five quotes (1.17.25)

five things I read during the third week of the year

What determines your success isn’t “What do you want to enjoy?” The question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?” The quality of your life is not determined by the quality of your positive experiences, but the quality of your negative experiences. And to get good at dealing with negative experiences is to get good at dealing with life. . . Because if you want the benefits of something in life, you have to also want the costs. If you want the beach body, you have to want the sweat, the soreness, the early mornings, and the hunger pangs. If you want the yacht, you have to also want the late nights, the risky business moves, and the possibility of pissing off one person or ten thousand.

—Mark Manson, “The Most Important Question of Your Life” (personal website)

I love this. New Year’s resolutions are mostly in the dustbin by this point because people (me) don’t really want to suffer or sustain negative short-term consequences to get what we want. The downhill is so much easier. The status quo takes little maintenance. One of my grim jokes about American Christians is that we are a people who want Easter without Good Friday. Which is only to say, we’re Americans. We’ve been conditioned to believe that we can achieve our ambitions through vibes and good thoughts. The cost to success, though, is enormous. If we want what we say we want, we must be willing to bear that cost.

People will sometimes approach me with projects I don't really want to do. But if I do them, those people will smile and shake my hand and go, “We feel positive emotions, and it's because of you!” and that will feel good. So I often end up signing on to these projects, feeling resentful the whole time, cursing myself for choosing—freely!—to work hard on things I don't care about.

This is gutterballing: excelling, but in slightly the wrong direction. For most of its journey, after all, the gutterball is getting closer to the pins. It's only at the end that it barely, but dramatically, misses.

Gutterballing is a guaranteed way to stay stuck in the bog because people will love you for it. “You're doing the right thing!” they'll shout as you sink into the swamp. “We approve of this!”

—Adam Mastroianni, “So, you want to de-bog yourself” (Experimental History)

Fantastic article. I am operating right now under Oliver Burkeman’s argument that late January is actually the best time to think through the new year. In late December, we’re feeling penitent over the amount of money we’ve spent and calories we’ve consumed (for me, in egg nog form) over the past few weeks and so we make these grandiose demands on ourselves that overwhelmingly fail to take root. I love Mastroianni’s concept of “de-bogging” ourselves. And one of the most tempting bogs to fall into is the one he describes here: gutterballing. Ceaseless, frenetic activity makes us feel good about ourselves (phew! 5 o’clock already!) and others admire us (man, that dude sure does go to meetings!). But in the end, gutterballing is just what Mastroianni describes: an activity that seems so close until we realize we’ve missed the pins altogether.

James possesses what Houellebecq lacks: not just faith but imagination to see beyond the limits and shortcomings of the moment, to look past them to a future worth bearing children into. True, that future must not be godless, and Houellebecq is right to realize just how weak secularism is in the face of true faith, for it cannot, in the long run, reproduce itself. It is bound to die and thus to death. Few are better than Houellebecq at this diagnosis, and none as unsparing. But we must turn elsewhere for the cure. Suicide is not inevitable; neither is colonization, literal or metaphorical, from without. Renewal is possible from within. Yet even renewal from within, if it be true renewal, must also come from without: that’s just the nature of a sacrament.

Natalism goes only so far. Renaissance comes from above.

—Brad East, “A Future Worthy of Life: Houellebecq, Decadence, and Sacraments” (Mere Orthodoxy)

P.D. James rules. Children of Men is the best dystopia of our times (read it!). I am writing a lengthy article at the moment about Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, and the book affirms one of my long-held beliefs: without Christ, it is still possible to diagnose a civilization’s ills but very hard to discern the cure. Because of her Catholicism, James can intuit what Houellebecq cannot: that the real cure for our postmodern malaise is not some technological or socially engineered panacea—it’s Christ. It’s the hope that comes from believing that life possesses telos or purpose, that we are more than random cells and molecules and quarks and leptons bouncing around this planet until our nervous system fails and we die and everything gets reappropriated and reconfigured by the soil.

Finally, the idea that the future of America depends on the spirit of the engineer triumphing over the spirit of the high school quarterback is itself alien to the deep sources of American greatness and success. Outside of the halls of junior high, we have traditionally been a country of jock-nerd synthesis and sympathy: Sometimes through alliances (eggheads charting courses for astronauts, stats nerds hovering over sporting fields) and sometimes through synthesis, the quest for both physical and mental self-improvement, mutual convergence on both sides of the jock-nerd divide. “Gentle giants” smelling of “gold and milk” who “could do anything” — that’s how Logan Roy, the Scottish-born antihero of “Succession,” described his first encounter with Americans (as opposed to our current era, when we’re gone to fat or “scrawny, on meth — or yoga”). The football king can have strengths the valedictorian lacks, or set a standard of energy and action that the more academically minded kid might want to meet, and sometimes the prom queen can just be the valedictorian. That’s America.

—Ross Douthat, “Does America Need More Meritocracy?” (New York Times)

This is Douthat’s response to Vivek Ramaswamy’s comments about how American kids have too many sleepovers and more people need to be like Screech rather than Slater (yeah, he actually used a 30-year-old television show for adolescents to describe our national failings). But the easy bifurcation Ramaswamy draws—nerds are great!; jocks are dumb!—is as simplistic as it is false. America is not just a nation of nerds inventing nerd things. In our most glorious years of development, we just borrowed Germany’s nerds anyway. American idealism is as much Chuck Yeager as it is Mark Zuckerberg. Our coolest president (Teddy Roosevelt, duh) was the ultimate mishmash of book nerd and alpha male. This is what we do. These are the type of people we produce—and they can even go to sleepovers and still pull this off.

And that is what I don’t see anymore. I have no doubt that there is still strenuous art being made, and that it is being received with attention and written about with intelligence. But almost all of that activity, as far as I can tell, is happening in coteries, in social niches and geographic pockets: poets doing readings for other poets, art that isn’t seen outside of Bushwick, critics writing for specialized websites or personal Substacks. What’s gone missing, in a society that long ago excused itself from seriousness, is a broader sense that art is urgent business, that your life, in some sense, depends on it. With that goes the mass audience. With that goes not only the possibility of meaningful criticism, but also its point. No one needs help understanding White Lotus, or Amanda Gorman, or Sally Rooney. For such creations, we can make do with “cultural criticism”—moralistic agendas, topical talking points, biographical chitchat—which is not arts criticism but a simulacrum thereof, and which any self-respecting gender studies major can produce.

—William Deresiewicz, “How Art Lost Its Way” (Persuasion)

Deresiewicz might be entering “old man yells at cloud” territory in this lament, but that notwithstanding, I am here for it. I think he is right: good art is still being made, even occasionally great art. But it is being lost on the masses of Americans. Netflix is directing its content monkeys to create television shows and movies where people narrate what they are doing so the people “watching” the show while staring at their phones can figure out what’s going on. “I’m pointing a gun at my enemy.” “I am drinking coffee while eyeing my rival suspiciously.” However, I think Golden Age nostalgia is wrong. Most art at most times is pretty banal and mid, as the kids say (or used to say—who can keep up?). Deresiewicz begins his article by talking about some dance lady from New York that neither you nor I have ever heard of. “High” art has always been a niche market pursued in equal parts by genuine artists and people who want to be seen as genuine artists. There were no glory days or golden ages.