I thought that trying too hard was my natural state of being. That I’d never been and never would be a natural at anything except being a striver. I’d earned all I had from sweat equity – not an ounce of natural talent or beauty or charm. I was blonde because I spent $600 every six weeks to get my roots done. I was tan because of some vile smelling substance that came out from the bottle olive green and foamy. I was thin and strong because I ate less than I wanted and worked my ass off. Through effort, I could make myself perfect. As long as I could try too hard forever, all of this would continue to be true. I’d always tried too hard and I hadn’t stopped yet.

And besides, my job was stupid. It could never overwhelm me. Burnout was the kind of thing you got from squinting into the blue-light glow of a computer screen, checking your emails first thing when you woke up in the morning, balancing budgets and meeting strangers on Zoom. I watched my friend Havana have a full-on mental breakdown, the squiggly tendrils of her nerve endings exposed like the wires of a chewed-up phone charger, brought on by her graduate internship at the Academy Museum. Havana would come to happy hour on Wednesdays at the Cozy Inn and say nothing, gazing catatonic at the scruffy men playing pool as she drained tequila sodas one after another, drained them like her job had drained her. I would go home and thank God for a job that required only a quarter of my brain.

And maybe a fragment of my soul every once in a while, like coins fed into a parking meter, a slow drip death I didn’t notice until my pockets were empty.

Every day for work, I ride a bicycle to nowhere. I stand before a long hall of mirrors, back turned towards my own reflection, pedaling off into the ever receding distance. I hold court from my stationary throne, doling out hollow motivational sound bites.

My courtiers, my consorts, are a revolving door of women adorned in too much gold jewelry, lacking in some higher purpose besides that of maintaining the eminently fuckable condition of their bodies. Their eyes are hungry, empty, bewigged with spiderleg tendrils of lash extensions; their spray-tanned bodies slick and hairless, sealskin shiny; their highlights tasteful, whispering of currency held in offshore accounts – old money, money pieces, quiet luxury.

As a girl, glutted on waterstained Teen Vogue magazines my mother brought home from her job at a free clinic, I would make myself sick wishing for what this type of woman must have had. $400 prom dresses and monogrammed sweatshirts. Tennis lessons and bracelets and skirts – all the trappings of tennis, really, though I never wanted to play the game. I dreamed, with my thighs sweat-stuck to the plastic chair on the porch of our trailer, about a summer home in the Hamptons.

For a long time, I’d thought everything was going according to plan. I had the job.

My apartment in West Hollywood was all white, soft focus natural lighting, like heaven in the movies. And I had him.

Even just saying his name was effortless. Judah. It’s sexy, tossed off, the way you don’t even have to close your mouth at the end. Like one long groan of ecstasy. It feels good to say. Judah. I had begun to suspect, quietly, privately, that he was going to save me. Like the sigh of relief that was his name, his money, his social standing, the gorgeous blue snaking veins of his forearms, they were all going to be the end of some kind of lifelong suffering. As if being poor was a house on fire, and he was the fireman’s hose. He was going to put out the flame.

There was a tacit understanding between us, an unwritten casting call that described my part and the girl who would play it. All I had to do to earn my place next to him was to stay thin, stay desirable.

My mother drove a Ford Taurus that was born before I was, floorboards littered with empty cans of Slimfast. When I was young, I didn’t understand why she drank them. She’d always been thin – part genetics, part empty refrigerator. But now I am older, and I see it all too clearly. She wasn’t drinking a thin, watery meal replacement. She was drinking dreams, assurances. She had learned the same lesson as all American women, raised on a steady diet of Baywatch and Bowflex commercials – that in order to be loved, to be made worthy, you must address the issue of your body. Love, or the potential for it, lived in thinness, in the shadows and gaps around your waist, between your thighs. The best thing you could do, the most feminine, was to glamorously half-exist.

I’d internalized that lesson at my mother’s knee, or maybe in the corner of our tiny, carpeted living room, watching her follow a Jane Fonda tape, huffing and puffing without air conditioning, immediately walking to the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door and encircling her waist with her hands, willing her flesh to shrink at her touch.

I thought I’d cracked the code when I got my job. I could earn money and the thing that truly mattered, a body worth coveting, all in just eight hours a day. And my body was my billboard, too. There was good reason to show it off. Every time I drew the attention of a woman in the Whole Foods on Lincoln Boulevard, I had a card in my wallet ready to hand out, a mantra ready to offer, a variation on the prayers I’d been hearing since childhood. For just one monthly payment of 899.95, you too can have this ass. Look good enough, and some man will come along and save you.

At first, it was so easy. You just spin your wheels.

And then one day, it becomes a crisis.

Another Wednesday at the Cozy Inn. Havana and I haven’t talked in a while. She is deep in the throes of a new relationship, nine months in and incapable of talking about anything else but him.

She walks in shrieking, holding out her left hand. A fat white diamond glitters from her finger, inches above ragged cuticles and unpainted nails.

I shriek too. Outwardly, it is a screech of joy. Inwardly, it is something else.
Havana is beautiful, special in her own way. She has wild curly hair and a brilliant mind.

She does not work out. For my one tequila soda, nursed over two hours until it is bitter, watery, nothing, she drinks three full sugar rum and cokes.
And yet, despite this apparent unworthiness, here she is flaunting the evidence that she has found love. I have defined obliques and lukewarm sentiments from a man I have dated for four years.

At work the next day, I am eager to pedal off this strange feeling, bubble guts and sweaty palms and a heart that is racing like I am being chased. Cardio has always been my cure all. Exercise will fix me, like it always has.
My mind, so often blissfully blank atop the bike to nowhere, fills with vast red questions. Isn’t spinning your wheels a bad thing? Isn’t spinning your wheels what happened when you were stuck in the mud, unmoving on some road you didn’t want to be on?

The next morning, Judah and I have our first ever fight.

Lying in bed on my all-white Egyptian cotton sheets, I see him stirring. I arrange my hair, fanning it out across the pillows in perfect tendrils, as if I just woke up looking like a woman in a Renaissance painting. Something I do every day. I am considering, in every moment, how to offer him the perfect picture. The ideal experience. I am struck by a pang of sadness, an ache like hunger in my heart. Does he do the same for me?

He rolls over, a slow, lazy smile spreading across his immaculate face.

“Would you still love me if I was fat?”

The smile evaporates instantly. “This is how we’re starting the day?”
“Would you?” I know that my role here is to sell him a fantasy. To be perfect and beautiful and patient and yet. Suddenly, I don’t care. The effort in me has evaporated overnight, the give-a-shit reservoir all dried up by the laser beam light of the diamond on Havana’s finger.

“Honestly?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I would have to see it first.”

“Are you fucking kidding me, Judah?”

“Did you want me to lie?”

“No. I wanted it to be true that you would.”

I walk to work. I think about what Judah said. I think about the opposite side of the coin of all that my mother taught me. Without my body, I am nothing. Unlovable. I think about Sisyphus and the rock. How the bike to nowhere makes me no different. Sisyphus with a perfect ass.

I get on the bike to nowhere and begin to shout commands. My body enters a type of fugue state. I become a channel for a higher power – the great God of motivational posters. I imagine opening my mouth and speaking with the voice of a little kitten hanging from a tree branch. “Hang in there,” I yell, “just 90 more seconds in this climb.” My legs spin in pointless circles. I think of how people got exercise back in the pioneer days. Doing useful things with their hearty bodies, things that were necessary for their survival.

“Why are we doing this?” I think. And then I realize that the thought has come out of my mouth and through the little headset microphone that used to make me feel like Britney Spears.

“Because it makes us stronger!” yells a woman in the front row who is here once a day, her gold pendant bouncing in the slick space between her fake breasts.

Her reply spins in my head, filling me with fury, red rising like mercury on a thermometer. It was a rhetorical fucking question. It creeps up on me like a teakettle boiling. A scream that forces its way out through my mouth, into the microphone. A primal, throaty scream.

The women facing me, the Lycra-clad lithe bodies on the dozen or so stationary bicycles, begin to scream too. We all continue to scream until we run out of breath.

I am on the bike to nowhere, and I am quiet. We are in the midst of a brutal climb, the motivational phrases that spill from my lips like vomit forgotten.

An impulse flashes through my mind, a breaking news bulletin.
My phone is connected to the speakers in the room. All at once my relationship with Judah has become a wool turtleneck a size too small. Something I am desperate to get out of, choked and itchy and so, so angry.

I am still in the bike-to-nowhere induced fugue state, still sleep walking as I call him.

“Are you ready to kiss and make up?” he answers, the bass of his voice thundering through the speakers of the cycle studio.

“I deserve better than this,” I say. “Be out of my apartment before I get home. Take all your things.”

“But Summer I–” I hang up the phone. I turn on the cooldown song and stay silent. The room follows suit. When the legion of Lycra-clad women are exiting the studio, I hear them talking to each other. “She just doesn’t give a fuck, does she?”

“I can’t decide if I respect her or if I pity her.”

Me neither.

I go home and I do not shower for three days. I cry and my mascara leaks down in rivers of black. I leave it there. I look in the mirror at the greasy, multi-colored mess of my face, my filthy hair, the strange far away look in my eyes. It is the first time I can remember not finding something wrong with my reflection.

In the past year I’ve written three long profiles about contemporary novelists tackling self-consciously huge projects where the scope and heft of the book is a major component of the book, whether it’s a sprawling geopolitical network of CIA operatives (William T. Vollmann’s 3,400-page A Table for Fortune), an epic about nine characters dealing with supernatural forces and climate change (Mark Z. Danielewski’s 27-volume The Familiar), or the intersection of working-class life, eternity and fourth-dimensional physics (Alan Moore’s 1,200-page Jerusalem). Authors that embark on this sort of thing usually only do so in the middle or late part of their career, after accumulating enough accolades that some publisher is willing to take the risk.

But the resulting novels tend not to do very well.

Vollmann’s book isn’t out yet, but Danielewski’s novel was canceled after five volumes (he’d written and submitted the first 10; volume 5, at least in the UK, sold just over 200 copies), and Moore’s Jerusalem, according to Bookscan, has sold roughly 12,000 copies in 10 years; not terrible, but surprising when compared to his most recent novel, The Great When (only 300 pages), which has sold that many copies in its first year.

Polonius tell Laertes that brevity is the soul of wit. Mark Twain (allegedly) apologized for having written such a long letter by saying he didn’t have time to write a short one. George Saunders said that humor is telling the truth in fewer words than people expect.

But brevity’s also an indicator of mastery – a sparse style, if it’s eloquent and well crafted, has allusive qualities. It gives the feeling of having been edited toward something. There’s a glimmer of intentionality.

Nick Hornby challenged the sanctity of a sparse style in his (ongoing!) column for The Believer, c. 2003, in which he mentions reading David Copperfield for the first time, Charles Dickens’s longest novel, and celebrates how expansive it is, how indulgent, with special emphasis on a scene in which young Copperfield is freezing on a sidewalk, trying to sell his coat to a drunk old man. The scene’s funny, sad, cozy and embracing and fun, is Hornby’s point, even though he can’t imagine a modern novelist getting it into the final draft of their book.

“[T]here’s some stuff about the whole winnowing process that I just don’t get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words … I’m sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty, if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all?”

One argument for brevity is that a book, if it’s short, suggests a more hospitable and potentially more skilled or focused work; something with a clearer message.

But a short book could just as well signal that the writer doesn’t actually have that much to say. That they’ve taken some tepid ideas and stretched them to a marketable size.

One way of testing this theory is to open a book by a celebrity or influencer (especially if it pertains to money). Hold it open on a table at any random page. Then, right beside it, open a novel or a Lincoln biography or something that was written by a writer. Note the difference between line spacing and margin size. The amount of white space. The memoir (or get-rich book) is literally filled with air.

So brevity’s obviously not a foolproof signal of value.

This year the journalist C. M. Kushins published a biography of the crime writer Elmore Leonard.

I love Elmore Leonard’s work. I think Kushins does too.

The bio is well reported. It collects facts and pins them on a clothing line and the reader walks out into the yard with her trench coat collar popped against the wind and she looks at those facts, in a left-to-right sequence, and gleans a narrative. After 400ish pages I had learned the whole sequence of major events in Elmore Leonard’s life. A difficult assembly! Takes talent. The sentences were clear and I was never confused.

But I also quit caring at some point, which was weird because as a thirtysomething retail-worker with an English degree I tend to put writers like Elmore Leonard on pedestals high enough they come with a parachute. By the end of the book I felt I had a real grasp of Leonard’s professional trajectory, which previously I had not, and it was interesting to know that he was a recovered alcoholic, and a half-interested Catholic, and it was fascinating that the author was sharing never-before-seen excerpts from the unfinished memoir of one of America’s great literary stylists – but I didn’t understand him any better as a person or an artist.

If Gay Talese or Martin Amis or Zadie Smith had gotten lunch with Elmore Leonard, then written a 5,000-word profile about the stories he told, and the mannerisms employed while telling them, we’d likely know him better than we do by the end of the biography.

Or at least we’d feel that we did.

The kind of book that’s really got me thinking about this is the thousand-page novel or multivolume history/biography that takes decades to write.

Publishers don’t like to release thousand-page books. More paper, more ink and sturdier binding means these things cost a lot to produce, which means the jacket price goes up, which means that prospective readers will be turned away by the cost (which only compounds the deterrence of its intimidating size).

Literary agents aren’t thrilled about thousand-page novels, either, because it’s hard to turn a profit.

It’s one thing to believe, as an author, that your story is important; it’s another to believe that your story is so good, and every passage so valuable, that it transcends the advice of experts, and the norms of the market, and deserves 30-plus hours of a reader’s time.

It is an objectively foolish thing for a professional author to embark on.

But sometimes they’re right.

A big book implies self-assurance. It tells you, by merit of just sitting there at such a size, I am worth the time it would take you to read three books on three different subjects.

Jonathan Franzen writes that the effect of a great novel is “to bring us into lives not our own, and the longer the book, the greater the chance of immersion.” His contemporary Donna Tartt is one of the most celebrated novelists of her generation, producing only three (large) novels in 30 years, most recently The Goldfinch (771 pages). Tartt has said, “I write the kind of books that I like to read, long books that keep me in the same imaginal space and with the same characters for a long time and that take over a big portion of my inner life, including my dream life.” Another contemporary, Michael Chabon (whose 639-page The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2001), said that he hoped, while writing a huge novel of his own, that it would feel, to contemporary (mostly adult) readers, the way big books had felt to him as a kid: inviting, immersive, a different world in which the reader can disappear.

Franzen, Tartt, and Chabon were all brought up in the 1970s and it’s an easy rebuttal to say that the reason they’re so in love with books is that they were raised at a time with less media and fewer distractions – a world more conducive to the immersive reading of long novels. Maybe their brains are just wired differently.

Within the span of a dozen years, each released huge novels, 600-800 pages, that were critically and commercially successful.

Go to Goodreads and check out the reader reviews for each book: Readers describe that slow, immersive experience of the sort their authors hailed.

But what if these books were even longer? If each were freighted with an extra 180 or 230 exceptionally good pages, tipping them into the thousand-page realm, how might their reception have been different? Even with the prizes and the celebrity book club endorsements and film adaptations. As hypnotic and lyrical and propulsive as they currently are, page by page – how many people would be deterred by the size of the house before checking out its rooms?

H. W. Brands is a historian and biographer. He’s been teaching for half a century. Author of 30 books. Two-time Pulitzer finalist.

When I interviewed him about his best-selling biography of Ronald Reagan, I mentioned that what I loved most about his approach to the material was that, on page 30, the man is 30 years old. It moves.

We talked about being disciplined as a historian, how to lock your sights on the exact parameters of your topic, keep your story from digressing; we talked about the task of literary portraiture, too, of capturing the details of a subject’s life and times and the intersection of the two.

That’s when Robert Caro came up – a model practitioner in both of these forms.

In 1974, after nearly a decade of research and travel and interviews, Robert Caro released The Power Broker, a biography of Robert Moses, a kingmaker in New York City public planning. As Caro illustrates, the guy was basically a gangster. One of the most powerful men in NYC for 40 years without getting elected to anything. Moses resisted Caro for years. Told people in his inner and outer circles not to speak with any young reporter who might come around. After three years he relented and granted Caro a few personal interviews. When Caro asked difficult questions, he was shunned once again. When the book was released, Moses insisted it was filled with lies, but could point to none. “It is slightly absurd, but typical of Robert Moses,” Caro told The New York Times in ’74, “to label as ‘without documentation’ a book that has 83 solid pages of single-space small-type notes and that is based on 17 years of research, including 522 separate interviews.”

