Why Getting Older Might Be Life’s Biggest Plot Twist

Aging isn’t easy, and topics like dementia and medically assisted dying can be hard to talk about. The British mystery writer Richard Osman is trying to change that. Osman has reimagined the notion of aging through his best-selling “Thursday Murder Club” series, centered on four seniors living in a posh retirement community who solve murders.

In this episode, he sits down with the Opinion writer Michelle Cottle to discuss why seniors make ideal fictional detectives and how a “cozy” murder mystery is the perfect frame to explore growing old. (...)

Michelle Cottle: This week I’m talking with Richard Osman, who writes the best-selling mystery novels known as the “Thursday Murder Club” series. These books revolve around four residents of a posh retirement village in the British countryside who investigate murders in their spare time.

The fifth book, “The Impossible Fortune,” is out in the U.S. on Sept. 30, and it comes on the heels of a Netflix adaptation of the original book. But before I get too carried away, I really should introduce their creator. Richard Osman, welcome, thank you so much for doing this.

Richard Osman: It’s an absolute pleasure, Michelle. Lovely to meet you across the ocean. (...)

Cottle: One of the big things that sets these stories apart for me is the perspective of the main characters, who are all older, and it really informs their views on life and death and risk and justice. Did you know you were going to wind up delving into these existential issues when you started all this?

Osman: I really did, actually. It’s taken a long time for me to write a novel. I’ve written all sorts of things over the years, and I kept waiting for something that I knew had a little bit of depth to it, something that I could really get my teeth into. My mom lives in a retirement village, and I go there and meet all these people who’ve lived these extraordinary lives but slightly shut away from the heart of our culture. The second I had this idea, I was aware I had a gang of people who are very different from each other but a gang of people who’ve done extraordinary things.

As a huge fan of crime fiction, I knew the murders and the plots can take care of themselves, but I had a bottomless well of character, experience and stories that I could draw upon with these characters. So right from the start, I thought it was worth me having a go at this because it feels like if I get the first one right, then others will follow. I knew there was plenty for me to write about here.

Cottle: Your characters are talking about hard stuff like loss, grief, loneliness, assisted dying, dementia. I feel like you and I have come at some of the same topics from really different directions now.

As a reporter, I tend to find that readers either really identify with what I’m writing about or that they just don’t want to think about it at all — like, “I don’t want to think about my parents getting old. I don’t want to think about getting old.” But on the other hand, we are tackling these things in a way that gives people a really appealing entry point. You know, murder, friendship, cake, baking. It’s like you’re sneaking tough issues in there for us to chew over.

Osman: Yeah, sneaking the vegetables under the ketchup.

Cottle: Do you hear from readers that they’re thinking about these things?

Osman: Yeah, definitely. One of the lovely things about writing the books is you have so many conversations with people, and a subject like assisted dying, as you say, it’s fascinating. It’s probably one of the most fascinating philosophical questions we can ask ourselves as human beings.

But, yes, we don’t always want to read beyond the headline. There’s always something else we could read that’s more palatable or easier. But with this, we are reading a murder mystery, and we’re laughing at jokes, and we’re laughing at characters with each other and then suddenly think, “Oh, now I’m reading about assisted dying,” and because I’ve got a gang of people, I can write about it.

Funnily enough, I wrote two chapters in a row — one from the perspective of a character who believes in it very strongly and one from the perspective of a character who doesn’t believe in it. These two people love each other, but they happen to disagree on this.

You’re getting to discuss something that people might normally avoid, something they might change the channel on or click past to the next article. That means a lot of people come up to me in the street to talk about it. We talk about dementia, grief, all of these things, and I absolutely love those conversations.

Cottle: You had a family member who suffered through Alzheimer’s, right?

Osman: Yeah.

Cottle: Did that inform how you approach one of the main characters’ husbands? In the book, he’s suffering from dementia. Did your experience inform how you were writing some of this?

Osman: Yeah, if you talk to anybody who works with dementia patients in any way, they’ll tell you every single experience is unique. Everything is different, and the dementia often takes on the form of the person with dementia. It’s a very personal illness.

My grandfather had dementia. He was a very bright, very strong man. He had been a cop and served in the army, so he was used to being, you know, very traditionally male. And then suddenly the faculties began to go. In his final years, I would visit him often, speaking to him and noticing what he remembered and what he didn’t. The last things to remain were probably laughter and love. Those were the final parts of him that stayed, and I wanted to pay tribute to that.

I wanted to understand him — how he was thinking, what his brain was doing, which circuits were still complete and which weren’t. So really, I’m writing about him. The fact that it resonates with so many other people is wonderful. Every example of dementia is slightly different, but there’s enough we all share.

In my conversations with him, I was constantly inside his head, thinking: What is his brain doing now? Where is it reaching? What is it trying to reach, and what does it actually reach? That became the foundation for Stephen, the character in my books who suffers from dementia. I wanted to give Stephen absolute, 100 percent humanity. I wanted his thought process to feel rational within his own mind. That was what I was trying to capture — how his brain might be working. And from what people tell me, it resonates, which is all I could hope for. (...)

Cottle: You said before that you were struck that these older residents had all these amazing life experiences but were kind of now largely ignored or underestimated, which sounds sad. We hear a lot about the invisibility that comes with aging. But in some ways, you turn this on its head. Your characters can do all these crazy things and get in all sorts of trouble and basically get away with it, specifically because they’re older and people are underestimating them. I feel like you’re making a pitch for aging or —

Osman: I really am, because, as I say, things occur to me as I go along, but one of the things that occurred to me very early on is the lack of consequence for a lot of what they’re doing. A lot of us are scared throughout life because we think, “Oh, no, but what happens if I lose my job or the money starts going down or something?”

When you’re older, the worst is going to happen at some time. You’ve got that perspective. And there’s a part in the first book, I think, where one person says: The only people who can tell us what to do now are our doctors and our children, and we rarely see our children, so no one’s really telling us what to do.

In the very first book, Elizabeth says to the cops at one point: “I’ll tell you what you should do — why don’t you arrest me? Lock an 80-year-old woman in a cell. See how much fun that is for you. See how much paperwork you’ll have to do. I’ll even pretend I think you’re my grandson. Go on, do it.” And you realize there’s a real freedom in that — a kind of carte blanche to behave badly, mischievously, to open doors you shouldn’t be allowed to open. I absolutely dove into all of that and took full advantage of their ability to beguile everyone.

Cottle: See, I’m very much looking forward to being there with them. I saw an article asking rather grandly if your books might change the way that Britain thinks about growing old. And I think the piece was specifically referring to the idea that seniors could decide to move into these communities where they hang out with people their age and get involved in stuff.

But even beyond that, your characters are thumbing their noses at the idea that seniors should fade into the background. I have to think this goes over really well with your readers of a certain age.

Osman: Yeah, I think it’s fascinating, because younger readers always say: Oh, my God, thank you for making these older characters heroes. That feels so aspirational. I can’t wait until I retire.

But older readers say something completely different: Thank you for not making us the heroes. Thank you for making us flawed and mischievous. Thank you for showing us drinking at 11:30, gossiping, falling in love and out of love. Thank you for writing us as human beings.

My starting point for all of this is simple. Everyone listening will have an answer to this question: How old do you feel in your head? There’s always a number, a point where you stop aging inside yourself.

My mom is 83, and she says she feels 30. And isn’t that right? Nobody really has an old brain. People may have old bodies and deal with old-age issues, but their minds are still young — 27, 30, 35, 40. So when I write these characters, I don’t think for a single second about the fact that they’re 80. I think about the age they still are in their heads, even though they live in very different surroundings. (...)

Cottle: Your characters present old age not as a time when life becomes narrower and narrower, as it can sometimes feel when you’re aging, but as a time of reinvention, of expanding comfort zones. That’s a very comforting thought for certain middle-aged readers eyeing the road ahead. And it sounds like I’m not the only one. That idea is clearly resonating with your younger readers, too.

Osman: The age demographics reading this book are insane, because they’re about older people, yes, but they’re not read predominantly by older readers. People from all age groups are picking them up. I think part of that is wish fulfillment, because loneliness is a real issue. There’s an epidemic of loneliness among older people but also, interestingly, among people in their late teens and early 20s, though for different reasons.

The quick fix, in both cases, is community. Of course, not everyone wants that, and that’s fine. Where my mom lives, if you don’t want to see anyone, you just shut your front door. But if you do want company, you open it, and that feels like something to aspire to. The fact that these books put that idea into the world — that later years can be lived in community — feels positive. We don’t have to fade into the background as we get older. We don’t have to disappear. We can grow, become more visible, even noisier. We can become more trouble, in the best way, as we age.

Cottle: That’s my goal.

Osman: That’s my goal as well. That’s sort of everyone’s goal, isn’t it? To just continue causing trouble... At every stage of life, we’re told what it’s supposed to be about. As kids, it’s education — getting to high school, then the right college. In our 20s, it’s climbing the ladder, getting promoted, earning more money. Then it becomes about raising a family, building a community, watching the next generation grow. But eventually, you reach an age where they’ve run out of instructions. There’s no one telling you, “Now the point of life is X.” And you realize: Oh, I can just do what I want. I could have done that all along. What was I thinking?

