articles I've been thinking about
too many substacks, too little time
by Shary Boyle
Fuck Your Miracle Year by Roger’s Bacon.
This is about the trap of analyzing and speculating about creativity instead of actually being creative.
This is the sad truth. The double-edged sword of the internet is cutting us much, much deeper than we realize. It makes Dwarkesh and countless others like him (myself included) waste their time writing about geniuses and how we can best foster innovation (a very safe, pre-approved topic—who doesn’t want to be innovative?), which as I said before is essentially just virtue signaling for nerds. It makes it so, so difficult for us to do something for ourselves (for love, for curiosity, for beauty, for pain) and ourselves only, not for college applications or resumes or followers (and this is the real reason why ideas are getting harder to find).
I’m Not Feeling Good at All by Jess Bergman.
This is about the disaffected, nihilistic narrators of recent female fiction.
However individually stylish or inventive, taken together, the novels tend to replicate the sensations of apathy and tedium they seek to describe. This may be intentional, but the outcome is more or less the same one Wood observed twenty years ago: fiction that depicts people who “are not really alive, not fully human,” whose style “seems evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself.” Even if, as Wood contends, “real humans disaggregate more often than they congregate,” rarely are their lives so hermetically sealed as the protagonists of this emerging genre. For many young women laboring under the grindstone of American capitalism, the operative feeling of the last ten or fifteen years has not been numbness but suffering. While the characters in these novels have in some cases experienced profound loss, their listless narration renders pain an abstraction. For the most part, denuded realism sidesteps the challenge of depicting the effects of alienating forces on people who do not already live in artificial isolation—who exist at the nexus of various social, familial, and professional relationships. In other words, the kind of people most of us still are.
The Physicalist Worldview as Neurotic Ego-Defense Mechanism by Bernardo Kastrup
This is a paper speculating on why the physicalist worldview might be attractive to people with certain psychological profiles. Found it through a @nosilverv tweet.
Going beyond religiosity, the physicalist narrative enables a sense of direct egoic control over nature. Indeed, a recent empirical study has shown that “believing that science is or will prospectively grant . . . mastery of nature imbues individuals with the belief that they are in control of their lives” (Stavrova, Ehlebracht, & Fetchenhauer, 2016, p. 234). Of course, by associating itself with science—in a philosophically questionable move that is nonetheless widely accepted—the physicalist narrative has become the enabler and ontological foundation of this belief. And because direct control—the notion that one can personally steer or at least predict what is going to happen—is known to be a key contributor to mental well-being (Langer & Rodin, 1976; Luck, Pearson, Maddem, & Hewett, 1999), it stands to reason that the allure of physicalism in this regard could potentially be even stronger than that of religious control-by-proxy.
I also enjoyed this tweet:
A Critical (But Highly Sympathetic) Reading of New Yorkers’ Sexual Habits and Anxieties by Wesley Yang
This is pretty funny.
Virtually everyone under the age of 30 has grown up with their sexuality digitally enhanced, and the rest of us are rapidly forgetting the world before we all were hooked into the same erotically charged network of instantaneously transmitted messages and images. This must be true across the country, but it seems particularly suited for a city as dense, morally libertine, and sexually spirited as New York. Part of the promise of this city has always been that there’s another prospective partner a subway stop away, but not until recently could that partner interrupt your daily business with a cell-phone snapshot of their parted thighs. And of course, the same technology that makes it easier to score also makes the sexual boast or confession easily transmissible to millions of other people.
The future of Humanity is IVF babies and Chinese Domination by Richard Hanania and Steve Hsu.
Honestly, the title is pretty self-explanatory.
Steve: Oh, yeah. I mean, if you have money. First of all, if you have foresight, so like, I think Apple famously provides as an employment benefit, egg freezing for its female employees. So if you had foresight and you froze 30 eggs. Because when you’re young, if you go through the hormone treatment, you can produce like unbelievable numbers of eggs, right? So, imagine like some girl, some young woman who works at Apple freezes 20 or 30 eggs, and then doesn’t get around to having a baby until she’s 57. She finds a sperm, she gets married, she gets sperm from her husband. But then they have a surrogate mom carry the embryo, because it doesn’t have to be transferred to the woman who originally made the egg, right? And so if you have means, you don’t even mess up your wife’s body. You just hire some surrogate mom to carry the embryo. And yeah. So that’s actually, to be totally frank, in IVF, you actually see this kind of happening with high net worth people now, where the mother doesn’t actually carry the fetus.
The case for American Seriousness by Katherine Boyle
This is about why America should be serious about building.
The encouraging news, though, is that the loss of American seriousness is the deterioration of institutional will, but not our capability or desire to build new things. America is still the country that immigrants traverse the world to get to because of their unwavering belief that this land is far better than the nations they’re leaving. And they are right. It is why more than 50 percent of unicorn co-founders in Silicon Valley are foreign-born, because it’s the last and truest place in the world where you can still build something new.
Are you reading any good articles/essays right now? Please share them with me :)