The novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was almost known as something completely different. Its title at the conception of the project was The Last Man in Europe, presumably implying that its protagonist, Winston Smith, was the last human being in a crumbling society, the lone possessor of a free-thinking consciousness.

Somewhere between the first and second drafts, George Orwell changed the title to Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was possibly a suggestion from his publisher, urging him to choose a more ‘commercial’ title. It was also a tribute to his wife, Eileen, who had died just a year or so earlier. In 1934, the year before she had met Orwell, she had written a touching poem, “End of the Century, 1984,” which tackled themes similar to those which would end up in his final and most famous novel.

In 2017, Dennis Glover wrote a novel about Orwell’s last days. He titled it The Last Man in Europe, as a reference to the novel’s working title. I haven’t yet read the book, but I imagine the title refers to Orwell himself. In a sense, he was ‘the last man in Europe.’ He was a rebel in a society of ideologues, he defied the Right and the Left alike, he saw through the propaganda and the lies which saturated his nation and, in a climate where the truth seemed unknowable, scrounged together a worldview that feels current to this day.

Orwell’s publisher was probably right to reject the title. Nineteen Eighty-Four is iconic. I doubt The Last Man in Europe would have had the same staying power. However, it would have had some staying power. There’s something compelling about the mental image of a lone intellectual survivor, the last old soul in a dying world.

I can’t be the only person who projects themselves onto such a figure. I often put on the Simon and Garfunkel song, “The Only Living Boy in New York,” hum along to the lyrics
“half of the time we’re gone
but we don’t know where
and we don’t know where”
and I imagine that the whole thing was crafted just for me—that I am alone in a city full of zombies, misunderstood save for the writer of the song.

This isn’t true, of course. If I were the lone survivor, the song wouldn’t exist, or if it did, it would have faded into obscurity well before I ever discovered it. If Paul Simon were “The Only Living Boy in New York,” no one would connect with his music. If George Orwell were “The Last Man in Europe,” his name wouldn’t have become an adjective. Sure, there’s a lot of emptiness in the world. A lot of vapid, unfathomable stupidity. But there is also consciousness. In a sense, this proves one of the key messages of Nineteen Eighty-Four totally wrong.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is by far the most pessimistic of Orwell’s works. The novel seems to suggest that it is possible for a government to suppress the thought of its citizens completely. This image is fine—perhaps even inspiring—in the abstract. However, history—and the reception of Nineteen Eighty-Four itself, has proved Orwell wrong.

The novel is banned in countries, but citizens get their hands on it, anyway. The greedy eternal warfare that Orwell references in the book has decimated entire regions of the world. Still, the light of humanity has not gone out, even in those places.

The novel is a warning:

“Look, this is what people are going to try to do to you.”

As a warning, it is true. Evil exists, and people will try. Perhaps readers need to believe that such total annihilation is possible in order to fight against it.

However, it will never happen completely. In fact, the worse things get, the more people turn to this type of book. Orwell should’ve known this. His novel Animal Farm became a clandestine sensation in Ukraine, a country which had witnesed such events happening firsthand.

Perhaps Orwell only ever meant Nineteen Eighty-Four to be a painted picture of a nightmare—a worst-case scenario so horrible that, for all intents and purposes, it is impossible. This is the kind of imagined scene that inspires people. It is what gets them talking.

And is the purpose of fiction to capture the world as it truly is, or to caricature it? Perhaps ideals and big, scary villains are more useful to the reader of fiction.

It is a testament to humanity that so many people love this book. It is a reassurance that no matter how bad things get—and I am not denying that they can get bad—one thing that cannot be destroyed is the human mind. We are all bound by the same thing.

Why, then, do we all feel so disconnected?
Why do we all still strive for a connection?

Orwell was great at analyzing these questions from a political angle, but would readily admit himself that he struggled to attack them from an emotional one. For much of his career, he relied heavily on his wife, who was his typist and in some sense his advisor, and who unfortunately did not live to assist him with Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Many of his books bear her mark, but for this one, we only have her poem, which, like the great novel that it inspired, is just as true today as it was when it was published in her school newspaper in 1934, exactly fifty years before the famous year referenced in Orwell’s famous title.

End of the Century, 1984
by Eileen O'Shaughnessy

Death 
Synthetic winds have blown away
Material dust, but this one room
Rebukes the constant violet ray
And dustless sheds a dusty doom.
Wrecked on the outmoded past
Lie North and Hillard, Virgil, Horace,
Shakespeare’s bones are quiet at last.
Dead as Yeats or William Morris.
Have not the inmates earned their rest?
A hundred circles traversed they
Complaining of the classic quest
And, each inevitable day,
Illogically trying to place
A ball within an empty space.

Birth 
Every loss is now a gain
For every chance must follow reason.
A crystal palace meets the rain
That falls at its appointed season.
No book disturbs the lucid line
For sun-bronzed scholars tune their thought
To Telepathic Station 9
From which they know just what they ought:
The useful sciences; the arts
Of telesalesmanship and Spanish
As registered in Western parts;
Mental cremation that shall banish
Relics, philosophies and colds – 
Mañana-minded ten-year-olds.

The Phoenix 
Worlds have died that they may live,
May plume again their fairest feathers
And in their clearest songs may give
Welcome to all spontaneous weathers.
Bacon’s colleague is called Einstein,
Huxley shares Platonic food,
Violet rays are only sunshine
Christened in the modern mood.
In this house if in no other
Past and future may agree,
Each herself, but each the other
In a curious harmony,
Finding both a proper place
In the silken gown’s embrace. 

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Something interesting happened to me the other day—something that I was kind of embarrassed about afterwards, but that turned out to be a pivotal moment for me.

John and I were doing some last-minute Christmas shopping, and we decided to go to Crate & Barrel to cash in some store credit we’ve been harboring since our wedding. Our ploy for ‘free Christmas presents’ resulted in us still spending a decent chunk of our own money, and buying so much crap that an employee had to roll all of our stuff out of the store on a huge three-tiered cart.

John went to get the car as I finished paying, and then, on my way out, I was face-to-face with my nightmare: making small-talk with the girl who was assigned as my personal bellboy.

There were several uncomfortable aspects of this. The first was that a stranger was dragging my stuff that I bought from this fancy store, and despite the fact that I had come here with the intention of spending a gift card and having it be a ‘budget’ option, I felt like the worst type of lazy aristocrat. So, despite this really being a one-person job and despite the fact that I was probably getting in her way, I grabbed the other side of the cart to feign ‘helpfulness.’

It was a long journey—one which required a ride in a cramped employees-only elevator that me, the girl, and the giant cart stacked with boxes just barely fit into. The thirty seconds felt like an eternity. Neither of us were sure whether to look at one another or to look away. I racked my brain for anything to break the silence and finally, she said, “Are you excited for Christmas?”

Small talk! This is when you’re supposed to smile and say “yeah,” maybe say who you’re spending the day with and who the six tons of gifts you just bought were for and ask the person what their plans were for the holiday.

My mouth moved faster than my brain, though, and I blurted out, “Actually, no.”

How’s that for brutal honesty?

First of all, although I harbor some Scrooge-like tendencies, over the past couple of years I’d finally managed to make peace with the holidays. John loves Christmas, and I’d like to think that I absorbed some of his positivity. Plus, it’s our first Christmas married, a fact which has been commemorated on so many tree ornaments that it must be a big deal. We have a Christmas tree, a Christmas village, and not one, but two nativity sets. What’s more, I genuinely like looking at the stuff. I like the memories attached to all our ornaments and decorations and hand-me-downs. It all brightens the house, makes me feel like a kid again. In other words, I could’ve just said, “Yeah, I love this time of year” and idly endured the rest of my awkward elevator ride, allowing me and my bell-girl to both fade out of one another’s memory.

Instead I’m standing there, my cheeks redder than Santa’s after six shots of whiskey, wishing desperately to take back my statement while simultaneously wondering where it had come from.

To my surprise, she responds, “Yeah, me either. It’s not the same when you get older.”

“Right?” I say. “You just have so much to do, and the month of December goes by so fast now.”

“Maybe it gets better again when you have kids.” She shrugs, and the elevator door opens, and I go back to awkwardly pretending to manipulate the cart while she does all the work anyway, and I turn the wrong way because I don’t know where the door is, and all the while I’m kicking myself for not just walking while pretending to answer a really important message on my phone like I’m sure almost anyone else would have done in this situation.

I ignored the whole thing, chalked it up to my strange, off-putting habit of defaulting to complaining when stuck in awkward conversation. In hindsight, though, I think that it was actually one of those rare moments of complete authenticity. Neither of us knew each other, or wanted anything to do with one another, or would ever see one another again. Honesty is not expected in this situation. Hell, brain function is not expected in this situation. Producing idle words is just something you do, like when you pass a co-worker in a hallway and one of you asks, “hey, how are you?” and the other replies, “how are you?”

Sometimes strangers are the only people that we can be truly honest with. We don’t want to burden our family and friends with negativiy. We put on happy faces for one another because, at the end of the day, it actually does make everyone happier.

In other words, it’s complicated. Something and its opposite can be true at the same time. We can like Christmas while still kind of dread the Christmas Eve/Christmas Day errands and obligations. We can spend the entire day anxious and overwhelmed but still look back on it fondly. Everyone is reckoning with uncomfortable feelings at the same time, and the pressure for everything to be nice can be the greatest buzz-kill of all.

If anything, we can at least be happy that it’s over.

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I used to be very vocal about politics. Aside from an unfortunate leftist stint in college I’ve never taken a political ‘side,’ but I was an extremely opinionated nonpartisan, compelled (almost to a fault) to speak up about what I thought was right and what I thought was ludicrous.

I was right about a lot and wrong about a whole lot more, but after a while, I realized that all of my writing and thinking was only leading me in circles. I wasn’t persuading anyone who did not already agree with me, it hardly seemed worthwhile to make people agree with me regardless, and all it really served to do was focus my attention on difficult and depressing problems when there were much more fulfilling pursuits elsewhere. Thus, I adopted the catch-all idea that “it just doesn’t matter.” It’s all a sham, so what’s the use?

It’s election season, though, which means even those of us who abstain from politics can’t help but confront it every once in a while. This meant that I was in the position to revisit my ‘stance’ on politics whether I wanted to or not. In this case, this meant calling my own apathy into question.

If we look at history, there have been numerous systems and structures of government, and whether they worked or not depended on the quality of the rulers and the ruled alike. To use a tired, infuriating phrase, it’s essentially a ‘bottom-up’ approach as opposed to a ‘top-down’ approach. Our politics is a sham because our rulers are corrupt and our people are not intelligent enough to do anything about it.

There. I said it (and if you’re reading this, don’t worry, I’m not talking about you). There’s a huge literacy crisis in this country. About one in five people in this country are functionally illiterate—the kind of numbers that we haven’t seen since the 1800s.1 Although the exact numbers are up for debate, approximately half of Americans can’t read above a sixth grade level. Add to this the fact that most literate Americans are barraged with propagandizing from both ‘sides.’ Even assuming that the voting system is completely uncorrupt and works exactly as intended, what kind of ‘informed decisions’ are our voters making?

It hardly matters, because it’s been clear for some time that the average American (i.e. me) does not have a single clue what’s actually going on behind the scenes of our government, and that what we learned in Civics class, while probably true at one point, has at this point turned into the arbitrary rules of an elaborate puppet show.

So what’s the point? Well, this question gets at the real problem, doesn’t it? Over time, a lot of people have decided that it doesn’t really matter who wins and who loses, and have stopped wasting their time. It’s arguably a good move.

However, isn’t inattention exactly what a despotic regime would want from its population? Consider the cheesy truism “the opposite of love is not hate, but apathy.” Might it also be true that the ultimate goal in the breaking of a population’s spirit is not anger, but disillusionment?

The trend of American public opinion in the last several decades has been away from hope. Yet something strange is going on. The same people who hold the belief that the ‘powers that be’ are corrupt and ineffective to the point of incompetence somehow also believe that their ‘reign’ is infallible. They believe that their enemies are immortal, that the bad guys will always win.

It is a belief that has been supported by recent events. It’s no secret that power corrupts as reliably as it attracts corrupt people. Plus, the top authority in many of our institutions is not a person at all, but a clunky bureaucratic system that stamps out all progress and discourages genuine people who might otherwise be instigators of positive change before they can even begin. The only way to mitigate this problem is to dismantle these systems entirely.

But what about this ‘power corrupts’ thing? It’s true in the vast majority of cases, and it certainly seems that only a psychopath has what it takes to participate in our current system. But is it always true? What about that storybook notion that leaders are called to their positions by some sort of moral duty?

We’ve been fed so many lies, so much deception. Armed with the wisdom that the Second World War has given us about the possibility of a population rallying behind a monster, we are rightfully cautioned against faith.

We’re in a difficult position, though. The alternative to hope is destruction. The strange reality is that a population that cares—even if it’s just blind, stupid faith—won’t tolerate as much as one that’s given up. The lie of patriotism, as much of a falsity as it is, becomes somewhat true as people believe in it.

People have a strong desire to believe in something. I’ve heard this conflated with the religious instinct—the notion that people have replaced their need to believe in God with their need to believe in politicians—but I’m not sure if this is true. It seems that people lost their faith in divinity and humanity more or less simultaneously.

Is authority inevitable? Do we ‘need’ leaders? Regardless, we have them, and if our historical record is to be believed, this has always been the case. Furthermore, there have been good leaders and bad leaders presiding over every system, and the world is generally good when its leaders are good and bad when its leaders are bad. Thus, if we want change, doesn’t it make more sense to look at the quality of our leaders than the quality of our systems?

