My friend Leslie is an excellent writer who’s published multiple books, most notably The Unmothers, named a New York Times Best Horror Fiction Book of 2024. She’s new on Substack and worth a follow.

Today, she posted “We Are Not Angry Enough About AI” and agreed to give me just a little bit of rope to politely disagree.

Leslie writes:

And thus, we are given crap. The popular phrase for this is “enshittification” where all products become as shitty as possible in order to save a few cents. Our clothes are quick stitched plastic. Our movies are written by committee (or AI). We are charged monthly for buggy services and have to beg computerized customer service to fix the multiple issues. Insurance doesn’t pay for healthcare but you will pay for insurance. It goes on and on.

I have a different experience of the items on this list. My clothes are mostly cotton or other natural fibers, except where I’ve chosen to buy clothes that include synthetics for convenience. The movies I watch are written by people. So are the books I read. I subscribe to a few services, but they’re ones I choose to pay for that I like and value. My health insurance is pretty good. I definitely wish it were cheaper!

I have a lot of choice in these areas. Some of that choice is due to having money. But I don’t spend a ton of money on my cotton t-shirts; it doesn’t cost me any more to buy a book written by a human than to buy some shlocky AI-generated thing. I specifically chose to buy a previous generation car so it would have physical climate control knobs. I can’t wait for that trend to die!

I had an idea that my question for Leslie was “What makes it feel like the things in the list are forced on you, rather than being choices you can make?” And I still have that question, and I mean it sincerely.

But I have another question, one that feels more pressing, and it’s for me as much as for Leslie. If we accept the idea that middle-class Americans are wealthier than 99% of people who have ever lived on the planet, and that our lives have more leisure and luxury than 99% of people who have ever lived on the planet — I realize this may be a contentious belief, but for the sake of argument, if we accept it for a moment — if that’s true, then why does life feel so bad for so many?

Because it does feel really bad. I don’t dispute that. There is plenty of time when I’m unhappy about things in my life. I mostly like the work I do, but there are big parts of it I want to improve. And when I look around, especially on social media, I seem to be quite a bit happier than many people around me. When I talk to people about the world, they feel terrible about it. They sometimes feel good about their own lives, but they feel terrible about the world.

I agree with Leslie that AI is just the latest technological innovation in decades of innovation that haven’t made us happier, haven’t made our lives feel more meaningful, and haven’t made us feel more alive or more connected to one another. I don’t know whether technological innovation can do that. But something needs to make us feel more alive and more connected to each other. It’s definitely not going to be tech companies!

What will it be? What did we lose, and how did we lose it?

This week I listened to an episode of the Zach Lowe podcast about the Knicks winning the NBA Championship. Sean Fennessey is a Knicks fan, and a Mets fan, and a Jets fan. He said, “I’m an extremely, extremely sad sports fan.” He said, “When I watch sports I’m pissed off and fearful.” The Knicks winning made it feel “like there’s a piano off my back.”

Zach and Sean talked a bit more and then Sean said this in closing (slightly condensed):

“I saw Toy Story 5 this morning with my daughter. It was an incredible movie. A blue heron landed in the middle of the LA River and we sat and watched it as we were having brunch. This is unbelievable, what this world can give us, if it just turns in your direction for a short period of time.”

I get it. And Sean’s talking about being a sports fan in particular, not about his whole view on life. But the last sentence resonated with me. Sometimes I am going through my day as though the world is turned away. And then a moment happens and I find its favor.

I have been noticing that this favor is more likely to find me when I am looking for the places where the world is always, continually, turned towards me. Last week I was in Berkeley and starting a new online course, and my partner for the course lives two miles from where I was staying, and we were able to meet up in person. I thought he might be a young tech bro without much to share, but he’s my age, and like me he works in tech but has a rich background and has a lot to share with me.

Yesterday a friend of mine from high school posted on Substack about a miracle; I went to a talk in Berkeley about the same miracle.

I met and he was photographing cool bugs and then I found this cool bug!

There are moments of wonder like this everywhere. There is beauty and joy everywhere if I am looking for it.

You can run the risk of believing, if you’re not careful, that you are being cradled by the universe, or by God, and that everything laid out for you — even, maybe especially, your trials — is part of a divine plan for your betterment.

None of this is new. Keats saw that people called the world a “vale of tears” and said instead that the world is a vale of soul-making. He said “Call the world, if you please ‘The vale of soul-making.’” He’s begging you.

This seems fine to me. Many popular ideas are people talking about what is important to them and insisting that it is universal. They attract people with similar outlooks or experiences; sometimes they form a movement.

