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Hi friends 👋 ,

Happy Tuesday!

I’m getting into the bad habit of sending these essays whenever I finish them. Maybe it’s a good habit.

This one is about an idea I’ve been thinking about for a while. Over the last few weeks, I’ve read as much as I could in order to try to put some more rigor around it.

The idea is that technology creates means, but that we shouldn’t expect it to create meaning. That’s up to us.

To realize the amazing present and future we want, we need both means and meaning. I want Not Boring to be about both. This is the manifesto. Read the whole thing here.

Let’s get to it.

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Means and Meaning

I recently read Anna Karenina.

No no, I appreciate it, but please hold your applause. I didn’t do it for a medal. Really, it was nothing. Yeah sure it’s like 864 pages of Russian literature or whatever, but Tolstoy is such a magnificent writer it really didn’t feel that long. Lots of people have read it. It’s no big deal, really.

Where was I? Ah, yes.

It struck me, towards the end (I’m a little slow), that what the book is about is getting what you want and finding yourself asking, “Cool, now what?”

I bring this up not to brag – again, lots of people have read Anna Karenina! – but because it’s a theme that, mostly unintentionally, I’ve been playing with in Not Boring over the past few months.

It’s there in The Return of Magic:

The Return of Magic isn’t a rejection of reason and science. Reason and science have gotten us here, and we need science to expand. But we must simultaneously rediscover the wonder and intuition that we’ve forgotten, so that we might see the universe as alive, connected, and full of possibilities.

It’s there in Long Questions/Short Answers:

Actually, fuck answers, the more I think about it. The best questions don’t have answers. The point of the question isn’t to find an answer. The best questions are organizing principles, magnets, ways of seeing.

It’s there quite literally in Most Human Wins:

In the AI bull case Roon and Elon discuss, when sufficiently smart AI can do anything humans can and more, AI will cure cancer, improve crop yields, and speed up travel.

Humans, in our divine discontent, will say, “Cool, now what?”

Now what? is the fundamental question of the modern era.

To be certain, it is an old question. Anna Karenina is not a new book.

Before Tolstoy, Aristotle distinguished between “instrumental goods” like wealth, tools, and health and “intrinsic goods” like virtue, contemplation and friendship. He argued that contemplative life (bios theoretikos) was the highest form of human activity because it was meaningful in itself, and that the active life (bios praktikos) was necessary but subordinate.

The Ancient Greeks, however, assumed scarcity. For them, having enough instrumental goods was a prerequisite for philosophical contemplation. Recall Maslow’s Hierarchy: humans need their basic needs covered before they can spend time on self-actualization.

We, however, live in an age of abundance. And contra Maslow, it doesn’t seem to be making us more actualized. We have not filled our lives with meaning and contemplation.

It turns out that instead of Maslow’s linear progression, there is a complex dynamic relationship between instrumental goods and intrinsic goods, the active life and the contemplative life, or physiological needs and self-actualization.

“Again I tell you,” preached Jesus, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”

More generally, the greater our means, the harder it may be to find meaning.

Why? Anna Karenina might suggest a mechanism: there is thrill in striving. Purpose in striving. Even those who have put in decades of work are overcome by a sense of melancholy when they finally achieve their aim.

Michael Phelps felt lost and depressed after his 2012 Olympics, perhaps the greatest of all time. Harper Lee barely published after the overwhelming success of To Kill a Mockingbird. J.K. Rowling compared her sense of loss upon completing the Harry Potter series to bereavement. In Losing My Virginity, Richard Branson shared that business successes left him feeling unexpectedly empty.

Now what?

Now, it is easier than ever to get what we want, or what we think we want, or a simulacrum of something that simulates what we want. Want adoration? Get 1,000 likes on a tweet. Want riches? Build the fastest company ever to reach $100 million in ARR. Want the answer? Ask AI. Want to get skinny? Take Ozempic.

Technology’s magic is that it can produce means. It lets people do more with less. Technology, however, cannot provide meaning. In fact, the greater our technological powers, the more challenging and urgent our search for meaning becomes.

But just because it is harder does not doom it to impossibility. The inverse relationship is not deterministic. Means and meaning were never perfect substitutes.

Here, modern philosophers correctly diagnose the problems of modernity but leave a big, pessimistic hole when it comes to solutions.

Byung-Chul Han calls ours The Burnout Society. “The capitalist economy absolutizes survival,” Han writes. “It is not concerned with the good life. It is sustained by the illusion that more capital produces more life, which means a greater capacity for living.”

That is not an illusion! It’s just incomplete.

Capital can support more life, which means a greater capacity for living.

My working model for the meaning of life is based on the Perennial Philosophy, that we’re all a piece of a universal consciousness, the One knowing itself, and in this model more people having more unique experiences is the point.

But simply because capitalism produces more life, which means a greater capacity for living does not guarantee that we are fully utilizing that capacity. That is up to us.

And it is hard to argue that we are utilizing that full capacity. We have both greater means and less meaning.

This is the great challenge of the modern era, and of all future eras: to shrink the gap between means and meaning as our means continue to grow.

