five quotes (4.10.26)

five things I read during the first week of easter

given the medieval understanding of acedia as the “noonday demon”, this is a pretty good image

In such a society, the slothful and the industrious are each entitled to the same share. Which brings us to sloth. This didn’t used to mean merely lazy, it meant indifference to duty, spiritual torpor. These are different things today, and they are treated somewhat differently. But what they have in common is how they are discussed by social science and the culture generally. They are described as systemic or psychological problems, but not of the soul. That would be fine in a secular age, but both the psychological and systemic explanations are descriptive, not proscriptive, putting the blame on others, not the self. How can you expect someone with a disability or someone oppressed by “late capitalism” to get over themselves and get a job that isn’t “affirming” in some way?

—Jonah Goldberg, “Man, Sin, and the Modern Lens” (The Dispatch)

The Greek word for sloth is acedia. Dante saw this as the besetting sin of the character Dante in The Divine Comedy, and the transformation experienced by the pilgrim in the poem is toward spiritual fervor. Our modern application of the word ‘sloth’ as a stand-in for laziness obscures the spiritual dimension of sloth as a sin. In the classical understanding, someone could be a hard worker but still apathetic towards their spiritual duties. This is the sin of acedia. The cure isn’t more activity, but to invigorate our spiritual appetite. This is why I don’t consider “hard work” a virtue, in and of itself. You can work hard at any number of things, but still be spiritually dead. In fact, hard work can prevent us from seeing our spiritual sloth.

Researchers find two primary causes:

​1. It’s utterly exhausting: In the world of optimization, once you’ve opened Pandora’s box, there exists a never-ending list of things you could be doing “better.” You find that there is a better way to hydrate in the morning, a better way to get sunlight, three new supplements to try, a peptide, two new health tracking tools, special glasses, a particular sauna to sweat in, a specific temperature for your ice bath, and on and on and on. (Never mind that the vast majority of these interventions have little to no evidence of benefit.) Eventually, you confuse what actually makes a difference toward your goals versus a whole bunch of elaborate nonsense—and the amount of energy required for the latter leaves you too tired for the former.

—Steve Magness and Brad Stulberg, “Optimizing Ourselves to Death” (The Growth Equation)

Yeah, I agree with this. The major problem with optimization is that we could conceivably spend so much time optimizing that all we really focus on are the things in our lives that aren’t as perfect as we imagine they could be. One critique of this is that the major optimizations in life—eating healthy, avoiding alcohol and other harmful substances, and sleeping adequately—are swept up in a cloud of red-light treatments, sauna sessions, dubious Oura ring data, and a cabinet full of vitamins and supplements whose cumulative effects pale in comparison to sleeping for 7-9 hours per night.

What’s fascinating is that this attitude is a well-established hallmark of masculinity. Sociologist Dr. Jonathan Haidt noted in The Anxious Generation that easily the biggest and most replicable cross-cultural male-female sex differences are that (on average) women like people more than things and men like things more than people. As kids, boys overwhelmingly play with trucks and girls with dolls. As teens, boys get addicted to video games and girls to social media. As adults, men choose STEM and women choose HEAL occupations. (Something even more true in more gender-equal societies.) Men choose religion, and women choose spirituality. Men find much more joy in looking at life like a machine to understand, problems to solve, and obstacles to overcome. Women look at life far more as relationships to love and reconcile with. Hence, men’s preference for stories about overcoming obstacles, such as action or sports movies (even when the protagonist is a woman). And why most stories made by women or for women (even when the lead is a man) have their conflicts resolved by people opening up and expressing their feelings (Heated Rivalry, Pride and Prejudice), self-acceptance and acceptance from others (K-Pop Demon Hunters), reconciling with and apologizing for wrongdoing (Frozen, Wicked).

—Joseph Holmes, “How ‘Project Hail Mary’ Answers the Call for Positive Masculinity” (Newsletter)

My oldest son is speeding toward the end of the novel, with the promise that I will take him to see the movie in the theater once he finishes. I have heard this genre of books and movies, like The Martian, Project Hail Mary, Ocean’s Eleven, and others, described as “competence porn.” I don’t like the crassness of the term, but it evokes why these movies are so appealing to people (generally men). We live in a world where old-fashioned competence can feel less vital; these movies give us a window into the necessity of basic skills and the ability to problem-solve complex situations.

What Sobrevilla calls “toxic confidence” is largely just the renegotiation of those rules, an attempt to cast an incipient reclamation of basic, uncomplicated self-assurance as some sort of aggressive masculinist cult. A couple of examples that Sobrevilla calls out specifically include Olympic free skier Eileen Gu and actor Timothée Chalamet; I’m afraid these examples just make Sobrevilla seem afraid of excellence. When Gu - an Olympic gold medalist, a celebrity, a Stanford student, and a burgeoning entrepreneur - says that being inside her own head is “not a bad place to be,” that isn’t pathology; it’s the statement of a young woman who has done the work and is honest about it. (And wouldn’t we prefer for everyone to feel like insider their own head is a nice place to be?) Maybe Gu is a genuinely awful human being, I don’t know, but nothing Sobrevilla references rises to the level of narcissism or whatever other pseudo-medical accusation we’re throwing around these days. I find Chalamet a little aggravating, but when he says that he aspires to be considered among the great actors of his time, when all is said and done, that’s not a statement of Trumpian bellicosity but instead a reflection of honest, healthy ambition. We’ve been so conditioned to expect performative self-deprecation that accurate self-assessment reads as arrogance.

—Freddie DeBoer, “Perhaps There Are Options Other Than “Toxic Confidence” and Insecurity-as-Identity” (Newsletter)

Freddie is so good at stuff like this. For sure, some people have “toxic confidence.” There are people who dramatically overestimate their abilities and end up in wrecked vehicles, in mountain search-and-rescue operations, or in careers that outmatch their capabilities. However, not every expression of confidence is toxic. The same logic applies to “toxic masculinity.” There are indeed expressions of masculinity turned toxic; however, healthy masculinity is a powerful force for good. Similarly, there is toxic confidence, but there is healthy confidence that derives from long experience and competence in a field. Excellence is good, and we should strive for it.

Simmons’ later habit of firing off hot hawkish and conservative takes online probably didn’t help. I think he even deleted his blog at one point due to the controversy. It’s clear he was a different writer after 9/11. But the political aspects of Simmons’ personality came out far better, and in much finer, subtler form, in his earlier fiction compared to his later online polemics. In the actual books, he acted as a kind of “humanities popularizer.” Looking back at it all together now, his genre writing is secretly an ode to the Western canon, and he was a champion of teaching people (and specifically, kids) about it. That I discovered Simmons somewhere around the age of middle school, and that it hit me so hard, was likely not a coincidence. Simmons had won awards teaching 6th grade in gifted and talented programs before leaving to write full time.

—Erik Hoel, “RIP Dan Simmons. Why Weren’t You More Famous?” (Newsletter)

The Hyperion Cantos are perhaps my favorite science-fiction series of all time. Hearing about Simmons’s death makes me want to revisit them. As Hoel notes in the article, Simmons was incredibly literate and intimately familiar with the Western canon. His novels point people away from “genre” fiction and into the classics. This is rare in a sci-fi writer. However, as Hoel notes, Simmons was many things: a sci-fi writer, a horror writer, a scholar, and a teacher. Part of his lack of universal appeal, according to Hoel, was his broad range. Hoel argues that we don’t like polymaths. I am not sure I buy the argument, at least fully. Literary fame is a fickle beast, but I would say that we increasingly misunderstand polymaths in a hyper-specialized world.