What I’m curious about is whether it’s important that they be convinced the thing is universal.

If you discover something universal, you get to be part of the club “I have discovered something about the conditions we are all living under” rather than part of the club “I’ve found my people.” You can talk about what you’ve discovered with the language of objectivity and science, which gives it more value in mainstream culture.

This seems too bad. Finding your people is fun! And thinking things are universal when they’re not is a form of delusion that hurts people. In the worst case it leads to people trying to control others.

Let’s make this personal. I was convinced for a while that everyone should feel their feelings somatically. That is, they should literally be able to feel feelings in their bodies. Then I dropped the universality piece of this and became more ecumenical. People have different ways or relating to the world; not everybody needs to do everything I do.

Then recently a relatively straightlaced friend of mine started seeing a therapist who taught him to feel his feelings somatically, and it’s been a beautifully enriching experience for him. I wouldn’t have thought this would be accessible to him.

So I’m a little caught in the tension here. I want to talk more about ideas I think are important, so they’re available to people when they’re ready for them. I can see the appeal of being a universality, but I want to resist trying to control people.

I see many folks being pulled into ingroups where they spend a lot of time judging outgroups.

Non-apology for this post: I thought it would be fun to have some sleepy writing time, where I write on my Substack before the caffeine and Sudafed kick in. I know people talk about writing being hard, but they just put a lot of pressure on themselves. Doing bad writing is easy.

There are a few books that have helped me deal with anxiety.

When I started going to a therapist, one of the things I wanted was to stop feeling bad. That seems pretty natural, right? I have bad feelings: looping, anxious thoughts, endless worry that feels compulsive, tightness in my chest, a kind of restless energy that I really want to get rid of. In some way anxiety is by definition a kind of energy I want to get rid of. If I didn’t want to get rid of it, it would be excitement.

In San Francisco, I was lucky enough to work with a therapist who saw his job as not helping me get rid of what I was feeling, but helping me be able to embrace what I was feeling and have more space for it. I have found that embracing what I’m feeling can often transform how it feels, so that anxiety and other challenging feelings feel more expansive.

All of these folks have a similar message: our feelings, including difficult feelings, are important sources of information for us. Sometimes what those feelings want might be deeply confused, but they have positive intentions for us. When we’re able to embrace those feelings rather than suppressing them, they become dramatically less painful.

So all these folks want to help you embrace your feelings. Which doesn’t mean that you start believing everything your anxiety may tell you. But it can lead to having more freedom, so the anxiety you feel doesn’t feel like it’s controlling you.

Here are a few resources I’ve found helpful:

Books about anxiety

• David Burns, When Panic Attacks

  David Burns is one of the therapists who helped develop Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. This book is the best summary of his work and it focuses specifically on anxiety. (Despite the title, it doesn’t focus only on panic attacks — it’s about anxiety in general.) He focuses a lot on being willing to feel fear around what you’re doing, but choosing to do it anyway and see whether the fear was justified. I found this book really helpful for me.
  

  I used to take “When Panic Attacks” with me on business trips. Before I moved to San Francisco, I went out for a Macworld conference to meet up with other employees of a company I was working for. At a party one evening, I was talking to one of my coworkers and asked him why he didn’t start a company of his own. He seemed like a good programmer and a smart guy. He told me that he wasn’t good at talking to people or making connections, and then he said “I’m not like you” and mentioned how I was going up to people and introducing myself to them at the party. It was a really nice compliment — but what was really funny about it was that I’d taken time between the conference and the party to go back to my hotel room and re-read a section of “When Panic Attacks,” trying to psych myself up for the party and give myself the courage to talk to a bunch of new people.

• Eugene Gendlin, Focusing

• Ann Weiser Cornell, The Power of Focusing

  These two books are both about the same thing, and they’re both very good. “Focusing” is a word that Eugene Gendlin came up with for a particular way of feeling what’s happening within your body both emotionally and physically.

  
  Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is, in part, about finding ways to see some of the ways your thoughts may be misleading you. Focusing takes a different approach: it’s an opportunity to feel what you’re feeling physically. I find that Focusing can help me have some distance from what I’m feeling, but lets me see what I’m feeling as important information for me. For me this is an important component of emotional fluidity. I want to be able to feel things, but I don’t want those feelings to get stuck (which can happen if I don’t let myself feel them), and I also don’t want to believe all of the thoughts that come up when I’m feeling any particular thing.

Non-books

There are a couple non-book resources that have been helpful for me as well.

