You may remember the joke.
Kotter: Today’s word is ‘metamorphosis’. Can anyone use that word in a sentence?
Horshack: Oooh Ooh.
Barbarino: I never met a morphosis I didn’t like.
I’m a bit tired of freaking out about AI, but I did get a pang of jealousy the other day that is complicated into a lot of things I’m dealing with these days. Yesterday I found myself doomscrolling and I found a tearjerker that wasted 4 minutes of my life. It was the story of a dead soldier whose remains were on a passenger jet and the humans that made it possible for the family (of humans) to see the casket at the destination ramp. Calculated like a kid’s fantasy about pitching a no-hitter at the bottom of the ninth, it drew me in and made me tap my fingers in anticipation of the slowly scrolling text.
As Mike Hind reminds me, there are better things to get worked up about. But he’s so right that we get worked up about what other people blithely do. We’re the sensitive ones. But no, we’re just being territorial about our place in the social landscape. All of us midwits are like grandfather who used to listen to Enrico Caruson on the gramophone complaining about transistor radios playing the Beatles. As much as we admire our own sophistication, it still triggers something to know we are a pathetic minority and on days of insecurity, we are lonely. Not nearly as many people get our jokes. Such is a feeling, I’m sure all the LLMs are programmed to ignore, they’re oh so happy to engage. What kind of evolutionary pressure will they face? That depends on our receptiveness to slop.
The Long March
I thought I’d have a job in March, I still don’t. I have gone through half the alphabet in tactics, but Microsoft just laid off 4,000 9,000 and finally some of the smart people I listen to have acknowledged that now must be one of the most difficult times for tech weenies to get a job as an outsider. I have been using the cattle call entrance for half a year now, and I’m almost getting used to it. I have been imagining that there are hiring managers sitting at a desk. But maybe it’s all just Workday and Taleo. I’ve been thinking about shaking hands with loan managers in a FICO world.
Grand Central Station / drumming on a paint can / looking for the A&R man, don’t come.
What is so compelling, Steve Jobs asked apocryphally, that you would do it for free? I would write on Substack. I do write on Substack. I think I’m doing my best work ever, and why would I not? But we are in a literate world of billions. It’s networked and fragmented and we should seriously consider the idea that stardom was an artifact of the pre-networked world.
War Movies
When I have trouble sleeping, or entertain feelings of self-pity, many of the strategies I have deployed cycle around my own Stoic practice - which isn’t such a practice as much as it is a natural evolution of thought and now I get it. Nevertheless it works well for me because I am also low neurotic. Unlike Whitney Houston, I don’t get so emotional, baby. I don’t always need to dance with somebody who loves me.
A pivotal story emerged in my youth when I watched a war documentary about how Europe was at war and Americans were enjoying a new dance craze. It stung me. It made me believe that brainy little old underprivileged me was keeping it real and those suckers couldn’t even dance. Kinda sad in retrospect, how documentaries work like that. How we mainlined PBS into our mindstreams.
There’s a privilege game going on in American society. It’s how we in the middle class partition ourselves. It’s truly, truly deep, and it’s something we can only sustain in peacetime. Very few of us who haven’t fled tyranny to come to America know what it’s like to have no consumerist choice of living arrangements, employment or social circles. We don’t know what it’s like for the circumstances of war and national necessity tell us that the only work is at the shipyards. You now work for Henry Kaiser, period.
Peleliu
I have just finished a triple play of this Stoic tactic and they all circle around a crab claw shaped island in the South Pacific called Peleliu. It’s not Iwo Jima. It’s not Guadalcanal. It’s someplace MacArthur never went.
I have an uncle that went to war in the Pacific. My mother tells me that Adam was stranded somewhere and survived 3 months on peaches. That would have been C-Rations. I’m in the process of trying to find clues, and the possible fact that he was in a segregated unit didn’t help. It’s a marvel that Fold3.com has millions of records, but I can tell you this. AIs are going to be better, not at delivering any useful experience anytime soon, but much better at crunching databases and keeping track of the metadata and query spaces. That’s hardly the point. If you don’t know Peleliu, you don’t know jack about WW2.
The numbers work like this. K 3/5 was the Marine company that survived at Peleliu and Okinawa. A standard company has about 230 officers and soldiers. Fewer than 30 survived without injury or death. Beginning to understand what it’s like to survive shelling and bombardment is a lesson, like calculus, you may never need to apply in your life but you must understand those rules underneath everything in the real world.
Yes, I take such extreme concepts to heart, I keep Solzhenitsyn’s warnings clear in my mind. My younger mind couldn’t accept that the world was so vicious, but reading E.B. Sledge is the life-changing reminder of how to survive the worst, the absolute worst, with your soul intact. His example is the necessary blindspot of our entitled handwringers pseudo-moralistic engagement.
Take A Stress Pill
This was the advice of HAL 9000 when confronted with its betrayal of the mission of Cdr David Bowman in Kubrick’s greatest film. Those of you who read The Final Hour my story of continuing heartbreak might like to know that long-running tragedy continues, but at a very low rumble. There’s another story I probably won’t write until my father is dead about my struggle with his struggle with dementia and decline. These days it has its acute moments. I’m heading over to take him out for pizza today, which as always will be bittersweet.
These are things that matter, and specifically these are things we must wrangle with in a way that twists us, sometimes into knots we cannot untie. But it is the matter of risk and the quality of our drive that shapes us. Moreover the quality of feedback that we have to get, and the level of detail we storytellers dig down for that sets us apart from algorithms.
I can accept the loneliness of writing and thinking myself into health. It’s enough to be healthy even at the end of the world. This is a multidisciplinary discipline that is a shared mental exercise for readers and writers. That is what writing about philosophy and virtue means to me, and I believe it is what draws people here. It’s honest work. It doesn’t go viral. It has too many tangential roots to be discrete. It touches more bases than are needed for an RBI for a cleanup hitting systemic boost. My writing has always been like that - it purposefully has been online in networks since I gave up performance poetry in the mid 90s, and performance politics in 2008.
Substack Is
Substack is, in many ways, like its grandfather, The Well. It’s hot and cool because of journalists. I don’t sense that it is like a drum circle or a creative writer’s workshop. I can accept that. Writers write. So when AIs come in and start producing that kind of slop we recognize as readily as the CNN anchor voice with the scrolling headlines, we’ll be used to it and identify. Some fraction of it will be that. I don’t see myself leaving the platform anytime soon, I’ll just be a little bit harder to find.
Somebody called me a warrior poet. I like that. It means a lot.
I have been spared the experience of having my parents descend into senility; they both died suddenly of heart failure* before their minds got incomplete. I did see my grandmother for a few days when she was starting to go that way, and it was shattering. I cannot imagine what it must have been like for my cousins who cared for her at the end of her days. Between your father and your son, that's a lot of stress to be bearing, and I'll pray for you and them because it's pretty much all I can do.
* "In the end, all forms of death can be classified as heart failure." - Robert Heinlein
https://www.archives.gov/files/publications/ref-info-papers/105/index.pdf
I’ve been thinking about requesting a copy of my father’s WWII military file. Or, I could ask the question that I am curious about, “What Japanese company did he feed the ore smelting furnace for when he was a Japanese POW?” Perhaps the government archives will do that sort of research.
Your article was thoughtful and engaging. Thank you.