The weight of the book – the heft of it in your hand, the diligence of its reporting and the scope of what Caro excavates with his research – lends it a prestige beyond its literary qualities. This is the brutally lighted exposure of a viciously private person who’d avoided scrutiny for decades.

The strange magic of The Power Broker, as with Caro’s later projects, is that the book you’re holding in your hands (which is, as the title suggests, not just about one person but about the network of political power in which he operated) not only documents, in lavish detail and beautiful prose, what this fiercely private villain was like, as he displaced people, or betrayed them, or destroyed their reputations … we also realize that the act of reading this account is exactly the sort of comeuppance he would have hated most: to be scrutinized like this, have his legacy taken from him and recast, in brutal light, by this humble-seeming young reporter who chose, out of conscientious dedication, to spend seven years exposing him.

The more we read, the more we want to exact some kind of punishment on Moses.

The more we read, the greater punishment we are exacting on Moses.

Robert Caro, with his editor Bob Gottlieb, cut 300,000 words from The Power Broker’s million-word manuscript – not because they were bad, as Gottlieb was forever at pains to point out (mainly because Caro, at 90, has clearly not made peace with it), but because the final product, at 1,226 pages, was all the sheets that could be bound together in a single volume at the time. “I can make people interested in Robert Moses once,” Gottlieb said, when Caro suggested the book be split into two volumes. “I can’t get them interested twice.”

In the 50 years since its release, Caro has been working almost exclusively on a biography of President Lyndon Johnson. It started as a trilogy in 1982. The first installment is nearly 1,000 pages and covers the first 30-odd years of Johnson’s life. He only lived 64 years.

But then Caro’s research started to creep. Volume 2 covered only seven years. Volume 3, at 1,200 pages, covers a decade. What began as a three-volume work expanded to four. But in the fourth one he became infatuated with Bobby Kennedy as a foil for Lyndon Johnson. So that one becomes almost a dual biography and ends pretty abruptly.

Now, age 90, Caro claims to have written nearly 1,000 pages for the fifth volume.

Brands sees a flaw in Caro’s greatness: “If a student asks me to suggest a book that’ll teach them about Lyndon Johnson,” he told me, “I’m not going to tell them to read Caro’s biography.” It’s too huge. Too granular in its detail.

Indeed, as Caro himself kinda suggests, it’s hardly a “biography” except that this is the closest word we have for it. Volume 3, Master of the Senate, is as much a portrait of Lyndon Johnson as the senate itself; volume 4, Path to Power, is as much a portrait of Lyndon Jonson as vice president as it is a portrait of the vice presidency.

Caro’s work is something in between history and biography; it’s one medium as a vehicle for the other, or it’s both at once. Or some third thing. An artfully neurotic absorption of all material pertaining to this pivotal historical figure, as filtered through the mind of a brilliantly obsessive writer. The literary equivalent of a 12-minute guitar riff.

These books are as much about Caro as anything else.

Another complicating factor in any author’s quest to write a huge book is, coincidentally, the thing that maybe prompts the idea in the first place: the fact that they’re going to die.

Cormac McCarthy was still working on his final novel, The Passenger, 40 years after he started it. He was almost 90 years old. In and out of cancer treatments. Different from the person who’d embarked on that sprawling project in the 1980s when he made little money and worked on his fiction to the exclusion of all else. As his biographer Tracy Daugherty said via email:

“He would often eat at a Luby’s on Mesa Avenue in El Paso. People would approach his table and ask for an autograph. He’d politely decline. Once, a reporter flew all the way from England to speak to him. This guy tracked Cormac to Luby’s. Cormac apologized, said he knew the fellow had come a long way, but an interview was something he just couldn’t do. The reporter flew home.”

Later in life, diminished by illness and needing company as he never had before, this project that’d consumed so much time and effort, piecemeal over the decades, was at risk of never landing.

While profiling McCarthy’s deathbed push to finish the novel, I found that sources close to him resisted any suggestion that The Passenger was incomplete (everything he wanted in the book is there in the book), but all agreed that, had he been in better health, he would have done another couple drafts.

In my reporting on William T. Vollmann’s 3,400-page opus, A Table for Fortune, I was told what Vollmann himself has since confirmed to The Wall Street Journal: His cancer had come back, it was terminal, and he’d seek no further treatment. Hence the writing of the book, as well as its editing, would be conducted against the clock.1

It’s another reality of writing huge books that they take a long time to read. The long road to publication will therefore be met mostly with silence. Even among critics, since they’re likely taking a flat rate to review the book, and the more hours it takes to read something, the less they’re being paid per hour. So they’ll turn down the gig, or, worse yet, they’ll skim, look for the gist, and review it anyway.

The response will be slow in coming, if it’s sincere; the first one will almost always be suspect. It’s a recipe for letdown.

So if the question we’re asking ourselves is “What’s the punchy, coherent argument for why big books are a decisively good thing,” the answer is that there probably isn’t one – the benefits and drawbacks of a gigantic book that takes you months to read are experiential. They contain multitudes. They ramble, they digress, they negate themselves and make you sad and bring you up high and make you sad again, an emotional yo-yo effect that lasts for months, but at the end of it neither one of those feelings prevails – what you get, instead, is some larger and more rewarding feeling of relation with this thing, or these characters inside it, or the authorial consciousness on the other side of it that kinda mirrors the most meaningful personal relationships we have in life: They’re complicated, they’re long, more meaningful than the sum of their highs and lows.

In the literary tradition – and yes, our current moment is tethered to it – huge books endure as mutual leaps of faith, between writer and reader, toward the same single point of sustained quiet and contact.

The odds of a payoff are often remote, but we keep on doing it, through the generations, like a meditation or prayer, a humble gesture, involving us both but aimed at some larger thing.

For years I have had a recurring dream: I am woken in the night by a booming knock. I stumble through my room in the dark and make my way downstairs to the door. The stairs lead from a split-level loft down into an open, high-ceilinged den. Moonlight spills in through a window wall, which opens to a stilted deck that looks out over the backyard.

The details are always the same. The style of the home is modern rustic, and I can see the coniferous trees of the mountains, an impenetrable wall of hemlock and fir sloping off into the distance through the window wall. I reach the bottom of the stairs and turn around towards the front of the house. I walk through the den into a small foyer toward the front door. Crystals of ice collect around the threshold gap and creep slowly across the floor like a shadow cast by the setting sun. With a cool burn beneath my feet, I open the door into the blackest hour of night. A spotlight shines from out of view. The flat ground, colored the blue-black of solid ice, stretches as far as I can see. The howl of the wind beats against my ears, nearly deafening me. Through the flurried haze, a hooded figure in a black cloak stands beneath the spotlight. I can’t make out its face, but I feel its eyes meet mine from beneath the hem of the hood. It beckons. Across the frozen earth, I follow. We are eventually swallowed by darkness.

Emerging from the pure dark, I step into a familiar scene. An empty beach at low tide, lit by the flat white light of a giant, papery moon. The sky is uncannily clear, and a warm breeze carries the sweet, nostalgic scent of summer. I feel at once that I’ve been here before. At the beachhead, a warped palm swoops long and low, forming a natural bench. The hooded figure is sitting there. I approach the tree, clamber up its goosenecked trunk and sit down next to it. We watch the tide gently ebb in silence. The figure turns to face me, but I see nothing beneath the darkness of the hood. It reaches out and places its hand on my shoulder, and I wake up.

From the moment I first awoke from this dream, I knew the beach: Destiny Islands from the 2002 game Kingdom Hearts. The shadowed figure was cloaked in robes similar to those worn by members of the game’s mysterious Organization XIII. I knew who it was, too.

If you’ve played Kingdom Hearts, you know that you leave Destiny Islands quickly. A wave of shadow sweeps your friends away, and you set out to try and get them back.

From the start, though, it is clear that these quaint shores are too restrictive for you to remain there for long. This place was designed to be left behind; to linger in the shared memory of its characters as an everlasting symbol of unspoiled youth. Your time there with them is brief, but the two-hour tutorial zone is steeped in the sweet sadness of impending change. This is the beach at high tide. When these waves return to the sea, life as you know it will be swept away with them no matter how desperately you try to cling to it. You get the sense that these are the good ol’ days, and that they are swiftly coming to an end.

Has there ever been a more perfect metaphor for growing up?

In 2007, I was 14. My best friend, Allen, was learning to play the piano. He had found a YouTuber named Kyle Landry who would cover songs from his favorite anime and video games and use them as a template for improvisation. He had already exhausted all of Kyle’s videos of songs from Naruto, an obsession that had wholly consumed him at the time. Scanning the other videos, he found a few songs from something unknown to us: Kingdom Hearts. I remember walking into his house one day after school to find him (predictably) in the nook to the right of the front door, seated at his piano. The desktop computer behind him was playing Kyle’s first cover of “Dearly Beloved” on a loop. We were enamored, and rushed to play both of the existing mainline games. They became a palpable part of our friendship, the Destiny Islands a shared virtual treehouse of the adolescent soul.

I think of Allen often. We haven’t spoken in years, but the places that we inhabited together, tangible and intangible, still inhabit me.

Virtual worlds are much like dreams; they are informed by our world without being bound by its material constraints. They can burrow into the walls of our minds and permeate our waking lives.

Years after I left Destiny Islands behind, I felt similarly connected to the cold, demanding realms of Myst. These places were quietly chaotic; the disparate wreckage of other worlds crudely reassembled, impractically constructed and absurdly interconnected. Who would design such obtuse machinations? This was clearly the work of people struggling to make sense of the world, so much that they created a world defined by logic of their own. There is nothing easier for a 20 year old to comprehend than that.

Thoughtfully designed environments such as these, ones that weave their narrative themes into their explorable spaces in such a way that they are expressed before any narrative properly begins, are the most crucial thing that video games have to offer.

Both video games and dreams run parallel to our waking lives. They serve as analogous spaces in which we can process our experience unrestrained by the limits of corporeal life. A dream, its nature inextricable from our own, draws directly from our sensory experiences. It can evoke and mimic them. A virtual world, however, bereft of scent, flavor, and texture: what defines its sense of place? We are quick to credit “immersive” visual fidelity, or granular interactivity, or a grounded simulation that makes the world feel more “real.” Though valuable qualities, these are far from what makes a virtual world special.

The world of a video game is defined by its connection to our own humanity. While the origins of our own universe continue to elude us, in virtual universes, by contrast, there is no denying intelligent design. We can reshape our tangible world, but we are forced to work with finite materia. In shaping virtual worlds, the stuff of creation is practically infinite. These places are sculpted from human experience, created by people for other people to inhabit – navigable projections of self, broadcast from soul to screen. A video game invites us to walk the halls of someone’s dream. In turn, it can become part of our own. These digital landscapes are a part of me, virtual threads enmeshed within the fabric of my life. The strata of the human experience contain both tangible and intangible layers. There is no make-believe. It’s all real to me.

That same dark wave that separated the kids of Kingdom Hearts cast Allen out to some shadowed sea beyond my reach. I have struggled to make sense of his absence, just as I struggled to make sense of what a model ship floating in a birdbath has to do with the locked door of a planetarium on the island of Myst. I hadn’t seen him in years until he showed up, cloaked in hooded robes, knocking on the door of my dream. I still don’t know why.

I had never bought perfume, never been interested in perfume, never wanted to know anything about perfume. Nevertheless, as I saw my best friend’s bathroom vanity slowly fill with perfume samples; as she trained her nose to distinguish tonka from coumarin; as she learned what a chypre and what a gourmand was and developed opinions about niche and independent perfume houses; and above all when she sent me a package containing, conservatively, one million half spent and discarded perfume samples, I knew: I was going to get into perfume.

I was not necessarily averse to this inevitability. I saw myself – a version of myself – bathed in a faint golden aura. I was ever so slightly different. I got regular pedicures and slept in silk pajama separates. I was groomed. I had a regular order of operations I carried out before leaving the house – casually, thoughtlessly, out of habit, simply because that’s the kind of person I was and it never occurred to me to live any other way. This sequence involved makeup and a set of everyday pearl studs and culminated in a spray of my signature scent at the hollow of my ivory throat.

My signature scent! I could see it, custom-made, discreetly present, lingering delicately in the room after I left, suffusing people’s memories of me with a warm, subtle intoxication. My signature scent would be so closely associated with me and I with it that the two of us would be indistinguishable. It would not merely make me smell better, but manifest some inner essence in a shimmering concentration. It would, doubtless, be very expensive.

You will note that for the duration of this extravagant little fantasy I have said nothing about perfume itself: nothing about woody notes, attars, benzoin, vetivers. All of the focus has been on me, and the role perfume will play in a certain vision of myself and my life. This is not (or not only) an indication of narcissism. It speaks to a fundamental aesthetic divide between what I like to call the connoisseurs and the basics.

For the genuine connoisseurs, each discrete object is the point of the exercise. They lose their selves in what they love; they want to get deeper into it, and find it inexhaustible. They are always ready to be bowled over by some new wonderful thing, and there is always another hanger in the closet, another space on the shelves. These are the people who amass collections: art, books, jewelry, clothes, or, by way of example, one million perfume samples. Almost everyone who gets seriously into perfume is a connoisseur

I am not a connoisseur. I am a basic.

For basics, the dominant mode of engagement with the aesthetic realm is not devotion and possession, but mastery: the identification of excellence and its successful incorporation into her own persona. The connoisseur wants to have and wear marvelous clothes. The basic wants to look her best. She wants to look her best, specifically. The basic is concerned with two questions: what is best, and what is fitting. And what is best can only be determined with some reference to what is fitting. This is what a basic wants: the signature scent; high-quality clothes that flatter, manufactured in ways that meet her approval, that suit the demands of her specific life; a pair of gold hoops that go with everything.

Basics are not actually lower maintenance than connoisseurs. The rigors and difficulties of a given standard, the constraints on creativity, are half the fun. But deciding on the standard, and then meeting it, is more important – is more fun and pleasurable – than being ever open to the romance of some new particular object on undefined and finally ineffable grounds.

For connoisseurs, taste is an exercise in recognition; for basics, in judicious selection.

I am a basic to such a degree that I will wear what I have and like well past the point of stained and moth-eaten disgrace rather than settle for something new and affordable that is not exactly what I want, or that does not perfectly fit and fill a well-evidenced gap of real need. I rarely buy books; the process confuses me. There is no natural limit on the enjoyment of books, no overriding reason to buy one, but not another. If not one, why not all? I feel nauseous in bookstores. The library is much safer.

So you can see why, upon realizing that I would be following my friend down the perfumed rabbit hole, I needed a schema to order my quest.

I knew, for secret and foggy reasons probably best explained by Mandy Aftel’s contention that perfumery is the heir to alchemy, that I wanted only natural perfumes. That is, I wanted perfumes whose scent molecules derived from tangible materials found in the world, rather than being synthesized in a lab. Excellent – in one stroke, I had narrowed my focus and eliminated the vast majority of perfumes made today. I had also made the whole affair significantly more expensive. This was a promising start.

Unfortunately, perfume immediately began to resist my schemas. I was warned, for instance, against buying perfumes because I liked the notes listed. Tuberose, as a material, is not the same as silk or rabbit fur. However much you know about its properties, what you will think of the role it plays in a given composition cannot be pre-determined without smelling the specific perfume as a whole. Cultural associations and symbolism certainly contribute to our perception of scents, but trusting yourself to them is an uncertain gamble. Many a sniffer’s conception of herself as a tobacco-and-leather kind of person has foundered on the rocks of an irresistible vanilla reverie. The complexity and sensual immediacy of perfumery means that the nose always tells its own story. I found I liked rose and orange blossom, ambergris and animalics. But however much I wanted to specify and control the parameters of my signature scent, it would unavoidably be an exercise in surrender to the vision of the perfumer who translated these parts into a luminous whole.

Then again, perfume is troubled by the mysterious inaccessibility of the other. I can approve of the way I look, and know, more or less, how I look to other people. But I can have much less confidence in how I smell to other people, because the molecules in a perfume are interacting in a particular way with my body chemistry, and again with that of whoever is smelling me. There are many approaches to perfume, and for many of them this fact does not pose a problem. But it did for me. I wanted my signature scent to conjure up some wordless essence of me – some Eau de la Clare – not only to my nose, but to the nose of the other person. Or at least to the other person who mattered most. I wanted a lover’s help in choosing a perfume, which meant that my final once-and-future signature scent must remain undiscovered territory absent a once-and-future husband. My entry into the dark, sensual, and suspiciously French world of perfume had only landed me with something else I had to save for marriage.

