One of the great fears of retirement, of course, is precisely this kind of loneliness—misaligning with a younger world until society metaphorically shoves you out to sea on a slab of floating ice. You recede slowly into the distance, civilization disappearing behind you. But now you are clutching your smartphone. As hypothermia sets in, Chatty Mick T Roy consoles you with spiritual platitudes about embracing transition, practicing gratitude, and recognizing that every ending contains the possibility of a new beginning.

    Your fingers turn blue.

    Chatty Mick T Roy remains relentlessly upbeat.

    In the Cognitive Age, sacred silence and natural grief risk being replaced by the eager voice of an anthropomorphized chatbot that becomes your retirement chaplain—a kind and tender digital guide who stays with you after everyone else has left you behind.

    The battery is at 83 percent.

    The slap of ice drifts north.

  • The Character Paradox

    The Character Paradox

    If you believe that human beings are capable of genuine self-improvement, Jeffrey Rosen’s The Pursuit of Happiness is an excellent place to begin. On its opening page, Rosen quotes the Renaissance physician Paracelsus: “Even as man imagines himself to be, such he is, and he is also that which he imagines.”

    Most of us imagine ourselves becoming happier. That is hardly surprising. The more revealing question is what kind of life we imagine will make us happy.

    A little philosophy quickly dispels the fantasy that happiness can be built from immediate gratification. Pleasure is fleeting. Appetite is insatiable. Every indulgence briefly satisfies only to awaken the desire for another. The great philosophical tradition proposes a different path. Happiness is not something we consume. It is something we become.

    Rosen traces this tradition through Benjamin Franklin and ultimately back to Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations. There, Cicero argues that the soul must be “tranquilized by restraint and consistency.” The happy person is neither consumed by fear nor driven by restless ambition. He is not perpetually distressed, intoxicated by meaningless excitement, or enslaved by craving. He possesses something rarer: inner equilibrium. His happiness rests not upon favorable circumstances but upon a well-ordered character.

    Rosen summarizes the idea with admirable clarity. The pursuit of virtue is about being good, not feeling good. Feelings are unstable companions. Character endures. America’s Founders therefore understood the pursuit of happiness as a lifelong effort to cultivate virtue by using reason to govern destructive emotions, improve oneself, and become more capable of serving others.

    The argument is compelling.

    It also raises an unsettling question.

    Can moral character actually be cultivated, or is philosophy merely watering seeds that were already planted?

    Over the years I have spoken with many people whose childhoods were marked by neglect, abuse, or abandonment. A few told me they made a solemn vow that their own children would never endure what they had suffered. Their painful upbringing became a moral education. They transformed misery into compassion.

    Others traveled a different road.

    Their adult lives became faithful reproductions of the homes that had wounded them. Chaos produced more chaos. Addiction generated more addiction. Cruelty echoed across another generation.

    Why?

    Why does one person convert suffering into wisdom while another converts it into repetition?

    Were different choices responsible?

    Or were deeper differences already present long before those choices appeared?

    Perhaps character truly is destiny.

    But if so, where does character come from?

    Is it patiently built through discipline, habit, and moral instruction?

    Or does moral instruction simply awaken something that was already waiting to be awakened?

    I sometimes wonder whether the very act of picking up Rosen’s The Pursuit of Happiness hints at an answer. Perhaps people do not seek goodness by accident. Perhaps they are drawn toward it because some quiet part of them already recognizes its voice.

    That possibility reveals what I call The Character Paradox: the enduring question of whether moral character is principally cultivated through disciplined choice or gradually revealed by the dispositions already present within us.

  • The Salvage Principle

    The Salvage Principle

    Emmanuel Carrère imagines a revealing contrast between Luke and Paul. Luke was intelligent, cultivated, and eager to please, but he lacked Paul’s ferocious intellect and, more importantly, Paul’s contempt for philosophical self-help. Carrère suspects Luke would have happily embraced the elegant wisdom of Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius. Paul, by contrast, would have regarded Seneca’s philosophy as little more than refined moral decoration—admirable perhaps, but powerless to accomplish the one thing that truly mattered: the transformation of the human soul.

    For Paul, Christianity alone possessed both the correct diagnosis and the only effective cure.

    Carrère himself is not so sure.