That’s the moment you finally understand: I’m allowed to have fun. I’m allowed to be with people, to laugh, to enjoy myself. Yes, I still want to look after others and make sure my community is safe and cared for, but I’m also allowed to have fun.

And that feels like a revolutionary act.

by Michelle Cottle and Richard Osman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. There's still quite a bit of ageism around, I don't know if it's getting better or worse.  I'm old and this all feels very familiar.]

How I Joined the Resistance

The religious evolution of J.D. Vance.

I prided myself on an ability to overwhelm the opposition with my logic. There was an arrogance at the heart of my worldview, emotionally and intellectually. But I comforted myself with an appeal to a philosopher whose atheism-cum-libertarianism told me everything I wanted to hear: Ayn Rand. Great, smart men were only arrogant if they were wrong, and I was anything but that. (...)

To lose my faith was to lose my cultural conservatism, and in a world that was growing increasingly aligned with the Republican party, my ideological response took the form of overcompensation: having lost my cultural conservatism, I would become even more economically conservative. The irony, of course, is that it was the economic program of the Republican party that least interested my family—none of them cared how much the Bush administration slashed tax rates for billionaires. The G.O.P. became a kind of totem—I attached myself to it ever more strongly because it gave me some common ground with my family. And the most respectable way to do so among my new college friends was through a dogged commitment to neoliberal economic orthodoxy. Tax breaks and Social Security cuts were socially acceptable ways to be conservative among the American elite. (...)

As I advanced through our educational hierarchy—moving on from Ohio State to Yale Law School—I began to worry that my assimilation into elite culture came at a high cost. My sister once told me that the song that made her think of me was “Simple Man” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Though I had fallen in love, I found that the emotional demons of my childhood made it hard to be the type of partner I’d always wanted to be. My Randian arrogance about my own ability melted away when confronted with the realization that an obsession with achievement would fail to produce the achievement that mattered most to me for so much of my life: a happy, thriving family.

I had immersed myself in the logic of the meritocracy and found it deeply unsatisfying. And I began to wonder: were all these worldly markers of success actually making me a better person? I had traded virtue for achievement and found the latter wanting. But the woman I wanted to marry cared little whether I obtained a Supreme Court clerkship. She just wanted me to be a good person.

It’s possible, of course, to overstate our own inadequacies. I never cheated on my would-be spouse. I never became violent with her. But there was a voice in my head that demanded better of me: that I put her interests above my own; that I master my temper for her sake as much as for mine. And I began to realize that this voice, wherever it came from, was not the same one that compelled me to climb as high as I could up our ladder of meritocracy. It came from somewhere more ancient, and more grounded—it required reflection about where I came from rather than cultural divorce from it.

As I considered these twin desires—for success and character—and how they conflicted (and didn’t), I came across a meditation from Saint Augustine on Genesis. I had been a fan of Augustine since a political theorist in college assigned City of God. But his thoughts on Genesis spoke to me, and are worth reproducing at length:

In matters that are obscure and far beyond our vision, even in such as we may find treated in Holy Scripture, different Interpretations are sometimes possible without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such a case, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search of truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it. That would be to battle not for the teaching of Holy Scripture but for our own, wishing its teaching to conform to ours, whereas we ought to wish ours to conform to that of Sacred Scripture.

Let us suppose that in explaining the words, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and light was made,” (Gn 1, 3), one man thinks that it was material light that was made, and another that it was spiritual. As to the actual existence of “spiritual light” in a spiritual creature, our faith leaves no doubt; as to the existence of material light, celestial or supercelestial, even existing before the heavens, a light which could have been followed by night, there will be nothing in such a supposition contrary to the faith until un-erring truth gives the lie to it. And if that should happen, this teaching was never in Holy Scripture but was an opinion proposed by man in his ignorance.

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?

I couldn’t stop thinking about how I would have reacted to this passage when I was a kid: If someone had made the very same argument to me when I was 17, I would have called him a heretic. This was an accommodation to science, the kind that someone like Bill Maher rightly mocked contemporary moderate Christians for indulging. Yet here was a person telling us 1600 years ago that my own approach to Genesis was arrogance—the kind that might turn a person from his faith.

This, it turned out, was a little too on the nose, and the first crack in my proverbial armor. I began circulating the quote among friends—believers and nonbelievers alike, and I thought about it constantly.

Around the same time, I attended a talk at our law school with Peter Thiel. This was 2011, and Thiel was a well-known venture capitalist but hardly a household name. He would later blurb my book and become a good friend, but I had no idea what to expect at the time. He spoke first in personal terms: arguing that we were increasingly tracked into cutthroat professional competitions. We would compete for appellate clerkships, and then Supreme Court clerkships. We would compete for jobs at elite law firms, and then for partnerships at those same places. At each juncture, he said, our jobs would offer longer work hours, social alienation from our peers, and work whose prestige would fail to make up for its meaninglessness. He also argued that his own world of Silicon Valley spent too little time on the technological breakthroughs that made life better—those in biology, energy, and transportation—and too much on things like software and mobile phones. Everyone could now tweet at each other, or post photos on Facebook, but it took longer to travel to Europe, we had no cure for cognitive decline and dementia, and our energy use increasingly dirtied the planet. He saw these two trends—elite professionals trapped in hyper-competitive jobs, and the technological stagnation of society—as connected. If technological innovation were actually driving real prosperity, our elites wouldn’t feel increasingly competitive with one another over a dwindling number of prestigious outcomes.

Peter’s talk remains the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School. He articulated a feeling that had until then remained unformed: that I was obsessed with achievement in se—not as an end to something meaningful, but to win a social competition. My worry that I had prioritized striving over character took on a heightened significance: striving for what? I didn’t even know why I cared about the things I cared about. I fancied myself educated, enlightened, and especially wise about the ways of the world—at least compared with most of the people from my hometown. Yet I was obsessed with obtaining professional credentials—a clerkship with a federal judge and then an associate position at a prestigious firm—that I didn’t understand. I hated my limited exposure to legal practice. I looked to the future, and realized that I’d been running a desperate race where the first prize was a job I hated.

I began immediately planning for a career outside the law, which is why I spent less than two years after graduation as a practicing attorney. But Peter left me with one more thing: he was possibly the smartest person I’d ever met, but he was also a Christian. He defied the social template I had constructed—that dumb people were Christians and smart ones atheists. I began to wonder where his religious belief came from, which led me to René Girard, the French philosopher whom he apparently studied under at Stanford. Girard’s thought is rich enough that any effort to summarize will fail to do the man justice. His theory of mimetic rivalry—that we tend to compete over the things that other people want—spoke directly to some of the pressures I experienced at Yale. But it was his related theory of the scapegoat—and what it revealed about Christianity—that made me reconsider my faith.

One of Girard’s central insights is that human civilizations are often, perhaps even always, founded on a “scapegoat myth”—an act of violence committed against someone who has wronged the broader community, retold as a sort of origin story for the community.
 (...)

To Girard, the Christian story contains a crucial difference—a difference that reveals something “hidden since the foundation of the world.” In the Christian telling, the ultimate scapegoat has not wronged the civilization; the civilization has wronged him. The victim of the madness of crowds is, as Christ was, infinitely powerful—able to prevent his own murder—and perfectly innocent—undeserving of the rage and violence of the crowd. In Christ, we see our efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim for what they are: a moral failing, projected violently upon someone else. Christ is the scapegoat who reveals our imperfections, and forces us to look at our own flaws rather than blame our society’s chosen victims.

People come to truth in different ways, and I’m sure some will find this account unsatisfying. But in 2013, it captured so well the psychology of my generation, especially its most privileged inhabitants. Mired in the swamp of social media, we identified a scapegoat and digitally pounced. We were keyboard warriors, unloading on people via Facebook and Twitter, blind to our own problems. We fought over jobs we didn’t actually want while pretending we didn’t fight for them at all. And the end result for me, at least, was that I had lost the language of virtue. I felt more shame over failing in a law school exam than I did about losing my temper with my girlfriend.

That all had to change. It was time to stop scapegoating and focus on what I could do to improve things. (...)

I noticed during my research that many of those social problems came from behavior for which social scientists and policy experts had a different vocabulary. On the right, the conversation often turned to “culture” and “personal responsibility”—the ways in which individuals or communities held back their own progress. And though it seemed obvious to me that there was something dysfunctional about some of the places in which I’d grown up, the discourse on the right seemed a little heartless. It failed to account for the fact that destructive behaviors were almost always tragedies with terrible consequences. It is one thing to wag your finger at another person for failing to act a certain way, but it is something else to feel the weight of the misery that comes from those actions.

The left’s intellectuals focused much more on the structural and external problems facing families like mine—the difficulty in finding jobs and the lack of funding for certain types of resources. And while I agreed that more resources were often necessary, there seemed to me a sense in which our most destructive behaviors persisted—even flourished—in times of material comfort. The economic left was often more compassionate, but theirs was a kind of compassion—devoid of any expectation—that reeked of giving up. A compassion that assumes a person is disadvantaged to the point of hopelessness is like sympathy for a zoo animal, and I had no use for it.