Steven Hayes is a psychologist who developed a therapy type called “ACT.” He has a wonderful Ted Talk where he explains the core idea of ACT, which I think is applicable to everyone. His idea is that trying to shut down your painful feelings is like not listening to a close friend in need.

I also recommend this Joe Hudson podcast episode about anxiety. Joe Hudson has a good approach to emotions. I find him a little hard to summarize.

During COVID, when the CDC and Anthony Fauci were lying me, I read a lot about masks and disease transmission from Zeynep Tufekci. She made strong arguments for masks and for COVID being airborne. Now she’s someone I take seriously about bird flu. I am fairly busy, and I can’t be an expert on bird flu. Zeynep can. Great.

There’s a ton of stuff I want to know about but don’t want to become an expert on.

• Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein and Josh Marshall help me make sense of politics

• Tyler Cowen helps me make sense of economics

• Romeo Stevens & many other Twitter folks help me make sense of esoteric therapy/meditation technology

Having access to trustworthy experts is incredibly useful in a world where context is that which is scarce.

It’s also helpful to have a sense of people who talk a lot but are idiots. I tend to mute these people on Twitter as a useful shorthand for “You looked into this person at some point and decided they were an idiot.”

I have fantasized about creating a web service to let people easily categorize folks in this way, becuase it can be hard to remember the folks who aren’t trustworthy. Some people vaguely on this list: Michael Hobbes, Glenn Greenwald, Robert Reich, Alex Berenson.

This is a very important process and maybe it’s just too obvious to talk about. One thing this internal process is not is an argument for other people. When my friend asks “Why shouldn’t I like Tulsi Gabbard,” the answer “I looked into her at one point, became convinced that she’s a fucking moron, and then jettisoned the reasons why she’s a moron because I have limited mental capacity” isn’t very satisfying, and for good reason. I read “How to Disagree” and it’s good and correct about how to refute an argument. That's not what this process is for.

Tulsi Gabbard was recently right about something, which is great! Good for her. Being right about multiple things over time may move her out of fucking moron status, but being wrong about one important thing is probably going to keep her there forever. Whatever, she doesn't care.

Some tips:

• Revisit your sources over time and figure out if they’re actually reliable. Maybe you’ve changed! Maybe they’ve gotten brainworms!

• Don’t confuse disagreeing with you about something with being a fucking moron. A friend of mine sent me an episode of the Tucker Carlson show podcast to listen to where Tucker interviews Jeffrey Sachs. The episode is called “Jeffrey Sachs: The Untold History of the Cold War, CIA Coups Around the World, and COVID’s Origin.” Tucker is untrustworthy. My view of Jeffrey Sachs is that he’s probably a useful stooge about Ukraine / Russia, but I haven’t actually read or listened to anything by him about this. It’s worth reading the transcript and figuring out whether he seems trustworthy. Even better would be to read his writing about something else and get a feel for his sensemaking before engaging with him on an issue where I have very strong priors that tell me he’s a fucking moron.

Normies trust the NYT or WSJ editorial boards. There’s something useful to that. I trust Tulsi and Matt and Ezra and Tyler and Romeo.

How I do this is by by keeping some part of my attention on my body. Here with me. Not in the computer.

I read the blogger John Gruber describe the computer as “a place you can visit” and describe Apple Vision Pro as even moreso. When I visit my computer, sometimes, I am not elsewhere. The same with my phone. My consciousness disappears. Sometimes this is on purpose; when I’m stressed out, I can retreat into the phone. If I’m at a party, I can take a break and just be on my phone. Bob’s not here right now.

But I am practicing being here some more.

The last of the best-smelling roses in the Peninsula Park Rose Garden.

Also, I’m realizing that I want to do more than just be, like, in-person encouragement for people. I’m angry seeing so many of my friends waste their potential. I’m angry that there aren’t better resources out there to help people figure out how to be more alive, more able to feel their feelings and pursue their fullest ambitions.

Plus is doing this and I’m jealous.

Some problems and experiences I want to think through:

• How do I experience and heal from my own anxiety? What have I been learning, what’s been helpful for me? What is out there that seems worth exploring for my own growth and healing?

• What practices lead people to healing and growth?

• How can we maintain our time and attention when so much technology seems devoted to taking it away from us?

• How do I create a life full of human connection, both to people immediately around me and physically distant friends and family?

• How does an internal vs external internal locus of control change how people experience the world?

• What is it like to design software in accordance with Christopher Alexander’s nameless quality?

• What are my Feynman problems?

You can expect: infrequent posting; sentence-case section titles; images of things I’ve encountered wandering around outside. Here’s a little figure on a beach in San Francisco:

Talk soon.

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