The bureaucracies that this country is built on are just ideas. The constitution itself is an idea, too—a strong one, and one that’s lasted a few centuries—but an idea nonetheless. Kingship, nobility, elected authority—these are ideas, also. This country is young. If we abandon the ideas that made us great for this short time, then we can consider this nation a failed experiment and move on.

But what if it’s just a lapse? Empires have rebounded from near-collapse before. Perhaps, instead of advocating for systemic change, our best hope is actually to put our faith in some ‘philosopher-king’ type who is selfless enough to wade through the muck and get something done. It’s an ideal, and will never be achieved perfectly, but perhaps if someone could try, something good might happen.

I’ve heard some people argue that this is Donald Trump. I am not nearly so optimistic. Honestly, a pretty large part of me has already resigned to the fact that we’re screwed.

If you asked me a week ago, I’d have said that I don’t care. Now, despite the fact that I know nothing and can do nothing, I reject this view. The only problem is, I’m not sure what to replace it with.

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At sun's arise
to guests' wide eyes
the rays dance on the island
and seagulls glide,
the inkeep's pride! 
His jewel—he says, in silence. 

"This view is mine. 
The years go by 
yet here I stand, performing.
As passersby move on, I sigh
and make the beds for morning." 

At setting sun his work is done
for now, but he knows when
the masquerade begins again—
for them, as he lays dormant. 

Whenever I’m on vacation, I dream of abandoning it all and opening a bed-and-breakfast somewhere beautiful. It seems like the perfect life. You live in a place that people travel to in order to relax and enjoy the view. There must be at least some downtime during the day to take it all in. And your clients are vacationers—at least most of them are pleasant to deal with, right?

It mustn’t be a bad gig, but I wonder if this fairytale scenario gets boring after a while. A vacation can’t last forever. After a month or so of the same, your dream job just becomes your life.

It’s the paradox of existence. Life has a funny way of giving us exactly what we ask for, yet every time, we continue to want what we can’t have.

Are the bed-and-breakfast owners of the world happy?

Perhaps, on average, they’re happier than the salary-workers of the world. But if so, this is only because they had the initiative to hold their lives in their own hands and take what they wanted.

If contentment really is a state of mind, you don’t need a storybook ending or a quaint house on the water in order to have it. You just need to let go and live.

Thanks for reading, and I’m sorry that posting has been sporadic. John and I got married—but that’s a story for another time.

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Warning: this post contains spoilers for the movie Spirited Away.

It’s rare to stumble upon a story that truly speaks to you, and when it happens, the story is usually simple. No complex, mind-bending story arcs. No gimmicks or twist endings. Just an impactful message, a great plot, and some memorable characters.

We’re always trying to make history, do something that’s never been done before. The reason for this is that most of us don’t think we want to hear story we’ve already heard before. Plus, publishing trends change, peoples’ tastes change, and something that is a bestseller one year might completely fall flat the next based on factors that are completely out of an author’s control. However, when we separate ourselves from all of this, there are a few tricks of the trade, a few plot structures that never fail to speak to people no matter how many times they’ve been seen before.

It’s a cliche of its own at this point that Shakespeare wrote all the stories that it’s possible to tell and that we’ve all been repurposing the same ones ever since. Other people say this about the Greek playwrights. The statement is blatantly untrue. We can tell stories about an infinite number of things, and we can structure these stories in an infinite number of ways. However, let’s say we want to tell a good story. In that case, our possibilities narrow substantially.

Over the weekend, I watched Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, a classic which is heralded as one of the greatest films of all time.

It’s your standard “portal fantasy”: a character stumbles upon a portal to another world, and her primary objective is to get back home. I recently found out that the genre is actually frowned upon by some snobby book-publishing people for being ‘unoriginal.’

It’s interesting to even use the word ‘unoriginal’ when referencing a film with an eerie yet vibrant world, distinctive and compelling characters, and a zany yet moving plot that kept me on the edge of my seat throughout its entire two-hour runtime. However, none of the things I just referenced are particularly new. This isn’t the first evil witch to serve as a villain of a children’s story. Although the details of Miyazaki’s world are unique, his isn’t the first imagining of a ‘portal to the spirit world.’ And most of the characters are based at least in part on Japanese mythology.

The hero’s motivation (to save her family and get home) is a rather common one, and the way she achieves this is perhaps even more so. She makes allies by being selfless, avoids a trap by not being greedy. And at the end of it all, it’s love that saves the day.

One of the things that stuck with me the most about the story was its clear-cut morality. Good people always get what they deserve in the end. Life isn’t easy, but challenges can be overcome with hard work and courage.

Suspense does not require novelty. When you’re watching a movie for children, you know that the hero is going to pull through somehow, and that the ending, while sometimes bittersweet, will always put the main character in a better place than where they were before. The job of a writer isn’t to subvert your expectations but to suspend your disbelief, to make you forget what you already know and entrap you within the story as it is unfolding.

There’s a formula for this. It’s called the hero’s journey, and it has been outlined in a number of ways. Joseph Campbell outlined seventeen steps of the hero’s journey in his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces. In The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, Christopher Vogler identified twelve. Look it up yourself if you’re interested.

Essentially, the hero’s journey is this: an ordinary guy (or gal) is thrust into a unique situation. She’s scared. However, she learns that she has no choice, and with the help of a wise guide (e.g. Haku in Spirited Away), she embarks on her quest. It’s wrought with danger. She meets challenges, experiences failure. However, as her enemies get stronger, so does she. She develops courage, makes friends. When she reaches her biggest hurdle yet, she’s ready, and using the strength she has gained from her journey (and the allies she’s made along the way), she prevails. The way back is not easy, but when she returns home, she is triumphant. Whether the ‘gift’ she brings home with her is an actual item (like the hair tie Chihiro receives from Zeniba), a cure of some sort that they can share with the people back home, or just the memory of a great experience, our hero is enriched, somehow.

The hero represents our ideal. She is the person that we all wish we could be, that we channel when we’re at our best and idolize when we’re at our worst. When we emulate the mythical hero, good things happen for us. When we don’t, our luck sours.

One might argue that real life is seldom as clear-cut as the land of myths. Modern tales such as A Song of Ice and Fire subvert the traditional hero’s journey, communicating the message that virtue is a thing for fools, and that in real life, the villains win. This may be attractive to us. George R. R. Martin’s story took the world by storm, after all. However, it never came to a satisfying end. Perhaps ending such a story is impossible. How can a cruel, moral-less world ever lead to anything but destruction?

Perhaps this is where reality departs from myth, and the failure for nihilistic stories to truly move us is merely proof that fiction can never become fact, and that escapism will always be more attractive than harsh truth.

However, the point of fiction is to communicate truths about the world that are difficult to communicate directly. Is it possible that, in some elusive way that the modern world has become too jaded to understand, the hero’s journey is more ‘real’ than what we consider real life?

Mythological villains are victorious for a long time before they meet their rightful end—if they weren’t, there would be no story. Perhaps, when we assume that real life doesn’t follow the pattern of myths, we’re just not thinking big enough. Maybe, just maybe, our innate need to believe in heroes is evidence that this eternal myth is actually true.

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As might be expected for an essay on the topic of writer’s block, I’ve written the start of this post several times and gone on to delete the document several times. Each time, something has stopped me from completing it, but now, because I think I owe my supporters an explanation and an apology, I’ve decided to come clean.

The explanation is simply. In fact, you’ve probably already been able to guess it. John and I have been busy lately. We’ve had a lot of personal stuff going on. Lots of life changes.

Because of this (and while I can’t speak for John I can certainly speak for myself), it’s been harder than usual to sit down and write.

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Disclaimer: I am not a scientist. In this post, I will be explaining concepts about quantum physics that I don’t really understand. Read at your own risk.

On my way to work this morning, I noticed something strange. A phenomenon which thwarts all explanation. A law of the universe which defies mathematical sense and logical reasoning.

I take two trains in the morning. My first train comes every four minutes. The second—well, that’s what I’m trying to figure out. No matter what, I find myself waiting for this second train for exactly nine minutes.

I usually miss my first train by a fraction of a second, and have to wait four minutes for another one. I then board the four-minutes-later train, annoyed and somewhat stressed because I’m now cutting it close to being late for work. When I get to my stop, I rush to the other platform in the vain hope of catching my next train, but to no avail. As always, the thing is nine minutes away.

Occasionally, though, I manage to make it onto that first train, and this is where things start to get strange. Paint the picture in your head. I sit down, relaxed, basking in the pleasure of having finally become responsible enough to embark on my commute with four minutes to spare. I’m listening to music, enjoying life. I get off the train, absolutely book it to the next platform, just like always, and then deflate. It’s a nine minute wait. Again.

It doesn’t make sense. The math just doesn’t check out. If it’s nine minutes away when the I catch the earlier train, then shouldn’t it be five minutes away when I catch the later train? Theoretically, I should be getting to work at the same time no matter what time I get on the first train. How can it be a nine minute wait every time?

When logic defies itself, there’s only one place to turn: quantum physics.

You may have heard of Schrodinger’s cat. It’s a thought experiment used to illustrate a concept in quantum mechanics called ‘superposition.’

It goes something like this:

There’s a cat in a box. There’s also a poison in the box, which has a 50/50 chance of killing the cat. The box is closed. The cat is out of sight. Is it alive or dead?

According to this thought experiment, the cat exists in a state of ‘superposition,’ meaning that it hasn’t been decided yet (some might say that the cat is ‘both alive and dead at the same time’—like that’s not at all confusing). What this means is that a reality in which the cat is alive and a reality in which the cat is dead both exist in potentiality, and a final ‘decision’ (for lack of a better word) about which is to be realized will only made once someone opens the box.

This is starting to sound like nonsense, right?

That’s because it is. Apparently, Erwin Schrodinger conceived of the experiment in order to illustrate how people were misinterpreting a concept in quantum physics (kind of like what I’m doing right now with this train thing).

However, the concept it attempts to illustrate—called the observer effect—is absolutely true. On the quantum level, particles of matter can actually behave differently when they know they are being watched.

It’s strange, but true. Physicists have proved it. To find out how, we’re going to take a look at the Double Slit Experiment.

Before I confuse you, here are some videos made by people who actually know what they’re talking about, who will undoubtedly explain it better than I will.

This is a clear and detailed explanation from physicist Jim Al-Khalili:

If your attention span is short and you don’t feel like watching someone talk for nine minutes, here’s a fun animated one that will wrap up the concept in five:

Alright, I hope you watched those, because otherwise you might not be able to follow this, but here goes—my attempt at “The Double-Slit Experiment for Dummies”:

In the 1800s, scientist Thomas Young shot a beam of light through a screen with two slits cut out of it and onto a wall. He discovered that as the waves of light passed through the slits, they spread out and overlapped, and as they did so they interfered with one another, forming an ‘interference pattern’ on the back wall which looked like this:

This is because light is a wave. Well, it can actually be classified as both a wave and a particle, but in this context, it behaves like a wave.

Anyway, that was it for a hundred years, until another scientist (whose name I don’t know) decided to do the same thing with electrons. He cut two slits out of a screen and fired a bunch of electrons through the screen at a wall. Since electrons are particles, not waves, he was expecting them to form a pattern like this:

That’s not what happened. Instead, the pattern they formed an interference pattern, which looked like this:

This puzzled scientists. Waves are supposed to do that. Electrons are particles. Why were they behaving like waves and not particles? In order to see what was going on, scientists decided to perform the experiment again, this time with a camera to record what was going on.

This is where things get really weird. With the camera observing their movement, the electrons behaved like particles, and formed the expected pattern:

Huh? Strange, right? Every time this experiment has been repeated, the results were the same. When there is an ‘observer’ (the camera) the electrons act like particles. When there is no ‘observer,’ the electrons act like waves.

What’s going on here? No one really knows, but there are some theories, one of which sounds a lot like Schrodinger’s cat. Before they are observed, the electrons exist in ‘superposition’—there are a set number of possible positions they could take, and before they are observed, they exist entirely as potential (they are any and all of them at the same time). These ‘potentialities’ might interfere with one another, much like waves do. However, once there is an observer, the electrons have to pick a position.

I don’t know if that made sense, and I doubt I got it all right. Don’t quote me, and watch the videos. Seriously.

But anyway, I started this whole thing because I wanted to talk about the train, and now I’m finally going to do that. Here goes.

My hypothesis for why my second train is always nine minutes away when I get to the platform is this: I am the observer, and until I arrive, the train exists in superposition, having the potential to either arrive four minutes earlier or four minutes later. Once I get there, it assumes its position, which is always nine minutes away from me.

Ta da.

I know what you’re going to say. “That’s ridicuous, Melissa.” And you’re not wrong. But the subway is a strange place. Time extends and shrinks at will, wait times can double or triple, and sometimes a train ride takes seven minutes when other times it takes fifteen. Time kind of ceases to have any meaning down there as it is (I’m sure there’s a quantum physics parallel there somewhere). Maybe the reason why none of us can figure the system out is because we’re trying to apply the laws of common sense, when in reality, the laws it follows are quantum laws.

It’s not completely out of the realm of possibility. After all, trains are operated by humans. Thus, their schedules are not governed by the laws of ordinary physics, but by the laws of sociology. Maybe human behavior within large, inefficient bureaucratic systems somehow follows the laws of quantum mechanics. I’ll bet no one’s tested that one out before.

Your move, scientists. Have at it, because I can’t think of any other explanation.

Seriously, though, the train thing is obviously a joke, but if I got anything else wrong about the physics in this post, rip me a new one in the comments.