Whatever You Wish

One of my favorite speculative essays of all-time is Isaac Asimov’s Whatever You Wish, which begins:

The difficulty in deciding on what the professions of the future would be is that it all depends on the kind of future we choose to have. If we allow our civilization to be destroyed, the only profession of the future will be scrounging for survival, and few till succeed at it.

Suppose, though, that we keep our civilization alive and flourishing and, therefore, that technology continues to advance.

Asimov’s belief, then, is opposed to Han’s. A flourishing society means one with technological advancement.

In such a future, he imagines, the logical jobs like “computer programming, lunar mining, fusion engineering, space construction, laser communications, neurophysiology, and so on” won’t actually be necessary. Robots will do all of that for us. So what will we do?

Consider that there have been times in history when an aristocracy lived in idleness off the backs of flesh-and-blood machines called slaves or serfs or peasants. When such a situation was combined with a high culture, however, aristocrats used their leisure to become educated in literature, the arts, and philosophy. Such studies were not useful for work, but they occupied the mind, made for interesting conversation and an enjoyable life.

These were the liberal arts, arts for free men who didn't have to work with their hands. And these were considered higher and more satisfying than the mechanical arts, which were merely materially useful.

Perhaps, then, the future will see a world aristocracy supported by the only slaves that can humanely serve in such a post—sophisticated machines. And there will be an infinitely newer and broader liberal arts program, taught by the teaching machines, from which each person could choose.

Asimov was, perhaps, inspired by Aristotle. In The Scent of Time (2017), Han writes:

Aristotle distinguished between three kinds of life. A free man may choose between them. The highest form of life is the bios theoretikos, a life dedicated to contemplation. As a free man, the master does not come into direct contact with the resistance exerted by things, as he leaves all work to the slave. This freedom enables him to have an entirely different relationship to the world, one that is not determined by the world as an object of work or domination. The contemplative relationship to things presupposes freedom from work. It interrupts the time that is work. According to Aristotle, the vita contemplativa is divine because it does not suffer any compulsion and is free from any interest.

Work is necessary. Humanity needs means to survive. But per both Asimov and Aristotle, if others do the work for us, we are free to live a richer, more divine contemplative life. A life of leisure, as Han describes in his 2023 book, Vita Contemplativa:

The activity of the God, ‘which surpasses all others in blessedness’, is contemplative activity (theoretike),” The activity of contemplation is an inactivity, a contemplative calmness, leisure (schole) to the extent that, unlike active life (bios politikos), it does not act; that is, it does not have its purpose outside of itself. In its inactivity, its leisure, life relates to itself. Life is no longer estranged from itself. Aristotle therefore associates bios theoretikos with self-sufficiency: ‘And the self-sufficiency that is spoken of must belong most to the contemplative activity.’ Only vita contemplativa promises divine self-sufficiency and perfect blessedness.

This is the leisure of St. Augustine – “The attraction of a life of leisure ought not to be the prospect of lazy inactivity, but the chance for the investigation and discovery of truth.” – and to ground it in reality, the leisure the great Indian mathematician Ramanujan sought, not for no purpose, but to dedicate himself to his math:

What he wanted, Ramanujan replied, was a pittance on which to live and work. Or, as Ramachandra Rao later put it, “He wanted leisure, in other words, simple food to be provided to him without exertion on his part, and that he should be allowed to dream on.”

He wanted leisure . . . The word leisure has undergone a shift since the time Ramachandra Rao used it in this context. Today, in phrases like leisure activity or leisure suit, it implies recreation or play. But the word actually goes back to the Middle English leisour, meaning freedom or opportunity. And as the Oxford English Dictionary makes clear, it’s freedom not from but “to do something specified or implied” [emphasis added]. Thus, E. T. Bell writes of a famous seventeenth-century French mathematician, Pierre de Fermat, that he found in the King’s service “plenty of leisure”—leisure, that is, for mathematics.

So it was with Ramanujan. It was not self-indulgence that fueled his quest for leisure; rather, he sought freedom to employ his gifts. In his Report on Canara, Malabar and Ceded Districts, Thackeray spoke of the “leisure, independence and high ideals” that had propelled Britain to its cultural heights. The European “gentleman of leisure,” free from the need to earn a livelihood, presumably channeled his time and energy into higher moral and intellectual realms. Ramanujan did not belong to such an aristocracy of birth, but he claimed membership in an aristocracy of the intellect. In seeking “leisure,” he sought nothing more than what thousands born to elite status around the world took as their due.

It is the type of leisure that Asimov envisioned: that we will all be technologically-enabled Ramanujans, if not in skill then in desire.

Won't people choose to do nothing? Sleep their lives away?

If that's what they want, why not?—Except that I have a feeling they won't. Doing nothing is hard work, and, it seems to me, would be indulged in only by those who have never had the opportunity to evolve out of themselves something more interesting and, therefore, easier to do.

There’s this funny quirk in sci-fi where its authors imagined technologies like flying cars, robots, fusion, and AI, but not social media. They pictured us largely being… us, but with better technological capabilities. With more means, and the same meaning.

David Foster Wallace, however, saw what was coming. Our relationship with media and technology, and with our ability to pay attention, suffused his work.

