Juan David's Newsletter - October 3, 2021
The Creation of Meaning, an Explanation of Modern Life, Unhappiness =! Depression
Hello hello,
A little later than usual but here we go!
Curiosities 🙌😄🥲
1. The Creation of Meaning
People out there will try to take away your subjectivity.
Whether that’s the government...a boss, a company, your parents, drugs, video games, advertising...
All these things are selling you a product that will make your life a LOT easier... and get rid of this tension that you otherwise have to CONSTANTLY feel...that maybe you should be doing more than you are.
You know you should be doing more...and you may be like the religions and philosophers of the past...maybe you create your own philosophical fiction, this complex narrative that allows you to sacrifice your own subjectivity...because at least it is comfortable... being just an object. Comfort should be your #1 goal.
Creating a story of how humans fit into this world and why anything we do matter is one of the most important problems right now.
2. A 200-Word Explanation of Modern Life
A key explanation of, like, modern life is that politics are so vicious and polarized because (1) everyone uses Facebook, (2) Facebook has an algorithm to decide what stuff to show people, (3) that algorithm is built to maximize engagement, (4) the algorithm is very effective, and (5) it turns out that what maximizes engagement is vicious polarizing stuff, oops.
That probably exaggerates the role of Facebook’s algorithm and understates the agency of its users — “Everything you hate about the Internet is actually everything you hate about people,” says Balk’s First Law — but there’s something to it. Social media reflects and also shapes human behavior, in an emergent way.
It targets a behavior it likes — spending more time on Facebook, basically — and tries to maximize it. To do that, it maximizes behaviors that correlate with the target behavior, like posting and reading vicious political content. It gives people what they want, as revealed by their actions, which is not what they actually want.
(Or is it?) And so at some level you have behaviors in the real world that seem to be designed by an algorithm to maximize engagement on social media; politics are vicious and volatile because that’s what Facebook, deep down, wants.
From Matt Levine, 09/23/2021
Another one could be like: Everything you don’t like about social media is actually everything you don’t like about yourself
3. Older vs. Newer Art
Older art tends to have bright colors, ornate details, realistic representations, technical skill, and be instantly visually appealing to the average person. Newer art tends to be more abstract, require less obvious skill, and have less direct appeal.
From Whither Tartaria?
A vivid description of how and why modern buildings could be better.
4. “Unhappy? NO! I’m depressed.”
There is something to be said here about the word depression, which has almost entirely eliminated the word and even the concept of unhappiness from modern life. Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed.
This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means.
Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed).
This idea in turn implies that one's state of mind, or one's mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one's life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct.
From The Frivolity of Evil by the retired doctor Theodore Dalrymple.
And of course, the solution is always the therapist or psychologist.
5. 21st Century: The Age of Physical Problems
And in the 21st century, so many of our biggest problems can’t be solved digitally; they must be solved through physical matter, and finding new ceilings for how well we can build the world around us. I can’t really think of too many companies with a more important mission than that.
From Twist Biosciences: the DNA API by Alex Danco
Or maybe we’ll just go live at the metaverse, and the physical world will stop existing.
I was interviewed for a 14-day interview series about how to study and succeed academically.
Become Motivated to Study for Success is a video interview series I’m a part of to help you find your motivation and is hosted by Jessyka Coulter. Watch it. Learn from it.
Sign up today HERE.
See you next week,
Juan David Campolargo