And as I reflected on these competing views of the world, and the wisdom and shortcomings of each, I felt desperate for a worldview that understood our bad behavior as simultaneously social and individual, structural and moral; that recognized that we are products of our environment; that we have a responsibility to change that environment, but that we are still moral beings with individual duties; one that could speak against rising rates of divorce and addiction, not as sanitized conclusions about their negative social externalities, but with moral outrage. (...)

And here, again, the words of Saint Augustine echoed from a millennium and a half earlier, articulating a truth I had felt for a long time but hadn’t spoken. This is a passage from City of God, where Augustine summarizes the debauchery of Rome’s ruling class:

This is our concern, that every man be able to increase his wealth so as to supply his daily prodigalities, and so that the powerful may subject the weak for their own purposes. Let the poor court the rich for a living, and that under their protection they may enjoy a sluggish tranquillity; and let the rich abuse the poor as their dependants, to minister to their pride. Let the people applaud not those who protect their interests, but those who provide them with pleasure. Let no severe duty be commanded, no impurity forbidden. Let kings estimate their prosperity, not by the righteousness, but by the servility of their subjects. Let the provinces stand loyal to the kings, not as moral guides, but as lords of their possessions and purveyors of their pleasures; not with a hearty reverence, but a crooked and servile fear. Let the laws take cognizance rather of the injury done to another man’s property, than of that done to one’s own person. If a man be a nuisance to his neighbor, or injure his property, family, or person, let him be actionable; but in his own affairs let everyone with impunity do what he will in company with his own family, and with those who willingly join him. Let there be a plentiful supply of public prostitutes for every one who wishes to use them, but specially for those who are too poor to keep one for their private use. Let there be erected houses of the largest and most ornate description: in these let there be provided the most sumptuous banquets, where every one who pleases may, by day or night, play, drink, vomit, dissipate. Let there be everywhere heard the rustling of dancers, the loud, immodest laughter of the theatre; let a succession of the most cruel and the most voluptuous pleasures maintain a perpetual excitement. If such happiness is distasteful to any, let him be branded as a public enemy; and if any attempt to modify or put an end to it let him be silenced, banished, put an end to. Let these be reckoned the true gods, who procure for the people this condition of things, and preserve it when once possessed.

It was the best criticism of our modern age I’d ever read. A society oriented entirely towards consumption and pleasure, spurning duty and virtue. Not long after I first read these words, my friend Oren Cass published a book arguing that American policy makers have focused far too much on promoting consumption as opposed to productivity, or some other measure of wellbeing. The reaction—criticizing Oren for daring to push policies that might lower consumption—almost proved the argument. “Yes,” I found myself saying, “Oren’s preferred policies might reduce per-capita consumption. But that’s precisely the point: our society is more than the sum of its economic statistics. If people die sooner in the midst of historic levels of consumption, then perhaps our focus on consumption is misguided.”

And indeed it was this insight, more than any other, that ultimately led not just to Christianity, but to Catholicism. Despite my Mamaw’s unfamiliarity with the liturgy, the Roman and Italian cultural influences, and the foreign pope, I slowly began to see Catholicism as the closest expression of her kind of Christanity: obsessed with virtue, but cognizant of the fact that virtue is formed in the context of a broader community; sympathetic with the meek and poor of the world without treating them primarily as victims; protective of children and families and with the things necessary to ensure they thrive. And above all: a faith centered around a Christ who demands perfection of us even as He loves unconditionally and forgives easily.

by J.D. Vance, The Lamp |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Poor J.D. definitely lost the plot (not hard if solipsism and rationalization are your super powers). Hard to feel sorry for him though. In his present world view - Catholic or not - ambition (maybe destiny!) Trumps everything.]

Here's a Story For the Kids

The other day, on Twitter, people (“people,” you know who I mean, the disorganized blob of posting addicts, ahistorical teenagers, and semi-employed journalists and academics who on the right day constitute a plurality of social media discourse) were submitting bids for the worst song of all-time. And it wasn’t long before someone posted a clip of Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes performing their 2010 hit “Home” on NPR’s Tiny Desk.

(Twitter embeds don’t work anymore, but it’s around the 5:00 mark below.)

The clip went viral in a way that other suggestions for WOAT did not, even though “Home” isn’t that bad. Really, it’s not. Sentimental and cloying, yes, and the whistle is grating; I did not like the song when it came out, and no false nostalgia descends upon me now. But if I put on my “neutral cultural critic” monocle, strip away all associated memories, and attempt to hear it for what it is, “Home” is basically cut-rate folk-rock. Maudlin, but not ontologically objectionable. Tinker with the production and you can imagine the Carter Family singing it. There are worse songs in this genre, for sure, and way worse songs beyond that. (...)

And that’s not getting into the hundreds of god-awful filler tracks, novelty cash-ins, and self-recorded demos that litter the deepest recesses of Spotify’s library and Instagram Reels, though I grant that when people say “worst song of all-time” they usually refer to “worst song of all-time that listeners have heard of.”

But what made people (again, “people”) respond so strongly to “Home” was the video, in which singers Alex Ebert and Jade Castrinos duet face-to-face in that stripped-down and “real” Tiny Desk way. They make affectionate eye contact, and in particular Castrinos is making a face that says “I am sort of kooky but I really love you,” while Ebert’s face says “I am communicating a secret that only we know, which is that I really love you” A love song sung by two people who are in love—this is a formula that listeners usually fall for, and “Home” was sort of popular when it came out. It’s easily the band’s most popular song.

Still, much of what I just described is considered ontologically objectionable in 2025. Partly it’s because of the way they look: Ebert is long-haired, bearded, and shirtless underneath a white suit jacket (Father John Misty as a cult leader), while Castrinos hides very short hair beneath a knitted beanie, and lolls her head around as she sings. I cannot speak to the spiritually liberating experience of performing this song, but a ruder interpretation is that she looks like she’s clearly on drugs, thereby making her behavior insincere. Partly it’s the received understanding that this song is emblematic of the widely mocked “stomp clamp” genre that symbolizes millennial culture of the early ‘10s—music regarded as unilaterally embarrassing because the young have come for the old even though lots of us also hated it at the time!!!!!!! We didn’t all work for BuzzFeed!!!!!!!

Anyway. That “Home” seems “cringe” is possibly its worst sin—get a load of these two 20-something white people drawling at each other about moats and boats and waterfalls when they should be taking a dang shower. Actually, Ebert and Castrinos resemble the type of people who Father John Misty is so good at skewering, the self-serious flower child artiste types who are horrible to talk to at parties.

(A pet peeve: Everything is “cringe” from the right perspective. Even the haughtiest people I know have made—or enjoyed—art filled with emotions and ideas that are, to me, flatly wack. One of the most judgmental snobs I ever knew is now a fitness influencer. Another paints the worst paintings I’ve ever seen in my life. Another writes fiction. Calling something “cringe” is usually a confession of vulnerability, a sign of weakness. Projecting your own aesthetic and emotional insecurities onto other people? That’s cringe, bro.)

Watching all this discourse unfold about a song I never liked inspired a familiar feeling: the need to correct someone on the internet who is wrong. I particularly feel this feeling when the discussion involves a period of time I lived through, and still remember pretty well. It’s obnoxious to be confronted with the crude stereotypes of how people allegedly behaved and thought back then. I understand that history is always being re-remembered by the pedantic, but sometimes you go, “whoa, that’s my history.” (...)

It’s funny that the song is seen as “cringe” now, though, because my first thought watching the clip is that these two people—both thin, and attractive in the face—are obviously having sex with each other. Perhaps today they look like back-to-the-land types, or MAHA believers, or simply homeless—but back then, this look said “we are going to take drugs and fuck,” which is categorically not cringe. (Unless you’re talking too much about your polycule, but I don’t want to open that can of worms.) Sex can be gross and shameful, but two hot people giving in to unbridled desire is one of the most powerful forces alive. It’s why people watch movies, or pornography, and it’s why many were—and are—skeptical of the hipster, this fear that attractive people were fucking. And when you remember, as I said above, that “hipster” was at some point applied to literally everyone under the age of 25 who voted for Barack Obama, it all reduces to a fear that young people are having fun.

Ebert is a particularly funny vector for this accusation of “cringe” because he was formerly the lead singer of Ima Robot (nobody remembers this), a sexed-up dance-punk band from the early ‘00s that the art kids of my high school were obsessed with. The line “No, I want to wait for someone like you” from Ima Robot’s single “Dynomite” is as earnest as anything in “Home,” and it’s sung by the same person: a handsome white man who was probably having a lot of sex with other good-looking people. That the same guy with a different haircut could go from making cocaine music to marijuana music (to paraphrase an old Chuck Klosterman observation) is the stronger criticism about the meaninglessness of this stuff: It was all lifestyle content sold by intellectually bankrupt sex addicts. (...)