Infinite Jest featured The Entertainment, a videotape so compelling people just watched it until they died. Something to Do With Paying Attention has everything to do with paying attention. And in a conversation with Rolling Stone’s David Lipsky, during a five-day road trip at the end of his Infinite Jest book tour that would become a book, which became a movie, DFW addressed the challenge head-on:

DFW: And that as the Internet grows, and as our ability to be linked up, like—I mean, you and I coulda done this through e-mail, and I never woulda had to meet you, and that woulda been easier for me. Right? Like, at a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? but if that’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you’re going to die.

Lipsky: But you developed some defenses?

DFW: No. This is the great thing about it, is that probably each generation has different things that force the generation to grow up. Maybe for our grandparents it was World War Two. You know? For us, it’s gonna be that at, at a certain point, that we’re either gonna have to put away childish things and discipline ourself about how much time do I spend being passively entertained? And how much time do I spend doing stuff that actually isn’t all that much fun minute by minute, but that builds certain muscles in me as a grown-up and a human being? And if we don’t do that, then (a) as individuals, we’re gonna die, and (b) the culture’s gonna grind to a halt.

Did you skip over the block quote? Don’t. Go back and read it. Pay attention.

DFW’s 1996 prediction must have seemed prescient when The New Inquiry posted it as an excerpt in 2010. It feels downright clairvoyant in 2025.

When he said that, in 1996, only 16.4 in every 100 Americans used the internet. Today, 93.1 out of 100 of us do.

In 1996, when they finally connected to the ‘net after waiting dozens of seconds for their 28.8k modems to dial up, those pioneering netizens found websites that looked like this…

Or this…

While it might surprise a modern reader that Pepsi’s website was so much radder than Apple’s, it shouldn’t. Back then, PepsiCo was worth $45.6 billion. Apple was worth only $2.6 billion.

Today, PepsiCo is worth $184.3 billion, good for a respectable 4x over the period. Apple, meanwhile, has grown its value 1,207x to $3.14 trillion, with a T, thanks in large part to the fact that it has put an internet-superhighway-connected-supercomputer in all of our pockets.

According to Business of Apps, 155 million Americans own an iPhone (and most of the rest own Android pocket internet-superhighway-connected-supercomputers). More than 5x more people carry an internet computer with them everywhere they go today than used the internet at all in 1996. We millions connect to the internet at something like 1,000 - 70,000x faster speeds than we did in 1996.

And our pocket computers not simply to passively consume entertainment, but to scroll apps that actively consume us.

Each of us has our own addiction. Some scroll Instagram. The kids like TikTok. My drug of choice is Twitter.

I deleted Twitter from my phone a couple weeks ago. Again, hold your applause. I do this sometimes. I always come back, but right now, I’m pretty pleased with myself. That weekend, I hung out with my family and went to the FIFA World Club Cup Finals and so wasn’t at my computer, and therefore not on Twitter. On Monday, when I signed on for the first time in over 24 hours, I was greeted with “Recent post” notifications in my feed, which, presumably, if I’d had the app installed and notifications on, would have pinged me, luring me back.

Later that day, Elon Musk announced that xAI/X launched Companion Mode in SuperGrok.

Companion Mode is AI waifus and AI Chads, animated avatar experiences currently exclusive to iOS users who subscribe to SuperGrok Heavy for $300 a month. Those who fork over 25% more than the per capita Gross National Income of Burundi each month can both speak to the avatar and hear her respond. And watch her respond. The animations sync, creating an immersive, spoken conversation feel. Mike Solana wrote about the implications in Goonpocalypse.

The internet is no longer a thing we can choose to distract ourselves with. It is its own organism with its own desires, and chief among those desires is to wrest our attention away from us.

DFW was right. The technology got better and better and better and better, and easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money.

Asimov was probably right, too, that we won’t sleep our lives away. And, technically, he might have been right that people won’t choose to do nothing. He assumed choice. He didn’t know about social media, and he didn’t know about Companion Mode.

Neither did Jean Baudrillard, but he certainly anticipated them.

In 1981, the French philosopher published Simulacra and Simulation, in which he argues that in contemporary society, we live in a world of simulations that have become more real than reality itself, that have irreversibly replaced reality.

To give you some sense of his view, the book inspired The Matrix, but Baudrillard himself didn’t like The Matrix, because it allowed for the possibility that there was any underlying reality to return to at all.

To Baudrillard, we've moved so far beyond the original referent that the very concept of an authentic, underlying reality has become meaningless. We live in hyperreality: a world in which Disneyland, television, consumer brands, and media representations actually constitute reality.

We photograph meals to craft an image of our lives. Instead of being present at the meal with friends, our mind is in the internet. The Instagram post becomes more real than the meal itself.

Within an hour of this week’s Blackstone shooting, people (bots?) began tweeting their theories that it was a “false flag” operation, because BlackRock was actually founded out of Blackstone and the shooter reportedly yelled, conveniently, “Free Palestine!” The shooting became more about the conspiracies than the victims.

When the Astronomer CEO was caught on Coldplay camera canoodling with the company’s head of HR, the story became the memes. Only the übermeme, Gwenyth Paltrow’s Thank You For Your Interest in Astronomer, could resolve the situation. It was never, of course, about the actual people cheating or being cheated on.