And even that, I realized, as I sniffed samples, wouldn’t be the end of it. I would change. My body chemistry would change with time, with meant the way things smelled to me and on me would change. Scents would change from season to season, blooming in the winter and cloying in the summer. There would never be an end to all this sniffing.

I gave up.

That is to say, I tabled the idea of my one-and-only, once-and-future, custom-made signature scent, and decided to buy a bottle of Divine, an old-fashioned, vampy, leopard-skin scent from Providence Perfume. I had received a sample in my giant sample package and instantly fallen in love. It will sit on my dresser, much loved and over-sprayed; a small, grudging, one point seven ounce concession to the delight that makes no promises and the beauty that admits no mastery.

If we were to seek the image of the soul we could do worse than to look to the sky. Yesterday, leaving the supermarket, I was stopped in my tracks by a herd of squat gray clouds scudding across a deepening lilac; the underbellies of their dark, pensive masses flared red, and one star had risen prematurely above the throng in the beset blue of the evening. What it said to me I can express no better than by this description. My mum often sends me pictures of hastily captured sunsets, and I’d estimate that the most common text I’ve received from her besides the thank-yous for letting her know I’ve gotten home are the ones asking me if I’ve seen the moon.1

Up above us the theater of human experience is tossed in capricious and comprehensive analogy, and so evocative is its changeable display of our inner state that to ask which is the reflection and which the original seems foolish – the one expresses the other. More than this, civilization has grown under its tutelage; the sky has given to us not just light and darkness, rain and sunshine, food and water, but symbols, stories, instructions, warnings, ways of life … whether to the ancient Babylonians, the Chinese, the Australian aboriginals, or any other culture that has ever looked upwards.

The sky is the first fount of divination, in that divination requires the opening of a channel of communication between a conscious subject and an object, or composite object, so variable in nature as to present itself in an inexhaustible variety of forms. Theism aside, if the epithet “divine” can be applied to the human being it is because we are born into a world of things to be interpreted – in the interest of survival – not just as themselves but as signs of yet other things. We are born diviners, and the subject-object bond required for divination presupposes at least a potential and temporary oneness, an errant equals sign whose two distinct lines hover ephemerally together at heightened moments of attention.

Divination demands contemplation to the point of immersion, so it follows that the life of religious devotees is often given over to the extended and repeated consideration of sacred objects, and that many religions have declared the sky as the house of the divine, it being the mirror of the soul. The religion of materialism – under whose sway a majority of the developed world has unthinkingly come to live – also conforms to this glorification of the heavens, and for a brief moment in the industrial renaissance of the postwar 1950s and 60s, it began, in keeping with its theological grounding in matter, to see those divine dreamlands among the stars as a real promised land, one into which the body, being the materialist vessel, could rise.

The ensuing Space Race took us to the moon, but no further. Like most grand human operations, it had been motivated primarily by terrestrial competition, and it was as if, after the power play between the Soviets and the Americans was over, the subconscious of the human race had been brought to the edge of a void that we were woefully unequipped to comprehend. The dark chasm of space had teemed with possibility – was it not populated with stars? – but we had always, up until that point, gazed from the ground.

Setting foot on the moon is perhaps one of the two definitive moments of the 20th century, the other being the dropping of the nuclear bomb (and both really can be narrowed down to two molecular instants of impact). On the materialist plane of thought, what could be more significant, more worthy of mythology, more inaugural of a new epoch than these two things – the placing of the earth’s destruction in our hands, and the first footfall on another celestial body?

In the time since these events, our entire collective aspect has shifted, away from what might be called the heroic – not in a moral sense, but characterized by the tendency to venture outwards, and towards something more passive and insular. The most obvious inversion of the archetype of the hero is probably the hermit – the dweller and explorer of the self – but I think that we may have become more akin to frozen spectators, like the figure in Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, sealed in the contemplation of a scene from which we are held forever separate. Not so much wanderers as wonderers. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag tells us that the first major world disaster of the 21st century, on September 11, 2001, “was described as ‘unreal,’ ‘surreal,’ ‘like a movie,’ in many of the first accounts of those who escaped from the towers or watched from nearby. (After four decades of big-budget Hollywood disaster films, ‘It felt like a movie’ seems to have displaced the way survivors of a catastrophe used to express the short-term unassimilability of what they had gone through: ‘It felt like a dream.’)”

Perhaps it is written into the nature of a materialist age of empire that a time comes when there are no more worlds to conquer, or the conquest is brought to an end, and what has been acquired must be considered – the shift into contemplation – before it slips away. The emperor becomes the museum keeper, and a jealous one too (just ask the countries still trying to get their possessions back from the British Museum). Materialism ages into vicariousness when you learn that you can’t have everything – but you can look as much as you like. If this is the age that we have moved into, then it explains the blurring in our time of the psychological boundary between contemplation and acquisition. Our lives are so abundant in images created by marketers, manufacturers of desire. Barriers begin to take on the aspect of shop windows, but the things behind them lose something of their sheen when the window is broken through.

Likewise, the possibilities of space seemed endless to the dreamers of the mid-20th century, but they were virtual, founded on fantasies, hypotheses and images seen through telescopes or TV screens. The cold reality of the moon landing revealed what we had always known: that space is inhospitable to human beings without the kind of extreme adaptation that would push us beyond humanity as we had known it. The astronauts came back singing the praises of the earth. The ground of the moon cannot be kissed, not without dying to pay the price, like the toll exacted by some fatal lunar lover in a fairy tale, one whose light shines alluringly from afar, but whose barrenness becomes evident up close. Once up there, we are out from under the dome beneath which our cultures have arisen. That is not to say that we couldn’t learn to flourish beyond the boundary of our atmosphere, with enough time and technology, but the fact remains that leaving the earth is a severe sacrifice – it demands a severance of the earthly umbilical cord, a becoming alien.

So instead, we turned our technological nous towards the proliferation of digital worlds. It was a small leap, as the very same technology that had been developed for space exploration had also already been put to use in generating the first interactive computerized environments. Steve Russell created one of the very first video games, Spacewar!, on the same DEC PDP-1 computer that was simultaneously being used for NASA’s Mariner program, and on the same Massachusetts campus where technology was being developed for the Apollo spacecraft. Many of the earliest video games were symbiotic with the cosmic zeitgeist, being explicitly narrativized around space travel, including the primitive Lunar Lander, and by the time the Space Race reached its end in the early ’70s, arcade classics like Asteroids and Space Invaders were just starting to be rolled out to the masses like conciliatory dreams. The early arcades were like museums of what might have been.

A similar story was prevalent in the popular cinema and television of the time, with Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, Battlestar Galactica, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Buck Rogers, Planet of the Apes and more all dramatizing the space-age dream (or nightmare). One of the very first and most legendary films to use special effects was Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon. The Space Age reached maturity very much within and alongside the still-young medium of cinema. Besides reboots and sequels of old intellectual properties like Star Wars and Dune, most of the successful filmic sci-fi of the 21st century has come back down to earth, dealing more with our growing relationship with technology, with films such as Ex Machina, Her, The Matrix, I, Robot and After Yang, and even popular space films like Interstellar, Arrival and The Martian foreground humanity’s relationship to the earth. These feel more attuned to the current zeitgeist, whereas the epic space operas feel much more like fantasy than they might once have done, though perhaps not to the wealthy fantasists who, having grown up absorbing such media, have rekindled the dream of space travel for a much more exclusive group. But at least for now, the collective dream is no longer space-centric.

We have, of course, continued to expand our conception of the universe, but virtually, sending out probes, analyzing data and construing knowledge of places we have never been and most probably never could go, places that can perhaps only nominally be considered places: the Orion Molecular Cloud or supervoids like the CMB Cold Spot. In the meantime, we have rapidly enhanced our capacity to digitally render our fantasies as environments to be virtually explored. We have grown accustomed to gaining the perception of places into which we can never step. If perception is an invitation for us to act, as Henri Bergson believed, and as anyone who has impotently watched the horror of an injustice play out in the palm of their hand must have surely felt, then how many of our perceptions are erecting a screen between even our simplest desires and their fulfillment? The marketers know – the secret of advertising is that the product being advertised is not really there.

I was born in 1994, and so have grown up used to having vicarious access to virtual and remote worlds. As a child I loved wandering to the edge of the map in video games. Some games would try to justify the boundary with a fence, or an unpassable wall, or open water where certain death lurked; others would turn you around with a curt reminder to stay on course, or simply let you butt up against an invisible barrier. But what led me to seek out these boundaries was that there was – most of the time – a view beyond them. When I looked out onto an inaccessible rolling field, populated maybe with a few buildings or some trees whose low resolution lay plain their purely illusory presence, I dreamed of jumping the barrier. I wanted to try the doors of the out-of-bounds houses because inside of them there could be anything. I used to fancy there might be a whole other game hidden there, or, even better, that I would enter a never-ending landscape whose noninteractive objects teased my imagination with the thought of what just one interactive object might do.

But my fascination with these crude backdrops was contrasted with a kind of ambient fear I felt whenever I played a game that made no use of them, such as the early Super Mario games, or Metroid, or Donkey Kong, which, at least in some levels, were set against an entirely black background. No fake stars to adorn the void; it was as if Mario was running and jumping on platforms suspended in absolute nothingness. When I was very young this fear made certain games almost unplayable for me, especially when, in a game like Space Invaders, the black background would change color to signify an increase in difficulty, and suddenly the void became orange, or green, as if nothingness had suddenly become malevolent and bared its teeth.

It would be an exaggeration to say that space travel has – or ever could – lose its novelty, but it remains true that in the late ’60s we reached a fork in the road of humanity, where we might have continued to branch outwards but instead burrowed inwards. In this insular age, simulation theory has arisen as a new cosmogony – how likely this theory is or isn’t is not the point, what matters is that it is a new collective dream – and, if we take the theory and run with it a little, then the argument could be made that burrowing deeper is not all that different from traveling into outer space. Eventually, if we look deep enough, everything atomizes and spreads apart like a universe exploding into life, as if we were turning not a magnification dial but the wheel on a cosmic clock. We can look at any object and conceive of the universe of atoms that make it up, and perhaps even every individual atom, if we could see deep enough into it, would contain an entire universe – or it could be that all of these fractal universes would simply be the code of our own, re-rendering itself at each entry point, which is everywhere. The distance between ourselves and the edge of space could be – at a lesser stage of magnification – that between the nucleus and the envelope of an atom. Zoom in enough and chasms would open up in space between every molecule that makes up the world, existential lacunas of dark matter, in which nothingness perhaps has its own kind of life unknowable to us, like the characters in Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics who use atoms as gambling chips or marbles to race across the curves of space. Even given these hypothetical degrees of magnification however, the problem remains: We can look, but how do we enter these spaces?

The legacy of the 21st century so far has surely been the ubiquitous proliferation of the internet. We picture it as a web, which is like a diagram of star systems interconnected – digitized, transposed, etherealized into data. Part of the great sci-fi dream was of a universe so vast that nature repeats itself; one in which we might find an earth mark 2, mark 3, mark 400 … on the internet we can see into even more replicas of our world than we could ever dream of. Like space travel, in order to access the web, we rely on technology too complicated for most of us to understand, and once there we enter a non-environment, one that asks us to leave our bodies behind. It promises us entry in exchange for our becoming vicarious.

Simulation theory is an adaptation of belief fit for the internet age; it has its echoes in the Veil of Maya, and in the creationist myths. Great technological advancements have always inspired new conceptions of the universe – as long as there are minds with enough comprehension to contrast one object with another, reality exists alongside representative fantasies of its totality, and seen in this light religious and scientific ideas of infinity seem like metaphors for the same thing: the totality, the pleroma, the outside or beyond that conditions our inside and within. But what really makes simulation theory the apt cosmogony of our age is that in a simulation everything is non-corporeal.

We could psychologize the shift away from corporeality as a sort of collective trauma response after the atrocities of the 20th and 21st centuries – which not only occurred but were seen to have occurred – but really it is nothing new; corporeal suffering is the foundation of the spiritual life and has always been generative of imaginal worlds beyond this existence, perhaps it is even the generative factor of the elusive substance we call soul. To be soulful is to have suffered. What is different in our age is the collective shift towards the vicarious, and we are still coming to terms with our new ways of seeing. Maybe we have been running away from suffering into the spectacle of the suffering of others – maybe that is our new original sin: the guilt of the watcher powerless to act. But the ancients too observed plays of light in a region they could not enter, and from their seeing they advanced their understanding and channeled what they had learned into action. We must not forgot that to see is to divine.

At its most beautiful the sky bruises, and bleeds at the horizon – this vicarious age may be only the first flickers of a new dawn.

Last October, I sought the help of a professional gamer to coach me in Valorant, a teambased first-person shooter in which players are tasked with planting or defusing a bomb (or, better still, just killing all of their opponents). I have played – according to a back-of-the-envelope calculation – somewhere around 3,500 hours of Valorant in the past five years. That comes out to between 7% and 8% of those five years. The math looks worse if you count just waking hours, and desperately sad if you can conjure up the mental image of a grown man sitting at his desk, face several inches from the monitor, and imagine the cumulative strain of those hours on his posture. I’ve probably been subjected (or subjected my teammates) to thousands of hours of middling, uninspired gameplay.

At my peak, I was statistically one of the best Valorant players, if you accept charitable interpretations of all of those words. In late 2023, I vaulted ever-so-briefly into Immortal, the game’s second-highest skill bracket. I slipped from that vertiginous peak literally as quickly as possible, flunking out of the rank in two matches. Nevertheless, being an Immortal Emeritus notched me a spot around the top 2% of players by rank distribution, placing me among tens of thousands of players lording over the unwashed millions of lower-ranked scum. I once ran this boast – that Valorant might be the one thing I was statistically best at, percentile-wise, among all my skills – by a friend of mine. Even over Discord, I could sense he was frowning. “I think you’re probably a better journalist,” he offered, tactfully.

But in the months since that halcyon day, I had regressed and plateaued, bobbing around what I’d estimate to be the top 8% mark. For the sake of my self-esteem, I needed a professional assessment, a qualified somebody to tell me what I was doing wrong and how to fix it. I reached out to a distant acquaintance, a former pro gamer who offers training sessions for $70 a pop. He told me to record myself playing. We’d review the footage together, and he’d point out my mistakes and offer corrections.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes playing Valorant. At its best, the game is the thinking man’s teamwork-oriented first-person shooter. When teams are evenly matched, Valorant takes on an orderly, algorithmic quality: attack and riposte, attack and riposte, as each team aims to be the first to win 13 rounds.

Few matches meet this ideal of play and counter-play. Often, rounds play out instead like a handful of abortive Rube Goldberg machines. On one side of the map, Player X swings a corner for no apparent reason and has his head blasted clean off by an opponent holding the angle. One domino falls askew, without toppling the others. Elsewhere, Player Z flubs a jump and accidentally falls off the map and dies. Meanwhile, some third player has read the timing of the round all wrong, and is miles away from the action as his team gets wiped out, a mistake he has made enough times to earn him the unflattering nickname the Snail among his friends. (Not that this has happened to me.)

And thus, at its worst, Valorant operates as a sort of psychoactive software meant to induce Falling Down (1993) style crashouts. Recently, I was temporarily banned from the game (for the first time ever, I should note) for bad-mouthing a teammate. OK, that’s not entirely truthful: I was temporarily banned for screaming at this teammate – a complete stranger – calling them a fat, disgusting beast, saying they probably typed with just their index fingers, and mimicking what I imagined they would sound like if they used voice comms by doing eight to 10 heavy breaths directly into my microphone. This profane rant kicked off when this teammate wandered away from the rest of the squad at a pivotal moment in the round without saying anything. (We won the round anyway.) I am 31 years old. The person I was yelling at was more likely than not a child.

I was desperate enough to keep playing that I urgently appealed my ban in a groveling email to Riot Games’ support team: “Dear sir or madam, yada yada yada, I want to express my profound regret over my actions. My juvenile playground taunts – nothing hateful! – were hardly constructive, I now realize. I’ve never been banned before and am generally a member in good standing of the Riot ecosystem. In light of my history of upstanding behavior, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” My suspension was, unsurprisingly, not overturned.