Yet it’s easy to imagine Ebert coming by all of this authentically, in that girls and boys alike just want to have fun. This is uncomfortable to think about, the possibility that strangers may just be enjoying their lives. I watch a lot of TikTok videos, which I’m still unpacking, and a frequently encountered affect in the comments is a sort of smug tut-tutting. Like if you’re watching a video where a cat eats a slice of turkey, you’d better believe you’ll read a comment where someone tells a whole sob story about how you’d better make sure the turkey isn’t cooked in any herbs because my sister’s cat ate a piece of rosemary and died. If there’s any opportunity to judge from a removed vantage point, a commenter will take it. More and more I wonder if culture isn’t just cresting toward the inevitable endpoint of art not mattering so much as whether it is produced by someone worth rooting for—someone who doesn’t make other people regret their own personal choices. We’re already there, maybe.

I regret very few things in my life, and I am lucky to feel this way. But I’m certainly aware of the choices I didn’t make. And the truth is, in 2010 I was definitely envious of people like Ebert and Castrinos, so confident and happy in their crunchy earthy hedonistic bubble. I lacked the confidence to be so romantically available, in a way that might allow me to have my own full eye contact love affair with a sprightly and interested person. I was the type to pine, and ruminate, and this is not pining or ruminating music—this is stuff for dropping acid and frolicking in a field. My father had died a few years before, and I’d moved past the immediate shock toward a deeper understanding that I was now different, and sadder, in a way that often prevented me from letting loose. But really, my father’s death only sharpened and clarified feelings that were going to come out at some point. People my age who enjoyed this song—I don’t even think I felt like we were part of the same species.

This is why the clip of “Home” offends, I think, because it’s visual evidence that two young people were maybe in love. Without the video, it sort of sounds like Paul Simon. With the video, it’s everything you’re not, and everything you never were, and everything you will never be, which is a scary thought.

by Jeremy Gordon, Air Gordon |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

Some Parts of You Only Emerge for Certain People

I think about this Virginia Woolf quote often. To me, it speaks to love’s power as an act of invention, the way certain people draw out a version of you that didn’t exist before they arrived. They witness you, and thus, rearrange you. In their presence, words you didn’t know you knew tumble out. Your thoughts sharpen, colours seem richer, you inhabit yourself more fully.

We all carry endless hidden selves and latent worlds, waiting for the right gaze to bring them to the surface. I’ve felt this in my bones: relationships that have remade me, expanded me, taught me. Time and again, people have been the most transformative engine for becoming I’ve ever known.

Every enduring friendship, every romance worth the name, behaves like a kind of psychic technology. Two minds meet, exchange a pattern of attention, and, almost invisibly, each begins to reorganise around the other. What starts as perception becomes structure.

Henrik Karlsson captures the mechanism simply: relationships are co-evolutionary loops. Beyond sociology, it feels like spiritual physics. Who we choose to orbit defines, over time, the texture and colour palette of our becoming. Love becomes a technology of transformation, a living interface between selves. To love well is to take part in someone else’s unfolding, even as they take part in yours. (...)

I’ve often felt how literal that process can be, like a slow annealing of the self under another’s attention. A few months ago, I read an essay that rearranged me: What is Love? by Qualia Computing, which frames love as a kind of neural annealing. In metallurgy, annealing is the process of heating metal until its internal structure loosens, then cooling it slowly so it hardens into a stronger, more resilient form. The lattice reorganises; the material changes.

The essay suggests that in high-energy emotional states, such as falling in love, grief, awe, psychedelics, deep meditation, the brain becomes molten, its patterns loosened, more open to reorganisation. The person we focus on in these states becomes like a mold for the cooling metal, shaping how our thoughts settle, what habits crystallise, what identities take hold.

This is why the right gaze, the right conversation, can change you down to the grain. Emotional heat loosens the architecture of the self, and in the presence of someone who sees you vividly, the molten structure reforms around their image of you. What remains afterwards is stronger, different, marked by the shape of their attention. Attention becomes anchor; identity reshapes in response to their rhythms, their gaze. Perhaps this is why the right presence can feel like destiny: whole inner continents, hidden selves and latent worlds, begin to surface, shaping you into someone you hadn’t yet met. 

by Maja, Velvet Noise | Read more:
Images: Virginia Wolff; Banksy

Evolution of Emotions

"If you understand that every experience you have now becomes part of your brain's ability to predict, then you realize that the best way to change your past is to change your present."

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, psychologist Paul Eckman, PhD, and psychotherapist Esther Perel, PhD, explain how the brain constantly rebuilds emotions from memory and prediction. According to their research, by choosing new experiences today, we can reshape how our past influences us, gain more control over our feelings, and create new possibilities for connection and growth.

LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: It can certainly feel like emotions happen to you. That they bubble up and cause you to do and say things, but that experience is an illusion that the brain creates.

Not everybody has as much control as they might like, but everybody has a little more control than they think they do. When you're experiencing emotion or you're in an emotional state, what your brain is doing is telling itself a story about what is going on inside your body in relation to what's happening in the world. Your brain is always regulating your body. Your body is always sending sensory information back to your brain, and your brain isn't wired in a way for you to experience those sensory changes specifically. Instead, what you experience is a summary. And that's where those simple feelings come from.

If you understand that every experience you have now becomes part of your brain's ability to predict, then you realize that the best way to change your past is to change your present. Just in the same way that you would exercise to make yourself healthier, you can invest energy to cultivate different experiences for yourself. The fact that your brain is using your past experience to predict what you're going to see, and hear, and feel means that you are an architect of your experience, and that doesn't involve breaking predictions. It involves seeding your brain to predict differently.

PAUL EKMAN: It's my belief that the way in which emotions evolved was to deal with things like saber-toothed tigers, the current incarnation of which is the car that's suddenly lurching at your car at a high speed. You don't have time to think. In split seconds, you have to do and make very complex decisions, and if you had to think about what you were doing, you'd be dead. It's a system that evolved to deal with really important things without your thinking about it.

So that means that sometimes, you're gonna be very unconsidered, very thoughtless. Well, these exercises that we're giving people, moving their facial muscles, concentrating on the sensations to make them more aware of an emotion when it arises, so that they will feel it at the moment and then can say, "Did she really mean to ignore me? No, it was just an accident." Or, "Maybe I shouldn't jump to the conclusion that she doesn't care about me at all."

The way in which we can improve our emotional life is to introduce conscious awareness. Nature did not want you to do that. So you have to do it yourself.

ESTHER PEREL: All relationships are colored with expectations about myself and about the other. My expectations influence that which I then see or hear. It is a filter, as well as my mood. That is one of the most important things to understand about relationships and communication — how people actually co-create each other in the context of a relationship because those people make part of who we are.

We will draw from them the very things which we expect from them, even when it's the opposite of what we really want. A lot of emphasis is put on our ability to say certain things, to say them in the right way, to articulate our needs, our feelings, our thoughts, our positions, our opinions. What is lacking is the ability to see that speaking is entirely dictated by the quality of the listening that is reflected back on us.

by Paul Ekman with Lisa Feldman Barrett, Big Think |  Read more:
Image: Jon Han

Human Exceptionalism

A terrific new book, The Arrogant Ape, by the primatologist Christine Webb, will be out in early September, and I don’t think a nonfiction book has affected me more, or taught me more, in a long time. It’s about human exceptionalism and what’s wrong with it.

It also has illuminating things to say about awe, humility, and the difference between optimism and hope. (...)

Here’s my review:

Here are some glimpses from the review:

***

Christine Webb, a primatologist at New York University, is focused on “the human superiority complex,” the idea that human beings are just better and more deserving than are members of other species, and on the extent to which human beings take themselves as the baseline against which all living creatures are measured. As Hamlet exclaimed: “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason!… The paragon of animals!” In Webb’s view, human exceptionalism is all around us, and it damages science, the natural environment, democratic choices, and ordinary (human) life. People believe in human superiority even though we are hardly the biggest, the fastest, or the strongest. Eagles see a lot better than we do. Sea sponges live much longer. Dolphins are really good at echolocation; people are generally really bad at it. And yet we keep proclaiming how special we are. As Webb puts it, “Hamlet got one thing right: we’re a piece of work.” [. . .]

I have two Labrador Retrievers, Snow and Finley, and on most days, I take them for a walk on a local trail. Every time, it is immediately apparent that they are perceiving and sensing things that are imperceptible to me. They hear things that I don’t; they pause to smell things that I cannot. Their world is not my world. Webb offers a host of more vivid examples, and they seem miraculous, the stuff of science fiction.

For example, hummingbirds can see colors that human beings are not even able to imagine. Elephants have an astonishing sense of smell, which enables them to detect sources of water from miles away. Owls can hear the heartbeat of a mouse from a distance of 25 feet. Because of echolocation, dolphins perceive sound in three dimensions. They know what is on the inside of proximate objects; as they swim toward you, they might be able to sense your internal organs. Pronghorn antelopes can run a marathon in 40 minutes, and their vision is far better than ours. On a clear night, Webb notes, they might be able to see the rings of Saturn. We all know that there are five senses, but it’s more accurate to say that there are five human senses. Sharks can sense electric currents. Sea turtles can perceive the earth’s magnetic field, which helps them to navigate tremendous distances. Some snakes, like pythons, are able to sense thermal radiation. Scientists can give many more examples, and there’s much that they don’t yet know.