In each case, the simulation doesn't just represent reality but becomes it. This is what Baudrillard meant by hyperreality.

Baudrillard's is not a purely anti-technological position.

What set him off in the first place was the May 1968 student and worker uprising in France that nearly brought down de Gaulle’s government. Radical on the surface, he was appalled by how quickly and totally it was absorbed and neutralized by the media and consumer system. Its revolutionary symbols were immediately commodified, its radical energy channeled into lifestyle consumption, its political demands transformed into cultural products. Think Ché t-shirts and posters, adorned by would-be revolutionaries who will never revolt. The system didn’t need to defeat the revolution by force; it simulated revolution so effectively that real revolution became impossible to distinguish from its media representation.

Certainly, though, Baudrillard would not be surprised to see people yelling at and talking dirty to bots. He wrote that there are “three orders of simulacra” (simulacra (n): a copy or representation that no longer refers to any original reality but instead becomes a self-contained truth in a hyperreal realm):

1. Simulacra that are natural, naturalist, founded on the image, on imitation and counterfeit, that are harmonious, optimistic, and that aim for the restitution or the ideal institution of nature made in God’s image;

2. Simulacra that are productive, productivist, founded on energy, force, its materialization by the machine and in the whole system of production—a Promethean aim of a continuous globalization and expansion, of an indefinite liberation of energy (desire belongs to the utopias related to this order of simulacra);

3. Simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model, the cybernetic game—total operationality, hyperreality, aim of total control.

It is not, he would argue, that we are spending too much time scrolling social media and gooning to AI Companions instead of spending time in the real world, but that social media and AI companions have become the real world, or the hyperreal world. They form our reality.

These third-order simulacra are, like Infinite Jest’s Entertainment (and there is evidence that DFW both read and taught Baudrillard), so alluring and so devoid of meaning that even as we create the means (second-order simulacra) to give ourselves more time for meaning, we will instead get sucked, inevitably and irreversibly, further and further into the simulation.

On our current path, many will take the time afforded to them by the miracles of modern capitalism and fake jobs and sleepwalk through life glued to increasingly alluring screens.

Diagnosis Without Cure

So what do we do?

Modern critical theorists are frustratingly empty here. They identify problems but provide very little in the way of practical solutions.

Han is devastatingly good at diagnosis and frustratingly weak on cures. He proposes a return to the vita contemplativa, thinking to think, reflecting on beauty, and the like. It feels like a call to withdraw from society and the economy (especially the economy) in order to contemplate. Ironically, in doing so, he embodies the uselessness of vita contemplativa without vita activa.

This is a uselessness Han himself touches on, briefly, almost as if acknowledging the necessity of the vita activa to fend off critique without dwelling on it long enough to taint the purity of the vita contemplativa. He cites Meister Eckhart and quotes Gregory the Great:

Be aware: while a good plan for life requires that one moves from the active to the contemplative life, it is often useful if the soul returns from the contemplative to the active life, in such a way that the flame of contemplation which has been lit in the heart passes on all its perfection to activity. Thus, active life must lead us to contemplation, but contemplation must set out from what we inwardly considered and call us back to activity.

“A vita contemplativa without acting is blind,” Han admits, “a vita activa without contemplation is empty.”

This is the tension at the heart of The Glass Bead Game, which Herman Hesse began writing in Germany as the Nazis were rising to power and completed during World War II. The book follows Joseph Knecht, a brilliant young man who is recruited to Castalia, a secluded intellectual province dedicated to pure learning and the mysterious Glass Bead Game from which the book gets its title, and rises to become its master, the Magister Ludi.

Hesse’s Castalians proudly engage in the most useless work possible, the purely theoretical, on purpose, in order to avoid the taint of reality. Similarly, Han proposes contemplation outside of capitalism, because contemplation in the service of productivity is a form of auto-exploitation that defeats its purpose.

What Knecht realizes (spoiler alert), but Han fails to, is that pure intellectual contemplation is meaningless without a connection to actual human life and responsibility. As he tells his friend and Castalian colleague, Tegularius:

Your love for culture and the products of the mind does you credit. But it happens that cultural creativity is something we cannot participate in quite so fully as some people think.

A dialogue of Plato's or a choral movement by Heinrich Isaac — in fact all the things we call a product of the mind or a work of art or objectified spirit — are the outcomes of a struggle for purification and liberation. They are, to use your phrase, escapes from time into timelessness, and in most cases the best such works are those which no longer show any signs of the anguish and effort that preceded them.

It is a great good fortune that we have these works, and of course we Castalians live almost entirely by them; the only creativity we have left lies in preserving them. We live permanently in that realm beyond time and conflict embodied in those very works and which we would know nothing of, but for them. And we go even further into the realms of pure mind, or if you prefer, pure abstraction: in our Glass Bead Game we analyze those products of the sages and artists into their components, we derive rules and patterns of form from them, and we operate with these abstractions as though they were building blocks.

Of course all this is very fine; no one will contend otherwise. But not everyone can spend his entire life breathing, eating, and drinking nothing but abstractions. History has one great strength over the things a Waldzell tutor feels to be worthy of his interest: it deals with reality. Abstractions are fine, but I think people also have to breathe air and eat bread.