I have died over 100,000 times in Valorant, but the most important death was a slow one. In my first year or two playing, I was relentlessly positive, faithful to the idea that any situation and any game was winnable. I hadn’t played a first-person shooter in at least a decade, and I extended to other players the same grace I expected in return: We were all happy climbers, slowly but predictably improving. There was a time, in other words, when I would not have dreamed of joking that I was going to kill myself over the results of a match or round or duel.

Those reservations feel quaint now. Once I’d attained what could be considered a “good” rank in Valorant, a sort of status anxiety set in. Every victory was richly deserved. Losses, however, were personally wounding – a literal but also metaphorical stripping of rank that felt wildly unjust, a conspiracy by people dumber and less agentic than me meant to drag me down to their level. If only my teammates had listened. If only they had gotten more kills. If only they had played in a way that enabled me to get more kills. If only this or that teammate hadn’t made some snide, shitty remark, tilting me off the face of the earth. This map sucks. My teammates are all morons. This meta is horrible. The developers are braindead. The other team is playing so weird. Have I really played three-thousand-some-odd hours and somewhere along the way gotten worse?

I play video games with a consistent group, a pack of guys I fell in with more or less at random, all a few years younger than me. Some of them are … how to put this delicately … precariously employed. And yet, I log more hours than them online playing video games. I cherish their friendship, though my relationship with them has largely played out online; we are virtual strangers, in the sense that for all the hours we’ve spent yapping into each others’ ears, we’ve only met in person a handful of times. We have been, at times, viciously cruel to one another, but also extraordinarily generous and kind. I picked up a taste for Japanese menthols from them at the ripe old age of 29. I hope that they’ll attend my wedding.

A few years back, I began to notice that every morning, for the first several hours of the day, my eyes wouldn’t come to focus. The left eye always felt like it was going over a speed bump catching up to the motion of the right. I could feel it above the eye and under the brow. To fix my vision, I would lightly pinch the less-cooperative eyeball over the skin of my eyelid and jiggle it back and forth to try to shunt it into alignment. Sometimes, I’d dig around with a finger in the space under the top curve of the eye socket, hoping to jostle into place the wiring or whatever was going on back there. The condition made reading difficult, and the stuff of first-person shooting – rapid and precise alignment of crosshair on screen to target – nearly impossible.

Eventually, I saw a neuro-ophthalmologist. An MRI ordered by the doctor uncovered nothing at all, a non-finding that set me back roughly $3,000. If in that time – a year or so of increasingly bad vision, five months of waiting to see the doctor, a few months more to undergo the test and get the results – I even considered that the culprit might be the eyestrain resulting from those aforementioned hours-long gaming sessions, I didn’t take the thought too seriously. To step back from gaming would be to sever what already felt like a tenuous relationship, playing out almost entirely over the internet in the gauntlet of competitive Valorant.

But as the condition worsened, the gulf between what I believed to be my peak and my actual everyday performance widened, made all the worse by the kinds of jokes that are characteristic of a group of 20-somethings. I consider myself a cerebral player, preferring advantageous timings to direct one-on-one duels. But that bit of flattery doesn’t change the fact that I’m just not very good at Valorant’s core mechanic: shooting people. And I wasn’t getting any better. Every missed shot became freighted with meaning: I’m better than my friends can see, but I can’t prove it. To be appraised correctly is to be understood. To be misjudged is crazy-making. Every egregious whiff or misplay became fodder for a mid-coital intrusive thought.

I could feel myself reverting to boyhood, storming out of the proverbial playdate cursing my erstwhile friends after particularly infuriating games. I fell victim to those school-age anxieties – Do these guys even like me? – coming out the back of marathon double-digit-hour gaming sessions, at the end of which everyone is more or less nonverbal. I could feel my neural pathways atrophying with every inside joke repeated unthinkingly, landing to lesser and lesser effect as the night wore on. I grew hypersensitive to small and more than likely imagined changes in social gravity: who’s up, who’s down, who’s spending less time online, who can get people to come online just by getting into the Discord call and who can’t. I toyed with vows of silence, promising to myself on more than one occasion to quit Valorant indefinitely until my friends, on hands and knees, invited me back. And I was also the one to come begging after an unlucky string of matches: “Please, bro. Just one more game. It’ll be normal.”

I have broken that promise (“Just one more game”) hundreds of times, throwing good game after bad, queuing up for another without a passing thought. When I win and queue another, I’m pushing my luck. If I’ve lost, I continue out of despair. It’s a gamble: on myself, on the idea that I can manifest a better performance out of thin air. At a certain point, stupor sets in – the kind of slack-jawed stare that materializes 30 seconds into a short-form video you have no context for and have landed on accidentally, except it lasts all 30 minutes of a Valorant match.

In truth, I play Valorant because at any given moment it is the easiest thing to do. It’s easier than writing. It’s easier than working. It’s easier than chores or exercise or playing an instrument. It’s easier than reading. It’s easier than going to bed. I frequently choose Valorant over all of these things.

“Addiction” is a thorny word when it comes to video games. It calls to mind the anti-gaming panics of the ’90s and early 2000s, the anguished cries of millions of parents: My child is turning into a zombie! When “addictive” is used as a favorable adjective in marketing or press coverage, some critics smartly point out that it’s no trivial thing: Some of us have dealt with real addiction, they say. But I would struggle to choose a better word – compulsion, maybe? – to describe my on-itsface-quite-normal relationship to Valorant, which extracts the maximum of my time and energy for … what, exactly? The reward of a space in which to impress and/or yell at teens?

When COVID-19 hit, I thought I might seize the opportunity afforded to me by lockdown to write an album. Then Valorant came out. Thirty-five hundred hours later, with several thousand dollars invested into virtual in-game goods and a succession of absolutely necessary gaming accoutrements – a desk, fancy chair, mouse, mousepad, mouse bungee, custom keyboard, wrist rest, monitor, monitor stand, headphones and so on – I wouldn’t say that I’m any closer to completing my masterpiece.

As I was recording my gameplay for the coach, I could tell I wasn’t playing well. Still, it wasn’t anomalously bad, something so unexplainably awful that there’d be no point in review. I’d had plenty of games like this before. Not great, not terrible, just sort of nothing-ish. I could learn from this.

I came away from the session with a program – daily routines to train my aim and solidify good habits, and recommendations around in-game behavior to make me a more productive and useful teammate. Toward the end of 2025, I told myself I would commit to that program, with a few health-conscious modifications to dampen the gamer-ness of it all: Wake up early. Stretch. Train my aim following the regimen set by the coach. Warm up my movement in some Deathmatch lobbies. Play a few real games. Pause if they don’t go my way. Turn down invites to team up from friends who might drag me down. Aim train again before bed. Repeat. Slowly climb back to Immortal.

There was a gonzo journalism element to it: I subjected myself to X surprising thing for Y days in hopes of generating Z unusual result. I bought a single pack of Marlboro Reds to smoke if I started to get too silly in-game because I’d read somewhere that academics chew nicotine gum for its focus-sharpening qualities. The idea of maximizing the Oddity Quotient on the experiment for effect really tickled me: getting into powders and peptides or learning about the correct number of milligrams of caffeine to consume daily – things of that nature. I did not, ultimately, pursue those lines of inquiry.

Still, I was eager to get started. So much so that minutes before departing the house to drive to my parents’ house for the holidays, I turned to my fiancée and asked if I could get a quick dub in before we left. She made a face I hadn’t seen her make before. “That would be a little grotesque, no?” she said, after a pause.

The program started in earnest in January. I wish I could say I committed. I wish I could say the monastic tack took, that I summited the ranked pyramid and reached Immortal. In the span of a week and a half or so, I saw real improvement. I stuck with the agonizingly dull aim training – a series of high-speed clicking exercises whose usefulness as a test to detect concussions in professional athletes has been studied.

I can’t say exactly how or why the 3,500-hour fever broke. Maybe it was my friends drifting to other games, the embarrassment of neglected chores, or the sustained attention itself. But I keep coming back to something the coach said as we scrubbed through those 40-something minutes of unremarkable play. Earlier, as he and I reviewed the footage of one of my matches, he remarked, offhandedly, that there wasn’t much in the footage to critique. It wasn’t meant as a compliment.

“You’ve just got to get active,” he advised. There were a lot of stretches, he said, in which I wasn’t really doing much at all.

Nate starts the office tour on the top floor of the building, where he and Andres take in a panoramic view. Andres stares out the window for a good while, squinting in the light. Across the lake, distant spires rise to a pale sky.

“So this is the fruit of ungodly success,” Andres says.

Nate laughs. “It’s pretty crazy. I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to it.”

“Over time, you get used to anything.”

Andres doesn’t seem confrontational about this, but Nate takes a note to be careful. He’s realizing now that he doesn’t know Andres’ feelings on the company Nate joined, or the whole idea of selling out. There was a time when they shared a sense of resentment at an industry that didn’t seem to want to do anything with them, but those days were years ago. Today, many of the people in their loose circle have taken jobs at companies they used to condemn. People were supporting families, they had to eat. That’s how they got you.

Nate takes Andres down through the floors, showing him the design pods, the art pods, the sound studios, the motion capture studio, the kitchen and the gym.

“Does anyone even use all this equipment?” Andres picks up a nearby hand weight and tests it, as though he doesn’t believe it’s real.

“All the time. There’s usually a pretty good number of people working out, especially in the afternoon,” Nate says. He doesn’t know why he feels defensive. Maybe it’s because there’s a growing suspicion Andres is making fun of him somehow, secretly, or making fun of the whole idea of this luxurious office with its glass walls and views and amenities. In reality, this is the bare minimum of what they get for creating and running several of the world’s most successful games. Some of Nate’s coworkers, who’ve been here much longer than him, speak openly about their exotic sports cars, their wine collections, their heli-skiing trips. Nate has the presence of mind not to share with Andres the alienation he still feels when he overhears those conversations.

“Are you one of them?”

It takes Nate a moment to realize Andres is talking about exercise, and to register the playful tone in his voice. He supposes there’s no reason for him to be dishonest.

“Yeah. I’ve started, at least. It’s only been a couple weeks so far, but I decided I needed to get back in shape. Game development isn’t great for the body, as we both know.”

Andres nods, but he looks distant, lost in thought. “Sure. If I were back on the market, I’d do the same.”

Back on the market. So he knows about him and Monica, then. How? It’s not like it was a se - cret, but he hasn’t spoken with Andres directly in over a year. He supposes knowledge like that moves on its own. People get lunch and dinner together, they have game night and developer socials.

“I’m not in a rush or anything,” Nate says.

“Of course not. How is Liam?”

“He’s good. He’s at the age where he’s starting to become interesting. He’s like a little man. He fixates on weird things.”

“Fixates? Like on what?”

Nate shrugs. “He’ll pick something, and then he’ll only want that. Like just that specific thing, over and over. Right now he’s on a big phase with Virginia Seele. Do you know who that is?”

“The pop star? I don’t keep up with any of that.”

Nate nods. He wants to say he wishes Liam would stop listening to Virginia Seele. Not that he hates herthe songs were fine, the melodies perfectly catchy – but there’s something about his son being a fan of hers that doesn’t sit well with him as a father. He was taken aback when he discovered that Liam had Virginia Seele in his earbuds on the way to and from school. In some sense she was another vapid modern musical act among many, but Virginia Seele made that emptiness the point. I’m becoming who you want me to be, she’d sing. Was that really the best you could hope for? Couldn’t the kids have something a little more full-hearted than this cynical, nihilistic stuff? At least before they became teenagers …

Andres seems to pick up on his thoughts in spite of his effort to hide them. “Kids don’t really start to have taste until they’re 13 or 14,” he says. “Everything until then is just whatever’s in front of them.”

Nate nods, but wonders how Andres would know. Unlike most of the other people in their circle of friends who came up together making indie games, Andres stayed the same. He stayed making experimental interactive fiction for tiny audiences. He stayed single. He stayed stuck in the scraggly-beard-and-cargo-shorts phase of life. Nate, clean-shaven and wearing a dark green Henley shirt he recently bought at a price he would have balked at just a year ago, feels like he is speaking to someone from the past.

“Anyway,” Andres says, “I’ve been meaning to ask. How much money do you make here?”

Nate takes a deep breath, blows air through his mouth, looks at the ceiling, looks pained. Finally, he mentions a number.

“Wow,” Andres says.

Nate shrugs and laughs. “Yeah, it’s crazy. It’s too much, honestly.”

“That’s like four times what I made last year, between sales of my games and contracting. Or more like five times.”

“Well, maybe you could come work here.”

“They don’t need anything I do.”

Nate shrugs. “You would be surprised. They need all kinds of people.”

“They don’t need someone who prototypes shitty little games and makes dinky synth music.”

Now it’s starting to frustrate Nate, the way Andres refuses to accept the possibility that he could find himself in some kind of relation to this company. In fact, throughout the tour, Andres hasn’t said anything in the way of expressing approval or disapproval of what he’s seen. Having some kind of reaction would be the polite thing to do. Nate even would’ve liked it better if he got upset, saying this company and its fancy office stood for everything he was against. Something like that.

“If you say so.” Nate decides to try a different tack. “Look, I understand. At the end of the day, you still have your artistic independence.”

This gets Andres’ attention. “I guess? Too bad artistic independence doesn’t pay the rent.”

“No, but it’s worth something, isn’t it? When I got here I had to learn a whole new language. My boss is always talking about being ‘accountable to the fans.’ And what that means is, we basically have to do whatever they want.”

“There’s nothing new about being in conversation with the audience. That still requires judgment.”

“But that’s the thing, in our case, it kind of doesn’t. Just the other day we announced we were going to make a minor change to the movement system and all these players yelled at us. So a couple days later we pulled back. We gave up. We’re at their whim.” Nate lets out a sigh, realizing how real his disappointment is. “I hardly think of myself as a game designer anymore.”

“You’re a conduit for the will of the people,” Andres says, and Nate finally catches the sharpness in his voice that he’d been anticipating.

“I could put that on my business card.”

“You should. It’s funny.”

Nate thinks there’s something strange about the way he says this, almost like Andres looks down on him. What if he does, though? What if Andres has every right to look down on him? After all, he sold out, leaving behind his money worries, his artistic integrity and his old crew. He went to work for the man and now he’s whining about it.

The conversation with Andres is still on Nate’s mind as he pulls into the parking lot at Liam’s school that afternoon. He thinks that maybe in the future he could help Andres in some way. If not a job, he could fund one of the games, or help put on an exhibition. He could show that there’s something good to come out of his working where he is now, despite the way it looks.

Liam clambers into the car and pulls the door shut without looking at him or saying anything. He’s staring at his phone, earbuds in. It occurs to Nate to wonder if that’s normal for a child about to turn 10. Why does he even have them in the first place? He could ask Monica why. On second thought, maybe he shouldn’t. There’s a thin stream of sound leaking from them. It’s Virginia Seele.

Nate starts driving his son to his mother’s house. He tells himself that Liam will grow out of it. Or even if he doesn’t, what’s the problem, exactly? Can he point to a real reason?

“Hey.” Nate waves to Liam in the back seat, finally overcoming his fear that his kid hates him.

Liam doesn’t seem bothered at all. He pops the earbuds out. “What’s up?”

“I’ve been listening to some Virginia Seele too, you know.”

Nate can’t see Liam’s reaction well in the back of the car. He’s hoping it’s not too cringe for your dad to listen to your music. Unfortunately, he’s pretty sure he would’ve been upset if his own father did that to him.

“Yeah? What do you think?”

“It’s fun. It reminds me of some of that stuff we had in the ’90s.” Nate feels himself sounding ridiculous, but he can’t seem to find the path to a less embarrassing set of words.

“I like the lyrics,” Liam says.

The lyrics? Nate suppresses a laugh. That’s the kind of thing that surprises people about having kids: just how unpredictable they can be. He wouldn’t have expected Liam to be engaging with, much less appreciating, the lyrics to songs like these at his age. Was he already seeing himself in meta-commentary about conforming yourself to the ideals of others? Was that because of social media? Maybe Liam is getting too much screen time. He could talk to Monica about that.

At the same time, Liam wasn’t wrong. The lyrics were what struck Nate, too. To be a pop star, you have to be a strange being, both more than human and less than human at the same time. Virginia Seele existed to fulfill her contract as an avatar. It was strange, because she kept basing her songs on real-life things, even though at the same time she wanted you to know that she had anything but a normal life. Just when you thought you related to her she reminded you that she was different.

“You know, Virginia Seele and I have something in common,” Nate says.

“Yeah?”

“We’re both defined by others, in a way.”