Webb marshals these and other findings to show that when we assess other animals, we use human beings as the baseline. Consider the question of self-awareness. Using visual tests, scientists find that human children can recognize themselves in a mirror by the age of three—and that almost no other species can do that. But does that really mean that human beings are uniquely capable of recognizing themselves? It turns out that dogs, who rely more on smell than sight, can indeed recognize themselves, if we test by reference to odor; they can distinguish between their own odor and that of other dogs. (Can you do that?) In this sense, dogs too show self-awareness. Webb argues that the human yardstick is pervasively used to assess the abilities of nonhuman animals. That is biased, she writes, “because each species fulfills a different cognitive niche. There are multiple intelligences!”

Webb contends that many of our tests of the abilities of nonhuman animals are skewed for another reason: We study them under highly artificial conditions, in which they are often miserable, stressed, and suffering. Try caging human beings and seeing how well they perform on cognitive tests. As she puts it, “A laboratory environment can rarely (if ever) adequately simulate the natural circumstances of wild animals in an ecologically meaningful way.” Suppose, for example, that we are investigating “prosociality”—the question of whether nonhuman animals will share food or cooperate with one another. In the laboratory, captive chimpanzees do not appear to do that. But in the wild, chimpanzees behave differently: They share meat and other food (including nuts and honey), and they also share tools. During hunting, chimpanzees are especially willing to cooperate. In natural environments, the differences between human beings and apes are not nearly so stark. Nor is the point limited to apes. Cows, pigs, goats, and even salmon are a lot smarter and happier in the wild than in captive environments. (...)

It would be possible to read Webb as demonstrating that nonhuman animals are a lot more like us than we think. But that is not at all her intention. On the contrary, she rejects the argument, identified and also rejected by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, that the nonhumans animals who are most like us deserve the most protection, what Nussbaum calls the “so like us” approach. (This is also part of the title of an old documentary about Jane Goodall’s work.) Webb sees that argument as a well-meaning but objectionable form of human exceptionalism. Why should it matter that they are like us? Why is that necessary? With Nussbaum, Webb insists that species are “wonderfully different,” and that it is wrong to try to line them up along a unitary scale and to ask how they rank. Use of the human yardstick, embodied in the claim of “so like us,” is a form of blindness that prevents us from seeing the sheer variety of life’s capacities, including cognitive ones. As Nussbaum writes, “Anthropocentrism is a phony sort of arrogance.”

by Cass Sunstein, Cass's Substack |  Read more:

Image: Thai Elephant Conservation Center

[ed. See also: this.]

Dialectical Damage

On the walk a girl asked me why I wrote about relationships and I said it was because relationships, like clothes, are things you can’t avoid. Unless you’re a hermit, you come in contact with people every single day, and the decisions you make around who you like and dislike, who you keep close and avoid, who you love and how you treat them become the foundation of your life. Everyone has a philosophy on relationships, even if they can’t articulate it. If you’re good at relationships, you don’t need to be good at literally anything else; if you’re bad at relationships, you will never be happy, no matter what other virtues you possess or what you achieve in the world. Put that way, it sounds scary, and I’ve always approached relationships with a certain kind of terror.

Being in relationship with another person often involves a clash of styles. Like, someone else might have a similar philosophy on relationships, but they probably don’t have the exact same approach. And relationships are inherently a two-person game, so suddenly you’re subject to someone’s process—how they communicate, how they spend their time, who they like, what they value. And you have to decide if you like it, and more than that, are capable of adapting to it.

I used to believe that you should love someone for who they are. I still believe that, but with the caveat that I think that you should also love how they handle things. Is the distinction meaningful? Maybe it’s obvious—as a matchmaker, a lot of people certainly tell me they want to date someone whose judgment they respect. Of course, someone’s judgment can be broken down into a million little things. What’s their prose style? Do they talk slow or fast, do they think slow or fast? Are they confrontational? Are they direct or indirect? How do they talk when they’re angry? How do they apologize? How do they give feedback? Are they expressive or contained?

I mentioned offhand to a friend recently that I could never date one of our mutual friends. He has a habit—I’m gonna make it up for privacy—something like, he believes in only buying plane tickets when he’s already at the airport. My friend couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get past that. And my take was basically that it’s not about the habit itself, it’s about the way that it’s representative of a million other things about this person and their style of doing things and how they live. About their relationship with time, anxiety, control. The great thing about friends is that you aren’t exposed to every single downside of their style and general conduct—like, to some extent it doesn’t really matter if they’re messy or clean, if they’re avoidant or anxious, if they’re a good romantic partner or only an okay one, because you’re not affected by it. But if you’re dating someone and living with them, you are impacted by everything they do.

Often I wish I could approach romantic relationships with the loving detachment I bring to friendships. Like, sometimes you’re on the phone with a friend and they’ll be like, “I’m considering doing [The Worst Idea Ever]” and you’ll be like, “Yeah, I don’t think you should do that, but good luck if you do!” But that would necessarily be a rejection of the merging that occurs in romantic love, where what they do to themselves becomes partially something they do to you.

by Ava, bookbear express |  Read more:

Image: Susan Rothenberg, Butterfly, 1976
[ed. See also: affinity (be).]

Canada is Killing Itself

The country gave its citizens the right to die. Doctors are struggling to keep up with demand.

The euthanasia conference was held at a Sheraton. Some 300 Canadian professionals, most of them clinicians, had arrived for the annual event. There were lunch buffets and complimentary tote bags; attendees could look forward to a Friday-night social outing, with a DJ, at an event space above Par-Tee Putt in downtown Vancouver. “The most important thing,” one doctor told me, “is the networking.”

Which is to say that it might have been any other convention in Canada. Over the past decade, practitioners of euthanasia have become as familiar as orthodontists or plastic surgeons are with the mundane rituals of lanyards and drink tickets and It’s been so long s outside the ballroom of a four-star hotel. The difference is that, 10 years ago, what many of the attendees here do for work would have been considered homicide.

When Canada’s Parliament in 2016 legalized the practice of euthanasia—Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAID, as it’s formally called—it launched an open-ended medical experiment. One day, administering a lethal injection to a patient was against the law; the next, it was as legitimate as a tonsillectomy, but often with less of a wait. MAID now accounts for about one in 20 deaths in Canada—more than Alzheimer’s and diabetes combined—surpassing countries where assisted dying has been legal for far longer.

It is too soon to call euthanasia a lifestyle option in Canada, but from the outset it has proved a case study in momentum. MAID began as a practice limited to gravely ill patients who were already at the end of life. The law was then expanded to include people who were suffering from serious medical conditions but not facing imminent death. In two years, MAID will be made available to those suffering only from mental illness. Parliament has also recommended granting access to minors.

At the center of the world’s fastest-growing euthanasia regime is the concept of patient autonomy. Honoring a patient’s wishes is of course a core value in medicine. But here it has become paramount, allowing Canada’s MAID advocates to push for expansion in terms that brook no argument, refracted through the language of equality, access, and compassion. As Canada contends with ever-evolving claims on the right to die, the demand for euthanasia has begun to outstrip the capacity of clinicians to provide it.

There have been unintended consequences: Some Canadians who cannot afford to manage their illness have sought doctors to end their life. In certain situations, clinicians have faced impossible ethical dilemmas. At the same time, medical professionals who decided early on to reorient their career toward assisted death no longer feel compelled to tiptoe around the full, energetic extent of their devotion to MAID. Some clinicians in Canada have euthanized hundreds of patients.

The two-day conference in Vancouver was sponsored by a professional group called the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers. Stefanie Green, a physician on Vancouver Island and one of the organization’s founders, told me how her decades as a maternity doctor had helped equip her for this new chapter in her career. In both fields, she explained, she was guiding a patient through an “essentially natural event”—the emotional and medical choreography “of the most important days in their life.” She continued the analogy: “I thought, Well, one is like delivering life into the world, and the other feels like transitioning and delivering life out.” And so Green does not refer to her MAID deaths only as “provisions”—the term for euthanasia that most clinicians have adopted. She also calls them “deliveries.”

Gord Gubitz, a neurologist from Nova Scotia, told me that people often ask him about the “stress” and “trauma” and “strife” of his work as a MAID provider. Isn’t it so emotionally draining? In fact, for him it is just the opposite. He finds euthanasia to be “energizing”—the “most meaningful work” of his career. “It’s a happy sad, right?” he explained. “It’s really sad that you were in so much pain. It is sad that your family is racked with grief. But we’re so happy you got what you wanted.”

