So it Goes
If things seem out of control, Nora Ephron highly recommends having Meryl Streep play you: it will be one of the best days you've ever had.
On Value of Culture has grown to more than 112 essays for subscribers and supporters. I re-organized the homepage (click through to the website) to make it easier for you to surface relevant food-for-thought and readings you might have missed. Enjoy!
Out of the slumber and into ‘sonder’? At no time I’ve felt ‘the awareness that everyone around me is the main character of their own complex story’ more than now. That’s what ‘sonder’ means in The New Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.
There’s a word for the bittersweet feeling of having arrived in the future, of seeing how things turned out and not being able to tell our past selves: énouement (from French énouer, to remove knots and other defects from scraps of fabric, + dénouement, the final part of a story in which conclusions are drawn).
Along with ‘ludiosis’1 nonsensical word salads in speeches, we’ve come across a situation for which we’ve no adequate words. At least I don’t, because we seem on the verge of insanity in a rush to stuff as much money in fewer and fewer pockets.
To have no adequate words is often true when we try to express emotions. It’s truer of new emotions we might not have yet experienced in our lifetime. Maybe we’ll remember nothing2 of this weird time.
That would be a positive outcome.
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Emotions can do a lot of damage when unchecked. When prices go up ‘just because we can’ and for little other reason, that’s the power of anticipation turned on customers. And that’s what happened since we got at winter’s door.
Cable companies hurried up to claw back promised3 customer discounts. Electricity and gas providers hiked up retail rates in a scramble to compensate for the huge energy draw AI companies created.4 Groceries went up at the mere mention of tariffs.
So it goes. A ‘get out of jail free’ card is handy for monopolies.
Many of us might be ‘nilous’ (adj.), ‘anxious to imagine how many times we must’ve barely avoided catastrophe.’
This word sounds like it would be a companion to nihilist. (After years of abuse, values have become meaningless to the nihilist.)
We might yet feel ‘ringlorn’ (adj.), ‘the wish that the modern world felt as epic as the one depicted in old stories and folktales: a place of tragedy and transcendence, of oaths and omens and fates, where everyday life felt like a quest for glory, a mythic bond with an ancient past, or a survival against a clear enemy, rather than an open-ended parlor game where all the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.’
For more on the value of emotions, see my conversation with Batja Mesquita, Between us... How emotions are ‘stories in the world.’
Maybe we’ll remember nothing as civilization ages. But now’s an even better time to be present to this moment.
The dark ages were not as dark as advertised. In fact, they were a time of ingenuity, invention, and innovation. I sense that in many ways the fever that has gripped the world is breaking.
As representatives of humanity, we don’t have to accept, bend, nor collaborate to our own demise.
Perhaps I’ve written in vain about the value of culture in the past couple of years. I tell myself that the 0.001% who read may not be the person who shares but thinks. I trust myself. As I look back on the last year, this is some of the best writing I’ve ever done.
And when I’m having a hard day I wish I could do what Nora Ephron recommends: call Meryl Streep. “She’s so good people don’t really notice. I call her at the end of the day to find out how I did and inevitably it’s one of the best days I've ever had.”
It’s tongue-in-cheek. Yet it’s good advice. I interpret it as to get over oneself and use some skillful detachment when it comes to what’s happening, to be ‘in it,’ conscious, thoughtful, calm, considerate, but not ‘of it,’ flippant, mindless, upset, rude.
Politics is downstream from culture, after all. So it goes.
Ephron used everything that came her way. She worked through it, got to the other side, and turned it into something. We can, we must yield our creative, compassionate, and collaborative side.
We may feel ‘manusia’ (n.) ‘the ambient feeling of being a human being.’ Which is ‘a baseline mood that everyone feels intensely every moment of their lives, but can never pin down because they have nothing else to compare it to.’5
It’s to be expected.
There’s energy in human endeavors and social interaction.6 It would be a shame to waste even a joule (J)7 we could invest on long term value on the mindless chase of ultra-processed news in streams.
References:
Koenig, John, The New Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (Simon & Schuster, 2021)
Ephron, Nora, I Remember Nothing (Knopf, 2010))
‘Ludiosis’ (n.) the sense that one’s just making it up as he goes along—knowing that if someone asked why he does most things, he couldn’t really come up with a convincing explanation.
Ephron was a journalist who wrote film scripts: ‘Bewitched,’ ‘Sleepless in Seattle,’ ‘Silkwood,’ ‘When Harry Met Sally,’ ‘You’ve Got Mail,’ and ‘Julie & Julia’ among the most popular.
Every promise not kept weakens companies; it erodes trust, which money cannot buy back. In essence, these ‘geniuses’ trade goodwill and relationships for a few bucks. Of course, airlines lead the way with their lack of transparency and nearly nonexistent customer service.
Electricity consumption from data centers, AI, and cryptocurrency could reach double 2022 levels by 2026, according to projections from the International Energy Agency. Someone has to pay for it, both in terms of decreased power, and increased cost. An apt metaphor for our time of digital slavery (platforms get data for free via ‘content’.)
Sanskrit manusyá, human being. Pronounced ‘muh-noo-zhuh’ or ‘muh-noo-zee-uh.’
I read somewhere that the boundaries of our personality are defined by the things we hate. It’s an enormous draw of energy that gives us absolutely zero in return. In fact, it puts us in the negative.
The amount of work done when a force of one newton is applied over a distance of one meter.