Liam is quiet, and Nate can’t help himself.

“You know when she sings about becoming the person you want her to be, it’s a bit like my job now. I used to be the kind of game designer who decided what I wanted to make players experience. Maybe there’s a long corridor to kind of lull you into a sense of safety, and I put a surprise in at the end to make you jump. Or I want you to think about the relationship between two values, so I design a system where they’re intertwined … but the players of the games I work on now think they know everything about the game already, before I can even put anything new in there. So we just listen to what the players are saying, look at how they behave, and then we do the thing that seems best. It’s no different than if they just told me what to do. So what does that make me, right? The part where Virginia Seele says she’s only who she is because the fans made her into that – I feel like I’m in the same place. Less visible, but the role is the same.”

Liam stays silent.

“When you’ve got this crowd chanting at you to do something, and you do it … who’s in control, really?”

“I don’t think you’re like Virginia Seele.”

Nate laughs. This time he couldn’t stop himself beforehand, but he hopes Liam doesn’t take it the wrong way.

“No, you’re right. We’re different. Very, very different. I don’t sing or dance. And she’s much richer than I am. That’s for sure.”

Liam goes back to being quiet again.

“And Virginia Seele has something to say. I had something to say once, maybe, but I said goodbye to all that.”

Nate is late again. This time Monica doesn’t bother to mention it, but he knows it’ll be going into her database. Her ammunition stores. She’ll reference it later when she again accuses Nate of being absorbed in his work to the detriment of his personal life. Which is funny, because it’s only now that he started the new job that he’s really pushing himself.

“Is he listening to Virginia Seele again?” Monica frowns as Liam runs past her to his room.

“You don’t like him listening to her?”

“I don’t like the example she sets. Why?”

“When did he get the earbuds?”

“All the kids at school have them.”

“Virginia Seele is pretty interesting, actually.” Nate doesn’t know why he’s saying this. He feels like he’s being driven by a motor in his back. “Have you listened to any of it? It’s about how you have to turn yourself into something in response to others. To be a successful artist or entertainer, you’ve got to think about that. But if you go that route, then what’s left of you? If you reduce yourself into nothing but a machine for responding to other people, do you really have any kind of independent existence?”

Monica gives him a withering look. “Does this have something to do with your new company?”

“Maybe it does.”

“Wouldn’t that require knowing how to listen to people?”

There it is. He was waiting for that.

“I guess. I mean, there’s listening, which is what I was talking about, and there’s blindly molding yourself to be what other people want you to be, which is what I think some people mean when they say they want you to listen to them.”

On the drive home, Nate puts on Virginia Seele as loud as he wants. It’s funny, he thinks. He had such big ideas after the separation. He would get in shape, he would find someone new, he would rededicate himself to his craft. The new job initially seemed to be the first of a number of steps he would take to be the person he imagined he could become. But it wasn’t long before his transformation seemed to have stalled out. The chains of reality yanked him back to the sad truth: that he was a divorced dad who would set off alarm bells in everyone he knew if he opened his mouth about Virginia Seele again, no matter how much he thought there was something real in her work. He would keep his head down and go back to the office tomorrow morning, and if he did his job well, he would rinse himself out of the game he worked on completely. No room for any kind of individual taste in what amounted to a pure product, the perfect expression of its customers’ wishes.

Maybe that’s fine. Maybe the worldview of people like Andres is wrongheaded. Wasn’t there a kind of beauty to be found in annihilating yourself in service of the customer? In a total vacuum of artistic intent, you could achieve a kind of synchronization with your players that someone like Andres, who often thought of his audience in antagonistic terms, could never find. Nate was in the business of fulfilling wishes, the same as anyone who worked in an entertainment field. It was time to give up the pretense that he had something to say, something to broadcast to the world. Throughout history, some artists didn’t shape clay to create forms – they were the clay, beaten and distorted by the forces around them.

Nate realizes now that he was on this path before he knew it. He was farther down it than he’d let on to anyone, farther even than he could admit to himself outside of the house. All alone in a cavernous space he originally purchased with the idea he would raise a family, he might gradually lose hold of his mind, let it fall into fragments, let it be replaced by the noise of things.

One night he finds himself scrolling through Virginia Seele’s social accounts. He doesn’t remember the events that led him there, but now he taps “like” on every single post, as though it were a reflex. Is this sad? It’s certainly not a matter of hoping the artist herself would notice or care. There was simply a point where the gravity of her ideal became too powerful. It got him, that was all. Something is lost when that happens, but something is gained, too. Something important. In that heightened moment he can forget the fact that he is him, that he is pathetic. He sheds his neutral poise and starts to believe in something. From there, everything tumbles along at great speed. He only needs to follow the contract he makes with his audience, after all. It’s an ancient, inviolable compact, the same agreement that binds his employer to its fans, the same one that collapses the space between people and turns them into self-reinforcing entities with their own collective minds and memories.

Right now, Virginia Seele is becoming who you want her to be.

There is a yoga studio I go to in Chicago, on the third floor of an office building between a tax preparer and a wholesale jewelry importer. The elevator trembles when it moves and works only half the time. The glass doors are scratched and clouded, and when you push them open, the smell of fish and urine greets you. Inside, it’s too crowded; mats overlap, everyone’s belongings pile in corners, the air hangs heavy wi th palo santo, Nag Champa and sage. The teacher always speaks in a hush, as if the fluorescent light itself were sacred.

She plays ambient music and tells us things like “you are light-beings having a human experience.”

The building itself is unremarkable from the street: red brick, narrow windows suggesting decades of filing cabinets, and fluorescent overhead lights. It goes unnoticed in a city full of architecture demanding attention. But inside, on that third floor, there exists this pocket of intentional tranquility, this space carved from commercial banality.

The studio is small.

Even 15 people make it crowded. The carpet, the same carpet it must have had when it was what I always imagine as an actuary’s office, is worn from years of bare feet, and water stains mark the ceiling tiles. During Savasana, lying flat on our backs in corpse pose, I stare at those stains and think about the plumbing in the floors above us. The radiators clank and hiss. I can hear a toilet flushing. Outside, the Brown line passes, and the whole room trembles slightly, a reminder that we are not floating in some ethereal realm, but lying in an office building in Chicago. I take a deep breath and take in the smell – the urine, the fish, the faint odor of mold.

Sometimes I look at her and wish I could believe her without irony. I envy people who can find transcendence in recycled air. I know she’s wrong, and still, I want her to be right. There’s a kind of warmth in believing the impossible that I can almost feel before my knees jerk and dismantle it. What I mean is: I can see the appeal. I can feel it tugging at something in me, that desire to believe we are more than bodies. The teacher speaks with such conviction, such gentle certainty, that for moments at a time I can almost let myself slip into that worldview. Almost.

But then my mind catches itself, pulls back, insists on its skepticism.

There are highs people chase their whole lives, and mine is believing in bullshit with my whole heart. I crave a specific strain of bullshit, though: the kind that smells faintly of incense, that hides in strip malls between Massage Envys and vape shops. The kind sold by psychics who also sell leggings on Facebook Live and tell you the fabric contains sacred geometry. I’m drawn to the aesthetics of belief, to the visual and sensory language of the implausible. I collect it the way some people collect casual sex. I save screenshots of websites promising to realign your chakras for $19.99. I watch YouTube videos of energy healers who wave their hands over prone bodies and claim to be curing 3D tumors. I read testimonials about supplement websites where people swear that drinking structured water or taking iodine drops or eating beef liver has cured their anxiety, their insomnia and their existential dread.

I’m not immune to the appeal – I’m not just a tourist. I’m not on safari.

I’ve bought the crystals. They’ve spoken to me. I’ve burned sage in my home until the smoke detector went off. I’ve listened to binaural beats on my headphones, hoping for the promised altered states of consciousness. I have seen Reiki practitioners and done guided meditations.

But I have such doubts. Such unshakeable doubts.

I want more than anything to touch the place where belief lives. They are plate spinners, that circus act where someone keeps multiple plates rotating on top of long poles, running from pole to pole to give each plate another twist before it wobbles and falls. That’s what these belief systems feel like to me: precarious constructions kept aloft through constant effort and attention. I want to watch them in motion, to see how long they can stay up, to witness the exact moment when they begin to falter. Because they do falter. They always do. The law of gravity applies even to metaphysics.

Amy Carlson’s face was blue when she died. The colloidal silver did that, turned her skin that color. I’ve watched the HBO documentary twice, Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God. The footage shows her bloated, confused, livestreaming to followers she exhorted to call her “Mother God,” to call her Mom, to see her as God. She claimed to be a 19-billion-year-old deity who had been Cleopatra, Marilyn Monroe, Robin Williams, Saint Germain and Jesus Christ. They sold crystals and colloidal silver in streams that felt like a weedsoaked QVC. When she died, they wrapped her corpse in a sleeping bag and Christmas lights and waited for resurrection.

“The body was warm,” her followers insist. And you can tell, they still believe.

I love the way her followers spoke about her with such love and certainty.

They’re not monsters or even stupid – they’re not stupid at all. They’re people who wanted something to believe in, who wanted to be part of something more transcendent than themselves, who wanted a Mom who would never leave them.

Amy Carlson was not Mother God, though. She was a woman from Kansas who struggled with alcoholism, who gathered around her other struggling people and built a shared reality that eventually killed her. The colloidal silver turned her skin blue. The alcohol destroyed her liver. And when she died, her followers wrapped her body in a sleeping bag, put it in a back room, and kept livestreaming, kept selling crystals, kept insisting that she would return.

They kept her corpse for weeks.

Amy Carlson never did anything miraculous. She said she was God – and yet she did nothing, only streaming, only YouTube videos filmed at the foot of Mount Shasta or in Colorado or on the road, on the way to Hawaii, insisting that she was Pele, to mobs of angry Hawaiians.

She died as a person does, a 3D person. She slurred her words in the videos, her eyes unfocused, her movements uncoordinated. She raged at her followers, at the camera, at the world that wouldn’t believe in her, that wouldn’t raise its vibration. Near the end, she could barely move.

Her followers had to carry her to the bathroom, feed her, dress her. And still they called her God! Still they livestreamed her decline, framing it as “ascension,” as Mother God taking on the pain of humanity, as a sacrifice being made for us. The cognitive dissonance required to maintain this belief in the face of such obvious evidence is staggering. Belief doesn’t require evidence. It requires only the willingness to ignore evidence, to reframe it, to fit it into a narrative that preserves the core conviction.

Amy Carlson is dead, and she did not resurrect.

Her followers eventually had to contend with that fact, though some of them still haven’t. Some of them still maintain that her death was part of the plan, that she’s working on another dimensional plane to prepare for the next phase of ascension.

What a high – a life unhindered by doubt, when anything could be true. It’s the moment in yoga class when the teacher says we are beings of light and for a split second, I don’t automatically dismiss it. It’s the moment when I’m holding a crystal and think there’s something to this. It’s the moment when I read about quantum mysticism or sacred geometry and think that perhaps the universe is stranger than our rational minds can comprehend, that perhaps there are truths that science hasn’t yet discovered, that perhaps everything we think we know is just a thin layer of understanding over an infinite complexity. That moment, that suspension between skepticism and belief, is the high.

Echo Mehta was everywhere when I was at NYU. She was beautiful in a way that interrupted lectures, hovering at the edge of consciousness like someone you once loved and now can’t quite place. Her hair was dark and thick, always falling in front of her eyes, and she had a way of pushing it back that felt like a gesture from another era, something practiced in front of mirrors until it looked entirely natural. She wore vintage dresses, the kind you find in expensive Brooklyn thrift stores, and silver rings on most of her fingers. She smelled like cigarettes.

Everyone knew her or knew of her. She seemed to exist on a different plane than everyone else. She was someone who moves through the world with a kind of certainty and strangeness that makes them magnetic. She was always surrounded by people, and yet she never seemed entirely present with any of them. She gave you her attention like a gift, intense and focused, and then withdrew it just as suddenly, leaving you feeling like you’d lost something you never quite had. I was in love with her, the way everyone was in love with her, which is to say I was her captive audience.

She would talk about auras and past lives, about the Akashic records and the collective unconscious, about how our souls choose our traumas before we’re born so we can learn the lessons we need to learn. She said these things with absolute conviction, and people believed her, or wanted to believe her, or at least wanted to be the kind of people who could believe her. She made the most ridiculous claims feel so indelibly true.

She told me she could see spirits. She said she had memories of past lives: as a priestess in Atlantis, as a healer in ancient Egypt, as a young woman who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

She talked about moldavite, the green, glassy stone formed by meteorites. She said it could accelerate your spiritual evolution so fast it might ruin your life. She wore a piece around her neck that she’d shoplifted from a store in the East Village.

“They’re overcharging,” she said. “Moldavite wants to be free.”

Echo was a favorite of Saint Germain, the Ascended Master. She said he’d appeared to her since she was fourteen.

“They’re preparing specific people,” she told me. “Not everyone can handle the downloads.”

Echo had a secret Facebook group where she shared Pleiadian downloads. About 30 of us, mostly NYU grads working jobs we were overqualified for. I was an archival producer for American Experience, the PBS show, which sounds more impressive than it was. Mostly I watched old footage and wrote timestamps.

The parts of my life I remember with the most tenderness always involve unconditional acceptance of people like Echo. That yes, Echo was a starseed. That yes, these crystals contained ancient wisdom. That yes, the universe was desperately trying to communicate with me through angel numbers and parking spots.

Echo’s posts started gentle.

“The Pleiadians want you to know you’re loved.” “Your struggles are preparing you for your mission.” Then came the warnings. The dimensional shift. The purge.

“Not everyone will make it to New Earth,” she wrote one night at 3 a.m. “Millions will choose to exit rather than ascend. This is their soul contract. Do not mourn them.”

Once, Echo invited me to her apartment and served me golden milk. This was before you could buy golden milk at a coffee shop. Back when it was a special drink only Echo knew how to make, with dried roses floating to the top, and too much turmeric burning my mouth. She touched my forehead with her sticky hands, her face close to mine. Her breath smelled like cigarettes and rot.

“You’re opening your third eye too fast,” she told me. She said that my soul was from earth, not the stars. She held my hand. She burned sage and Nag Champa.

“When I met you, I didn’t think you were that energetically connected. You seemed dead inside. Like there was nothing there. But you’re not. You have it. You’re special.”

There was a woman in our group, Lauren, who had bipolar disorder. She stopped taking her medication because Echo said pharmaceuticals lowered your vibration. She gave away her furniture. She started calling estranged family members to tell them she’d see them in the next density if they made the cut.

Echo never broke character. I’d heard her on the phone with her mom, sounding completely normal, complaining about student loans. But when Lauren posted increasingly unhinged messages, Echo just responded with more Pleiadian wisdom.

The intervention came from David, this pudgy Marxist kid who’d joined partly as a joke and partly because he had a crush on Echo.

“This is fucked,” he told me over terrible coffee at Veselka. “Someone’s going to get hurt.”

I defended Echo. I said Lauren had her own issues. I said we all knew it was metaphorical.

What follows is blurry, maybe from shame. David screenshotted our conversations where I’d admitted to doubts, where I’d joked about Echo’s downloads. He shared them with the group. I was expelled first, my vibration too low for the coming shift. The betrayal felt physical, like something had been ripped out of my chest. The whole community collapsed within a week.

Lauren ended up hospitalized. David went back on everything he said, started posting about mercury retrograde. Echo mourned the loss, cryptic Facebook statuses about how she couldn’t trust people anymore. Sympathy pouring in from everywhere. From writers and models and Chloë Sevigny.

I missed the group immediately. Not the drama, but the feeling of being connected to something vast and mysterious. My ex-husband and I were living in Middle Village, Queens, in an apartment crawling with roaches, an hour from anything that mattered. Every day I’d watch WWI footage – I worked as an archival producer at PBS, in those days – then take the train home to nothing.

So I developed a ritual. Every day after work, instead of going straight home to Queens, I’d take the subway to Manhattan. Sometimes to Namaste Bookshop, sometimes to crystal stores on the Upper East Side where rich women bought amethyst geodes for their foyers. I’d stand in front of walls of tumbled stones, intuitively feeling their energies, waiting for one to call to me.

And they did call.

Even knowing it was bullshit, I could feel the rose quartz promising to heal my heart, the black tourmaline offering protection, the labradorite whispering about transformation. My checking account dwindled but my apartment filled with stones. Oracle decks in candy colors featuring mermaids and unicorns. Statues of deities I barely understood. Ganesh, who Echo had assured me was “the Hindu god who specifically comes to white people.” Quan Yin for compassion I couldn’t find anywhere else.