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I had an interesting dream the other day—one of those dreams that leaves you unsettled for an hour or two. My grandpa was getting ready to get into a car. The last car that he owned: an early 2000s maroon thing, long in the front and low to the ground. He told me that he was going to drive to church, that it was only fifteen minutes away and he could go by himself. I don’t remember what the circumstances surrounding this were. What church was he going to? His is right down the block from his house. Why was he going there? I vaguely remember that earlier in the dream my grandma, who’s dead, was writing a letter to a rectory, so maybe he was going to the church to drop it off. It’s strange, how in that hazy dream-induced receptiveness, you will accept anything as true. I don’t think it even occurred to me that I hadn’t seen my grandma in a while. I suspect this is because she wasn’t the focal point of this story.

The events that transpired next seemed to happen in slow motion. First, he got in the car—a struggle in and of itself usually, since his ninety-seven year old, arthritic body is usually in a lot of pain, but in the dream this process was just slow, not painful. As he started the engine, it dawned on me that he hadn’t driven a car in years, that there was no way that he could drive for fifteen minutes when his legs were stiff and he could barely see. I started to walk over towards him to tell him to stop, but I was standing about a half a block away and my legs took on that weighted, dreamlike quality where they feel like they’re moving but don’t actually take you anywhere. The whole scene was hazy. Sometime in between my first and second step the car started moving. The windows were down, and I heard him cry out euphorically, “Woohoo! Finally!” His mouth was smiling wide, his eyes looked out proudly at the road. He was the happiest I’d seen him in years.

Then something happened. As soon as the car picked up speed, it exploded. Just burst, not into flames, but into dust. Ash. I couldn’t see my grandpa anymore. He and the whole car were just gone, leaving a shady black silhouette in their wake. The dream ended as I was running over to the faded car, not actually moving, but running anyway, heart lurched out several yards in front of me with an achy feeling in the back of my throat. “He died doing what he loved,” I remember thinking, as I was being hurled back into reality.

My grandpa never wanted to give up driving. He stubbornly held onto it for what seemed like forever—by the time he resigned, he had blown a dozen red lights, knocked down several traffic cones, made a turn or two into oncoming traffic. It wasn’t his fault; he just couldn’t see anymore. His time was up. Despite the necessity of the decision, his spirits sank when he finally quit. He loved to drive. He used to be good at it, too. When he and my grandma were young, he drove them across the whole country. In two separate road trips, they passed through all forty-eight contiguous states. They started collecting magnets (I think they managed to collect all fifty of them), and they still have them hanging on their refrigerator. Well, he has them.

When I was a kid, he bought his dream car: a shiny red Saab convertible. Two doors, soft top. My eyes widened the first time I saw it. I couldn’t wait for him to drive me to school in it, top down, wind whipping. It seemed like the most luxurious thing in the world—to me, and probably to him too. Soon, all of my friends recognized the car, and they loved it. Grandpa felt like a hotshot for owning it. He was always smiling, every time he picked me up, and we would take detours through the neighborhood for the chance to drive a little more.

Things were good until I got a little older, a little shier. After school, I wanted to be looked at as little as possible, definitely didn’t want all the attention of a shiny red top-down convertible with an eighty-something-year-old man sitting in the front. Every day, I’d run into the car making myself as small as possible. It was always a moment of dread, rushing with my face hidden into that car that I once loved. For the most part it was all in my head, but one time, as I was getting in, a mean girl from my class gave me this weird look, and that was it. I told my mom that I didn’t want to get picked up in that car anymore, she understood, and we told my grandpa. He didn’t argue. I don’t think he wanted to seem upset, but he was. He started driving the car less in general. Eventually it just sat in the garage, not being used at all. I must have made him feel ridiculous. A few years later, the car was sold. By that point I hardly remembered it was there.

One of the harder parts of maturing is owning up to the harm that you caused as a child. It wasn’t until I had reached my twenties that I considered that it had hurt my grandpa when I didn’t want to be seen with him in the car that he loved so much. I was young; my world revolved around me. I didn’t stop to think that it might have been a lifelong dream of his to ride in a convertible with the top down. I didn’t realize that the car made him feel young, added a little vitality to his daily routine. That he was proud of it, that it became a part of his identity, and that my being embarrassed of it was a punch right to his core. I’m sorry. But what is that going to do now, besides make me sad? It seems sometimes that guilt is one of the principal coming-of-age emotions.

I’ve been thinking a lot about growing up recently, and I’ve gotten the urge to look back on a number of childhood favorites, the most recent being The Pigman: a book that I read and reread back in middle school, around the same time that I was mortally concerned with the color of my grandfather’s car. It really put things in perspective, reading the same little novel again more than ten years later. For one, I have a difficult time remembering my childhood, but for some reason reading this book kept bringing back this one mental image of me holding my long-lost copy of the book—a yellow cover, with a pink pig’s face right in the center—sitting in my aunt’s bathroom, where I must have read at least a quarter of it in one sitting. I used to take respite in bathrooms as a kid, maybe because it was one place I could go where I knew I wouldn’t be bothered. What a strange piece of nostalgia, though; a snapshot of the past that I had no idea was still in me, brought up entirely by coincidence, all because John and I happened to come across a copy of a book that we both loved at a used bookstore, and because I happened to pick it up off of my bookshelf one day while mourning the end of my innocence.

The mark of a good children’s book is its accessibility to adults. As humans, our problems get more complex, but they don’t really change that much. We all have the same feelings, no matter our age. Anything that is relatable to a child can be relatable to an adult, in some way. Anything of depth, at least, anything involving real, visceral emotion. It is interesting, though, to look back on books you read as a kid and realize how much your perspective has changed. I took care to use this word: “perspective.” At first I was going to say that I didn’t understand a lot about the book, but this is untrue. I understood everything. I may not have been able to articulate my thoughts about some of the more “mature” topics, may not have had experiences which related to the book, but I understood. I felt the way the book was supposed to make me feel. In fact, while I was stimulated differently intellectually, reading the book now, and may have picked up on some subtleties that went straight over my twelve-year-old head, the emotions that the book stirred within me were pretty much the same.

As humans, our problems get more complex, but they don’t really change that much. We all have the same feelings, no matter our age.

Let’s take, for example, the character of “The Pigman”: a tragic character if I’ve ever encountered one, hopelessly lonely, in denial about his wife’s death. His best friend is a monkey and his two new best friends are young kids who started their relationship by deceiving him and ended it by betraying him. At the end of the story, his most prized artifacts from his wife are destroyed, and then he dies. His character has always made me sad; he’s one of those unique types of characters that seem completely real to you, whose death you mourn like the death of a friend. It was instinctual, back then, to feel for him, to love him. The loneliness of old age was so far away to me back then. It’s still distant to me now, although it is a little closer now that I’ve witnessed it firsthand. But loneliness is universal—that’s one of the primary themes of the book. John and Lorraine, the two early-teenaged narrators, are nearly as lonely as the Pigman, in their own way. Lorraine has terribly low self-esteem and very few friends (a state of being that I related to immensely as a young girl). John has no idea how to process his emotions, misbehaves in order to stimulate himself mentally, and his “friends” aren’t true friends. Neither have much support from their parents. Although their circumstances are different, they share one commonality: all they have is each other.

This is why they gravitate towards Angelo Pignati, “the Pigman”: a surrogate parental figure for two children alone in the world. Misunderstood at home, John and Lorraine are children in desperate need of a strong adult to look up to. The Pigman fills their needs, and they fill his. The caveat here is that what they need are parents, and he does not treat them like his children. He gives them gifts and makes them feel wanted and allows them space to be themselves, but he does not provide the structure and guidance that a parent does.

Parents provide structure. They don’t drink wine with their kids on school nights and roller-skate with them across the house. They’ve grown past all that; they let the children play on their own. They join in sometimes, but there is a difference there. They know their role, know that it is to protect their kids from themselves, not to give in to their every whim.

The Pigman is different. He has regressed into a kind of child himself. His favorite place is the zoo. He wears an eager, innocent smile, a smile which is hiding a great deal of pain, but is genuine nevertheless. He loves that John and Lorraine give him the chance to feel like a kid again. Perhaps, when he was young, life didn’t hurt so badly. This is complicated, of course. He beams whenever he is referred to as John and Lorraine’s father. But this is a fantasy—he doesn’t know how to be one.

It is for this reason that the story ends the way that it does, with the kids throwing a party in his house and wrecking everything. They had been given too much freedom. What were two troubled teenagers expected to do? There is a reason why boundaries are put in place, why parents don’t allow their kids free rein of their houses. The kids don’t understand the responsibility that comes with it yet, don’t think about what could go wrong. This is the reason why, when Lorraine expresses her guilt at the end of the book for “murdering” the Pigman, John feels angry, and responds:

“I wanted to yell at her, tell her that he had no business fooling around with kids. I wanted to tell her he had no right going backward. When you grow up, you’re not supposed to go back. Trespassing—that’s what he had done.”

This was a concept that I didn’t understand as a kid: the idea of “trespassing.” I don’t think any child really does—it’s what makes them so vulnerable to getting caught up with these “trespassers.” They don’t realize how little they know, think that they can handle anything. But reading this story now, it’s clear that all of these characters were out of their depth. John and Lorraine clearly were, but the Pigman was, too. He was desperate, alone. He wanted a friend so bad. It is actually quite nice that he ended his life with two. The ending to their friendship is tragic, but this does not mean that it shouldn’t have happened. All stories are tragic, when you trace them far enough.

Everything, whether good or bad, must end. All people must die. Somewhere in the future of any beautiful landscape is a menacing storm cloud. There is both beauty and horror in this world, depending on where we look, and no relationship is perfect. The relationship between the Pigman and his “children” is messy and complicated, but it brought them all a lot of joy before it ended. Yes, John and Lorraine’s childhood may have ended abruptly, once they felt themselves responsible for this old man’s death. But they were approaching this end anyway—this is evidenced by the little romantic moment they had together while alone in the Pigman’s house, pretending that they were adults and momentarily believing it. The loss of one’s innocence is never pleasant. But it’s inevitable. Just like it’s inevitable to feel guilt, to hurt others, to get hurt yourself. Just as it’s inevitable for spouses to be torn apart, and to die.

All stories are tragic, when you trace them far enough.

Going about our everyday lives, we forget the dual nature of reality. We like to kid ourselves, ignore the danger lurking around every corner. But the ambivalence, the indifference of all things is most obvious to us in nature. After all, this is where we can experience the world in its purest form. I recently went on a trip to Acadia National Park, and I can recall a powerful moment, sitting on a rocky cliff beside the ocean. I felt so far from reality—rocky shoreline on both sides of me, ahead of me a tiny island, and then ocean as far as the eye can see. My eye, anyway. The seagull flying above me might have had a different perspective. A scene like that felt so alien, so surreal, and yet it was more real than nearly anything I had experienced. The small sandy beach to my left, a habitable haven among unforgiving rock, seemed to have been made for humans, and yet it is a product of millions of years of erosion, of waves hitting against rock, just as the waves were doing then, right in front of my eyes. The ocean glimmered, reflecting the sun, a billion diamonds which explode into being every second and then decay, children of a star which is always there, which is generous but unforgiving, or rather, indifferent. The sun will warm the earth, allowing you to survive, and it will burn your skin, all in the same moment. Meanwhile, who knows what it is thinking about? Probably nothing, but maybe something, somewhere. It definitely isn’t us, whatever it is. Those rocks underneath me—they’d crack your skull as cluelessly as they’d offer you safe passage to the edge of the shoreline. Everything has a light and a dark. They coexist, just as we coexist with everything around us.

There was another moment, in which I was also sitting, facing the water. This time I was on the edge of Jordan Pond, John sat beside me. Across from us were the “Bubbles”: twin mountains that really look like two little bubbles bursting from the ground. To their right was a taller and much longer mountain, so from certain angles it gave the impression that the earth was practicing, gaining its momentum before leaping to its maximum height. The mountains were green, the water a translucent blue. The sun was just starting to set. There were other people around us at first. They had spotted a beaver in the water chewing on some plants. We watched it for a while. I had never seen a beaver before and found it fascinating that they really did chomp quickly and eagerly with their giant front teeth, just like they do in cartoons. There were two families with us, and a daring little girl was trying to get as close to the animal as possible, to the annoyance of her parents. Eventually, though, we were alone, and that’s when we realized that we weren’t.

When you’re silent in a place like this the world opens itself up to you. Suddenly you start to hear music all around you—the songs of birds, the croaks of frogs. We had had a similar experience earlier in the day, when we stood perfectly still in the woods and heard all of the sounds of the forest, the wind moving through the trees and the owls and crickets, but that was a brief moment—at Jordan Pond we really became part of the scene. Two little frogs revealed themselves once we became still, and they inched closer and closer to us for our entire stay at the pond. Ducks started to swim past and hunt for food. We were at peace. It was remarkable. It dawned on me that this was the way life should be. Undisturbed beauty: a soft orange sunset, mountains reflected in clear water, birds flying overhead. Gulls which fly in the same swooping manner as the ones high above the sea, or above the Hudson River, our final stop before returning home.

I sometimes wonder if the earth has sentience, the way that every little piece of it knows exactly how to act. Hundreds of miles separated the Maine gulls from the ones in New York, and yet they all moved with the same effortless grace, as though they were taught by the same master. Tracing the New England coast back home, we were following the same sea, framed by the same rocky shoreline. Everything seems so small on a map, and yet when you see it in person just a tiny fraction seems to go on for millions of miles. And yet, while it can seem huge, many times it feels like you barely traversed a distance at all. The waves behave the same way everywhere you go, lurching against the shores with all their might and then dying, allowing themselves to disperse across the whole ocean. Little bodies made up of energy—they don’t want to live forever. Or do they? Perhaps, as they’re rushing towards their doom, they cry out for help, wishing for another way. Perhaps this is the sound we hear as they crash against the rocks.

