Does believing in things make life easier?
and some paradoxical lies we've bought into.
In this week’s newsletter:
A little bit of housekeeping and a thank you to the paid subscribers
Me, desperately trying to wring insight out of what is essentially a high thought
An update on my February “more friction challenge”
First I want to quickly do some housekeeping. If you’re reading this blog online, you might have noticed it has a new domain name! You can find Ask Good Questions on the Internet now by navigating to www.goodquestions.xyz. This is so that future posts and their accompanying links aren’t so tied up on the Substack platform. Just a small step away from my work being owned by a VC company.
Thank you, thank you for reading this little blog. It does me a lot of good to have a consistent outlet. Even though I do my best to keep separate my motivation to write it from the number of people on the other side of the screen, it is much more fun to see it as a conversation. Extra thanks to those of you who paid monthly or in advance with the expectation that you’d receive horoscopes. I realized quickly that is not my thing, but I haven’t done a great job of replacing it with something else. Now that’s changing.
Starting this month, I’m going to experiment with some more paid content, emphasis on “experiment”. It could be audio projects, videos, astrology lessons, virtual meetups (??), discussion or journal prompts, poetry analysis, self-help book reviews, interviews with randoms, or or or… I’m not sure! As always though, the goal will be to create and share things that make me think, make you think, and to walk the line of earnestness without taking myself too seriously. I can’t wait to discuss with you in the comments.
What do friction and god and cheating at the Sims have in common?
Last week I talked about friction and about some goals I have for myself this month to slow life down and make time feel stickier. I’m trying to make it harder to slide past all the other people. Often nowadays it feels like all the natural rough edges that come with being human have been lacquered over with synthetic materials, ground down to a shine, and we’re left without anything to grab ahold of. All we can do now is stare at ourselves in each other’s reflective shells. So that’s what this month’s little challenge is about for me, trying to rough up my experience a bit.
On the topic of interacting with each other, there were some really good ideas from people in the comments or replies to that email. My friend Lauren shared that she’s been giving herself the goal of talking with one stranger per day. Something simple, like complimenting their shoes or a sweater. Exchanging thoughts about the music playing in the bodega. She agreed that traveling between locations without headphones is key to the success of this.
Of her own experiment, Lauren said her takeaways have so far been “delight” and “disappointment”. Delight at how easy this has been and how it’s made her feel better through the day and disappointment at how much time she let pass without these interactions. Hearing about her experience makes me think that many of the introverts in our generation and the ones behind us are probably just inexperienced or out of practice. Connection is one of those things where desire might follow action more often than the other way around.
Another reader, Al, pointed out that a lot of what I’d listed was just normal life where they live in rural Vermont. No ride share, no delivery, less of the anonymity. It’s funny, I hadn’t really considered that, even though I grew up somewhere that’s the case as well. Probably this revelation has some bearing on a funny bit of ~discourse~ that’s been playing out on the Internet lately, the idea that the “vibe shift” which many a commentator has… commentated on… might be more a product of misunderstandings due to regional and urban/rural differences than anything more ubiquitous. To be clear, this wasn’t where Al was taking the thought, I don’t think, but it did provoke for me this always underlying question which is summed up as: Does anyone from a city understand literally anything about not being from a city? I digress, that’s a topic for another blog.
To get back to Al’s actual point, they also mentioned that one way they’ve been introducing friction and slowness into their life is to default less frequently to a screen when a phone call is an option. Call your representatives, call your friends and family, yes, but also call local businesses when you have a question about their hours or about what they have in stock. This is one of those things that, once you start doing it, it’s crazy how much faster it is. Less ambiguity and less outdated information. It turns out that people who are in a place right now are often better at answering questions about that place than people who updated a website months ago or whatever half-assed Google AI robot is currently trying to answer your queries.
Before I started down this tangent of “friction” in life, I was thinking a lot about belief and about the qualities that having “faith” requires of a person. I was also thinking about what we assume of a person who has spiritual beliefs and whether or not those assumptions bear out. Now, as you might expect, I see a few ways these two lines of thought come together, creating tension and revealing potentially better paths forward.
I want to start by asking the question: does having faith serve to simplify or complicate your understanding of life? Faith in gods, or Jesus, or the Moon, or communism, or the scientific method, or yourself. Does it make life less complicated, less rich, to be a person of faith?