I felt, for brief moments, holding a piece of celestite up to the light or pulling a particularly synchronistic oracle card, like I could access whatever dimension Echo lived in. Like I could be that certain, that special, that magical.

A flaw of mine that’s only become worse as I’ve aged is that I don’t admire people, I envy them. My brain runs this constant calculation, a detailed accounting of who has what and why it’s OK I don’t have it. Why the karma works out. The calculations balance, but only briefly. The envy just finds new targets, metastasizes into new resentments.

But Echo inspired something different.

Later, when I briefly joined a Wiccan coven, so did Swann, the high priestess who ran things. With them, my place in the hierarchy was so clear that envy became impossible. They were teachers, I was student. And that’s how it should be, that’s how I liked it.

I think that’s what I’m always seeking: an authority so absolute it overrides my critical brain. But it has to feel earned. The coven fell apart when I met Elder High Priestess Ravyn. She shopped at Ulta and ate at Buffalo Wild Wings. She wore those transition lenses that never quite clear up indoors. Then she’d turn around and claim she was “of the fae,” of a special bloodline, while the rest of us were just boring humans who were shut out of the higher realms. So I left that too, politely, claiming work conflicts, and never went back.

People tell me to find Christ, that I’d like it there. But I am not a Christian either. I want magic.

Every ending is a false ending. I am still in purgatory. Last month I paid $75 to lie on the ground of a repurposed office space and hyperventilate while a woman in palazzo pants played a singing bowl. I cried so hard I thought I was dying. She said that was energy blockages leaving my body.

Sometimes, unable to sleep, I’ll see someone from those days, while scrolling. Once, I saw Echo dancing across my TikTok For You page. Still posting about starseed activations and twin flame journeys and the coming age of Aquarius. She’s an astrologer now.

There is a scene from the movie Doubt that plays in my mind every day. Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius, stern and certain, sitting across from Amy Adams’ young nun, Sister James. She’s spent the entire film righteous, unbending, wielding her certainty like armor. And then, in the final moment, her voice breaks.

“In the pursuit of wrongdoing, one steps away from God,” Sister Aloysius says. “Of course there is a price.”

The First Noel begins to play on the organ as they sit in the snow.

“Oh, Sister James …” she says, tender for the first time in the film.

“What is it sister?”

“I have doubts. I have such doubts.”

I think about Amy Carlson’s body in that sleeping bag and about Sister Aloysius crying. Each time I think, this one could be different. Each time I imagine myself stepping into a world where human existence has a purpose. Where there is infinite goodness. The hope feels clean, almost holy, and then it goes away.

I tell myself I’ll stop looking. I never do. Still, I listen. And still, I am investigating. Always investigating.

Bi Gan’s sweeping Resurrection (2025) is a 20th-century epic that considers a timeworn cinematic trope: cinema as a dreamlike experience, as necessary and natural to life as dreaming itself. The film recalls Federico Fellini’s pronouncement that “talking about dreams is like talking about movies,” wherein “years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another.”

As in dreams, every object or scene has the potential to mean something, though Resurrection’s nested narrative structure – consisting of five stylistically distinct and loosely linked chapters – resists both meaning and climax as vehicles for revelation. Unlike Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut or Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, which refuse to demarcate between dream and reality, Gan’s film repeatedly insists on its oneirism without fully yielding to the subconscious’s impenetrable chaos. The film operates on a pseudo-Freudian register of shifting symbols and moods, where settings and characters function as fleeting archetypes for Gan to showcase his technical prowess. Resurrection weaves together an impressive pastiche of styles – from silent cinema to film noir to Hong Kong art-house – in an earnest ode to the medium, though the film ultimately strains under the weight of its ambitious symbolism.

Still, an ecstatic maximalism pulses through the lens, and Gan’s skill is undeniable. Certain mesmerizing scenes have the effect of searing themselves into the viewer’s memory: the German Expressionist-style opium den with tilted walls and twisted staircases; a top-down shot of bloodied hands plucking a theremin; the serene surface of a petal-covered pond; and a lingering long take that trails a young couple through a maze of dilapidated warehouses. The succession of striking tableaux is the film’s greatest strength, highlighting the Romantic thrust of Gan’s project. Beauty is its driving force and primary preoccupation, even as Gan claims to probe deeper. “What do we want subconsciously? That’s what we neglect today in the cinema world,” the director said in an interview with Film Comment, bemoaning the societal urge to “control our illusions, our brains … our dreams.”

Resurrection asks the viewer to surrender these learned impulses. The film is based on an intriguing idea: If cinema is a reflection of our dreams (and dreams, in turn, are cinema), what happens in a world deprived of dreams? In this post-reverie future, most humans have opted to stop dreaming to prolong their lives. (One could interpret this as an allegory of a hyper-capitalist society that’s sworn off art and other “unproductive” activities.) Those who continue to are called Fantasmers, underground rebels whose dream-locked lives threaten to bring disorder to society. These dreamers are being hunted by a group called the Big Others, who are tasked with preserving the linear order of reality.

Resurrection opens in the style of a silent film, with the origins and ideology of this dreamless society explained through title cards. We are introduced to an unnamed female Big Other (Shu Qi) pursuing a withered Fantasmer (Jackson Yee), a movie-monster-like figure who resembles Nosferatu. This chapter, which forms the narrative backbone that contains all the other sections, serves as a sumptuous showcase of the film’s aesthetic ambition. The elaborate production design pays homage to a range of silent movies like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and A Trip to the Moon, and the Big Other is shown to be a kind of director, a feminine proxy for Gan to further his allegory.

As the woman descends further into the Fantasmer’s stylized dreamworld, her supernatural abilities allow her to alter his dreamscape. She moves at a different frame rate than everyone else on screen. Twenty minutes in, diegetic sound appears when the woman speaks of her feelings for the Fantasmer. She pities him and knows that he is dying. The Fantasmer has a projector lodged in the back of his body, which allows him to anatomically experience film. The woman tenderly fixes him up and gives him – and by extension, the audience – a new reel of film to inhabit.

From here, the post-reverie narrative stalls for the film to launch into its series of movies within the movie, all featuring Yee’s Fantasmer in some guise. Each segment is also defined by one of the five senses. In the first chapter, the Fantasmer is a tortured prisoner in a wartime spy thriller accused of murdering a musician. He is held captive by a detective on the hunt for the musician’s suitcase. The relationship between the prisoner/ Fantasmer, the musician and the detective is nebulous: Flashbacks suggest the musician may have been trying to kill both himself and the Fantasmer on train tracks, but the Fantasmer flees by stabbing the musician in the ear. Of all the sequences, this one perhaps adheres most closely to the logic of dreams, in both imagery and unsettling coherence. The detective and the prisoner engage in a Lady From Shanghai-style shootout in a mirror shop, which ends with the detective finally claiming the suitcase. He opens it to find a theremin – but before he plays it, the detective stabs himself in the ear.

In the second chapter, the Fantasmer is an impoverished day laborer. His work brings him to a Buddhist temple, where he accidentally summons a deity after biting on a rock. The third chapter is a Paper Moon-like tale of a down-on-his-luck con man who teaches a young girl his tricks. They pair up to convince a wealthy scion that the girl has supernatural abilities; she can successfully identify a card from a deck using only her sense of smell. The final story takes place on 1999 New Year’s Eve, filmed in Gan’s signature long take. Here, the Fantasmer is a drifter who encounters Tai Zhaomei, a young woman (Li Gengxi) with mob connections, and trails her through the city. The extended tracking shot mimics the hyperrealistic dynamism of a role-playing video game. At times, the camera is quite literally on the couple’s heels as they walk through dilapidated warehouses and curved alleyways toward the karaoke bar where Zhaomei’s mob-boss lover (Mark Chao) is hosting a party.

By the fourth chapter, it’s become clear that Resurrection abides by its own digressive dream logic. Narratively speaking, anything goes. Dead characters are inexplicably revived and spirits are summoned. Zhaomei breaks into melancholic song before escaping with the Fantasmer on a boat, where she’s revealed to be a vampire and bites his neck. I was not so much troubled by the incomprehensible nature of this, or any narrative discrepancies in the individual stories. Rather, it was the film’s attempt to suture the vignettes into something unifying and profound that undercut its aesthetic aims. Gan felt that the film needed “a more complicated structure for the ending to make sense.” Yet its peripatetic nature seemed intent on depriving viewers of the sense of revelation or “resurrection” that the title alludes to.

The only consistent character is the shape-shifting Fantasmer, a cinematic entity that unites these loose narratives but is vacant of any dreams or desires. Without a fixed sense of character, the Fantasmer’s passive itinerancy becomes his defining feature. Perhaps it is to Gan’s point that cinema distracts us from death (or makes life bearable and therefore worth living), as the Fantasmer has been dying the whole time. But his fate feels increasingly unimportant with each passing vignette, so long as he inhabits a different character for the film to continue. As a result, the ending feels disoriented and inconclusive, as if Gan had, like the Big Other, simply run out of footage to keep going. Resurrection never moves beyond this initial proposition that cinema, like dreams, is essential to life. This is not to discount its breathtaking scope and beauty, but its visual achievements fail to amount to an emotional crescendo, a pure moment of intuited truth. What Gan forgoes, through his formal experimentation, is the dramatic stakes and emotional involvement that makes a film feel essential. Such a feeling is rare, but unforgettable: becoming so absorbed into a cinematic reality that a character’s emotions feel like an extension of your own.

I love the way lemons arrive as if from a book, 
fall sweet to bitter from a myth into liquor –

I love the way when citrus undresses
it can never be clothed again, as in conversation

when my words go just a little too far 
and you eat the garnish from my glass. 

No going back. At some point in sculpting 
his Pietà, Michelangelo hammered a bit too much, 

then stopped, as all artists must. It is finished, 
he might have said, the surprise of failed intent 

how it’s possible to worship imperfection. I would never 
dream of changing you, I say, in the late hours, 

when exhausted I have let go all judgment 
and our skin falls back against the sheets, 

the ripple of a crisp morning lake, and the bed 
like a hand holds us steady on the water.

[Image credits: ‘Citron’ (c. 1715) by Bartolomeo Bimbi; ‘The Pietà’ (1498–1499) by Michelangelo; ‘Resting Girl’ (1753) by François Boucher]

I once stayed in a desperately normal suburban home, friend of a friend, while on a road trip to Austin. The couple had two kids and the dad liked Dragonball Z and the mom liked sangria.

After a few, they, to my great surprise, pulled out vials of blood that were hanging around their necks. “We’re vampires,” they told me. “Our master is very powerful. He lives in the cul-de-sac over.” They, apparently, never told anyone about this dark secret, but they trusted me. I wondered if it would be possible to change the subject back to Dragonball Z. “So, yeah, Vegeta is an interesting character…”

I left as soon as I woke up, passing a hundred homes exactly like theirs, as they faded back into the repeating patterns, lost in bleak anonymity. I could not find these people again if I had a gun to my head.

There’s a sort of truism that goes something like “If you think everyone is boring, it might be you.” More to the point, if you pay real attention to people, they will, almost without fail, shock you with their weirdness. It is the reason truth is stranger than fiction – you can’t, as it were, make this stuff up. If I hadn’t witnessed the opening scene, I would think it was “not believable” enough for a story like this. So it goes…

I hope you will notice that you are also not an exception to this rule: Everyone thinks they hold the most reasonable set of public beliefs and yet have a few secret beliefs they believe everyone is simply not “enlightened” enough to understand. What we fail to notice is that this pair of beliefs – light and shadow – are not independent, but a reflection of each other. Greatness demands their open war.

And here, I think, we land on the heart of the issue: If you, for example, live in a soul-crushing suburb that denies the reality of transcendence and instead only fulfills the bodily desire for comfort and physical security, you will act out the reality of transcendence in a negative way by worshipping some weird vampire lord of the HOA, who is heavily implied to be sleeping with everyone’s wives.

That is to say, for one, we all demand to take part in a great struggle of the age. In fact, I find, the more “normally” you have managed to shape yourself, the greater the cry for transcendence and the weirder the ignored call twists you.

Did you know Jack Kerouac, the famously anti-suburban rambling man of white-hot authenticity, lived for long stretches with his mother in the suburbs?

Here, we have the same heartbreaking normalcy as our vampire couple, but the by-product is wildly different. Kerouac started an entire movement – the tone of a generation of beatniks as a result of his shadow’s revolt against the brutal regularity of his homeland. He, for whatever reason, resisted the temptation to fall into some rinky-dink sex-taboo fixation that might have wasted his powers. His lust, more than for most, instead came out as great sentences organized into a wild book, which takes decades of practice and restraint.

This, I think, outlines the great chasm between Jack Kerouac and the rest of us: the ability to consciously wiggle our shadow behaviors and beliefs into the light, in the guise of a life’s work. It speaks to two things at once: It gives an explanation for why “normal” people tend to hide such strangeness, and it also means that this exact strangeness is greatness, misused. Kerouac transmuted the shadow into sentences. Most of us transmute it into private browser tabs.

This is the sad but also hopeful fate of the vast majority of people. Sad because nearly everyone wastes away their vitality by the twin songs of porn and envy, both of which are increasingly available on their phones. They scroll and scroll, unwilling to reveal to anyone what they spend the vast majority of their day peeping at, knowing in their bones that it is shameful, but finding great relief by that exact reveling in taboo, but therefore draining all the blood from their public persona, which becomes hollower, shallower and “nicer” all the time.

These days, taking the time to go to a suburban vampire meeting would be an enormous improvement over the mind-melting ubiquity of porn (and by this I mean broadly anything that you would be ashamed to have show up in your history) and otherwise looking at things that make you envious, by no coincidence, slowly hunching you over your glowing precious.

Hopeful, though, because, if you want to know where all the greatness you once hoped for yourself has gone, it’s clearly been sucked into your phone. It is not because of the phone, though. The phone just capitalizes on age-old spiritual masturbation by making it as frictionless as it has ever been.

This is an unbearable realization, because if you try to stop, you will realize that you can’t. Your persona can’t survive without its shadowy twin, and so both must die and be reborn. Practically, that means you have to relearn almost everything you do, like a stroke victim. Like the smoker who “can stop whenever he wants,” but actually can’t. Our public persona – even though it feels independent right now – actually depends on the shadow to exist and therefore both would change beyond recognition if integrated. The only way forward is to learn, little by little, to suffer withdrawals and, in the midst of the pain, feed the beast a scrap of something new – write that book or look into seminary. It takes time.

What emerges is work and a life that 1) does not elicit shame and 2) is still so authentic that it makes the sneering inner vampires fully quenched in their bloodlust. Something that makes people go, “Wow, I’ve always felt this way, but I could never express it.”

Being obsessively normal does not, then, mean living repressed in a suburb (or whatever sort of hell “normal” may or may not mean to you). That would only serve to make you secretly stranger. Being obsessively normal means, instead, to bring full-force authenticity to every mundane act of your life, and thereby make it mundane no more. If you’re a teacher, say, making each lesson somehow both terribly strange and yet infinitely recognizable, and so brand-new again. You gain the energy to do that by aggressively guarding yourself against any beliefs or behaviors that you yourself know to be shameful.

Once you set your teeth to do this – and you know this if you’ve ever really tried – you find that it is impossible. You need help. So, you also have to learn to ask for it. It’s even more humiliating than it sounds, actually, but at least then we know in which direction greatness lies. That alone is a great relief.

In short, greatness means bringing your inner suburban vampire into the light. What will rise from the ashes will not be another vampire, though, but a bird.

Pablo Picasso created over 50,000 pieces in his lifetime – paintings and drawings and sculptures and ceramics and collages – each one proof of a voracious obsession that devoured him in the service of creation. Art, for him, was never egalitarian; it was ruled by necessity and it overtook him in the form of obsession. In 1963, on the back cover of a sketchbook, he wrote, “Painting is stronger than me; it makes me do what it wants me to do.”

Obsession never asks permission of taste, tradition or public opinion. The word itself comes from the Latin, obsidēre, meaning to sit down before a city, to blockade it, to besiege it. Obsession does not care about balance or distribution: It seizes, it commands, it transforms. Creation does not emerge from consensus or moderation but from the violence of a singular vision imposed without compromise, because obsession is never a negotiation.

And what is obsession if not also a surrender, a giving over of the self to something larger?