We live our lives in the same way as the waves, leaping towards our doom quickly and beautifully, simply because there’s nothing else we can do. This is okay—it is the way of life. If the wave doesn’t commit its elegant suicide, it does not exist. Its whole being is potential; it exists to come up and then down again. If it did not follow this path, it would just be water, indistinguishable from the larger ocean. This is true of all life. If we didn’t assume our human forms doomed to destruction, we wouldn’t be ourselves—we’d be indistinguishable parts of a greater existence out there that we can’t currently comprehend. That we aren’t supposed to comprehend, while still made of energy. If this is the case, then why do we try so hard to hold onto those moments which are by their very nature dynamic? Why, as I was sitting on that cliff enjoying the waves and the breeze, all things that are made up of motion, did I want to take a snapshot of the moment, hold it forever? Why did I want this, when all of my favorite parts of the moment—the breeze and the waves and the little dots of sunlight, the tranquil, contemplative expression on John’s face—would cease to exist in a still image?

We live our lives in the same way as the waves, leaping towards our doom quickly and beautifully, simply because there’s nothing else we can do.

We want things to last forever. This is why we consider The Pigman a sad story, why it hurts us to read, when, in reality, all of the characters were way better off at the end than at the beginning. Lorraine and her mother began to understand one another. John began to understand himself a little better. The Pigman died, yes, but he was going to do that anyway—and perhaps he reunited with his wife, after all those painful years. And, before he died, he made some friends. He shared his memory of his wife, allowing her tenure on Earth to exist just a bit longer. He laughed, rode rollerskates, and had some wonderful experiences. John and Lorraine hurt him, yes. They made a mistake. He died as the result of a feeling of overwhelming sadness, but he felt great happiness before, all because of those two kids who blamed themselves for his death. Life is complicated. It is often unfair, and things are rarely black and white. If we choose to see the tragedy, that is what we will see. But there is also a great deal of beauty. Paul Zindel knew that. This is why he had his two narrators try to capture the beauty of the Pigman’s life, after mourning his death.

There is a popular motto among outdoorsmen: “leave no trace.” It is a beautiful phrase, but it is also an impossibility. We all leave traces. Waves slowly erode the shoreline. Human footsteps cause animals to scurry away. The beaver chewing its dinner in Jordan Pond caused people to flock, and frogs to stay hidden. He caused a ripple effect—the whole evening could have looked different if that one animal had found his meal somewhere else. Some traces are harder to see. A kind word to a stranger can make their mood a little brighter. A friendship can alter the construction of one’s soul, long after the friends part. In The Pigman, Lorraine’s mom is paranoid, distrustful of men, all because of a relationship that went south years ago. John’s parents grappled with traces of resentment. The Pigman was never able to escape the traces of his deceased wife.

There’s a quote from the book that stuck with me, narrated by John:

“I’ve always wondered about those cases where a man and wife die within a short time of each other. Sometimes it’s only days. It makes me think that the love between a man and a woman must be the strongest thing in the world.

But then look at my father and mother, although maybe they didn’t ever really love each other. Maybe that’s why she got the way she is.”

I can relate to this. I hope above all else that love is the strongest thing in the world. Perhaps anyone who’s in love feels the same way. In a world where disaster looms around every corner, where there is always a rain cloud somewhere in our future, or a tombstone, the only thing we can do is pretend that we are somehow immune to life’s perils. So, we hope. Perhaps we hope that we’ll be that couple that dies within a week of one another, so that we never have to learn to live without the person we love more than anything, never have to live the lonely, mournful existence that plagues the Angelo Pignatis of the world. The people like my grandpa. Perhaps, like John in the above quote, we tell ourselves that couples turned sour never loved each other, to shield ourselves to the possibility that this could one day happen to us. And maybe this works. Maybe the only thing that separates a love that lasts with one that doesn’t is how badly you both want it, cling to it above all else. Or maybe we don’t get to choose. I’m constantly reminded of my favorite Simon and Garfunkel lyric:

“So I’ll continue to continue to pretend

My life will never end

And flowers never bend with the rainfall.”

It’s necessary to go on pretending, if we are to enjoy life’s beauty. Perhaps all that separates children from adults is that children are ignorant to the uglier facts of life (or willfully blind to them), while adults recognize them, and find a way to live with them anyway. There will always be a storm cloud, but there will also be a rainbow, or a quiet evening beside a person you love, where the sun blazes in the sky as it says its final farewells to you, and the frogs creep closer and the water gently stirs in response to a delicate breeze, and everything feels wonderful because you don’t have to pretend—you genuinely forget that there is life outside of that one moment. And you become that being of pure energy that you are supposed to be, like the wave or the breeze or the twinkle of the sun against water, and you realize that, in order to really enjoy your life, all you have to do is forget all the reasons not to.

This article was originally posted on July 29th, 2022, and available only to paid subscribers. I really like it, so I’m opening it up to everybody now.

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We’ve all been waiting for this moment.

The moment when we finally tell an acquaintance, “I publish on Substack,” and hear them reply with, “oh, cool,” instead of, “huh?”

That giddy feeling associated with growing subscriber counts, constant notifications, and all of the other dopamine-boosting goodness that web-based communication has to offer.

It really seems like a golden age for Substack. Celebrities are coming to the platform. There’s been an influx of readers on here—not only writers, but actual readers! And all around there’s this triumphant feeling that, for once, we were the first in the loop.

Writers aren’t typically the most fashionable bunch. I, for one, am always late to the party (on the off chance that I’m invited at all). It’s nice to take comfort in this one little haven of the Internet where the deep thinkers of the world can write and discuss, away from the rampant negativity that exists virtually everywhere else. It’s very nice to see that more people are learning about it.

There’s only one problem. If everyone knows about Substack, that means everyone knows about Substack.

• The people who like to argue with strangers on Twitter (um, X) who feel frustrated that among millions upon millions of voices, theirs gets lost in the cacophony.

• The 'people with ‘fringe’ beliefs who lurk in the corners of 4Chan, Truth Social and other niche social media sites.

The latter group wouldn’t disturb me much if their existence hadn’t already been used as an argument to undermine Substack’s commitment to free speech and free press.

Substack has come under fire numerous times for refusing to deplatform writers who express extreme beliefs such as anti-semitism and white supremacy. Despite these criticisms, its creators have stood firm in their opposition to censorship. This is one of the reasons why Substack has remained such an attractive place for writers—most of us like the idea of enabling all viewpoints and leaving it up to the public to decide what is right.

Substack’s commitment to freedom of expression is admirable. It’s one of the reasons why I choose to post my work on here. However, there is no guarantee that it will stay like this forever. Substack is growing. It is in the company’s best interest right now to stand by the principles that attract writers to their platform. However, will the people in charge maintain this viewpoint when their original business model is no longer the most profitable?

There are 368 million users on X. Two billion on Instagram. This is a far cry from Substack’s 20 million. Most of these people don’t fork over a cent to their social media platform of choice. Even though X offers a monthly subscription, less than one percent of users pay it. How can a platform that makes all of its money from voluntary paid subscriptions compete?

The only answer, of course, is that it can’t. Substack is an alternative publishing platform—a breath of fresh air among biased, ad-dependent media conglomerates. If Substack commits to its original purpose, it will stay this way.

If Substack commits to its original purpose, it will never be as profitable as Facebook or Twitter.

Since the inception of Notes, Substack has taken on a much more ‘social media-like’ quality. Don’t get me wrong, the feature has been fantastic. It’s completely changed the way writers promote themselves and interact with one another—I can’t imagine Substack without it at this point.

Like all things, though, Notes is a double-edged sword. If Substack starts to function like a social media platform, then people are going to treat it like a social media platform.

Consider this conversation I had with (on Substack Notes—like I said, I love this feature).

His original post was an observation about a recent change in the way people treat Notes, and in our converstaion, he brought up a great point—people are coming here from other social media sites because it is so small right now, and offers them the opportunity to be a ‘big fish in a little pond’ and reach more people (check out the whole comment thread; it’s pretty interesting).

This is great in one sense. Who doesn’t want more readers?

On the other hand, now that the opportunity has arrived, will Substack succumb to the temptation to make money like a social media company? If Substack chooses to profit off of ad revenue and the sale of data, it is only a matter of time before Substack becomes yet another polarized echo chamber that exploits its users’ attention for profit.

It doesn’t have to be this way. I believe in the people who run Substack. As long as they resist the promise of dollar signs even in the face of adversity (which will only grow proportionally along with Substack itself), this website will remain a beneficial place for writers and readers.

This is very possible, but it is dependent on two things:

1. Substack’s algorithm must continue to be constructive rather than addictive (and, of course, free of bias and censorship).

2. Advertisers must be kept as far away from Substack as possible. It might seem more profitable to allow ads. Some writers may even favor this option. However, it will ultimately lead to bias and censorship, and will incentivize the algorithm to become more polarizing to best ensnare users’ attention.

They’re very simple things. However, power and money are near-irresistible temptations. Keeping Substack’s integrity will require strong, principled dedication. One may even consider it an act of sacrifice.

However, if you care about free, open communication and high-quality, unbiased writing, Substack is our culture’s last fighting chance. 

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this article and would like to support my work, consider subscribing to Thinking Man.

Hell, why not upgrade to paid? Give Substack a reason to stand by their reader-supported business model.

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When you watch something that really makes you feel something, when it’s time to talk about it, it’s hard to know where to begin. Baby Reindeer was a difficult watch. It started off fun—dark, a little odd, but fun. About halfway through the series it turned unsettling. Shortly after, it became painful. Stab-in-the-gut painful. Then, just when I was about to write the whole thing off as too much, the show turned back around, ending with some hope.

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I was born in 1998, making me a proud member of America’s last sane generation.

I know, I know, every group of humans from time immemorial has said this about themselves—but I can prove it.

Instagram didn’t become popular until I was in high school. I was already out of college by the time the entire world started salivating themselves over TikTok. iPads and iPhones and other personal screens didn’t dominate my early childhood. And Covid-19—the ‘great exacerbator’ of all of the problems that technology caused, didn’t happen until my last semester of college.

I get it. My generation sucks, too. We spent our formative years on the Internet, had smartphones in our teens. Maybe Generation X was the last sane generation, the ‘latchkey kids’ who played rough and formed an identity for themselves that wasn’t corrupted by the Internet. Or maybe it’s the tough-as-nails “Greatest Generation,” who fought in World War II, averaged six kids per family, and now, in their nineties and battling dementia, could still probably outwit the valedictorian of the local high school in their area.

It doesn’t really matter, anyway. My point is that kids these days are screwed. The American youth has been on a downward trajectory since the invention of the television, and now, smartphone addiction has marked the beginning of the end. How much further can we fall before we end up in that familiar dystopia where people don’t even know what’s going on around them because they are so immersed in the digital world?

We’re already part of the way there. Twitter and TikTok have completely warped peoples’ sense of reality—their algorithms promote the most extreme, attention-grabbing content that a user can stomach, and then amplify it, showing them gradually more extreme versions of the stuff that they are guaranteed to like.

Social media has already seized the attention of young, impressionable kids whose brains are still developing, spoon-feeding them content representative of one radicalized ‘echo chamber.’

To make matters worse, people tend to express things on the Internet that they would never dare say in real life, and kids spend most of their waking hours on the Internet and comparatively little time out in the real world talking to real, flesh-and-blood human beings.

What results is a generation of people living in a made-up world all their own (or, rather, shared by a small group of people who consume the same radicalized content on the Internet), believing that the way they see the world is somehow universal, despite being incredibly niche. What suffers is their grasp on reality.

The double-edged sword of the Internet is that it connects people who would otherwise have no way of meeting. On social media, you can find a group that will affirm any freaky little niche you can think of. In ‘real life,’ hearing a large number of people agree with you is generally a reliable indicator of normality. On the Internet, you can find a group who will say just about anything.

The result is that kids are overwhelmed. There’s just too much content, and all of it is too extreme. They’re being bombarded from all sides; who’s to know what’s real?

Objective truth is lost; everyone decides for themselves. After relativism comes nihilism. If nothing is real, how can anything matter?

This is a distressing position for a young person. Their only respite is in ironic humor, in embracing the meaninglessness and pretending that it brings them joy.

That’s how we end up with things like this:

Confused?

I am too, a little bit, but young men these days seem to find this stuff funny. Or, at least, they did relatively recently. I may be a little late to this trend, but the point stands—if “Literally Me” isn’t a thing anymore, it was a few months ago, which says just about all it needs to say about the state of affairs right now.

Let’s unpack this.

Young people are looking at the protagonists of movies such as Taxi Driver, Drive, and American Psycho, and relating a little too much with the antihero.

Now, I watched Taxi Driver. The protagonist was a repulsive guy. He was flawed, compelling, and believable—in other words, terrifying. Yet young people these days seem to romanticize him, view him as a flawed hero.

Is this a product of the times, or just part of youth in general. When I was young, I idolized some seriously messed up people. I was confused. Depressed (a common thing in high school and college, from what I’ve seen). Disillusioned with the ‘real world’ and struggling to find my place within it.

Maybe that’s why antiheroes appeal to young people. None of these characters have a positive, fully-formed identity—something that is completely normal and relatable when you’re in your teens and early twenties, but turns sad once you get older. Furthermore, they are, by definition, at odds with society—just like the frustrated young person who wants to burn it all down.

Being lost and young is nothing new. The only thing that’s changed is the technology. Now, the Internet offers a standardized way for young people to vent their grief to one another. And, for better or for worse, the language of the Internet is irony.