In the end, Knecht chooses to leave Castalia and re-engage with the real world. I will leave it to you to read how that turns out.

Baudrillard would have laughed at Knecht’s naive attempt to take the Red Pill and leave the Castalian Matrix. Both life inside Castalia and life outside, to Baudrillard, would be mere simulacra. When it comes to solutions, the Frenchman makes Han look like a bushy-tailed optimist.

He spends the last chapter of Simulacra and Simulation, On Nihilism, making the case that classical nihilism is no longer pessimistic enough.

Nihilism! Nihilism requires that there be truth, meaning, or reality to reject. Baudrillard says that truth, meaning, and reality no longer exist! They, too, have been replaced by simulacra.

He ends the book with this uplifting message:

There is no hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is, appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or nonmeaning itself.

This is where seduction begins.

Enjoy the simulation, because it’s all we have left.

But meaning here has a very specific connotation. It refers to the Enlightenment project of rational interpretation, the idea that phenomena point to deeper truths and systematic representations. Meaning as signification, the entire apparatus of rational analysis that treats the world as a text to be read. It is, to borrow from Iain McGilchrist, left-brain thinking.

I think this ending, intentionally or not, points to the way out.

Because meaning in the way that we normally use it, and certainly in the way that I’m using it, is almost precisely the opposite of meaning in the Baudrillardian / Enlightenment sense. It is right-brained: not analyzing reality but being moved by it, not understanding our place in the system but experiencing our aliveness within it. It is what makes life feel worthwhile, even magical.

Philosopher of technology Albert Borgmann makes a diagnosis similar to Han’s and Baudrillard’s. His “device paradigm” calls out that modern technology transforms everything into optimized, efficient systems that deliver commodified experiences while hiding the underlying reality. But unlike Han and Baudrillard, Borgmann offers a way forward.

In Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, he writes (emphasis mine):

As long as we overlook the tightly patterned character of technology and believe that we live in a world of endlessly open and rich opportunities, as long as we ignore the definite ways in which we, acting technologically, have worked out the promise of technology and remain vaguely enthralled by that promise, so long simple things and practices will seem burdensome, confining, and drab. But if we recognize the central vacuity of advanced technology, that emptiness can become the opening for focal things. It works both ways, of course. When we see a focal concern of ours threatened by technology, our sight for the liabilities of mature technology is sharpened.

I read this as: if we mistake means for meaning, if we believe that we will find meaning in the next technological breakthrough, we will ignore the things that provide real meaning as boring and antiquated. But if we realize that technology itself cannot provide meaning, then we can focus on the things that can.

If we have reached the simulation’s end-game, as Baudrillard would almost certainly argue we are with AGI or even its Companion facsimile, and it has not created meaning, then we can put technology in its right place as something that provides means and get on with the hard work of creating our own meaning.

We can engage with that existential question: Cool, now what?

Something To Do With Paying Attention

No, seriously, now what?

The problem with philosophers like Han and Baudrillard, too, is that they’re all analysis and no soul. For the soul, we need writers, people willing to engage with the billions of individual people who make up the systems.

And their answer has something to do with paying attention.

Something To Do With Paying Attention, a novella hidden within DFW’s unfinished The Pale King which he’d considered publishing as a standalone work, is one of my favorite things I’ve ever read. It’s a beautiful onion. You should read it (it’s short), and I don’t want to spoil it for you, but frankly, I think it would be impossible. A simulacra of DFW will never approach the real thing. My real concern here is that I won’t do it justice, because it’s both about attention and a meta-commentary on attention, as in, you’ve got to pay close attention to the book to really get it.

Anyway, the book is about a self-described wastoid who we apparently discover in The Pale King is Chris Fogle, aka “Irrelevant Chris” and his journey from wastoid to IRS accountant.

Irrelevant Chris throws his away for most of his life – “I tended to realize again that I wasn’t even really aware of what was going on, most of the time. Like taking the train instead of actually driving yourself somewhere and having to know where you were and making decisions about where to turn” – until, at 24, an accidental lecture from a Jesuit accountant, which hits him in just the right spot at just the right time, given the macro and micro circumstances of his life (his accountant father had died in a subway accident; his recent realization, upon hearing “You’re watching As the World Turns,” “that whatever a potentially ‘lost soul’ was, I was one—and it wasn’t cool or funny.”) he takes control of his own attention and directs it towards obtaining a career at the Internal Revenue Service.

The macro and micro circumstances, plus the Jesuit substitute accounting professor’s bearing and speech – “Gentlemen, prepare to wear the hat. You have wondered, perhaps, why all real accountants wear hats? They are today’s cowboys. As you will be. Riding the American range. Riding herd on the unending torrent of financial data. The eddies, cataracts, arranged variations, fractious minutiae. You order the data, shepherd it, direct its flow, lead it where it’s needed, in the codified form in which it’s apposite. You deal in facts, gentlemen, for which there has been a market since man first crept from the primeval slurry. It is you—tell them that. Who ride, man the walls, define the pie, serve. Gentlemen, you are called to account” – wake Irrelevant Chris up – George Saunders calls DFW, in a tribute, a “wake-up artist” – and fill him with panic, that he’s figured it out too late, that he won’t be able to pay for more college, particularly now that his father can’t pay for it, now that he finally actually wants to stay in college, so he can complete all of the courses that he needs to complete, and actually learn all that he needs to learn, for a career in the IRS, which he was drawn to as one of a common type of person who are “almost a special kind of psychological type, probably. It’s not a very common type—perhaps one in 10,000—but the thing is that the sort of person of this type who decides that he wants to enter the Service really, really wants to and becomes very determined, and will be hard to put off once he’s focused in on his real vocation and begun to be actively drawn to it,” but now that he’s focused on this real vocation, now that he’s started paying attention, the solution to his financial situation wrt college payments finds him.