La petite mort is a French expression that describes the feeling of a brief loss of consciousness post-orgasm; it means “the little death.” It implies that fleeting moments of intensity happen alongside annihilation, and that when the self vanishes and the ego dies, something grander – more powerful, more important – takes hold. Intensity is about disappearance: At the peak of what we’re capable of feeling, we dissolve into the thing we’re doing, we let our obsession capture us. Obsession is not discipline’s doppelgänger or talent’s twin; it’s the state of being where you choose not to return from your little death and instead surrender to the monomania of creating something that could never have come from moderation at all. “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction,” said Picasso.

The present culture says balance is our salvation: Eat a salad but also indulge in a burger, work for eight hours but also do something unrelated on the weekend, count your breaths and steps and hours of sleep. Balance is ergonomic, inoffensive, and designed to prevent collapse. The balanced person is never destroyed, but also never rebirthed; they live on the lukewarm shore, safe but shallow. Balance is about distributing your energy evenly to make sure nothing overwhelms – it’s the default philosophy of the accountant and the dietitian. Balance is the kind of advice we give when we just don’t care that much: drink enough water, touch more grass, pursue hobbies.

Balance is about survival, yet we all know that survival isn’t enough. Everywhere we go, we look for a taste of the absolute, some fracture in the ordinary through which the infinite might pour – so why settle and shrink into safety when the whole demand of being is to exceed itself?

The human being walks upright. We are the only animal that operates on the vertical axis, and our existential posture reflects our anatomical one, reaching upward for what exceeds the temporal, material and profane dimensions of the universe we swim in. We’re the only species enraptured by beauty as if it were the fingers of God reaching down from where we came from, reminding us that our toil is not just for survival but for culture, significance, mythos and connection. We’re the only beings with an appetite for meaning beyond information, for revelation beyond stimulation.

Obsession is the duty of the bipedal because standing up is a declaration, a refusal to be neutral or passive. Obsession is the refusal of grazing, wandering, and scrolling. Obsession never compares to what’s on its left and right; instead, it looks up. It’s not just the Nietzschean will to power; it’s the Olympian will to transcend, to fixate on one thing, to ignore all false idols and draw the whole self toward a singular high-fidelity purpose. Obsession says: this, and not that; here, not anywhere. And if not this, then give me nothing at all. Obsession: Abandon all hope, ye who enter…

An upward spiral, obsession has no work-life balance, because the right work – the kind that stokes the fire in your chest, wakes you up in the morning with ambition and passion, demands your best from you – will tip your life out of balance in the most chaotic yet exuberant way possible. Without obsession, you’ll wake up one day and realize you’ve been living the life you settled for and not the one you truly wanted.

Balance does not create prima ballerinas or star athletes; it does not produce Beethovens or Kafkas or Bourdains. A philosophy of moderation did not lead to the RMS Titanic, the design of the martini glass, the Mongolian conquest, the prized Persian cat, or the Cologne Cathedral. Moderation did not send man to the moon. Moderation did not invent the electric vehicle. Moderation did not abolish slavery. The future is created in the image of the obsessed: Every change in the world is somebody’s will made visible, somebody who, through time and talent and dedication, cannibalized themselves until nothing was left but the bones of a symphony, a company, a novel, an invention.

Where moderation keeps the self intact and secure, obsession kamikazes you into your most excruciating passion, demanding that everything you are must be remade in the shape of your calling. Creation requires distortion. Only when attention is narrowed and driven beyond measure does it pierce the surface of the ordinary. What looks like imbalance is actually the price of making anything that endures. Obsession is the feeling that everything irrelevant must fade out of focus, that social hours are only detours, that meals are only interruptions, and that only one thing matters. Plato called it “mania,” the gifts that lift the soul beyond reason, the frenzy that makes the poet sing, the lover risk, the thinker glimpse beyond the human. Obsession, though commonly associated with the tortured artist or the fanatic, is actually the precondition for all craft.

Anyone who has dared to lean into their obsession has sampled the flight of Icarus firsthand, the feeling of flying across heaven’s yawning mouth, seeing eye to eye with that angry yolk, its golden arteries of light spilling across a comatose, dream-drunk sky, and looking down at all those who are too scared to pursue their ultimate vocation – those who let their dreams die before they do are those who die many times before their death. In your bravest vision, everything is imaginable, and everything that’s imaginable is doable, and you’re the one to do it. A puritan’s piety – sheepish acceptance of the status quo – is rarer in your brave new world than penguins in the Sahara.

Obsession is a hand outstretched in the clouds, seeking for some touch of grace that will transform it into a hand that bestows gifts. Obsession is a solo attempt to cast oneself into the glowing aura of something eternal; it’s an invitation to let the muses speak through you. To create from the soul is to be utterly consumed in it, all to fit the infinite radiance of something holy into the frail little cradle of your own worldly existence. It’s why museums, art galleries and libraries are like temples: They’re buildings to which people pilgrimage so they can marvel at things that remind them they are but a speck in the grand history of a species that has been reaching for everlasting and indestructible love for a long, long time.

It’s either obsession or oblivion: all, or nothing. In the end, only the things created out of our obsessions can capture our imagination forever.

Can fiction become a form of receptacle, or reliquary? Here are two novels about attempts to store unstable objects. In Bora Chung’s The Midnight Timetable, the Institute is home to a selection of haunted items: a tennis shoe, a handkerchief, a cat that should really have been killed by the nail sticking out of its fur. And in There Is No Antimimetics Division, by Sam Hughes, a writer and programmer who works under the pen name qntm, the Organization has a whole department devoted to the containment of ideas and entities that come with “self-censoring” qualities. These “antimemes” shape the world around us but avoid any kind of purchase in our memories or perceptions.

Both the Organization and the Institute are examples of the kind of pulpy, paranoid spaces that Amy Scattergood invokes so luminously in her poem “The Ministry of Truth”:

Inside the locked doors 
a library of telephone books 
from each foot-thick metropolis to the pioneer shacks. 
Every day phones ring.

They are also, as many reviewers have pointed out, timely incarnations of the classic haunted house – both offer a series of rooms in which strange things might happen. And frequently they do.

Chung’s novel is, superficially at least, the more traditional of the two. In the book’s afterword, she suggests that ghost stories are a handy option for writers whenever they’re otherwise blocked, and these are, indeed, all ghost stories in the first reading. It’s not hard to think of each one as a nudge or prompt to get the mind working on a chilly morning. One after another, every story is built around an object in the Institute’s rooms that has unresolved emotions and meaning attached to it. It’s a Freudian approach to haunting: The past holds a terrible controlling power over the present.

And so that handkerchief leads us into the story of a family pulled apart by a pathologically selfish sibling, while the story that starts with the tennis shoe ends with the quiet unraveling of a social media streamer. The final episode in the novel makes the connection between physical items and their tethered ghosts entirely clear, in fact: Once a month the Institute’s noctivagant staff turn up for work in the daylight hours, and air all the items out on the lawn in order to expedite “the freeing of those that haunt the objects.”

In Antimimetics Division, however, things are initially more fraught. The risk inherent in running an organization that seeks to contain objects that can’t be remembered is a kind of institutional dementia. Marie Quinn, who is probably no longer aware how much time she’s served in her role tackling antimemes, is only dimly aware that her staff at the Organization continues to get smaller as people forget their jobs. Whole pieces of de - partmental infrastructure disappear suddenly when antimemes eat the memories of their existence. Plans for containing specific antimemes are made and remade, enacted and reenacted over the course of decades because the results cannot stick in the mind.

Agents are left to discover traces of their own past experiences, driven forward by promising gaps rather than the memories themselves, which no longer exist. “There are ideas that can’t be spread,” Quinn explains early on. “There are entities and phenomena that harvest and consume information, particularly information about themselves. You take a Polaroid photo of one, it’ll never develop. You write a description down with a pen on paper and hand it to someone, but what you’ve written turns out to be hieroglyphs ...”

Despite the differences in approach, Chung and Hughes have to contend with the fact that there is nothing in life quite so unstable as a story that’s in the process of being told. And so along with their cursed artifacts, both authors must engage with the maddening way that narrative wriggles around when you try to get it to behave.

For Chung, this leads to a kind of blending effect. The items in her Institute inevitably lead the reader out into the wider world. Once freed from its confines, that tennis shoe, or that handkerchief, is able to travel through time and space and even the porous borders of individual narratives. The Institute’s staff become protagonists as well as custodians: One must deal with an endlessly telescoping tunnel as they drive home from work, while another receives lottery results in advance from a telepathic sheep. The handkerchief is both a desired treasure that destroys a contemporary family and an object from the distant past, created as a gift for a bride-to-be. More than anything, it’s an object that just keeps turning in up in unexpected places.

And for Hughes, an opposite force is at work. Antimimetics Division began life as a serial fiction on the website of the SCP Foundation. This is a wiki-based “collaborative writing project” in which people from all over the world come together to add their own store of paranormal items, along with their histories and instructions on how to contain them, to the website’s archive. But Hughes reworked the book prior to Del Rey’s republication, and in doing so he tinkered with the structure, clarifying that it’s a novel rather than a series of stories. But somewhere along the way, a quietly stabilizing effect has creeped in too, and this is a shame.

Taken in small chunks, Hughes’ tales excel at wrong-footing the reader. Narrators turn out to be unreliable, simply because they cannot remember the details of what they’re doing for very long. A bureaucrat’s aide turns out to be an infiltrating specter in one story, while a woman must scrub away the memory of her marriage to save her husband in another. These moments work beautifully as vignettes.

But for a novel, the narrative must often build in the telling, and as the threat posed by the anti-memes grows more apocalyptic, even a story as strange as Hughes’ finds itself slipping into familiar beats. As the third act looms, there are protagonists and antagonists handily established. There’s a world-ending disaster looming and there’s a desperate plan in place to avert it. It doesn’t really matter what the flavor of horror is anymore, because the story has succumbed to the comfort of familiar beats and a timeworn Hollywood structure.

Is this a disappointment? Perhaps a slight one. But it may also be part of both books’ real message. Stories, Chung and Hughes can testify, are the ultimate unstable element. They are as uncanny as things get. Any attempt to store them or organize them may change them forever. Ultimately, then, both these spooky books are twice haunted, firstly by the horrors that lurk in the archives, and then by narrative, and by structure, and by all the tricks we have learned and unlearned over the centuries of telling ghost stories in the middle of the night.

At a meeting of a North American college speedrunning club in the late 2010s, introductions went around the circle. How did you get into this? Which video games do you follow? Which world record would you personally like to shatter? One by one, the students explained the origins of their obsession with completing video games against the clock.

One mentioned Punch-Out!!, a game famously suited to speedrunning. Another cited Andrew G, a pioneering figure in early Super Mario Bros. runs, whose fraction-of-a-second world bests helped define the discipline. A third said that he had followed Games Done Quick, the long-running charity event in which speedrunners perform live marathons for vast online audiences. Others nodded along. Then two or three people in the circle offered the same answer: They’d fallen into the speedrunning hobby via a YouTube channel that charts the history and evolution of world records.

The group was unaware, but Summoning Salt, the founder of that channel – and, in fact, founder of the club they had all just joined – was sitting among them. He was still a teenager at the time, but his online handle, “Salt,” had already become synonymous with the speedrunning scene, thanks to his brisk, meticulously structured documentaries. He chose, however, to not reveal his identity. Salt simply smiled politely and let the moment pass.

Today, Salt, as he is known to the 2-million-or-so subscribers to his channel, remains bafflingly coy for an individual whose audience rivals in size many of the most-viewed television shows. His peculiar combination of documentarian, historian, and internet personality has made him widely known. And yet, when we talk over Zoom, he declines to share his real name, and will only confirm, somewhat apologetically, that he is in his 20s and lives in Oregon. He explains that it took him nearly a decade to feel comfortable enough to perform, in June 2025, what’s known in the YouTube business as a “face reveal.” Until then, to his devoted audience, he was no more than a soft-spoken (albeit commanding), disembodied voice.

Part of that shyness comes, perhaps, from the fact that Salt never intended to become internet famous. He studied economics at university (which one, he won’t say), with a special emphasis on business studies. These academic choices felt, to him, arbitrary rather than intentional, the sort of path expected of a young man of his circumstances finding a way into the world. He became interested in speedrunning when he started watching videos uploaded by Sinister1, a speedrunner who made a name for himself by expertly playing games while blindfolded.

Speedrunners, Salt learned via Sinister1, are players who approach video games less as entertainment than as competitive systems to be mastered. They train in the same way as professional athletes by memorizing optimal routes, drilling precise inputs, and developing strategies that minimize risk and maximize speed. The goal is not simply to finish a video game quickly, but to play it perfectly, or as close to perfectly as human anatomy allows. Progress is measured in vanishingly small increments: a second shaved here, a frame of animation saved there. Yet these infinitesimal gains accumulate, and by the time a record falls it often carries the drama of any major sporting upset.

One of Sinister1’s favorite games, Punch-Out!!, particularly appealed to Salt. “It has these bright, really big sprites that are beautiful,” he told me. So, he downloaded a copy of the NES game, which was first released in North America in 1987, years before Salt was born. He was astonished to discover he’d picked up many effective techniques for playing the game simply by watching speedrunning videos. The experience of acquiring skill indirectly, through observation rather than instruction, felt revelatory. It suggested that expertise could be transmitted through careful watching, and that the logic of mastery could be made legible to outsiders.

While Salt enjoyed playing video games through a new lens, he soon realized he enjoyed learning about how records were broken much more than attempting to break them himself. He watched a two-hour-long video from 2013 in which Sinister1 offered his viewers a detailed history of the Punch-Out!! world record, that is, the fastest verified time in which a player reached the game’s end credits. “Sinister charted the world record from the early days of the ’80s, examining how the strategy had evolved,” Salt recalled. “I thought it was the coolest video I’d ever seen.”

An idea formed in his mind. What if he took this concept of charting the history of a world-beating attempt, but condensed the story down to 15 minutes or so, something more accessible to online viewers? So, he opened a new YouTube channel. When it came to giving his new venture a name, he remembered an old online video he’d watched in which the presenter opened a 30-year-old tin of spaghetti. While reading aloud the list of ingredients, the man misread “seasoning salt” as “summoning salt.”

“That phrase stuck in my head,” Salt said.

Salt’s first video, about Punch-Out!!, attracted only a few thousand views. But the feedback was good. “A lot of people told me: ‘Wow, what a great idea,’” he recalled. For his second upload, Salt examined Super Mario Bros. Overnight he saw his subscriber numbers double. Within a few days the video had earned a few hundred thousand views. Salt’s popularity began to snowball. Then, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and people had more free time to dedicate to following eccentric pursuits like speedrunning video games, Salt’s channel passed a million subscribers.

He quit his job (which one, he won’t say), and his hobby became his vocation.

Speedrunning long predates the word itself. Players were racing to complete games as quickly as possible as early as the 1980s, particularly on arcade machines and home consoles. At the time, however, the practice went unnamed. The term “speedrun” only entered the lexicon in the mid-’90s, emerging from early PC communities built around games like Doom, where players shared videos of their fastest completions. By the early 2000s, as online archives and leaderboards began to formalize competition across multiple games, “speedrunning” had solidified as the catchall label for a hobby that had already been thriving for years.

While the act of speedrunning can look, from the outside, faintly absurd, it obeys a strict internal logic. Speedrunners exploit the fact that video games are, like ours, worlds built upon systems. Beneath the pixels, games run on timers, counters, and invisible rules. If those rules can be bent – by entering a pipe at the wrong angle, by forcing the screen to scroll a pixel too far, by triggering a calculation the designers never anticipated – time can be saved. Sometimes a little. Sometimes a lot.

In Elden Ring, for example, a vast open-world role-playing game that can take the average player 50 hours or more to complete, speedrunners discovered what became known as the “chainsaw glitch.” By using a precisely timed input sequence, players were able to manipulate the game’s attack calculations, effectively transforming an ordinary weapon into a rapid-fire instrument capable of destroying bosses in seconds. In September 2022, the runner “FirstTwoWeeks” used the glitch to complete the game in just 19 minutes and 49 seconds. What had been envisioned by director Hidetaka Miyazaki as an arduous journey through a punishing fantasy world was reduced to a tightly choreographed burst of system manipulation, shaving dozens of hours from the intended experience.

Progress like this rarely comes smoothly. Instead, speedrunning history typically advances in jolts. There are prolonged periods of stagnation interrupted by sudden conceptual breakthroughs. Someone notices something others have overlooked. A constraint dissolves. The record falls. Then the slow work of refinement begins again.