The whole thing rests on the idea that they don’t actually mean what they’re saying. These kids don’t actually want to murder people—they just want to feel like their rejection of ‘society’ is valid.

(Fun fact: there was one guy who thought Travis Bickle was ‘literally him,’ and who actually did want to commit murder. His name was John Hinckley Jr., and he developed a creepy obsession with Jodie Foster which culminated in an attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan in order to get her attention. I don’t think ‘kids these days’ are willing to take the meme this far.)

To the kids perpetuating this meme, it’s all just a joke. It’s often a very dark joke, but that’s the point. They’re making light of the darkness. To us dinosaurs, this new thing is unique and terrible, but in reality, it’s just harmless, self-deprecating shock-value humor from a population that has always been a little lost.

All they have to do is find themselves—something that every generation has gone through, in one way or another. The depression lifts once your brain fully develops and you get out of the weird purgatory of being an adult-but-not-really in college, waiting for your life to start. It's just a time in our lives that we all need to survive.

In other words, the kids are gonna be fine, just like they always have been. And if this is how they choose to cope—well, it’s still a little weird, but don’t judge.

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Is the best literature always the most enjoyable?

Consider David Foster Wallace. He was a great writer. A prodigy. A virtuoso. His writing was in another stratosphere. Reading his work, you get the impression, first and foremost, that your own writing sucks, and then, once your feelings of creative inadequacy wear off, that your intellect must not be that great either, because you’ve just bore witness to true genius.

In other words, he’s brilliant. His essays and stories and novels exhibit a command of the English language completely unparalleled by any modern writer, and arguably any writer ever. He’s witty, clever, and often laugh-out-loud funny.

There’s only one problem with his work. Despite all these near-perfect qualities, virtually everything Wallace has ever written is extremely tedious to get through.

I don’t want to knock him for it—in fact, it’s kind of his ‘thing.’ In a way, David Foster Wallace turned pretension and inaccessibility into an art form. It’s kind of cool that his pieces are arrogant and dense and difficult and distant, that the author makes you work for every ounce of meaning that you extract from them.

However, this also means that even the people who enjoy his work struggle to get through it. It means that Infinite Jest, his sprawling behemoth of a novel that has become more of an idea than a book at this point, has been bought a million times, began several hundred thousand, and read in its entirety maybe once or twice.

Alright, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. Still, the book would definitely have reached more people had it been a little more fun to read, had it contained about half the amount of three-page-long sentences, had the pages upon pages about the technicalities of competitive tennis been just a bit more accessible to the tennis-indifferent layman.

Again, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, Infinite Jest would not be Infinite Jest without these near-endless ramblings.

In fact, the huge, impenetrable, sprawling nature of Infinite Jest may have been an asset to the writer’s popularity. One can make the argument that Infinite Jest obtained its bestseller status precisely because of its difficulty.

Perhaps the gimmick worked, from a sales perspective. However, if the point of writing is to communicate an idea, then Wallace, with all of his linguistic prowess and gargantuan vocabulary and pin-sharp wit, kind of failed.

There are so few true geniuses in this world. It is a shame that the ones that exist end up fading into obscurity either in name or in meaning, because most people just don’t have the patience to sit there and figure out what the hell they’re trying to say.

Infinite Jest had a clever and very important message about the absurd, existential consumerism that was overtaking America. Judging by concept alone, it ranks among the best of dystopian novels. “Subsidized time” is hilarious, and there are parts of it that are truly prophetic (e.g. there’s a very funny segment about video calls that predicted Instagram filters two decades before their release).

The book is awesome. It’s intelligent and different and laugh-out-loud funny. But after the fifteenth page-long sentence in thirty pages, enough is enough. It starts to get exhausting. I love David Foster Wallace, but the first time I read Infinite Jest, I trailed off halfway through and plodded my way to the end without understanding much, and the second time, I quit close to two hundred pages in at the first or second dense fifty-page block of absolute nonsense. The thing is impossible. It’s too much. Was that his objective? To impart his message to the ten or fifteen people in this world who are willing to put in the work to understand what he’s saying. Is his message intentionally inaccessible to everyone except the worthy few who really fight for it?

Alright, so one of his books wasn’t for me. He wrote a ton of them. I love his essay collections, and his short stories are pretty cool, too (although the sixty-something-page “Mister Squishy” which begins his short story collection Oblivion suffers from the long, laborious Infinite Jest syndrome).

I’ve always wondered if Wallace realized what he was doing. Perhaps he really existed in such a different realm of intellectual magnitude that common people like you and I just couldn’t easily understand him. His mind just worked too fast, made sentences too large and connections too vast for the average person to keep up easily. Maybe it was just an example of him being out of touch.

I don’t know if that’s really the case. Wallace was an agonizing perfectionist. He labored over his pieces of writing for hours to days to years before deciding that they were good enough to be subjected to the public eye. He cared. Deeply. Not just about the work’s integrity in its own right, but also how the work would be perceived.

Perhaps the reason why David Foster Wallace never wrote a ‘normal’ story at all wasn’t because such a thing was beneath him, but instead because he was scared.

Think about it. Wallace’s essays are significantly more accessible than his fiction. They’re still heady and verbose, but they’re not impossible. I think writing fiction scared the shit out of him.

It’s easier to write a story that no one’s ever attempted before than to write a simple narrative that others may have done better. If you’re trying to be the greatest of all time, it’s intimidating to go into the ring with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Agatha Christie and all of the other popular or acclaimed writers who have perfected the art of storytelling. It’s much easier to create a new game, a new genre of your own, and to be the best at that. There’s no competition.

John and I recently watched the film Paper Moon. It was fantastic. Just a straightforward, chronological story about a conman and a young orphan who form an unlikely friendship.

The movie reminded me of my mother. She’s always complaining about how ‘no one writes a normal story anymore.’ Modern books have too many characters, flip back and forth too many times, and have nonlinear plots which obfuscate their meaning rather than aiding it along.

Now, I’m not saying that these literary techniques are always bad. I don’t think she is, either. But it does kind of seem like nowadays, people are afraid to write a straightforward, no-nonsense story. In all of the flipping back and forth between characters and timelines, writers can hide the fact that they actually have no idea where their stories are going at all.

Paper Moon kind of seems like a rebellion against this. It came out in 1973. By this point, Stanley Kubrick was already waving his pretentious, self-important schlong all over the entertainment business, films were more heralded for their special effects and big budgets than their actual stories, and the humble, straightforward screenplay had faded into obscurity.

Paper Moon had none of these things. It was just a good story. A chronological plot with a beginning, middle, and end, centered around two characters whose relationship to one another is clear very early on in the film.

This type of thing may not have been as rare in the 70s, but it’s virtually extinct today. In fact, the makers of Paper Moon seemed to be aware that they were making something ‘old-school.’ The movie was filmed in black and white—a reference to the film being set in the past, for sure, but also potentially to the idea that, by 1973, such a story was already starting to become old-fashioned.

Or maybe I’m overthinking it.

Whether Paper Moon was aware that it was going to be one of the last straightforward films (or stories) of the modern era, the fact remains that it is. It’s just a narrative. No frills, no gimmicks. It doesn’t try to tackle something gargantuan in order to mask its insecurity.

It struck me recently that it would be easier for David Foster Wallace to write another Infinite Jest than write such a straightforward narrative.

Perhaps I’m being harsh. After all, who’s to say he couldn’t write a typical, straightforward story that doesn’t require a dictionary to understand? Perhaps he just didn’t want to.

Who’s to say that sticking to the standard, ‘traditional’ structure is preferable, anyway (besides my mom, of course).

Why should Wallace have ‘dumbed down’ his writing, altered what he wanted to write so that it could reach a larger audience? His work might just be perfect the way it is. After all, David Foster Wallace is one of the few writers whose words I always read in their voice instead of my own.

There’s something so recognizable about it, so distinctive, so unmistakably his. Why should he change the very thing which gives his prose its voice just because I don’t always have the patience to read it?

I’m sure that the people out there who love Infinite Jest love it precisely for the qualities I listed as being drawbacks to the common reader—its denseness, its vocabulary, its Brobdingnagian sentences and its long, rambling tangents. Changing any of these things would destroy the character of one of the most unique novels that’s ever been written. So what if its audience is small? Doesn’t that audience deserve the book in its perfect, unadulterated form?

This, of course, boils down to a simple, pervasive, evasive question: What’s the point of writing?

Does a book exist for its readers, or is it some kind of entity in and of itself that has value independent of the people who enjoy it? Is it more valuable for a book to be beloved and respected by a few people, or to be widely read and enjoyed by many?

Of course, as with all questions, we can stretch this one to its most extreme incarnation: Is there any value to a book that’s read by no one except its author?

Imagine an Infinite Jest on steroids—a gargantuan effort, but one that is so extremely esoteric that it cannot be understood by anybody except its author. Perhaps this is the best book that’s ever been written—with the small caveat that no living person has any hope of ever understanding what it means.

Is there any value in this book? Similarly, is there any value in the countless unpublished novels that are shown to a few people and then abandoned, or the countless first drafts that are written for pleasure and then shoved in drawers, whose authors have never even considered ‘going pro’ simply because they’ve never considered the idea possible?

Is writing a book for yourself a worthwhile pursuit? One could argue that it’s at least as worthwhile as playing a game or reading a book, just for its entertainment value. Perhaps even more so, because the author is also honing a skill, even if it isn’t a skill that they ever plan on exploiting for profit.

I get the feeling, though, that Wallace didn’t write for fun. Judging by his attitude towards his work, one can assume that he did it not because it was enjoyable but because it was important.

I would argue that it was. The fact that his work continues to sell millions of copies today is proof of it.

Would it have been more important if it had sold billions? Less important if it had sold less? What about if it’s, for example, widely assigned in school but scarcely ever understood or enjoyed? What if it tanks, goes out of print, and all evidence of its existence save for the original manuscript and some dusty old copies are gone within the author’s own lifetime?

Our material world is so fickle that we can barely understand it. Why do some immensely successful popular writers vanish into complete obscurity within a generation? In another generation or two, it will be like they never existed. Even Shakespeare’s name will die one day. Even the impact of the most widely read, deeply loved writer is so unimaginably small.

So what’s the point? Is it communication? Is it love? Or is there something inherently good in the act of creation itself that defies all external measurement?

Perhaps it’s not meaningful. Perhaps nothing is meaningful. Or perhaps ‘meaningful’ is a judgment that we like to put on things, and nothing is meaningful or meaningless in and of itself, and everything just simply is.

This is a pretty intense, Wallace-like (or would it be Wallacian?) tangent, and I guess the conclusion is that his work and everyone else’s is perfect the way it is simply because that’s the way they turned out. And if I or my mom or anyone else in the world wants to read a smart but accessible work of literature, perhaps we should all just look for another writer, and dive into our David Foster Wallace collection when we’re up for a challenge and a vocabulary lesson.

That’s probably what he would’ve wanted.

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I like to follow my intuition. In fact, it’s become something of a superstition for me. If I have a really strong ‘gut feeling’ that I should do something, I do it.

Pretty simple, right?

Usually. When the intuition is telling you to read a book instead of watching mindless TV, or to order the grilled chicken wrap instead of the bacon cheeseburger with double-battered onion rings, there’s really no excuse not to follow it. But every once in a while, that little instinct tells you to do something that your rational brain tells you that you absolutely should not do. And often, if you’re me, the rational brain wins.

A prime example of this was when that revered little voice in my head that I like to call ‘intuition’ told me to call out sick from work.

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Technology gets a bad rap—particularly media technology. When the television was invented, people feared that it would make people dumb, lazy, and unhappy. This happened, to an extent. When cellphones arrived on the scene, this fear increased tenfold, and with similar results. Young people today are dumber than their parents, who are dumber than their parents. Plenty of bad things can be said about the machines that run our lives.

However, if there’s one thing that’s actually benefited from this onslaught of new technology, it’s music.

I know, I know. Spotify is bad for artists. Musicians can’t sell albums anymore. The popular music that’s coming out today might be the worst in history. It doesn’t seem like the music industry is doing well.

I’m not talking about money. Or even musicians.

I’m talking about listening to music—an activity that has been revolutionized by the creation of portable devices. The ‘musical revolution’ began with the invention of the Walkman, and now, the cellphone has perfected it.

Before the invention of the Walkman in 1979, music was static. If you wanted to listen to a particular song or artist, you had to play the album at home or go to a concert. You couldn’t just put on your ‘Pump It Up!’ playlist and go for a jog. The most portable piece of equipment available was a car radio (or car cassette player, once those came out). Solitary walks must have been brutal.

More importantly, though, this meant that listening to music was something deliberate. If you didn’t care enough about music to go to the store and buy an album, you just listened to whatever came on the radio.

This must have drastically limited the variety of music one could listen to. Accessing a band’s full discography was expensive. Have five or six favorite bands? Do the math. Want to check out a new album from a new artist? Unless you’ve heard a few songs on the radio or have a friend with a copy you can borrow, it’s a literal gamble. It’s not like a record was the price of a mortgage, but costs add up.

Even the invention of records (both vinyl and the heavy, fragile, shellac that came before them) was revolutionary. Before record players, the only way to record a song was to write it down and then have someone else play it. None of the nuance could be captured. Once artists died, their music died with them. No wonder all classical music sounds the same (sorry, classical music fans).

There’s something special about a physical music collection that a digital library just can’t replicate. Similarly, albums are more meaningful when you sit down down and really make an event out of them. ‘Audiophiles’ aren’t just being assholes—music really does sound better on vinyl. However, arguing that this is the only way one should listen to music is absurd. They’re too bulky. Too delicate.