Has Canada itself gotten what it wanted? Nine years after the legalization of assisted death, Canada’s leaders seem to regard MAID from a strange, almost anthropological remove: as if the future of euthanasia is no more within their control than the laws of physics; as if continued expansion is not a reality the government is choosing so much as conceding. This is the story of an ideology in motion, of what happens when a nation enshrines a right before reckoning with the totality of its logic. If autonomy in death is sacrosanct, is there anyone who shouldn’t be helped to die?

by Elaina Plott Calabro, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Johnny C.Y. Lam

27 Notes On Growing Old(er)

1.) Will Storr, author and fellow Substacker, recently wrote about his “midlife identity crisis”. I was struck, while reading it, at how rare it is for people - men in particular - to admit that growing older can be tough. In the second half of life, we’re all expected to say how much happier we are than in our insecure twenties, how we wouldn’t swap places with our younger self, oh no, not even if you paid us. Hmm. Sometimes I feel that way, but not always. Some days, ageing feels like a curse, only lightly mitigated by the knowledge that the curse is universal.

2.) Let me summarise the science of how ageing affects physical and mental capability: all the lines on the graph point down. We can slow this multi-dimensional descent but not stop it. The miracle is that most of us are not driven mad by this knowledge. We ought to congratulate ourselves on the depth of our resilience, on our heroic fortitude in the face of adversity - while quietly acknowledging that we rely on a modicum of self-deception to get by.

3.) The American poet George Oppen said my favourite thing about growing old: “What a strange thing to happen to a little boy.” I love how this evokes the subjectivity of a bewildered child trapped inside an aged body; a boy staring at his wizened hands and wondering what on earth is going on.

4.) One of the weirdest things about the midlife ageing process, as those of you who have passed 40 will know, is that it is discontinuous. It doesn’t happen at a gradual and consistent rate, allowing you time to adjust. After lulling you into a false sense of security, it rushes forward, catching you unawares. It’s like finding yourself dropped into a different world. You may ask yourself, how did I get here?

5.) The physicist Michael Nielsen tells us that the Polish-American mathematician Stanislaw Ulam perceived his life as sharply divided into two halves: “In the first half, he was always the youngest person in the group. In the second half, he was always the oldest. There was no transitional period.” There was no transitional period.

6.) I think people who had a lot of success early in their careers (not an affliction from which I suffered) feel this more acutely than most. When you’re always the youngest guy in the room, it’s natural to build a whole identity around your precocity. Then suddenly - and it is sudden - you’re not the youngest anymore. You’re one of those anonymous older guys. So now who the hell even are you?

7.) In your twenties, you say “about three years ago” of memories you can only hazily locate on the timeline. Then at some point you suddenly hear yourself say “ about twenty years ago”. And you hear yourself saying it again and again. About things that feel like three years ago.

8.) The short story I think about most is The Swimmer, by John Cheever (later a film). It’s a golden Sunday afternoon in upstate New York in the 1960s. The well-to-do residents of Westchester are out in their gardens sipping cocktails. Neddy, a fit man in early middle age, decides to swim home from the party he’s at by way of his neighbours’ pools, just for a laugh. As he progresses from one pool to another, being made drinks as he goes, the weather and the mood start to get colder and darker. He finds himself being treated with inexplicable hostility and pity by once-friendly neighbours. Bewildered, he finally arrives at his own house, only to find it empty and abandoned. We sense that in the time it took Neddy to swim through a few pools in a mildly drunken haze, whole years, even decades, have passed. We also sense that Neddy is ruined in some way - that he has ruined himself. I’m not ruined, not yet, but Neddy’s bewilderment speaks to me. I only set off a few minutes ago. The sun was still high in the sky.

9.) One reason that the experience of growing old can feel jagged and abrupt is that there is a disconnect between how old we feel and how old we are. You often hear people say “inside I still feel young”. It’s tempting to dismiss that as meaningless happy talk but actually it’s often true, and it’s one of the strangest things about growing older. Neuroscientists use the term “proprioception” to describe a person’s intuitive sense of their own body in space - the position of their arms, the movement of their legs. If it deteriorates, you can’t control your actions without conscious effort. I think there’s a kind of proprioception for age, which for some mysterious evolutionary reason gets switched off around age 40. When you’re 18, you feel 18, when you’re 35 you feel 35, and when you’re 53 you feel…35. You’re constantly having to arbitrate between your felt age and your real age, reminding yourself that you’re not actually that person anymore, making a special effort to act appropriately (maybe you shouldn’t actually go skiing, or drink six pints, certainly not both). If you’re a young person, and you’re talking to an older person, it’s as well to remember that they may well believe, at some level, that they’re the same age as you. Many such conversations are asymmetrical: the young person always aware of the age gap, the older person not so much. [ed. this is kind of interesting]

10.) There hasn’t been enough scientific investigation of ‘felt age’ but there is some. This study finds that people over the age of 70 have, on average, a 13 year gap between their felt age and their real age. So a 73-year-old typically feels about 60. But the study also finds that this gap closes with age, as your body insists, ever-more loudly, on the harsh truth. I should imagine there is a lot of variation here. On announcing his retirement from Berkshire Hathaway, at the age of 94, Warren Buffett told an interviewer he had never felt old until he passed 90. Then, all of a sudden, he did.

11.) Wisdom is meant to be the great compensation for growing older. Though your your knees sound like they’re unlocking a safe when you bend down, and you can’t straighten up without an “oof”, you can at least revel in the depth of your insights into the human condition. Well, yes and no. It is true that we accumulate knowledge (and if we try really hard, more of it than we forget). It’s true that we get a feel for the repeated patterns that constitute so much of human experience, and a clearer sight of the possible mistakes arrayed before us at any point in time (whether or not we make them anyway being another question). But there are countering forces too. The world changes faster than we’re ready for, which borks our pattern-detecting software. We’re endlessly self-deluding; we smooth the random accidents of life into stories that put us in control of our own destiny (this is what The Road Not Taken is really about). We’re also lazier, more set in our ways, more dogmatic, less prone to question our assumptions. If we’re not careful, our ‘wisdom’ makes us stupid. Most cognitive decline is self-inflicted.

12.) In a quasi-scientific study of “wisdom at the end of life”, researchers interviewed people who knew they were dying, mostly old people. These interviews elicited such crystalline insights as, “I think you would have more wisdom if you have empathy and compassion.” Right. “Wisdom means seeing life on life’s terms.” Deep.

13.) People who know they’re approaching the last stop aren’t wiser than the rest of us, they’re just even more self-deluded than we are. I recently listened to an interview with the entrepreneur/self-help guru Alex Hormozi. I liked what he said about those “deathbed regrets” which get spun into cute homilies - I wish I’d stopped to smell the roses, I wish I’d seen more of my children, and so on: “The human condition is that we want it all, and we're not willing to make trades…‘deathbed regrets’ typically have the bias of wanting the other path - the path they could have taken - without considering the cost of that path. So they say "Hey I was really successful and I did all these things, but you know, I would give it all up today to have my family.’ It's like, well yeah, but you didn't, because you actually chose the path that you're on, and you weren't willing to do that. What you are saying right now is that you want it all. Sure. So does everyone.”

14.) Age is just a number, so they say, but numbers are pretty important. This one gives you a rough idea of where you are on the journey between birth and death. You might want to make a note of it is all I’m saying.

15.) Should you act your age? Yes if it means making elegant and creative adaptations to it. No, if it means performing it: striving too hard to convey authority, or worse, behaving like somebody who has given up on life. (...)

16.) There’s an interview with Mick Jagger from when he was 58, in which he’s way more patient than he might have been, while a Dutch interviewer suggests he’s too old to be a rock singer. Jagger is 81 now and still selling out stadiums. Jagger, McCartney and others from their generation have endured decades of being sneered at for not “acting their age”. Few people do that anymore. By stubbornly persisting, they’ve changed our ideas of what that phrase means.

17.) Jagger and McCartney hardly ever engage in age-based self-deprecation. They tend not to make those slightly nervous “I’m just an old geezer” jokes, of the kind that the rest of us start making from the moment we pass 30. I think that might have something to do with the almost ridiculously good time they’re having in their eighties. They play the double game to perfection: simultaneously aware of age and oblivious to it.

18.) There is comedy to savour in it, too, albeit comedy with that British sitcom feeling of being trapped in a losing game, laughter the consolation prize.

19.) What a strange thing to happen to a little boy or girl! Rembrandt’s late self-portraits capture so much about how it feels. That look on his face: pissed-off, amused, baffled, defiant. Here’s my face. Not pretty is it? But it’s the only one I’ve got.

by Ian  Leslie, Ruffian |  Read more:

Image: Rembrandt, various stages of life. The Collector.

[ed. Some good points but also 1.) feeling like anyone giving aging advice who's younger than you probably hasn't experienced the whole story yet (up to and including dying); 2.) living every day knowing a bomb could go off at any time, and likely will...eventually; 3.) dealing with the accumulated loss of loved ones and the shared histories that make up life - who we are, what it all meant, and inexorably drifting further out, away from everything that used to define us.] 

What Was Scattered Was Not Destroyed

Mega churches have replaced the Good News with a mission statement.