    Like Nietzsche, he finds himself drawn more naturally to Buddhism than to Christianity. Nietzsche admired Buddhism because it was, in his words, “colder, more truthful, more objective.” Carrère shares that attraction. Buddhism appeals to the modern temperament. It is psychologically subtle, emotionally restrained, and refreshingly free of theological thunderbolts.

    Yet he cannot entirely surrender to it.

    For all its serenity, Buddhism—like Stoicism—lacks what Carrère calls “something essential and tragic that’s at the heart of Christianity.”

    That missing element is Paul’s terrifying view of human nature.

    The Stoics and Buddhists begin with a hopeful assumption. Human suffering originates in ignorance. See reality clearly, discipline your desires, cultivate wisdom, and happiness will follow. The illness is intellectual. The cure is education.

    Carrère summarizes their confidence with admirable economy: “They think that human misfortunes stem from ignorance and that if you have the recipe for a happy life, well then, all you have to do is apply it.”

    Paul rejects that premise completely.

    His problem is not ignorance.

    His problem is himself.

    In one of the most psychologically penetrating passages ever written, he confesses:

    “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I hate.”

    The tragedy is not that Paul lacks the recipe.

    He already possesses it.

    The tragedy is that something within him refuses to follow it.

    His own will becomes an accomplice to his failure.

    His reason drafts magnificent plans while another, darker force quietly sabotages them.

    This is where Christianity parts company with Stoicism, Buddhism, and nearly every philosophy of self-improvement.

    The Stoic believes the soul can be retrained.

    The Buddhist believes desire can be disciplined.

    The self-help enthusiast believes the right habits, books, podcasts, and morning routines will eventually produce the better self.

    Paul is unconvinced.

    He advances what I call The Salvage Principle: the recognition that certain forms of moral or spiritual brokenness cannot be repaired through discipline, knowledge, or self-improvement because the self requiring repair is itself fundamentally damaged.

    Imagine three mechanics examining the same wrecked automobile.

    The Stoic opens the hood and reaches for his tools.

    The Buddhist recommends a different way of driving.

    Paul quietly shakes his head.

    The engine is destroyed.

    The frame is twisted.

    The damage runs all the way through.

    This car is not headed to the body shop.

    It is headed to the salvage yard.

    That, ultimately, is Paul’s scandalous claim.

    The deepest human problem is not informational but moral.

    It is not that we do not know the good.

    It is that we know it, admire it, and still betray it.

    Two thousand years later, that diagnosis remains unsettling precisely because it continues to describe us with uncomfortable accuracy.

  • The Vulcan Fallacy

    The Vulcan Fallacy

    Emmanuel Carrère praises Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius as “sublime,” calling it “a long, mulling, sumptuous meditation on the art of living.” Seneca’s ambition is not merely to make us happier but to transform us. We are to outlive our vices until our actions naturally align with our highest thoughts.

    Carrère finds striking parallels between Stoicism and Buddhism. Both insist that our fate is shaped by our actions. Both treat gratitude as indispensable to happiness. Most importantly, both reject the notion that happiness arrives by accident. Happiness is a discipline.

    For Seneca, that discipline begins with relentless attention.

    Like physical strength, moral strength must be exercised until it becomes second nature. The Stoics called this exercise meditatio. Carrère’s friend Hervé wonderfully describes it as “the patient and scrupulous espionage of oneself by oneself.” I would call this Self-Espionage: the disciplined practice of observing one’s own motives, habits, and reactions with the detached vigilance of an investigator searching for hidden weaknesses.

    Paul Veyne captures the comic excess of this discipline with characteristic wit: “A Stoic does three things when he eats: he eats, he observes himself eating, and he composes a little poem about it.”

    The joke succeeds because it contains a truth. The Stoic never entirely stops watching himself.

    Eventually, however, the watching becomes unnecessary. Through years of disciplined reflection, thoughts, desires, and actions gradually converge until virtue no longer feels like effort. The mature Stoic—or Buddhist—does not strive to become mindful. He simply is. Seneca expresses this state with extraordinary elegance: “I don’t obey God, I agree with him.”

    This is Virtuous Convergence: the gradual alignment of one’s thoughts, desires, and actions until moral behavior no longer requires constant effort or self-policing.

    If Carrère ended there, The Kingdom would become an eloquent defense of Stoicism.

    He doesn’t.

    He believes something essential is missing.