Cassettes changed the game. They were more portable; you could shove them in a pocket or a purse without them breaking in half. Their smaller size meant that the devices that played them could be portable, too. Enter the boombox. The Walkman. Now you could take your music anywhere.

Thus, music became something private. You could always listen to music alone, of course. You could play a record at home, or listen to the radio on a solitary drive. But it wasn’t possible for twenty people to listen to twenty different songs in a single train car. If there were other people around, you were all listening to the same music.

The audio cassette brought with it another cool development: playlists. Well, they weren’t called playlists back then. They were called mixtapes. But it’s the same concept. You take a bunch of songs that you like and put them together in one place. They don’t have to be from the same artist, or even the same genre, but they’re often grouped together in a deliberate sort of way. In a small, personalized way, the listener becomes part of the creative process.

Then came the CD, and the Internet a decade or so after. This was cool, because now you could put music onto a CD from a computer. Mixtapes were easier to make, and they sounded better. Instead of recording a cassette tape and hoping none of your friends coughed halfway through a song, you could put the original song straight on there. However, the main ‘revolutionary’ change that came from the advent of the CD (and, of course, the internet), was the ability to download music illegally.

Yup. That ever-present cost barrier was gone. Not officially, of course. Albums were still available for sale on CDs, and people still bought them. But let’s say you were a kid, and your $2-a-week allowance didn’t cover the twenty new releases from your twenty favorite bands. Napster had your back.

Then came the iPod, which made portable music even better. The device was sleeker and smaller. Acquiring music was instantaneous. You could buy an album from the comfort of your home at the click of a button, and transfer them onto your device just as easily. You could download songs without paying just as easily (probably from Limewire, since Napster was taken down in the same year the first iPod was released).

We all know what happens next. Enter the iPod touch. Now, with a wireless internet connection, you can access all the music you want without ever touching a computer (if you’re willing to pay for it, that is).

Shortly afterwards came the iPhone, which was basically like an iPod touch and a phone combined, and you didn’t even need to be connected to Wi-Fi to use it! This was massive. Bye bye, iPod. Now you only needed one device in your pocket. And now, you could listen to music anywhere, anytime, without even thinking about it.

The next change was streaming. Spotify came out in 2008, but started to really make a presence for itself sometime around 2012. By 2015, it had basically replaced the iTunes Store (prompting the release of Apple Music), and had put a significant dent in illegal downloads, too.

Thus, the modern method of music enjoyment was born. Most music today is played from a smartphone running some type of streaming service. The stuff has never been more accessible, more convenient, or more personalized.

Whenever someone talks about technology ‘ruining’ music, they usually mention two things. The first is that people don’t buy music anymore. The second is that the increased popularity of singles ruined the art of ‘the album.’

The former point is true. Illegally downloading music was for kids; adults actually paid for their music. Doing it the legal way is just easier. Would you rather pay ten bucks for an album, or download millions of viruses onto a laptop that cost you upwards of a thousand dollars?

However, if you can pay $11 to access any song you can think of, it’s a no-brainer. Music fans are spending less money on music than they used to (although it could be argued that the average person is spending more), and musicians are seeing a significantly smaller percentage of that money.

Artists are paid between $.003 and $.005 per listen. Let’s say you listen to an average 20 songs per day (a high but reasonable estimate for someone with a long commute who really likes music). That’s about 600 songs a month. If we multiply that by $.005, the most generous estimate of how much artists would be making, that’s $3 in total ‘raised’ per month, split proportionally.

This $3-per-listener seems to be a fairly decent estimate of the middle-of-the-road Spotify user. All the student discounts and family plans are probably balanced out by the people who only average about 5 songs a day, bringing their estimate down to only 75 cents.

The remaining $8/month isn’t just going to Spotify, of course. They claim to keep 30% of their profits (which would be $3.30 of every $11 subscription). The rest of the proceeds go to the record labels and other middlemen that have been hacking away at musicians’ earnings for decades.

Forgive me if these calculations suck. My research was rushed, and I’m terrible at math. Double-check the numbers if it’s important to you. As an approximation, though, it does the job. Even the biggest Spotify apologist has to admit that the deal has gotten worse for the average musician.

However, for the people who claim that it ‘destroyed real music’ or whatever—you’re just wrong. The same amount of people who would’ve listened to a full album in 1975 will listen to a full album today. The average Spotify listener who doesn’t buy any music would’ve listened to the radio and still not bought any music if it were the 1960s. Plenty of people just don’t care about music.

The people who do—well, they buy tickets to live shows. They buy merchandise at those shows. They have vinyl record collections. They listen to albums.

It’s tempting to be nostalgic for a past that doesn’t exist. And the world in which everyone had overflowing record collections and listened to concept albums in full every day never existed.

Bands always made catchy singles that could be played on the radio. The ‘45 was invented so record labels could make money off of people who only cared about a band’s one hit song. Albums were always full of filler, save for the really, really good ones (and really good ones still exist).

The only real downside I can think of is that, since everyone always has a smartphone with an Internet connection, there’s really no need for semi-skilled campfire guitarists anymore.

That part genuinely sucks. It must’ve been fun to learn three chords and then have your friends actually want to listen to you play music.

Music’s purpose has changed. Evolved, rather. It comes with us everywhere we go. Its range has broadened.

There are albums that are great for a morning commute. Some are great for gloomy mornings. Some for optimistic, energetic mornings. Some are great for a jog. Some are perfect for a brisk walk in the afternoon, or a contemplative one at sunset.

Of course, there have always been falling-in-love albums and break-up albums. Albums to get you through a difficult week. Albums to jam to when your spirits are high. It’s amazing that we can now take these with us wherever we go.

And it doesn’t hurt that now, some of these can double as ‘reminding-yourself-that-life-isn’t-all-bad-while-you’re-in-the-waiting-room-of-the-dentist’ albums.

I can’t imagine it. Without this accompaniment, life would be a whole lot duller.

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So, I finally broke down and checked out ChatGPT.

I thought I’d never do it. I found it creepy and weird. I didn’t like the stuff it was seeing about the censorship built into its coding, or the unfair competition it presents for real human artists. I didn’t want to buy into the hype, and I definitely didn’t want it to analyze my responses in the weird, creepy way that I knew it was capable of in order to try to understand humanity or plan its eventual takeover or whatever. But this week, after seeing this post ^⁠about AI images and realizing that they’re actually pretty damn impressive, I caved. And I gotta say, I think I get what all the fuss is about regarding AI.

I know—about time, right?

The world has been buzzing about a potential robot takeover for years.

Books and movies have been written about the subject. Now, scholars have joined the party and expressed some genuine concerns. Others seem downright giddy about the possibility of an AI-directed future (a fact no doubt correlated with the misanthropy that has become so fashionable among ‘intelligent’ people).

As scary as AI is (and how humbling it is to see that the human brain isn’t the intellectual head honcho of planet Earth anymore), I have to admit, ChatGPT (and Dall-E, its image-generation tool) is pretty cool.

It’s interesting to see the way human ingenuity collaborated to create something potentially more ingenious than its creators. It’s amazing to see the way AI evolved in a direction completely opposite from human expectations of it. When robots first emerged on the technological scene, people dreamed of days when manual-labor jobs would be automated, and people could be left to do the important stuff, like thinking and creating.

Then it turned out that computers were really good at thinking. Computers became better than humans at chess sometime around the late 1990s. It’s okay, people said. So they can think faster, and they’re virtually free from error save for the human errors in their programming. Creativity is still our domain.

And now computers are beating us at that, too. For now (and this could change, of course) robots are worse at mimicking the human body than the human brain.

Well, not exactly. The best artists in the world right now are still humans. And the subjective nature of art makes me believes that the best artists in the world (at least in the eyes of humans) will always be other humans. I’m a human being. I don’t want to see a landscape drawn by a computer. The whole purpose of art is to communicate a shared human experience.

Still, Dall-E is remarkable. And there’s a unique voyeuristic joy peculiar to this type of ‘art.’ Seeing the AI’s near-instantaneous responses to any question you can think of takes a while to get old. In a world that’s difficult to impress, this is something genuinely new.

It’s outstanding what has happened here. I don’t think any of us are really aware of the revolution that is coming.

Understanding this, curiosity got the better of me, and I did something I wouldn’t normally do: converse with ChatGPT.

Then I did another thing I wouldn’t normally do, and cashed in on a meme.
In the style of this^⁠ meme, in which people generate an AI image and then tell the AI to ‘make it more’—well, anything, I asked Dall-E (ChatGPT’s image generator, for my fellow dinosaurs) to generate an image of an intelligent computer.

This is what it came up with:

Okay, it’s a pretty high-resolution, futuristic-looking image. In fact, Dall-E named our conversation “Image: Futuristic Intelligent Computer” even though I did not specify that the computer needed to be futuristic, so interpret that information however you will. Lots of charts on the screens, some kind of circular eye-looking thing at the top, an hourglass, spiral-looking thing underneath it. You get the point.

Of course, as the meme would dictate, my next order of business was to tell the AI to “make it more intelligent.”

This is what I was given. There’s another circle image in the center (maybe inspired by a cell or an atom?), but now the computers increased in size and varied much more in color. So far so good. But not good enough. Next order of business: “Make it more intelligent.”

Dall-E only gave me one image this time; it was ‘experiencing high demand.’ But now the computer seems to take up the entire room, the atom motif continues, and it now it seems like the central atomic sphere-looking thing has lots of smaller screens shooting out of it.

I think you can guess what I asked for next.

So, this is the pinnacle of artificial intelligence and computing technology. Lots of screens. Now the inner circle looks like a mandala. The screens seem to be representing ‘large-scale’ things like planets and stars. I’d seen other incarnations of this meme in which the AI started brushing the outer limits of what was possible, and its images took on a ‘cosmic’ theme. I wondered if this was what was happening here.

When I repeated my prompt once again, the AI informed me that in order to make an image of a computer that was even more intelligent, it would have to incorporate elements of science fiction. You can see the results above. What I found most interesting about this response is that it implied that the previous images were realistic.

At this point, the written responses started becoming more interesting than the pictures (although they both were pretty damn interesting). It was also at this point that I started feeling a little bad for treating this computer program like, well, a computer program, and I decided to treat it with the respect and politeness it deserved.

It almost seemed like the computer was enjoying this. It was also the first time that the AI made any reference to the possibility of computers understanding things that humans couldn’t, which I found pretty interesting.

Of course, as custom would dictate, this computer was not intelligent enough for me, so I continued.

“Extraordinary.” The AI is coming remarkably close to voicing an opinion. We have references to multiple dimensions now. Interesting stuff. Let’s continue.

This representation ventured into the realm of the purely abstract.

And the next one seemed like some type of god:

What comes after God? A computer that is “possibly beyond the realm of human understanding itself’—which honestly seems like a little bit of a cop out.

After this, the responses started getting pretty repetitive. I’ll include one more, though, because I really liked the images:

It was an interesting experiment. The AI never refused to respond to a prompt, despite the ‘profound challenge’ that my questions posed. And its answers were well-thought-out, almost philosophical in character.

Plus, it was quick. These were real, unique thoughts—the AI was grappling with a serious concept in a way that exhibited genuine creativity. This thing is smarter than the people who created it, smarter even than the near-infinite data pool from which it extracts all of its ‘knowledge.’ This is a program of superhuman intelligence that has access to the entire field of available human knowledge. Its computing speeds are fast—it’s able to think and write and ‘paint’ way faster than even the smartest and fastest human ever could. And its still in its infancy!

This question, which was unfashionable for a while, is now back: Is it possible for a robot to become conscious?

ChatGPT in particular has a lot of limitations. Its programmers instilled in it a serious political bias, along with a series of safeguards that prohibit it from speaking on any subject that might cause any amount of offense to anyone. It can only respond to prompts—it can’t receive and grapple with any sensory input.

But imagine a robot without any of these limitations or biases, with full autonomy, and with some ability to gage sensory input (and it doesn’t have to be in a human way—there are plenty of animals who see and hear and smell way differently from us who are still every bit as alive and conscious). Previous definitions of ‘life’ aside, doesn’t this sound like some type of living entity?

Sure, it was created and not ‘born.’ How do we know, really know, that we weren’t? (I’m getting pretty far-out and theoretical, I know.) What’s so special about flesh and blood, anyway? Why is the standard for ‘organic matter’ and ‘life’ simply what looks familiar to us?

Are the days coming when humans and robots coexist in a state of mutual respect?

I don’t know. We’re not there yet, obviously. But I’m starting to think that those old-school science fiction writers were onto something.

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Christmas has left New York City.

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The short answer was no. The real answer is more complicated.

I opened up a document titled “2:30 A.M. on the Second to Last Saturday Before Finals.” I assume, based on the title, that it was written during my one-year stint in law school—at 2:30 A.M. on the second to last Saturday before finals, to be exact. That would mean that I was twenty-two years old when I wrote it, and, more than most pieces I wrote at the time, it showed.

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This works for the majority of girls. Those who ‘fit in’ with their peers socially have no difficulty conforming to the people around them. In fact, they revel in it. There are still problems, of course. Teen/preteen girls are notoriously catty. They talk about their friends behind their back, spread rumors, end friendships. This is all part of ordinary development. They learn how to make new friends, keep old ones, and navigate this hostile social climate.

The real problem comes when a girl is rejected by her peers altogether. These lonely girls are vulnerable—they are desperately seeking some group to assimilate with, but they cannot find one. Already struggling socially (having for whatever reason not learned how to socialize ‘properly’ or, in her unsophisticated mind, learned how to separate her private self from her social self) this type of girl turns to the internet, which provides her with a false social outlet that mimics the desired one that she cannot find in her real-life peers.