Maybe he heard about the IRS’ aggressive recruiting drive on WBBM-AM, but he also has a “partial memory of actually first seeing an advertisement for this recruitment program in a sudden, dramatic way that now, in retrospect, seems so heavily fateful and dramatic that perhaps it is more the memory of a dream or fantasy I had at the time.”

“Anyhow, according to this memory,” (I love this, according to this memory, which those four words make seem like not quite his, or certainly not in his control, but which he faithfully reproduces anyway), “I was sitting at one of the many stylized plastic tables in the Galaxy Mall’s food court, looking absently down at the table’s pattern of star-and-moon shaped perforations, and saw, through one such perforation, a portion of the Sun-Times that someone had evidently discarded on the floor beneath the table, which was open to the Business Classified section, and in the memory involves seeing this from above the table in such a way that a beam of light from the food court’s overhead lighting far above fell through one of the star- shaped perforations in the tabletop and illuminated—as if by symbolically star-shaped spotlight or ray of light—one particular advertisement among all the page’s other ads and notices of business and career opportunities, this being a notice about the IRS’s [note: I’m realizing I used IRS’ earlier] new recruitment-incentive program under way in some sections of the country, of which the Chicagoland area was one.”

To me, this sounds like a synchronicity – “a meaningful coincidence that suggests an underlying pattern or connection beyond normal causality,” first coined by Jung – but Irrelevant Chris calls it “another illustration of how motivationally ‘primed’ I seemed to be, in retrospect, for a career in the service.”

Synchronicity or motivationally primed, it is the type of thing that you can only notice if you’re paying attention, which is pretty much the point of the novella.

I’m not sure if he did this on purpose, although I’m sure he did because it was DFW, these revelations make you realize that you, the reader, weren’t really paying attention, either. That although Chris was a self-described wastoid, although he seemed to be much more like his account father, who was always “squeezing his shoes,” than his mother, who was always defending him, he was actually more like his father, deep down in his genes, than either of them would have admitted; he was destined to become an accountant, once he started paying attention.

Right there, on page 11, in what seems to be just another example of his waistoidness and his mother’s sticking up for him despite or because of that, Chris recounts “the past trouble I’d had with reading in primary school when we’d lived in Rockford and my father had worked for the City of Rockford. This was in the mid-1960s, at Machesney Elementary. I went through a sudden period where I couldn’t read. I mean that I actually couldn’t read—my mother knew I could read from when we’d read children’s books together. But for almost two years at Machesney, instead of reading something I’d count the words in it [emphasis mine, with the benefit of hindsight], as though reading was just the same as counting the words. For example, ‘Here came Old Yeller, to save me from the hogs’ would equate to ten words which I would count off from one to ten instead of its being a sentence that made you love Old Yeller in the book even more.”

This accountant’s tic shows up throughout the novella; he learns to read again, but he’s always counting at the same time. “For instance,” he says on the next page, “I’ve said 2,752 words right now since I started,” adding, with an accountant’s precision, “Meaning 2,752 words before I said, ‘I’ve said,’ versus 2,754 if you count ‘I’ve said’ — which I do, still.” Later, during the Jesuit substitute accounting professor’s rousing ode to accountants, he admits, “It suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea how many words he’d spoken since that 8,206th one at the conclusion of the review.” It took a speech on accounting to command his full attention, which had always been at least partially divided by word counting. Later still, however, in the IRS recruiting office, he’s counting again: “Overall, despite comprising scarcely more than 5,750 total words, the initial recruiting presentation lasted almost three hours…” Attention is something that needs to be constantly directed.

There’s this one spot next to which I scribbled “so good” in the margin, mid-Jesuit substitute accounting’s speech, when he wrote/Chris said, “However transfixed I still was, I was also aware [aware], by this point, that the substitute’s metaphors seemed to be getting a bit jumbled—it was hard to imagine the remaining orientals making much sense of cowboys and pies, since they were specifically American images.” Now that I write it, though, even that speaks to awareness. He’d become, during the speech, so aware as to not get fully swept up in its emotions. Like an accountant might avoid getting swept up in emotions, I guess.