My gut suggests that the answer is no, faith does not make life simpler. Based on what I understand about the people I know who hold deep faith in one of the above ideas, there’s a tendency for that faith to result in a pretty Sisyphean cycle. Have faith, test your the faith, redouble in your faith, and so on. The boulder rolls down the hill again. But when you look at the evidence on a mass media level, on a Western culture level, a very different answer emerges. From what I can see of the Very Public Christian™ or the Very Public Communist™ or even the Very Public Astrologer™, these seemingly faith-based identities lead to simple answers that are easy to build a life on. There is a lot of certainty there.
We could quibble over just how “faith-based” each of these identities are. After all, it might not be fair to equate faith in the scientific method with faith in a divine presence. The reason I think it’s fair is because even if the destination is different, each of these ways of being alive involves a process of searching. Each involves a movement toward a deeper understanding, or, said another way, a deeper (real-er?) experience of reality. That some of them appear incompatible and at odds doesn’t matter, not to the person within the process. I’m getting ahead of myself, but part of why I think these things can stand equally with each other is that in living out the experience of faith we are all in the same boat. We’re all in pursuit.
I started thinking about this because I’d had this little bit of doubt teetering back and forth inside my skull. I couldn’t name it at first, but I realized it had come from a conversation I had about astrology as a form of spiritual practice. That wasn’t sitting with me right. I have said it a lot and heard it a lot, but for some reason in this moment it clicked that it felt very wrong. Yes, astrology has a long history (ancient and modern) of being a bedfellow to magic and ritual and supernatural activity. It is also one of the oldest sciences, a rigorous analysis of real phenomena that led to important breakthroughs supportive of humanity’s drift toward organized life. Understanding time, understanding light and geometry and the beginnings of medical sciences. But that’s not even why the idea that astrology is a spiritual practice rubbed me the wrong way suddenly. It’s because it’s so rarely lived as a spiritual or scientific practice anymore. It’s a value-creation site.
I don’t have a perfect articulation for this yet, but astrology has fallen prey to the same force that has undermined yoga, meditation, tarot, psychedelics like ayahuasca, the Enneagram, Christianity, communism, and, I’m sure, many other mysterious practices or traditions. This force, this ethic, has flattened each of these complex, historically diverse practices into their most titillating and least difficult forms. Commodification is a wild thing.
This is where this all begins to sound more like a high thought than I wish. Basically, the commodification dilemma prompts the question: what if the destination never mattered anyway? What if the real prize was the journey? Lol.
There is a difference between “practicing astrology” and “astrology”. There’s a difference between taking a yoga class for exercise and having a yoga practice. Very many Christians are not practicing Christianity, claiming communism with a red rose emoji on Instagram does not do much to advance the cause, and taking a quiz to figure out your Enneagram type yields very little value. I don’t intend to sound judgmental, but this parsing is important. Claimed identity does not necessarily flow from experience.
As I’ve read more about Christian mystics,1 it has significantly challenged my understanding of the most devout followers of Christ. Fervent though many of them are, they are anything but simple in their relationship with faith. It should have been obvious to me, I guess, because it’s in the name, but these were people who were driven by mystery far more than they were driven by answers.
Yes, as a rule, they lived out their search through the mysterious as believers, but they also embraced seasons of doubt, many of them for years at a time. These dark nights of the soul are the kind of muddy and mutable manifestations of faith that we don’t have time for in a commodified system. These dark nights of the soul, these mysteries, are not easy to sell, but they are vital parts of a process. These slow and difficult times are how we can empathize with other people. Whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, the muddiness is universal. Without that experience, it is much more difficult to be in community with those who are different from us.
Any time you accept a simple answer for a mysterious question, you run the risk of causing more problems than you solve. This is true in religious contexts, interpersonal ones, and the political. Complex issues do not have easy fixes. There is always a tradeoff, something lost for something seemingly gained. The state of faith-based practices in our world shows better than anything the costs of overvaluing outcome over process, identity (brand?) over experience. Best case scenario, you miss out on potentially enriching experiences. Worst case scenario, you can sink into dangerous and hateful dogma, accepting someone else’s answers without interrogating whether you would have ever arrived to this intense certainty on your own.