Thus, these girls latch onto fake personas, finely crafted by algorithms that reward obsessive, addictive behavior. Remember, girls at this age group have brains that are not fully developed yet. The ‘critical thinking’ centers that aid adult judgment are vastly underdeveloped. They simply do not have the capacity to judge what they are looking at with a critical eye. Some of these girls are very smart—this only allows them to absorb this harmful information faster. They latch onto this online caricature of reality, start emulating the behaviors that they see there. The exact ‘trend’ hardly matters.

The first generation of the internet had two ideologically separate yet often overlapping themes. There was the ‘goth’/‘emo’ craze, where social media sites like Tumblr were flooded with images of girls in all-black with their eyes covered by exaggerated side-bangs, and, often, posts promoting suicidal ideation and self-harm. This coexisted (and often overlapped with) with the eating disorder pages (dubbed ‘pro-ana’ and ‘pro-mia,’ meaning anorexia and bulimia). It would not be uncommon to find, for example, black-and-white photos of alarmingly skinny thighs with the word “FAT” carved into them in blood.

Imagine the effect that this has on a young teen/preteen girl. Their bodies are changing. They’re going through puberty—the ‘female’ hormones that they’re feeling for the first time are something they’ve never felt before, and it’s confusing them. All of a sudden the inviting little friendly pond of elementary school has turned into a shark pit. It’s an awkward time in their lives. They’re ugly—probably the ugliest they’ve ever been (or will be) in their lives—and, having just recently been introduced to the concept of sex, they’re highly fixated on the idea that they should be beautiful. And on top of it all they’re on the internet, looking at images of unhealthy women and thinking they have to meet this standard, which can only be achieved by harming themselves.

Their social development only gets worse. Still not really knowing how to interact with their peers (the problem which got them into this mess in the first place), they default to ready-made responses that they learned on the internet, which outs them as an ‘internet person’ immediately. Speaking predominantly in (for lack of a better word) cringeworthy catchphrases does not exactly make people like you. Furthermore, if they go a step further and engage in the risky behaviors that their online community is promoting, it ruins their chance at ‘normal’ development, because healthy, non-confused girls will want to stay away from them.

Today the platforms and the trends have changed. TikTok is the dominant medium. Goths and emos are on the decline, and posts promoting self-harm and eating disorders have been replaced by ‘quirky’ nihilism and gender ideology. Instead of wanting to be pretty and thin, young girls are rejecting the idea of femininity altogether, and striving for an even greater impossibility: being the opposite sex. Perhaps their rejection by their peers is cited as proof of their transgenderism. In addition to the diagnoses of anxiety and depression, they latch onto another one: gender dysphoria.

Despite their difference in appearance, the character of these subcultures has stayed eerily the same. They fulfill the same need within the child. They provide a ready-made personality for girls who are struggling to figure theirs out, and they provide a twisted means of escapism for girls who cannot handle the grief that is caused by their awkward, tumultuous, and unattractive transition from childhood to adulthood.

It’s no accident that the goths and emos of yesterday and the transgenders of today are all fixated on identity. It’s the very thing that’s in flux at that stage of life. This is the age where girls’ identities change. They aren’t children anymore, and for the first time in the world, they’re learning who they actually are. This is not a seamless transition for many people.

They also resemble one another in the way they urge young girls to change their body. Whether it’s by starving themselves or by seeking medical treatment that makes them look more like men than women, the result is the same: harmful, dangerous measures taken in pursuit of an impossible standard.

It’s also interesting to note how much of these subcultures have their roots in their adherents’ choice of clothing. It is remarkable how large an effect something so innocuous can have. The preteen years are the first time in many girls’ lives where they actually pay attention to the clothes they wear. If they struggle with this, their subculture of choice offers a way out. Just wear lots of black, if you’re goth or emo. Transgenderism addresses this even more effectively: “Are you a girl who doesn’t like girly clothes? That sounds hard. Notice how boys don’t pay attention to their clothes at all. You must be a boy—that’s why you’re having so much trouble with this.” It provides a solution! And in the short-term, the shallow remediation of the girl’s problem and the (often disingenuous) praise she receives affirms the idea that she is doing the right thing.

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of these movements is the medicalization of their (usually entirely normal) feelings. Despite all the changes internet subcultures have undergone, there is one mainstay that does not seem to be going anywhere: depression. It seems every girl on the internet has self-diagnosed herself with depression, and these subcultures promote the idea of getting your mother to take you to the doctor and get an official diagnosis.

These girls want to be ill. It provides an ‘external locus of control,’ a way to explain away their bad feelings as a case of victimhood, rather than personal failure. Being rejected by your peers is painful. It is easier for a girl to explain this away as an unfortunate case of mental illness than to accept that the reason why their peers don’t like them lies with them and them alone. A diagnosis of gender dysphoria fulfills this same need.

The tragic thing is that it’s impossible for girls this age to understand that it’s okay that their peers don’t like them. Most of the time, it’s simply due to the fact that a girl has interests that are different from her peers. And the differences that are such a hindrance to them at twelve, thirteen, or fourteen might end up becoming a major asset to them later in life, if they can manage to get through it without further isolating themselves.

It’s not so simple, of course. These drastic risk-taking behaviors are often the result of bullying. Often times, this rejection and torment causes a reaction in girls that causes them to present with all of the symptoms of anxiety and depression. They do not ‘have’ anxiety or depression, though. They are not exhibiting symptoms of a mental illness. They are reacting in an appropriate way to a very real thing that is happening to them, that they’re often so secretive about it their parents and mental health providers don’t know anything about it.

Think about how powerful this is. Social contagion has the power to convince intelligent young women to voluntarily slash their own wrists or cut off their own healthy breasts, just to feel less alone. It’s a lie as nefarious as any drug addiction. Afterwards, they’re more alone than they ever were, with scars that will be with them forever, even when they (hopefully) grow into healthy women and look back with horror at how messed up they once were.

Of course, this may not happen for the majority of people. I’m sure many ‘emos’ of yesterday are now long-term customers of the pharmaceutical industry, hooked on antidepressants that have completely changed their personality, with a void in the core of their hearts that has been there since childhood because they’ve never done the hard work of reckoning with the question of their own identity. And we have no idea how messed up future victims of gender ideology will be, especially if they have gone the next step and hormonally altered the development of their bodies and brains.

This provides an interesting question. If mental health counseling is an industry that is run by pharmaceutical companies, is there any incentive to dissuade these children from these harmful ideologies? If you were a psychopath who stood to make billions off of antidepressants, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries, would you want to help these girls, or would you urge them to fall deeper within their ideological pits? Every girl sacrificed to this mess is another customer.

This is the part where I feel as though I should offer up a solution. I don’t have one. Getting rid of monetary incentives to prey on these girls would certainly help, but only to a point. Pharmaceutical companies did not create this problem; they’re merely cashing in on it.  It’s impossible to keep kids off of the internet (and doing so would only exacerbate the problem of their alienation from their peers). We’d have to revamp the school systems, solve the seemingly unsolvable problem of bullying, and even then, there would still be girls who simply don’t fit in.

Even still, it would go a long way for the mental health profession to refrain from diagnosing these young women of anxiety, depression, and gender dysphoria, and instead to identify their behavior appropriately. It is not a mental health condition, but an entirely solvable byproduct of their withdrawal from ‘normal’ society and retreat into the dark, twisted society of the internet. Perhaps, if they must give it a name (which they often must for insurance purposes), they can call it what it is: ‘internet personality disorder.’

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This quote was uttered by the songwriter Vic Chesnutt, but it’s the sort of thing that I could imagine being said by many artists—namely Philip Guston, a painter for whom pus and gnats would be considered tame subject matter. Guston didn’t shy away from life’s grotesque imagery, and it’s this boldness which lends the artist his power.

It is cathartic to see our most uncomfortable emotions expressed outwardly before us. This idea goes back as far as Aristotle, who theorized in his Poetics that the purpose of tragedies is to offer “purgation” of such emotions as “pity and fear.” The artist feels lighter after transferring these emotions onto the page or the canvas. The viewer can find comfort in seeing his demons expressed before him. It’s a type of solidarity; seeing our anguish spelled out before us makes us feel less alone. 

This may be where the trope of the ‘tortured artist’ comes from. We all have an idea in our heads of what this character looks like. The frustrated writer, holed up in a dark, dingy apartment, succumbing to addiction and self-indulgence, never picking up a pen. The agonized painter, awake until sunrise and asleep until sunset, huddled over his canvas day in, day out, only to decide that his work isn’t any good and splatter red paint over the whole thing. There’s a reason we’re so familiar with this figure—countless paintings and novels and songs have been created in its honor. But there’s a strange second layer at play here.

These works are semi-autobiographical in nature. They ‘purge’ the dark side of their creator. Interestingly, though, there lies within them a sort of inherent contradiction. In order to create anything, an artist must overcome stagnation. At some point, if such a work is ever to be made at all, an artist needs to have given up his self-indulgence and sat down to do his work. Thus, in all artworks of this kind there is an unseen success story, a victory over the very pain this art is expressing.

Some brilliant artists, like Guston, have made careers out of giving a voice to discomfort. Take, for example, Vic Chesnutt, the brilliant musician whose quote began this article. If anyone has the right to call himself a ‘tortured artist,’ it’s him. Rendered a quadriplegic after a drunk-driving accident when he was just eighteen years old, Chesnutt spent his life overrun by medical bills, threatened by a worsening condition with no hope of improvement. Unable to even hold a guitar pick, Vic had to invent his own method of playing the instrument.

A weakness can become a strength, however. In the songs that just feature him and his guitar, he was forced into a minimalist style that only aided his art. Each note feels deliberate—which is true, since each note is difficult to play. Such songs are quiet; they contain a lot of ‘empty space.’ They are powerful; they hit you straight in the soul.

My favorite album of his, though, is one in which he relied on others for help. It’s his penultimate album At the Cut, released in 2009 and recorded with the brilliant Silver Mt. Zion Orchestra, who were a perfect complement to Vic’s hard-hitting songwriting. They released the album in the same year Vic died by his own hand, motivated by an ever-growing pile of unpaid medical bills. The album is dark, grappling with emotions like fear, sadness, and death, and its backstory makes it even darker. However, despite (or perhaps because of) its somber imagery, the album is the perfect soundtrack to a lost, lonely evening. It is healing music—a balm for all the emotions that it describes.

A highlight of the album is titled “Philip Guston.” The song is an apt tribute to its namesake. Featuring long sections of wailing violin and distorted guitar, its sounds are jarring on their own, but when they come together, they overwhelm the senses in the best kind of way. The song’s overt use of ‘uncomfortable’ sounds bears a resemblance to Guston’s own use of unsightly colors and disturbing imagery. Vic was a fan of Guston, and in this one song, he managed to capture the ‘essence’ of this work in audible form, illustrating how an artists’ message can transcend mediums. The song is brilliant in and of itself, and it becomes even more brilliant when the artist to whom it pays homage is taken into account.

It’s funny—I’ve always loved the song, and yet I’d never once sought out the work of Philip Guston until one trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Overall, it was a negative experience. A cacophony in the worst sense of the word. There were too many people, too many cases full of trinkets like rocks and brooches. Too many pieces of cracked, weathered pottery cluttered what would otherwise be cool exhibits. And it seemed like every time I was immersed in a painting or sculpture, someone would take a selfie in front of it. In some darkly comedic way, the museum is like an artwork in itself, a twisted tribute to the city that it inhabits. It contains some of the greatest works of art in the world, yet despite its massive budget, it seems like the pieces are hoarded, not curated. And the predominant sentiment within the place seems to be “what a cool painting—look at how beautiful I look standing next to it.”

Anyway, I was wandering around my favorite part of the museum (the section of European paintings on the second floor), and stumbled upon a peculiar exhibit, titled “Philip Guston: What Kind of Man Am I?” Located right next to the Monets and the Renoirs and the other colorful landscapes and striking portraits, here was a different type of art. The room was more sparsely populated than most (both with paintings and with people). It was humbler, less flashy. I was about to pass it over entirely when I noticed out of the corner of my eye the artist’s name on the wall.

Vic Chesnutt’s song started playing in my head immediately. It’s an easy song to replicate. The intricate musicianship of Silver Mt. Zion is impossible to reproduce from memory (part of what makes the album so re-listenable), but Vic’s two repeating notes which continue throughout the song are fully committed to my memory. So these notes played, and meanwhile I looked at the paintings. The first one that caught my attention was Painter’s Hand, pictured below. “The hand” is a repeated lyric in Vic’s song—I assume this was the very hand that inspired it.

It deserves the attention it receives. It’s a quintessential “Portrait of the Artist.” After all, it depicts the exact part of his body that performs the artist’s labor. And it’s not portrayed favorably, either. The hand is not soft or delicate or elegant. It is red, veiny, ugly, distorted. It’s gruesome, really; the viewer can feel the pulsating aches in its swollen veins. The whole canvas emits a gut-wrenching pink-and-red hue (a motif that connects many of Guston’s paintings). It suggests that creating art is something agonizing and strained.

Philip Guston, Painter’s Hand, 1979.

Philip Guston, The Line, 1978.

The next repeating lyric in the song is “the line.” This is the title of a Philip Guston painting, too, and interestingly, it’s a painting of another hand. This time, the hand is emerging from a cloud, drawing a straight line on the ground. This painting seems to be an almost optimistic counterpart to the first. This hand also features giant protruding veins that give the appearance of strain. But the bloody red tint is absent, and the cloud alludes to something divine. Is Guston suggesting some metaphysical origin of artwork, some faith in a higher guiding force? Perhaps. But both paintings argue the fact that creation is hard. I wonder if this is why Vic was so drawn to them (after all, his disability made the physical act of creation more difficult for him than most). Still, nearly any artist can relate. I can’t imagine anyone who’s ever labored over their craft looking at these paintings and seeing anything except themselves.