The speech’s impact on him, which like the newspaper classified seemed directed right at him, was itself a payoff on a long trademark DFW digression a few pages earlier, in which he pokes holes in his Chrisitan roommate’s born-again Christian girlfriend’s story of being saved, when, lost and hopeless – “Fervent Christians are always remembering themselves as—and thus, by extension, judging everyone else outside their sect to be—lost and hopeless and just barely clinging to any kind of interior sense of value or reason to go on living, before they were ‘saved’” – “driving around in one of her parents’ AMC Pacer, until, for no particular reason she was aware of inside herself, she turned suddenly into the parking lot of what turned out to be an evangelical Church” [fuckkk no way. is this a callback to / refutation of his earlier point that driving and turning requires awareness unlike riding a train? it couldn’t be… unless…] “which by coincidence happened to be right in the middle of holding an evangelical service, and—for what she again claimed was no discernible reason or motive she could have named—she wandered aimlessly in and sat down in the rear of the church in one of the plushly cushioned theater-type seats their churches tend to use instead of wooden pews, and just as she sat down, the preacher or father or whatever they called them there evidently said, ‘There is someone out there with us in the congregation today that is feeling lost and hopeless and at the end of their rope and needs to know that Jesus loves them very, very much,’ and then—in the social room, recounting her story—the girlfriend testified as to how she had been stunned and deeply moved, and said she had instantly felt a huge, dramatic spiritual change deep inside of her in which she said she felt completely reassured and unconditionally known and loved, and as though now suddenly her life had meaning and direction to it after all, and so on and so forth, and that furthermore she had not known a down or empty moment since, not since the pastor or father or whatever picked just that moment to reach out past all the other evangelical Christians sitting there fanning themselves with complimentary fans with slick full-color ads for the church on them and to just kind of verbally nudge them aside out of the way and somehow address himself directly to the girlfriend and her circumstances at just that moment of spiritual need,” which of course annoyed Irrelevant Chris at the time, and after hearing which he asked her “just what exactly had made her think the evangelical pastor was talking to her directly, meaning her in particular, as probably everyone else sitting there in the church audience probably felt the same way she did, as pretty much every red-blooded American in today’s (then) late-Vietnam and Watergate era felt desolate and disillusioned and unmotivated and directionless and lost, and that that if the preacher or father’s [note: he drops ‘or whatever’ for this one] saying ‘Someone lost and hopeless’ was tantamount to those Sun-Times horoscopes that are specially designed to be so universally obvious that they always give their horoscope readers that special eerie feeling of particularity and insight, exploiting the psychological fact that most people are narcissistic and prone to the illusion that they and their problems are uniquely special and that if they’re feeling a certain way they’re surely the only person who is feeling like that. In other words, I was only pretending to ask her a question—I was actually giving the girlfriend a condescending little lecture on people’s narcissism and the illusion of uniqueness, like the fat industrialist in Dickens or Ragged Dick who leans back from a great dinner with his fingers laced over his huge stomach and cannot imagine how anyone in that moment could be hungry anywhere in the whole world,” but which then of course Chris has almost the exact same experience, priest and all, with the Jesuit substitute accounting teacher.

It’s less a story of uniqueness, he realizes, and more a story of awareness, or the awareness that unique circumstances create which in turn makes the message unique to the receiver even if they can be equally unique to other receivers. Or as he says, “Anyhow, it seems like a very long time ago. But the point of even remembering the conversation, I think, is that there was an important fact behind the Christian girl’s ‘salvation’ story which I simply hadn’t understood at the time—and, to be honest, I don’t think she or the Christian did, either. It’s true that her story was stupid and dishonest, but that doesn’t mean the experience she had in the church that day didn’t happen, or that its effect on her wasn’t real. I’m not putting it very well, but I was both right and wrong about her little story. I think the truth is probably that enormous, sudden, dramatic, unexpected, life-changing experiences are not translatable or explainable to anyone else, and this is because they really are unique and particular—though not unique in the way the Christian girl believed. This is because their power isn’t just the result of the experience itself, but also of the circumstances in which it hits you, of everything in your previous life-experience which has led up to it and made you exactly who and what you are when the experience hits you. Does that make any sense? It’s hard to explain. What the girl with the meadow on her boots had left out of the story was why she was feeling so especially desolate and lost right then, and thus why she was so psychologically ‘primed’ to hear the pastor’s general, anonymous comment in that personal way.”

All of which seems like a non-sequitur at the time of reading, but which pays off when Chris absentmindedly walks into the wrong building’s room 311 and wonders whether it “might not have been one more bit of unconscious irresponsibility on my part.”

“You cannot analyze sudden, dramatic experiences like this this way, though—especially in hindsight, which is notoriously tricky (though I obviously did not understand this during the exchange with the Christian girl in the boots).”

What matters isn’t the specific words or experiences. Each person can hear them or experience them in totally unique ways. What matters is how you, in that moment, in the midst of a lifetime of words and experiences, hear or experience them, which just has something to do with paying attention.

Attention is All You Need

My takeaway from Something To Do With Paying Attention is that the exact same situation can provide completely different meaning to different people depending on whether and how each is paying attention.

This is the death of meaning in the Enlightenment / Baudrillardian sense. There is no way to run a scientific experiment that determines who will respond to what how.

This is the birth of meaning in the sense that we’re talking about.

Take running. In Simulation and Simulacra, Baudrillard decries it as a Disneyland-like simulacra: “They no longer walk, but they go jogging, etc.” Borgmann, on the other hand, includes running as an example of a focal practice: a sustained and engaging human activity that orients life by fostering competence, excellence, and a way of life that shelters meaningful focal concerns through regular and mindful participation:

The great run, where one exults in the strength of one's body, in the ease and the length of the stride, where nature speaks powerfully in the hills, the wind, the heat, where one takes endurance to the breaking point, and where one is finally engulfed by the good will of the spectators and the fellow runners.