On the surface, Salt’s films are about old games and microscopic optimizations: a jump executed one frame earlier, a pixel-perfect landing, a timer nudged forward by a 60th of a second. But their real subject is not technology so much as people. What Salt charts, patiently and with keen narrative sympathy, is how human beings congregate around the smallest imaginable targets and worry at them for years, sometimes decades, until nothing more can be taken.

One of the most widely celebrated moments in modern athletics came in 1968, when Dick Fosbury unveiled a new way of clearing the high jump bar. Until then, jumpers attacked the obstacle face-on, scissoring or rolling their bodies over it in increasingly marginal refinements of the same basic idea. Fosbury approached the problem differently. He curved his run-up, turned his back to the bar, and arched over it headfirst. The technique, which was soon dubbed the Fosbury Flop, looked ungainly, almost like a mistake. But it worked and within a decade it had rendered every previous method obsolete. The bar had not changed. The athlete’s understanding of how to pass over it had.

Speedrunning has its own Fosbury moments. Each game, no matter how old or apparently exhausted, contains the possibility of being reimagined by someone willing to ask a slightly different question of it. Runners of Super Mario 64 discovered that by long-jumping backward against certain walls and staircases, Mario could gain so much speed that he could break the laws of physics, passing through locked doors and otherwise impassable walls, allowing players to bypass entire swathes of the game. In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a single misloaded cutscene, later dubbed a “wrong warp,” collapsed a sprawling adventure into a brief prelude to the end credits.

More recently, competitive Tetris was transformed when players developed a new way of manipulating the controller that shattered long-standing score ceilings. In each case, the breakthrough did not merely improve a winning time; it invalidated the terms on which records had previously been pursued.

Salt recognized that speedrunning history is built from these ruptures, tiny revolutions that redefine what mastery looks like, and soon discovered a talent for identifying when these technical histories contain narrative shape, and then making that shape legible.

“He found a format that shows people the most exciting parts of speedrunning while also telling a story,” said Beck Abney, a speedrunner known to the community as Abney317, who specializes in the 1996 game Mario Kart 64, and has been featured on Salt’s channel. “People can look up the videos, but without the background and story that Salt provides, viewers wouldn’t know what it took to achieve those records.”

History was Salt’s favorite subject at school, he told me, and it felt natural to combine that interest with storytelling. Each video begins as an act of excavation. “I look at the record timeline,” he said. “How many people are involved? Is there a rivalry? Are there big technique shifts?”

Matt Merkle, Games Done Quick’s director of operations, told me that Salt’s work is part of a broader effort to preserve a culture that has historically been fragile. Records fall, forums disappear, runners move on. What Salt provides, he suggested, is history rendered in a way that people want to watch, and therefore remember. That shift, Merkle noted, has encouraged more communities to take their own pasts seriously, maintaining archives and leaderboards with an awareness that today’s marginal gains may one day be a historian’s primary source material.

Indeed, Salt told me he studies old runs, forum archives and leaderboard data, then contacts the runners themselves – many of whom are surprised, years later, to find that their teenage fixations have acquired a historical weight. He checks interpretations, verifies mechanics and cross-references memory against footage. Errors he made in early videos taught him caution. These days, he consults widely with others in the scene before pressing publish on a new video.

In part, Salt exercises caution because so much of the history itself is contested, existing in liminal spaces on the internet, where it can be difficult to separate fact from mythmaking. Speedrunning is not a subculture built on fame. Many of its most consequential figures are anonymous handles, long retired, their achievements preserved only in forum posts and grainy video uploads. Salt’s work functions, in effect, as an act of recovery: an effort to turn scattered, obsessive labor into coherent folk history. He does not merely document the scene. He interprets it, shaping chaos into story, competition into meaning.

It’s contemplative, intricate work and often what eventually emerges is a true drama: Rivalries flare and fade, lone figures push far ahead of the pack, techniques arrive too early to be fully appreciated. Salt thinks carefully about pacing in his videos, when to linger, when to accelerate, when to allow a breakthrough to arrive suddenly. “You want viewers guessing what’s coming next,” he said, “but without lying about what happened.”

Salt occupies a curious position. He is not quite an insider (he no longer chases any records himself) but neither is he a detached observer. His authority comes from immersion. He often lives, for months at a time, inside other people’s obsessions. The cost of that intimacy is real. Each film requires hundreds of hours of solitary work, attention tuned to vanishingly trivial differences.

In a world crowded with urgent problems, speedrunning can seem like a marginal, trivial pursuit. Undeniably, the hobby demands an immense devotion of time and intellect to games most people finished, or abandoned, long ago. But the pursuit of video-game records belongs to a much older human tradition. For as long as there have been boundaries, people have tested themselves against them, measuring strength, endurance and ingenuity against the limits of terrain, body and law. Speedrunners do the same, only their arenas are digital ones, governed by unfamiliar calibrations of physics, time and gravity.

The obstacles are invisible, the margins infinitesimal, the victories often legible only to the initiated. And yet the impulse is recognizable: to see how far a system can be pushed and, of course, to climb to the summit of the leaderboard, the organizing structure around which so much competition takes shape.

For Sinister1, the speedrunner known for playing games while blindfolded, seeing Salt build a career from a format he had once explored has been a source of deep satisfaction. “I’m proud to have been a small part of that,” he told me. Any work that draws people into speedrunning strengthens the scene, he said. The reach of Salt’s stories has had tangible consequences: broadening the audience for speedrunning, raising its profile beyond specialist forums, and inspiring both established runners and newcomers.

Thanks, in part, to Salt’s work, the semiannual Games Done Quick marathon has grown into one of speedrunning’s most visible institutions, drawing hundreds of thousands of livestream viewers over weeklong broadcasts and encouraging donations in real time. Since its inception in 2010, the events have raised nearly $60 million for charity. “People who otherwise would have no interest in the community are suddenly drawn in,” Merkle told me of Salt’s videos.

And for runners themselves, Salt’s work of ordering and narrating the past serves a practical purpose beyond spreading interest in the scene. “The journey of a speedrun record and all the people that touch it along the way always has an interesting story,” said Sinister1, “and for that to be lost to time would be tragic given how much time and effort so many put in.”

Speedrunning advances cumulatively, with each generation refining or repurposing what came before. Knowing how strategy evolved (especially where progress stalled, which ideas failed, and which techniques were abandoned too early) can provide critical insight for those attempting to push times lower still. Old runs sometimes contain overlooked details that unlock new strategies. In that sense, the history functions as a working archive, actively shaping the present.

That impulse has also changed how the community remembers its own past. By tracing the evolution of records in so much detail, Salt’s videos have helped bring attention to figures whose contributions predated modern internet platforms and were therefore easy to overlook. “Not everyone takes the time to go back and look at old historical archives for the game,” said Mario Kart 64 speedrunner Abney. “When Salt makes videos, he brings attention to a lot of the past records that people might not have seen otherwise.”

Sometimes, Salt’s videos have resulted in speedrunners who were only active decades ago becoming belatedly famous. Matt Turk, for example, was an early Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! runner whose influence was widely felt but rarely acknowledged beyond a small circle, largely because his achievements came before YouTube and Twitch. Through Salt’s work, Turk has emerged as a foundational figure, his role newly visible to a much larger audience. These moments capture the deeper significance of careful documentation: They ensure that speedrunning’s history reflects not only its winners, but the many hands that shaped the path toward them.

If speedrunning risks vanishing into the digital ether, then the value of Salt’s work lies in his refusal to allow that to happen. He writes a history that would otherwise remain dispersed and easy to forget, treating these fleeting acts of optimization with the seriousness usually reserved for more established forms of competition. His work, as well as his attitude to fame, is carefully aligned with the culture it preserves. Many of the runners Salt chronicles are known only by pseudonyms; they seek recognition for what they have done, not for who they are. Salt, who has long resisted attaching a face or full name to his own voice, shares that instinct. What matters, in both cases, is not identity but achievement, that attention is directed at the act, not the actor.

His parents, he admits, find the enterprise strange. “They think it’s weird,” he told me, laughing, before conceding that they’ve come to see it working not just financially, but as a kind of calling. That ambivalence feels appropriate. Salt’s films do not argue that speedrunning is important in any grand, world-altering sense. They simply insist that attention, given honestly and patiently, confers value. In documenting how people devote themselves to the smallest imaginable margins – often without names, faces or lasting claim to fame – he preserves how meaning is made, through repetition, refinement, and the choice that something is worth taking seriously at all.

Pop stars pen essays now – 2,000-word meditations on the existential weight of fame. Public figures launch podcasts because yapping is how you capture the voting masses. Founders commission films to canonize their fledgling start-ups as inflection points in human civilization.

It is no longer enough to do something. Everyone feels compelled to say something too. The creator and the commentator have all but collapsed into the same figure. And if you haven’t made anything, you become an internet judge of what everyone else has said, done or made.

Saying something has become the unit of value.

But few have earned something to say. Fewer still limit themselves to what they’ve earned. Performative insight has become the norm, and it runs on schedule.

There was a time when only lived experience counted – when information, argument and perspective could only come from real-world immersion. From places with people and stories that weren’t desperate to be seen. But “experience” has become a blurry concept. If the internet is real life, does living inside it count as experience? Does voyeurism deserve an equal voice?

The clearest case: We’ve replaced time in the field with time on our phones. What we now call experience is the weighted average of our own and the residue of what others broadcast (and theirs is a weighted average too). Inspiration springs from algorithmic reference engines. Novel thoughts are mined from obscure blogs. Doomscrolling has become a primary source.

And now AI surfaces anecdotes and allegories and even perfect quotes that were never said. You can read about experiences you can never have from people who never existed. The ouroboros eats its own tail and calls it research. And yet, we can feel the uncanny valley of thin experience and stretched insight. So why are we still so seduced by the stage?

For one, we’ve lost faith in slow work. The American Dream feels increasingly unattainable or unappealing or both. So we embrace lottery culture. Why strive for 10 years when you can get there by going viral? Patience starts to look like gambling and gambling like a rational game.

The path of least resistance is the remix.

There’s a genre of writing flourishing that never requires the author to leave home: what’s been called “laptop nonfiction” (though any screen will do). You can watch YouTube to write about culture and skim Wikipedia to write about history and read blogs about the human condition … then opine on the human condition. You can reverse-search your way to profundity. The market for insight has been subsumed by public intellectual theater – everyone is a performer now.

Immersion is expensive. Reporting costs money and interviewing takes time and site visits don’t scale. It’s faster to parse and package what’s already legible than labor over the new. And the attention economy rewards formulas (see Substack’s diary entries and Twitter’s memetic threads). Mastering the algorithm pays faster than mastering your craft.

But this “source material” is degrading too. ‘Dead internet theory’ creeps closer to truth every day as ads, bots, and all kinds of slop get noisier. If you’re still living online, you’re working from a hollowing-out representation of reality. Soon immersion will be the only reliable source again.

You don’t have to work in an ahistorical vacuum – everything builds on what came before. But skimming your way to synthesis isn’t a substitute for experience. The epiphany must be earned.

Technical mastery masks existential poverty.

The aesthetics are immaculate. The substance is vibes.

The sexier way to say something profound now is by mastering the form. New creative tools and formats favor the young – the digitally native and technically savvy and performatively fluent. They’re wired from the womb to master the medium of internet influence.

A Harvard undergrad made a YouTube film that went viral enough to catch the eye of Hollywood directors. The cinematography was crisp and the mood atmospheric. And I liked it. But can you live through a full-fledged existential crisis and emerge with a neatly wrapped moral all before graduation? Sure, in theory. But there’s a technique to vibes, and mastering that alone makes you a virtuoso now.

Silicon Valley has its own version of this. The talent is real and the prodigies get crowned early too. Founders are expected to perform product-market fit before they have it. But the more insidious performance is the performance of soul: Launch videos and manifestos declaring deep purpose and world-changing insight. Founders bifurcating their identity into online visionary and offline scrambling to figure out what they’re building and why.

Taste without skill is a gap you can close. Taste and skill without soul is beautifully hollow.

You can’t extract infinite wisdom from finite experience.

Even earned insight has an expiration date. Legitimate voices become their own tribute bands endlessly covering their greatest hits. Manufactured freshness is premature and reheated wisdom is postmature, both cousin sins chasing relevance over sincerity.

Even as the well runs dry, the culture still demands you post. We demand perma-presence in a world struck by collective amnesia, where moments have shorter and shorter lives. The questions are always the same: What have you done lately? What have you said lately?

The imperative: Resist smooth understandings for textured ones, easy frames for richer ones that come with time. Read to challenge and write to think, not just to cite and speak. Let ideas marinate for years. The path to having something to say runs through years of nothing to say.

You can’t make an entrance if you never leave the room.

Musicians who never leave the studio inevitably just write songs about writing songs. Comics who never leave the stage end up with sets full of jokes about writing jokes. Writers who never leave their desk only have observations about observations. Yes, they’re doing the real thing. But when being the thing becomes your whole identity, the meta becomes all the material.

The meme doesn’t go far enough: Don’t just touch grass, plant it. One odd conversation isn’t enough but a hundred might be. Insight is forged in resistance, and silence can be laziness and cowardice or it can be preparation. It’s the work you do in the dark that earns you the light.

You can’t reverse-engineer having lived.

I’ve wrestled with this too. It’s screentime versus the rest of the world.

It’s my nature to consume critically: I glean motivations from every digital trail and predict industry patterns from apps I use and watch movies I’m not even excited about just to earn my critique of them. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if this is fieldwork or just fluff – it’s probably both. But when you’re in this mode for too long (curator, commentator, analyst), the tethers to reality start to weaken. Your sources slowly devolve into a collection of shower thoughts and URLs. The tacit work starts to fade. You find yourself conviction-poor and running low on truths to tell.

The worst feeling isn’t being ignored but fearing that you deserved to be. Imposter syndrome hits when you are indeed an imposter of lived experience. And lived experience is ultimately what people seek out and remember and want to pay for – the stuff of life that can’t be queried.

So interrogate: Where does your insight come from? Whose experience are you describing? What do you know that you didn’t read somewhere first? What have you alone seen and felt? Are you locked-in or just performing being locked-in? What have you earned the right to say?

I wrote about making something heavy, but the precondition: Heavy outputs depend on heavy inputs. You can’t make something truly heavy without having lived what you’re trying to make.

Earn something to say.

The pressure to say something, anything, isn’t going away.

The standard you must hold yourself to: Earn the right to say it.

The friction of reality must precede creation. So leave the room and get back into the field. Accumulate the firsts and the failures and the raw encounters with the universe that can’t be borrowed. Take your time, stay a little quiet a little longer, and cultivate something undeniable.

Then, and only then, say something.

Chisel will publish words worth carving in stone.

Most of what is produced online today is designed to be consumed and immediately discarded. We are overwhelmed by content, slop, posts that literally disappear.

When sculptors of antiquity picked up a hammer and chisel, they expected their Latin inscriptions to remain legible a thousand years. Chisel aspires to that level of conviction. We will prioritize the timeless over the topical. And we believe that to last, an object or idea must be beautiful.

Chisel is about the things in life worth holding on to: ideas, works of art, people that move us in ways we don’t forget.

Twice per week, we’ll publish stories for our newsletter subscribers across a variety of genres – culture, philosophy, arts criticism, fiction, poetry. Twice per year, those who’ve subscribed at the print tier will also receive a world-class print product unlike anything you’ve ever seen on a newsstand.

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Print editions of Chisel are published by the fine-press Irish book publisher Tune & Fairweather, printed in Florence, Italy with a level of production finish you’ll be proud to collect and display on that one shelf in your home that sits right at eye level for the appreciation of discerning guests. (No shame, we’ve got one too.)

But why a magazine? And why Substack?

Our founding team has decades of combined experience in the world of print media. We wrote and edited feature stories for outlets such as Paste, Edge and Wired, and we witnessed the post-2008 implosion of the legacy print world up close. We were there when ad revenues dried up and budgets got slashed. We were among those whose dreams were rug-pulled when old institutions failed to stick the landing on the “pivot to the internet.”

Today, though, we spy new opportunities arising. New infrastructure for publishing and distribution has made possible the creation of new media companies. We believe there is a viable path opening for print media too. Why let the record stores, now in a vinyl renaissance, have all the fun?

Our ambition for Chisel is to build a generational media institution, one that empowers the next wave of writers to build careers and do work they’ll be proud of for the rest of their lives. We are obsessed with the magazine we’re building.

Okay then. Let’s do this.