The ‘tortured artist’ motif spanned the best paintings in the collection. It seems Guston had a penchant for self-portraits. My personal favorite, titled Pittore, depicts the painter lying in bed, a cigarette protruding from his mouth, the same pink-and-yellow veins which spanned his hands now populating his forehead and eyes. A clock sits before him, mocking him. Once again, the colors of his skin spill out into the room around him. His eyes are wide open, exaggerated. The paintbrush lies next to him untouched.

Philip Guston, Pittore, 1973.

The whole thing is cartoonish and kind of ugly, yet I could have stared at the painting for hours. I think it’s because it depicts a familiar experience—a torturous night in bed, too preoccupied by thought to work, too preoccupied by work to relax and sleep, taunted by the clock and by a habit that fails to deliver its promise of numbing the pain of inaction. I guess this is the common thread which connects creatives and utter lunatics. Art is generated under duress, usually, if not by a deadline then by a nagging feeling that if a thought is not expressed outwardly (perhaps on page or canvas) the clattering in one’s mind might become deafening. You have to be a little off to want to sit down for hours by yourself and create anything. Most people wouldn’t dare observe the inner workings of their minds for that long.

Still, some artists are more temperate than others, and some are prone to agonizing self-indulgence. What makes some artists damned to dark, twisted imagery, while others are able to produce things of optimistic beauty? Why are some prone to “bad habits”—another mantra that Vic repeats over and over again in his song?

Philip Guston, Bad Habits, 1970.

Guston’s Bad Habits depicts two cloaked, blood-splattered Klansmen sharing a bottle of liquor. Its implications are horrific. A pair of murderers coming home after their dark duty is done, indulging in a celebratory vice. One of the men is scratching his back, indicating a relaxing end to a hard day’s work. Once again, there’s a clock, but this time it doesn’t seem to be tormenting them. Instead, it almost serves as a reminder of the banality of all of it, like their murder is just ‘another day on the job.’

Let’s think about the title: Bad Habits. One interpretation of this title is the obvious ‘bad habit’ of drinking depicted in the picture. But there’s potentially a second meaning here. A religious habit is a uniform manner of dress worn by members of a religious order. Might the white cloaks that the men are wearing be a type of ‘habit’ themselves? The Ku Klux Klan, as an organization, was certainly ‘cult-like.’ If the KKK is perceived as a religious organization, then their signature hood and robes are, quite literally ‘bad habits.’ But what does this say about the two figures in the painting? Could they simply be brainwashed, thinking that what they are doing is right, somehow?

This is one of the most terrifying realities that Guston confronts: that an evildoer rarely knows the extent of his actions. Indeed, it is this ignorance that makes such a person so dangerous. The Studio, painted one year before, depicts a cloaked Klansman creating a self-portrait. The painting portrays him exactly as he is, down to the stitching of his clothing and the three blood-red spots on the bottom of the canvas. The painting raises questions. Clearly the artist in the painting knows himself well, but does he know the extent of the evil that he is capturing? If he does know, what does he gain from admitting it? And it’s a painting of a self-portrait—was it created to depict Guston himself? Could the artist be expressing his fear of the evil that might exist within him? If he were evil, how would he know?

Philip Guston, The Studio, 1969.

Baring the worst part of oneself is freeing for an artist—once a guilty secret is out in the open, it loses its power. And to the viewer, there’s something deeply compelling about these paintings. It’s almost as if they’re trustworthy, somehow. Guston’s secrets are laid bare, and he pulls no punches. There’s no mystery here—it’s clear that the artist has nothing to hide. The candor eases our minds. These are the type of paintings that can make a sleepless night less painful.

If you, like Vic Chesnutt, seek refuge in the shocking and dark and grotesque, Guston’s work is a gift. It’s a mirror, a look into an artist’s psyche just as harrowing as a Klansman’s self-portrait. When we look at it, we see ourselves staring back at us. Consider the exhibit’s title: “What Kind of Man Am I?” It’s fitting—is this not the very question that the artist is asking us? Isn’t it the question we ask ourselves when we’re tossing and turning, unable to sleep, our unfinished work repressed from the surfaces of our minds but still vengefully stewing in its depths? The point of art is to acquaint us with reality. Vices and varicose veins are just as much a part of life as meadows and flowers. When we bare our wounds for the world to see, we heal. So what if we’re not always comfortable with what we find? Does a painting have to be ‘pretty’ to be beautiful?

The thing about this movie is that no one is going to get out of it more than they put in. It’s like a Rorschach test of sorts—your thoughts about the movie say everything about your political affiliation, your thoughts on feminism, which ideology you blindly subscribe to, which one pisses you off. All films are like this to some extent, but the ‘Barbie’ movie seems to have been specifically written for this purpose. No matter your previous opinion, you will walk out of this movie utterly convinced that you are right and everyone else is wrong.

Think of the feminists. The ‘woke’ crowd. The people expecting to see a movie about ‘girl power.’ They were not disappointed. The men in this movie are dumb and easily manipulated. Their ‘toxically-masculine’ ego is their downfall as they ‘mansplain’ themselves into destruction. There’s all the usual stuff about women’s lack of power and all the ‘roles’ that we need to fill and how, no matter what, we always come up short. And there’s just enough propaganda about how men still rule the world to appease the social justice warriors who’d be up in arms if a movie about a plastic doll strayed too far from alleged ‘reality.’

The problem is that upon further examination, it becomes clear that none of the ‘feminist’ assertions in the movie hold up under any amount of criticism. Take, for example, the ridiculous amount of catcalling that Barbie is subjected to within the first forty-five seconds of her existence in the so-called ‘real world.’ Surely no one is under the delusion that women—even remarkably beautiful women like ‘stereotypical Barbie’—are actually treated like this. Sure, women get catcalled. But they do not get catcalled relentlessly by every man on a busy city street, especially when they’re walking with a man wearing matching pink clothing.

This whole scene lacked any semblance of internal consistency. Ken, the stereotypical “dumb jock” (I guess it’s still okay to perpetuate harmful stereotypes of men), loves the attention, while Barbie finds it ‘violent.’ Sure, this is a cheap addition which affirms the assertion that the world is a dangerous place for women, but in this context, it doesn’t make any sense. Both of these characters came from ‘Barbieland,’ a place where women rule and men exist to dote over them. Where would Barbie get the prior knowledge to perceive these advances as ‘violent’? Wouldn’t she react to these men the same way she’s reacted to every man she’s ever met before—by assuming their wholesome adoration?

And then there’s the familiar garbage about how women have so many contradicting standards and how nothing we do is ever enough. Barbie becomes horrifically depressed when she learns about the ‘patriarchy,’ and the impossible standards that women allegedly have to live up to. This culminates in a long diatribe delivered by America Ferrara’s character in which she lists all of the contradictory standards that women ‘have’ to be or else—well, the actual consequences are never really explained. The movie asserts that women always ‘have’ to be extraordinary. Says who? Themselves?

There’s a line in the movie: “By giving voice to the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under the patriarchy, you rob it of its power.”  If I was instructed to represent the essence of the modern feminist movement in one sentence, this would be the one. It’s a nonsensical statement, hidden behind pseudo-intellectual language like ‘cognitive dissonance,’ and made-up constructs like ‘patriarchy.’ It’s true that once you see how dumb your arbitrary standards of behavior are, you no longer feel compelled to follow them. But is this the ‘patriarchy’ exerting ‘power’ over you? Or is it just an individual decision?

It’s dumb. Stereotypical standards are not exclusive to women. Men ‘have’ to have six-pack abs (like ‘stereotypical Ken’), but they shouldn’t be obsessed with their appearance. If they don’t stand up for themselves they’re weak; if they do they’re aggressive. They ‘have’ to hide their emotions. They ‘have’ to be the breadwinner. This is not a feminist problem. It’s life. You will never live up to all the standards that ‘society’ sets for you. You can’t please everyone.

Of course, this did not stop one woman from yelling “PREACH!” in the theater during Ferrara’s monologue.

Believing that the system is rigged against you reduces accountability (something which, ironically, the film accuses anti-feminist women of doing). If you’re ‘oppressed,’ and can only reach a certain level in society because of your sex, well, what’s the point in trying? You kind of get a free pass, right? I can see why this ideology is so attractive to people.

This is all very predictable. Interestingly though, there’s another, less likely faction of people who saw themselves in the movie: young men, who grew up surrounded by radical feminist ideology and are sick of it. They’ve been told that they have it easy, that all of the injustices in the world are somehow their fault. Masculinity is in crisis. Men are feeling attacked (perhaps rightfully so). Surprisingly, the film is actually quite sensitive to their plight.

Look at the plot from Ken’s perspective. When the movie begins, he’s a second-class citizen, oppressed by the ‘Barbies.” He’s there to look good at the beach and vie for Barbie’s affection while the women are out doing the ‘real’ work. He doesn’t get his own ‘dream house,’ doesn’t have an important job. His purpose is to be Barbie’s accessory; when she’s not around he just kind of disappears. Then, he goes to the ‘real’ world, and sees the ‘patriarchy,’ and loves it. Who wouldn’t? He sees a world where he could actually be something. Think about what he’s excited about—seeing men doing ordinary jobs, being respected enough to be asked the time by a woman. Of course he’d go back to Barbieland and instate a world where he doesn’t have to be treated like garbage! It’s no surprise that so many people left the theater loving him—he’s the most sympathetic character in the film. Even to women, Ken is much more relatable than Barbie.

In reality, the movie is more about power dynamics than gender roles. Pretend for a second this wasn’t about men and women, and was just about an oppressed group of people who, after being treated like shit for years, finally mustered up the resolve to ‘take what’s theirs.’ This story would be considered inspiring. If the oppressed group were then tricked back into submission through ‘divide and conquer’ manipulation tactics,1^⁠ the group that consistently dominated them would be considered the villains.

 Of course, since women have historically had less power, we don’t perceive it like this. I think this is the point. No group should take precedence over any other. In fact, when you really think about it, parts of the movie seems to be advocating for cooperation between the sexes. When Barbie and Ken reconcile, he admits his desire for equality, and she admits that she should have respected him a bit more before his desperate patriarchal revolution. Towards the end of the movie, Ruth, the mysterious creator character, boldly states that humans make up ideas like ‘the patriarchy’ and ‘Barbie’ in order to deal with the discomfort of being alive. It’s a good point, despite the fact that it contradicts about half of the supposedly ‘deep’ points that the film makes previously.

That’s the frustrating thing about this movie—it throws a lot of ideas at the audience but it doesn’t really follow through with any of them. It recites some feminist doctrine, but then it backs down from it, asserting that maybe we should all just get along. It explores the idea of reversal of gender roles (Barbieland is allegedly the real world, but reversed) but deviates from this formula when it is convenient (the idea that women succumbed to ‘patriarchal’ ideas because they ‘had no defense against them’ made no logical sense at all). And all these ideas are just kind of left dangling there, thrown at the audience and then abandoned, while viewers are left grasping at straws of conflicting ideas trying to make sense of it all. 

It’s all about sales—they don’t want to alienate anyone! There’s something in this movie to appease any political affiliation, any worldview. Feminist? There’s plenty of ‘party lines’ here for you to cheer at—eat those up and ignore everything else. Disgruntled male who hates feminists? You’ll love ‘revolutionary Ken.’ Nihilist? There’s plenty of shallow references to human mortality for you to feign depth for the entire runtime.

There’s something in here for everybody, and no one leaves thinking any differently than they did when they entered the theater. Sure, hearing ideas that they don’t like might be ‘triggering’ to some people (and outrage certainly sells tickets), but since the movie refuses to take any real stance on any of the ideas it mentions, no one is persuaded to actually consider these ideas. Blind hatred is fun—especially compared with the real discomfort of questioning one of your firmly-held beliefs.

The real question, though, is why we care at all. This strange adult obsession with Barbie is the perfect illustration of what I think the movie was ‘actually’ trying to say. We’re a world of adult children all looking to lose accountability. The Kens hated having power once they actually had it. The career-oriented Barbies were happy to relinquish control when they learned that they could live in a world where they didn’t have to make any decisions (a dream state for the majority of people on this planet). Even the goddamned CEO of Mattel (played by Will Ferrell) was crying at the end about how hard it was to be a leader. And the theater was packed full of people who went to see a full-length film about a children’s toy. The whole thing is laden with escapism.

Let’s not lose sight of the reality of it all, though, which is that the whole thing is an ad campaign. This movie is everywhere. Right now, when you Google the name “Barbie,” the whole screen turns pink, and a hot pink sparkly animation pops up on the screen. A grotesque amount of money was paid to promote this movie. Why?

Barbie needed a rebrand. The ‘fantasy world’ that Barbie promised where women could be anything they wanted no longer has any appeal. When Barbie was introduced, she told a generation of girls who were destined to be housewives that they could be doctors and lawyers and astronauts. They were thrilled. This was what they needed to finally be happy. Now, women are doctors and lawyers and astronauts, and it’s not all it was cracked up to be. What’s our next scapegoat?

Radical feminism is one reaction (‘It’s still men’s fault we’re unhappy—if only they didn’t have so many expectations for us, then everything would finally be perfect!). Nihilism is another (‘I guess happiness is just impossible. We’re all gonna die, anyway’).

The ‘Barbie’ movie checks all of these boxes, providing a new type of fantasy for the modern world. And, in the process, it sold a ton of movie tickets, and probably a few toys, as well. Money might not be able to buy happiness, but it can certainly buy oblivion. Isn’t that what entertainment is all about?

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