Here in Rockford, Illinois, a Rust Belt city well-acquainted with extraction and abandonment, that line isn’t satire. It’s an observation. You can’t drive across the east side without passing half a dozen colossal church buildings, their parking lots repaved more often than their theology. Inside, you’ll find stage lighting, fog machines, and sermons that sound suspiciously like quarterly business updates. If you drive west, over the Rock River, you’ll pass a dozen smaller sanctuaries. These are the old brick churches with crooked signage and overgrown hedges. The lights are off. The pews gather dust.

In my work as a therapist, I’ve sat with the shepherds of these flocks, who confess, quietly and often tearfully, that the Church is dying. Not changing. Dying. Some say it with a kind of weary relief, as if finally naming aloud what they’ve known for years, but didn’t have permission to speak. Others say it with resignation, their voices thin from holding up too much for too long. They speak of empty pews and aging congregations, of buildings they can no longer afford to heat, and the pressure to stay upbeat and innovate. Many of them have baptized, married, and buried three generations of the same families. What they grieve is not the loss of status or size, but the slow unraveling of something sacred, something that once held people together, and now struggles to hold at all. None of them say it flippantly because they’ve stayed, and love the flock, even as the pasture thins.

It reminds me of what’s happened to the land itself. This region was once a checkerboard of crop rotations and small farms that provided local goods and sustained families. Rockford made things that lasted. Spoken of now almost like mythology, this was the land of the monkey sock, the screw capital of the world, a manufacturing goliath built with many hands. It was a place of quarried limestone, used to build roads and homes with local stone and labor. Then the quarries closed. The factories shuttered. The fields gave way to monocrops, and the people were left to wander inside the skeleton of something that once provided. And now I see it happening again—this time in the sanctuary. Congregations are being mined for tithe, for clout, for spectacle. Rock bands and prosperity gospels work the crowd while the till stands open, not to offer, but to receive.

The Church has begun to mimic the economic logic of the industry that abandoned it. Build bigger. Consolidate. Extract. Move on. What follows isn’t meant to be a eulogy, exactly. It’s a reflection, maybe even a small lament. A slow walk around the ruins of Babel, with some help from Richard Rohr, Maslow, and a few thoughts from the therapy chair. There are still pockets of quiet faith out there. Faith with dirt under its fingernails, content to grow things instead of counting them. But it’s getting harder to hear that voice through the static. If the Tower of Babel was a warning label, we’ve peeled it off the pack and lit the match anyway.

As a therapist, I spend my days listening to people sift through the wreckage of their own lives. They are lives marked not just by trauma or loss, but by confusion. A kind of existential disorientation. They come in asking some of the same questions the builders must have asked when the mortar started to crumble: How did we get here? Why doesn’t anything feel solid anymore? Why doesn’t anyone understand me?

I used to think the Church could still be the place to hold those questions. Once upon a time, it was a vessel that held the complexity, the grief, the beauty, the doubt, and yes, the dogma too, but not as branding, and not as the product of a board meeting. But lately, it seems more interested in managing the brand. These days, the tower doesn’t just reach toward the heavens. It comes with WiFi and a gift shop. There’s a campus map in the foyer, a latte in your hand, and a QR code for online giving projected where the crucifix used to hang.

I’ve sat with pastors and priests in that same confusion, some who’ve grown sick from what they’re serving. “The church is dying,” they whisper. Sometimes they cry. Sometimes they laugh in a way that doesn’t feel right. They’re caught in the middle of an institution that once held the sacred, and now can’t hold much of anything. Certainly not silence. Certainly not a mystery. And in therapy, I see what happens when people have nowhere to put their anguish. It metastasizes into panic, into addiction, into rage. The Church, when it was at its best, offered not just answers, but a place to ask. Now, it too speaks in bullet points and marketing copy.

The builders of Babel wanted to make a name for themselves. I see the same instinct in my consulting inbox: churches asking how to grow their footprint, expand their “reach,” capture a younger demographic. They aren’t offering peace. They’re optimizing for engagement. And what gets built in the end is impressive. But like all “Babels,” it can’t bear the weight of the human soul.

It’s here that the voice of Richard Rohr begins to matter. A Franciscan priest and spiritual writer, Rohr has become a quietly subversive figure in modern Christianity. His work challenges the institutional Church, not with rebellion, but with depth. He critiques its obsession with purity over transformation, certainty over mystery, and control over grace. Though Catholic by vocation, Rohr’s appeal crosses denominations. He has found a massive following among mainline Protestants, evangelicals, and Catholics in spiritual transition, those no longer satisfied with black-and-white answers, but still drawn to the sacred. He writes of descent, paradox, and the long arc of inner change, offering something few religious institutions still know how to hold: permission to fall apart without being lost.

Rohr says we grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right, not as license, but as invitation. The descent doesn’t excuse sin, but neither does it condemn the sinner. It opens the door to the kind of grace that breaks us open and remakes us from the inside. That’s a hard sell in a church culture obsessed with excellence, relevance, and strategic growth initiatives. Failure doesn’t trend. Paradox doesn’t preach. And yet, every mystic worth reading tells us the same thing: the way up is down. Rohr calls it “falling upward.” The idea that transformation doesn’t come from climbing higher but from being stripped of the ladders entirely. We come to wisdom not through conquest, but through surrender. Through the wilderness. Through the kind of quiet that makes you question every illusion you once knew with certainty.

This doesn’t play well on stage. It’s not sexy. You can’t build a satellite campus around it.

But it’s real.

The spiritual desert has always been the crucible where illusions die. In therapy, I see that too. People come in looking for solutions, but what they really need is space. A place to fall apart without being judged or fixed. A place to let go of the performance and admit they’re scared, angry, tired, or lost. Rohr’s genius is that he gives theological permission for that unraveling. He speaks of a God found in the tension between opposites, in the unresolved spaces, in the compost heap of your failed certainties. Rohr doesn’t offer escape. He offers depth, like good soil, not poured concrete. Somewhere beneath that depth runs living water, though not always visible from the surface. And depth, like good soil, takes time and rot. (...)

In the therapy room, I hear the echoes. No one asks how to self-actualize. They ask why they feel numb, why the anxiety will not go away, why success does not satisfy, or why their relationships feel like transactions. They are not chasing the top of a pyramid. They are trying to understand what broke, and whether anything real can grow in its place. (...)

In Rockford, that difference shows up in the space between pride and grief. This is a city that once made things, machine parts, fasteners, hard goods with weight and permanence. When that vanished, we didn’t evolve. We mourned, slowly and without permission. The prosperity gospel doesn’t play well here, except in places that pretend the grief never happened. The landscape remembers. It’s a patchwork of rusted factories, cracked sidewalks, and churches that were built to last but now echo with silence. Faith here has to grow low to the ground. It doesn’t rise like glass towers. It creeps through the broken concrete and clings to whatever light is left. It is not triumphant. It is tenacious.

In therapy, I often feel caught between the two ladders. Clients want to “fix” their lives. They’re not asking how to self-actualize. They’re trying to understand why the scaffolding they built their life on no longer holds. They come in chasing Maslow, but often find Rohr: the painful gift of being broken open. Of discovering that transformation isn’t about climbing higher, but surrendering to what they can no longer control. The Church used to know something about that. Before it became obsessed with branding and metrics and appearing successful, it offered something harder and holier. It didn’t hand out blueprints. It offered bread, wine, and silence. Now it offers sermon series with titles like “Level Up.” (...)

And now, beloved, let us speak plainly of what’s become of Babel.

The Babel story was never just about language. It was about the illusion of unity: everyone speaking the same tongue, chasing the same goal, convinced that ambition itself was holy. It is easy to hear that same cadence today. In politics, in the media, even in ministry, everyone is talking. No one is listening. Each angle is convinced it is speaking sense while the other just refuses to understand. We have built towers of ideology, platforms of performance, and digital sanctuaries where clarity is promised but rarely delivered. The noise is constant, and underneath it all is something quieter, something heavier. Loneliness. (...)

The Church once served as a counterweight to all this. It was an embodied community, stubbornly local, where you sat beside people you did not entirely like and still called them brother or sister. It held tension instead of amplifying it. Now, many churches have become political performance halls, leaning into culture wars, doubling down on certainty, and selecting congregants more for their alignment than their presence. The container that once held our contradictions has become another venue for tribal identity. (...)

Babel didn’t end with a curse. It ended with dispersion. With people being sent back to their places, their languages, their particular lives. The tower fell, but the story didn’t. It just stopped trying to reach heaven by force. I walk through my community, meditating on this as I pass shuttered buildings, familiar faces, and the quiet persistence of people who keep showing up. So many of them carry disappointment like an old coat they cannot quite throw away. The plant closed. The school consolidated. The church split. And still, they show up.

by Colin Gillette, Front Porch Republic |  Read more:

Image: GetArchive

The Point of Life?

via:

[ed. See also: British Open 2025: Scottie Scheffler's sermon is the answer Rory McIlroy has been searching for (Golf Digest). Exactly right, and the media should get the message.]