Same activity, two very different ways of paying attention to it. Crucially, how you look at running, how you pay attention to it, shapes how you relate to the world in that moment. If you view it as a vapid simulacrum of walking, you will find yourself overwhelmed by the sheer stupidity of it all every time you chance upon someone out for a jog. If you view it as a way for a human to focus his mind and body against a hard task, you will find yourself impressed by human capacity each time you watch a runner zip by. The experience is more impactful, of course, if you’re the one running.

This is a little thing, but I think that meaning consists of the way you pay attention to millions or billions of little things.

And I think that one of the reasons that with more means, we seem to find less meaning, is that means give you permission to pay less attention.

In The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford compares the old Mickey Mouse cartoons to the more modern Mickey Mouse Clubhouse:

In the old Mickey Mouse cartoons from the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, by far the most prominent source of hilarity is the capacity of material stuff to generate frustration, or rather demonic violence. Fold-down beds, ironing boards, waves at the beach, trailers (especially when Goofy is at the wheel of the towing vehicle, on a twisty mountain road), anything electric, anything elastic, anything that can become a projectile. Anything that can suffer termite damage that remains hidden until the crucial moment. Springs are especially treacherous, as are retractable blinds. Snowballs can be counted on to grow by a couple orders of magnitude on their way down the slope toward your head. At any given moment, the odds of being seized by the collar by a severely overwound grandfather clock are nontrivial. Icicles: don’t stand anywhere near them. Bicycles tend to become unicycles, unpredictably, and rubber cement is easily mistaken for baking powder. Why do they have nearly identical labels?

“Those early cartoons,” Crawford writes, “present a rich phenomenology of what it is like to be an embodied agent in a world of artifacts and inexorable physical laws.” Then there’s today’s Mickey Mouse Clubhouse:

There are four problems per episode, and each can be solved using one of the four tools [offered by the Handy Dandy machine when a character says “Oh Tootles!”]. This assurance is baked into the initial setup of the episode; no moment of helplessness is allowed to arise. There is never an insoluble problem, that is, a deep conflict between the will and the world. I suspect that is one reason these episodes are not just unfunny, but somehow the opposite of funny…

…To be a Mouseke-doer is to abstract from material reality as depicted in those early Disney cartoons, where we see the flip side of affordances. Perhaps we should call unwanted projectiles, demonic springs, and all such hazards “negative affordances.” The thing is, you can’t have the positive without the negative; they are two sides of the same coin. The world in which we acquire skill as embodied agents is precisely that world in which we are subject to the heteronomy of things; the hazards of material reality. To pursue the fantasy of escaping heteronomy through abstraction is to give up on skill, and therefore to substitute technology-as-magic for the possibility of real agency.

This is, of course, just a kid’s show, but Crawford’s point is that one, this is what we’re raising our kids to expect, and two, actual technology promises this, too: “As we ‘build a smarter planet’ (as the IBM advertisements say), the world will become as frictionless as thought itself; ‘smartness will subdue dumb nature. But perhaps even thinking will become unnecessary: a fully smart technology should be able to leap in and anticipate our will, using algorithms that discover the person revealed by our previous behavior.”

Crawford published the book in 2016. He anticipated by nine years the advertisements for any number of AI agents that promise to anticipate and do everything for us so that we can… what, exactly?

Which is fine, sometimes great even, except that, as Crawford argues, the more we expect technology to do things for us, the less we pay attention. He points to Mercedes’ driver assist features and the inconvenient fact that roads designed to be safe are home to more accidents. “Emily Anthes writes that among traffic engineers”:

In the last decade or so, a few iconoclasts have begun making roads more hazardous—narrowing them, reducing visibility, and removing curbs, center lines, guardrails, and even traffic signs and signals. These roads, research shows, are home to significantly fewer crashes and traffic fatalities.

Mickey Mouse and roads are extreme examples. The roads have clear consequences and measurable statistics. But I think that our ability to engage in almost everything with less attention has an equally significant, if less measurable, impact on our felt sense of meaning.

If your phone holds a world of entertainment an arm’s length away, why engage in conversation? If ChatGPT reveals all of the answers at the tap of a few keys, why think? Better yet, if it can do that annoying work your boss assigned you, why do it?

With each reach for the convenient – each engagement with Baudrillard’s third order simulacra – we give away a little bit of our attention, and a little bit of our agency.

And sometimes, that is a fine trade to make! Even Han and Baudrillard would agree that there are many things we do that are not worthy of our time, attention, or agency. While Han and Baudrillard would disagree, Borgmann and Crawford, I think, would agree that using technology as a tool can help us move past things that aren’t really worth doing to focus on the things that are. People have annoying responsibilities. Removing yourself from the system is impractical and undesirable.

The question, then, is what you choose to pay attention to instead.

Because now we have cars that not only assist us, but drive us. I was in San Francisco last week and I took half a dozen Waymo rides. I love it. And the stats suggest self-drivin