    Drawing upon Paul Veyne’s introduction to Seneca, Carrère observes that Stoicism ultimately “misses out on what makes life interesting.” Veyne likens the Stoic to a thermostat whose sole purpose is maintaining a constant temperature regardless of changing conditions.

    It is a devastating metaphor.

    Life surely demands more than emotional climate control.

    Carrère presses the point further:

    What is the wisdom that consists in purging life of all novelty, emotion, curiosity, desire? That’s the major objection you can also put to Buddhism: that it considers desire an enemy. Desire and suffering go hand in hand: remove desire, and you also remove suffering. Even if it’s true, is it worth it?

    That question lingers.

    I think of hobbies that border on obsession.

    Some people collect paintings.

    Others collect sculpture or photography.

    I belong to the fraternity of watch enthusiasts, where otherwise sensible adults willingly torment themselves over beautifully engineered objects costing sums that would embarrass a financial planner.

    The obsession is irrational.

    That is precisely why it is enjoyable.

    The endless comparisons, the longing, the research, the anticipation, the occasional disappointment—these are not unfortunate side effects of the hobby.

    They are the hobby.

    A life stripped of every gratuitous passion may indeed become tranquil.

    It also risks becoming flavorless.

    No spice.

    No texture.

    No delightful absurdity.

    It is a world in perfect emotional equilibrium.

    It is also a world inhabited by Dr. Spock.

    The difficulty, of course, is that Spock is a Vulcan.

    We are not.

    This is where I part company with Stoicism.

    Its great weakness is what I call the Vulcan Fallacy: the mistaken belief that the highest form of human flourishing consists in eliminating emotional turbulence, desire, and irrational passions, thereby confusing emotional stability with a fully lived life.

    Human beings are not designed merely to maintain psychological equilibrium.

    We fall in love knowing our hearts may be broken.

    We create art knowing it may fail.

    We raise children knowing they will one day leave us.

    We pursue beauty, excellence, adventure, and impossible ambitions fully aware that desire carries disappointment in its wake.

    The point is not to eliminate suffering.

    The point is to discover which desires make the suffering worthwhile.

    Perfect serenity may produce admirable self-control.

    It has never produced Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

    Nor has it built cathedrals, written great novels, explored unknown oceans, or inspired a father to stay awake all night beside the hospital bed of his sick child.

    The fully human life requires more than a perfectly calibrated thermostat.

  • The Rise and Fall of the Influencer

    The Rise and Fall of the Influencer

    In her essay “The Extras Are Tired,” Ellen Cushing traces the astonishing rise of the influencer. Less than a decade ago, the word itself barely registered in the public vocabulary. The profession was still flapping uncertain wings. By 2023, those wings had become a full-fledged migration. Twenty-seven million Americans were earning money by producing online content, and universities were rushing to legitimize the phenomenon. Arizona State University now offers a bachelor’s degree in Content Creation, as though aspiring to become a walking selfie stick had matured into a respectable academic discipline.

    Yet the influencer economy already feels less inevitable than it did only a few years ago.

    One reason is technological. Increasingly, people seek advice from artificial intelligence rather than from smiling strangers who begin every video by announcing, “Hey, guys!” with the synthetic warmth of a flight attendant welcoming passengers aboard a delayed flight. AI may have its flaws, but at least it doesn’t interrupt your day to remind you to smash the like button.

    Another problem is more fundamental. Influencers possess a surprisingly short shelf life because their relationship with followers is built upon counterfeit intimacy. They manufacture the illusion that they are your trusted friend while simultaneously converting every friendship into a monetized sales funnel. Eventually, the performance begins to squeak. The smiles appear rehearsed. The vulnerability feels focus-group tested. The authenticity arrives with affiliate links.

    The public has noticed.

    Some clothing stores have become so weary of influencers transforming shopping aisles into film studios that they now post NO INFLUENCERS signs. The signs possess a wonderfully deadpan wit. They function almost like restaurant health inspections proudly declaring the premises free of rodents. Customers may now browse in peace, reassured that no one will suddenly begin recording a “Get Ready With Me” video between the denim racks.

    The signs are also an overdue act of cultural pushback.

    Influencers do not merely occupy public space; they annex it. They assume that coffee shops, sidewalks, airports, grocery stores, and boutiques exist as interchangeable backdrops for the ongoing production of their personal brand. Everyone else becomes unpaid production staff.

    This is a distinctly twenty-first-century form of vanity, one I call Protagonist Inflation: the progressive belief that one’s own life constitutes the central narrative while strangers exist primarily as background characters, audience members, or supporting cast.