Critique of Infinite Freedom

A few months ago, a retired tech entrepreneur, a co-founder of Loom (a video software company), wrote a short essay titled: “I am rich and I have no idea what to do with my life.” The author seems to be a young guy, maybe in his thirties, who sold his company and then found himself in an unfamiliar state of not having to work ever again. To write an essay with such a provocative title in this day and age, could’ve just been a deliberate attempt at trolling or engagement farming, collecting spiky replies and tiny violin GIFs in the comments. But it wasn’t that. The short text comes across as an earnest, almost despairing grappling for answers that are existential in nature. (...)

The young man suffers from an existential problem, but he’d been steeped for too long in a tech-heavy ecosystem to try anything outside a set of formulaic ‘if x then y’ solutions. He doesn’t know where to begin, what to do, how to think about this new reality. For now, this young man had retreated to Hawaii to study physics.

And what can one do after he’s been on top of the world? It’s a precarious, unstable mental place. There’s a disorienting emptiness mixed with residual dynamism that’s built up from the years of hustle and combat and that now lacks an outlet and direction. There is a creeping dread borne out of unexpected idleness. The restless mind longs for action, like a street fighter, flexing muscles and crackling knuckles, looking to beat up the next villain. But there’s no villain to beat up this time. You are alone with your thoughts and with nothing to do. The problem is unidentifiable. There’s no solution. This is a state that can create monstrosities.

Limits of Infinite Freedom

Musk, Bezos, Zuck, Andreessen, Altman––these men have a degree of freedom that is limited only in a sense that they can’t commit murder in broad daylight. None of their other ambitions, assisted and facilitated by lawyers, powerful connections, friendly lawmakers, favorable legislation, and weak or non-existent law enforcement, meet resistance or accountability. What could and does prevent them from fully realizing their grand schemes into reality and from experiencing absolute freedom, are obstacles of amorphous and capricious nature that are difficult to single out and attack: irrational human behavior, fickle customer loyalties, collective skepticism of or disenchantment with the products that they’re selling, public mockery of their ideas and egos, elections that don’t go their way, etc. These phenomena can’t be harnessed and corralled by a corporate decree or by an army of lawyers or by money thrown at it. To have almost no institutional or legal restraints coming up to this point, and then to suddenly face these volatile, unpredictable masses who deny them their due respect, who refuse to acknowledge their unrivalled acumen, and who question the usefulness of their inventions, makes them feel confused, frustrated, and unfree.

What can’t Musk do at this point? He has more money than God. He has our attention. He can have as much sex as he wants, he can buy a US president, he can go into space. He has Putin on speed dial. He can get access to your personal data. He can get away with naming his kids Techno Mechanicus and X AE A-12. But he’s still unhappy. He’s still striving. He still feels like a victim.

Musk is famously sensitive to being stifled. Paranoidally, he sees an insidious censure coming at him from all sides. His algorithms on X are set so that his own tweets reach the most audience. Well, he gets our attention, but then what does he do with it? All these elaborate tweaks in the algorithm, all the billions spent, all these free speech proclamations––all of this, so that he can peddle conspiracy theories and tell 420/69 jokes. Why would a billionaire many times over, owning a bunch of other, more serious companies, would spend most of his waking hours on this platform, getting into juvenile name-calling, spats with libs, and retweeting Catturd? Is it not enough for him to lord over us? Does he also want us to think he’s witty, cool, and funny? Does he also want to be loved?

Love then, whether public or private, is the elusive final frontier of a centi-billionaire. Like Trump, Musk is not entirely unloved. Both are leaders of cults with millions of followers, and yet they’re dissatisfied. They’re loved, yes, but by the wrong people. Somewhere deep in their hearts they both know that the people who worship them have been suckered into it. They don’t want the love of dimwits and morons––of the marks. They want to be loved by the smart and serious set, by the kind that could be invited to a black-tie event without risk of embarrassment, by the NYT opinion page, by the Nobel Peace Prize committee, by the European leaders, by bond traders––people and entities who are not swayed by the silly theatrics, who are immune to bluster. But Wall Street, once a lonely pocket of tepid support among the smart set, is second-guessing them now. The inability to control this slice of important reality, while dominating everything else, can derail Musk and Trump into feeling helpless. And it is this helplessness that brings about feeling of unfreedom, of unjust restraint. And when they feel unfree they seek an exit, any exit by any means.

The Road to Batshit

I think, in a way it was quite inevitable that Musk would venture out, like Trump, into the public sphere. There were no questions left in the business world and the world of engineering about Musk’s abilities. There, he was God-like. So it was a natural next move for him to step outside the familiar zone of tech entrepreneurship and try his hand at public works.

Musk and Trump want to make policy. But they’re both constitutionally (as in temperamentally) incapable of being bogged down in policy details. It’s like that time, during Trump’s first term, when he thought that he could write a new ‘bigger and better’ healthcare bill to replace Obamacare in two weeks. One look at a Cybertruck, and you know how it was designed: Musk drew it on a paper napkin, handed it to his engineer, and told him “make it look like this.” The engineer didn’t dare to ask further questions. Their policy is a feeling, a shapeless, broad-strokes sketching, a ten-thousand foot view. A size of the government must be cut. How? They’re not going to go into minutia. “Boom-boom-boom-bing”––that’s how.

So it was also inevitable that Musk would soon get bored with it. Entering public service exposed him to having to deal with those very amorphous forces that frustrated him in his business life, but now more prevalent and more entrenched, and lacking due deference. He was accustomed to rule by decree, to cutting costs and personnel without any remorse, but here, in the public sector, the riffraff, the immanent, cretinous masses, the unproductive, the retarded, have the nerve to talk back, demanding to know how they will benefit from his grand vision. They want to know how cutting Medicaid will help improve their health and other such silly things. And Musk can’t just tell the ingrates to take a hike, because the whole purpose of a billionaire entering public spotlight is, supposedly, to show the rubes how great he is.

He is mocked, unloved, and prevented from showing us what a great guy he is. What good are billions if you have no control over these things? What a guy to do?

by Katya Grishakova, The Center Holds |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via

[ed. See also: For the Men Who Have Everything (Political Currents).]

"They are running out of goals. Musk longs for Mars because the Earth can’t satisfy him any longer. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg try on new outrageous personas because they can’t feel comfortable in the skin they always knew. Sam Altman speaks of OpenAI like it can guarantee eternal life for all who might sign up for a ChatGPT subscription. All of these men enjoy an unfathomable amount of freedom. Absent murdering a few bystanders in the middle of Fifth Avenue, they really can do whatever it is they want. The old emperors and feudal lords were accountable, in some form, to the polity, and even they were constrained by technology and geography. These oligarchs are nation-states unto themselves. Legal and institutional restraints mean little to them.

Yet they ache. None of them, publicly, appear especially content, and some like Musk are in constant online combat with their critics. Musk bought off an American president and it wasn’t enough; Bezos is trying now. What they can’t seem to accrue—not Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman, Peter Thiel, or Mark Andreessen—is broad popularity and respect. (...)

The tech oligarchs understand this well enough. As insulated as they are, they are uneasy because they have to keep straining for attention and approval. If they, outwardly, shun the left-leaning, college-educated cognoscenti, they’d still, like Donald Trump, prefer some kind of affirmation. Much of Trump’s career can be understood through the lens of a Queens boy trying to get Manhattan to take him seriously. Most troubling for the oligarchs is that it’s not just the Times editorial board turning from them—it might be Wall Street, too. The bond traders are second-guessing them. Trump found his “liberation day” tariffs were not, in fact, going to liberate the world. They were going, instead, to crash the economy until Trump beat a hasty retreat. The tariffs are one kind of failure; the various business pivots of the tech elite are another. AI, in the end, might be too big to fail, treated by the federal government like the development of nuclear weapons. But there is no real business model otherwise: AI costs many billions of dollars and there’s no way to recoup on these losses unless ChatGPT or Claude subscriptions start costing individuals thousands of dollars per month. If Amazon, in the early years, lost money, it always had a road to profitability that seems indefinitely foreclosed to AI. One can detect a subtle angst: AI must happen because Silicon Valley is otherwise out of ideas. There are few great leaps forward left. AI cannot stack up to the invention of the internet or the personal computer, or even the introduction of the iPhone. Zuckerberg is chasing AI too, now that the Metaverse is emptied out. All the billions in the world can’t buy a new idea. Nor, after a while, validation. Musk’s retreat from the White House is proof enough of that. Tesla is losing to Chinese electric vehicles and will probably keep losing. Mars, meanwhile, remains uninhabitable, and always will be. The space-age billionaires cannot even match the achievements of the federal government in the analog age: fifty-six years ago, we put men on the moon, and neither Musk nor Bezos appear especially capable of replicating that feat. Instead, Bezos shoots his fiancé and a few fading celebrities into the lower reaches of outer space and begs for accolades. All anyone will remember of that voyage is the round of mockery aimed at Katy Perry, who wishes, more than almost anyone on Earth, it was still the year 2010 and not 2025. The “girl boss” and “lean in” era is as dead as techno-optimism. The Facebook whistleblower’s book is outselling Sheryl Sandberg these days, and will be for a while longer."