When you first play The Sims, it’s customary to go through a phase of using the motherlode or rosebud cheats to quickly acquire a fortune. Everyone knows this, somehow. If you are a real sicko like me, though, you also learn how to put the game into test mode. This gives you all the control of whichever god created god, the raw power of pure creation. This rules and sometimes I want to start a game and play it like this. But that never lasts very long.
Inevitably, cheating in The Sims causes you to lose interest. Suddenly it is all too easy and very, very boring. At that point, you start ratcheting up the drama, just to feel something. You might make your Sim quit their job, you set the house on fire, you create a five-Sim relationship drama that involves betrayal on all sides, and eventually you give up. You either let your Sims die or you start over from scratch. You have nothing better to do and you’ve pretty much ruined that game.
All of this leads me to believe that we have at least two conflicting, paradoxical beliefs that we have all been sold and most of us have bought. The first is the idea that an efficient life is an easy life and the second is that an easy life is a good life.2
One of the central premises of AI as it’s frequently advertised is that it will make the menial tasks of life faster, take up less time. Unfortunately, many tasks that are not really all that menial have been some of the first to “fall” to AI. The tech bros and the VCs promise us that they can make writing emails faster by not requiring us to write them at all. They also promise to make the reading of emails faster by summarizing them. Okay, fine. Since you’re summarizing my email, you may as well summarize all the books in the stack by my desk, that’ll save me a lot of time. Just give me the answers, please!
I’m all for AI to be deployed in many interesting cases that can help keep this Earth and its inhabitants alive and well. Obviously someone will need to fix the energy impact of AI to make that happen. They’ll also need to somehow convince those pesky VCs and their employees to focus on fixing the right problems and leaving the ones that make us human alone. But even if somehow the tech industry grew a conscience or our government mutated overnight into an institution with an interest in moderating society in favor of social welfare, we would still need to root out the idea that it always behooves us to “skip to the good part”.
I won’t try to make the case here at the end of this blog that there are hard things we have to do in life that are partially good because they are challenging. Maybe I will one day, but, for now, I am confident enough that anyone reading this would agree, many of the most fulfilling ways to spend our time here are difficult and are good in part because they are difficult. A good life includes these tasks, this hard work that we complete with a barely visible goal in mind.
This whole argument, this whole blog really, has been neglectful of nuance in some areas I know need more attention. For the record, I do not believe “feels good” = “bad for humanity” and vice versa. But I do believe that some of the most pleasurable and purpose-giving experiences available to us have proven to be low hanging fruit for market powers that want to make a lot of money off our apparent desire for those experiences to become faster, simpler, or obsolete.
Modern plumbing is a wonderful thing, but I don’t need a machine to write my blogs, a super PAC to tell me who best represents my interests, or a megachurch pastor to tell me about God.
This blog grew into something a bit unwieldy. If you’re still with me, I appreciate it! Clearly there’s more for me to unpack in this territory. If that sounds interesting, let me know. And please, as always, tell me where you agree or disagree or think I’m being truly, literally, completely nuts. I welcome it <3
Real quick, a February “more friction challenge” update:
I walked somewhere with headphones on, but I was catching up with a friend I haven’t spoken to since last March. I feel this gets a pass, though I have enjoyed otherwise not using headphones. I haven’t tried many compliments to strangers, but have exchanged more smiles and hellos.
I haven’t ordered takeout, but I have gone to pick it up at my neighborhood bar. I felt okay about this, because I sat and read while I waited for it to be ready and then discussed the book (Modern Mystics) with a bartender and learned about the Philadelphia Theosophist Society from him. Sounds bizarre and fun.
Full deactivation of IG is coming, I just wanted to share one last newsletter on stories and then clock out. I haven’t been on all week though, except when a boy I’ve been seeing texted me “please go look at the meme I sent you” at which point I logged on to see it. It was good!
Some things to read:
Pre-order Kelsey’s book if you haven’t, it’s very good! Gossip is good!
I enjoyed this blog by Haley Nahman about the cringe matrix. I was inspired to make a matrix for this blog, but I couldn’t quiiiite get there. Next time, maybe.
Prepare, Don’t Panic, and Don’t Comply in Advance. I really liked this piece and have been thinking about it a lot in relation to my day job in higher education.
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.
I’d like to read about other, non-Christian mystics. If you have reading recs, please let me know!
It is admittedly absurd that I’m taking up this clarion call. I hate to be uncomfortable.