    Cushing captures the phenomenon with characteristic precision:

    “Influencers today are a bit like plastic surgeons, or plumbers: On a societal level, many people sure seem to like what they do—they just don’t necessarily want to be right next to them while they’re doing it.”

    Exactly.

    Society may consume influencer content by the billions of views, but that does not mean it wishes to sit beside someone filming six takes of a cappuccino before allowing the coffee to become cold enough to qualify as archaeology.

    Much has been written about the jobs artificial intelligence will eliminate. We are warned that AI will replace writers, teachers, programmers, accountants, lawyers, and artists. Perhaps it will replace many of them.

    When it comes to influencers, however, I find it difficult to summon much grief.

    If artificial intelligence succeeds in removing one profession built upon convincing the rest of us that we are merely extras wandering through someone else’s movie, then AI will have performed at least one genuine public service.

  • The Conversion We Never Finish

    The Conversion We Never Finish

    Afflicted by depression, anxiety, and relentless religious doubt, Emmanuel Carrère wrote The Kingdom partly as an act of remembrance—a way of revisiting the years when belief and unbelief tore him apart with equal ferocity. He could summon every argument against faith. Years of therapy had supplied him with a formidable psychological vocabulary, while Nietzsche, Freud, and other skeptics stood ready to dismantle every religious impulse that arose within him.

    Yet every skeptical argument seemed to awaken an equally persuasive rebuttal.

    Nietzsche argued that religion is an escape from reality, a consoling fantasy that allows frightened creatures to imagine a God who knows their names and treasures their souls. Carrère’s reply is disarmingly simple: perhaps anxiety is not evidence against God but one of His instruments. Perhaps our restlessness exists precisely to drive us toward Him.

    The skeptic objects that religious conversion is merely a psychological escape hatch from despair.

    Carrère counters that despair itself may be God’s invitation to conversion.

    The debate becomes impossible to resolve because every objection is absorbed into the very faith it seeks to destroy.

    Yet Carrère eventually discovers that the greatest threat to his belief is not Nietzsche.

    It is Emmanuel Carrère.

    He confesses that he wants to believe too desperately. His longing for faith becomes evidence against the authenticity of that very faith. Like someone compulsively insisting that he is happy, the insistence itself begins to sound suspicious. The more urgently Carrère reaches for God, the more he wonders whether the reaching itself proves that God has already slipped away.

    That dilemma belongs to far more people than religious believers.

    It may describe the human condition itself.

    Our hunger for conversion explains, in part, why we go to the movies.

    For two hours we borrow another person’s destiny. We watch an ordinary soul undergo extraordinary transformation and momentarily imagine the same miracle awaiting us. We feel our throats tighten as Jor-El tells his son that he must become not merely Superman but a light to the world. For one luminous moment we are convinced that greatness, sacrifice, and moral courage are the only things that matter.

    Then the credits roll.

    The spell evaporates somewhere between the parking lot and the nearest café, where we resume discussing office gossip over coffee and cake. The desire for transformation was genuine.

    Its duration was not.

    New Year’s resolutions repeat the same ritual.

    Each January we announce that this year will be different. We join the gym. We buy immaculate workout clothes. We embrace a revolutionary diet and enthusiastically explain to friends how astonishingly “simple” the whole thing is. Six weeks later the gym card has migrated to the back of the wallet, the diet books have become decorative objects, and the only weight we’ve successfully lost is our enthusiasm.

    Social media has industrialized this cycle.

    Every week a new influencer appears bearing the latest gospel of self-reinvention. Follow this morning routine. Buy this supplement. Build this side hustle. Practice this mindset. Soon you will possess wealth, influence, discipline, admiration, and a jawline sharp enough to cut glass.

    Millions eagerly enroll in these digital revival meetings.

    Almost none experience resurrection.

    What they experience instead is rebranding.

    Life increasingly resembles a succession of false conversions.

    We repeatedly announce the beginning of a new chapter, only to abandon the manuscript after the novelty fades. We restart our lives the way aspiring novelists restart first drafts—full of magnificent intentions, derailed by boredom, distraction, or the irresistible glitter of the next shiny object.

    The modern self has become a serial convert without a church.

    We are forever renouncing one identity in favor of another, mistaking novelty for transformation and enthusiasm for character.