Would I do a PhD toay?

No. I wouldn’t believe I could.

Divorce has this side effect. I don’t know if it’s the same way as it is for women as it is for men. Among men, I don’t think I’m alone.

It stops you from believing in yourself. It ends your confidence.

Once I believed I could do anything, and so I took every road and every corner and enjoyed the drive.

Now I avoid most roads. You never know whether you’ll get a flat, whether the bridge will be out, whether it will lead you to a bad neighborhood.

You stay home.

— § —

The greatest instrument ever invented, not used nearly enough, is the harmonica.

It’s great because it’s a kind of talisman. There are souls living inside it, and their quiet arguments are the only ones that fate can hear.

Or is it fate? I’m not sure. It might be some substratum of reality that lives underneath carpets and floorboards.

— § —

In a strange, similar way, all the greatest books in history are books of aphorisms.

It’s not always obvious that this is the case; some people will say “But what about book X, that’s not aphorisms at all.”

They don’t understand that when an aphorism is truly great and concise, it can easily stretch to 1,000 pages and encompass entire lives.

— § —

Spring is nearly here. We will plant some grass.

Sometime soon I will die. I don’t know if that’s “soon” as in a day or “soon” as in three or four decades. But either way that’s soon.

Funny thing, the same is true about whoever reads this.

— § —

I got older and I didn’t have a favorite season any longer like I did when I was young. I didn’t “live in the present” as all the Wise People suggest I ought to.

As I got older, instead, with the start of every season I started looking immediately forward to the next season.

This is true even though the acceleration of the seasons brings me closer to my own mortality.

— § —

There are all these roads still in my head, from years and years of driving on them. Roads in San Francisco, Portland, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York… Roads that wind around trees and through cities and neighborhoods.

They lead to waterfalls and to mountain trails and to curly-haired, middle-aged Italians who sweep shop floors and sell steaming focaccia bread with their dirty hands.

The problem with being in love with every road you’ve ever been on is that you stop driving on new roads and you just drive the old ones again and again in your mind’s eye.

— § —

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between being alive and being dead anyway.

What’s weird is that this isn’t a sad statement per se.

— § —

It’s March 2023 and it’s nearly over.

I remember laying on my back in half a dozen different apartments in half a dozen different cities wondering what life would be like when I’m 40.

Now I’m 46.

This is called “being alive.”

— § —

You can’t fight what is.

There is this highly feminine trope that rules our society that if only everyone was kind, most of the suffering in society would be fixed.

The problem with this is of course that it’s not true, and it’s amazing that the majority of women in the west continue to feel this when, in fact, it should be obvious to them that nobody will settle for kindness because they won’t settle for kindness.

Will they mate off with a man who is merely “kind” and nothing else? Of course not. Will they stay with a husband who is merely “kind” and nothing else? Nope, divorce follows almost immediately.

Because of course there are many other things that, say, a man or a husband need to do:

• Perform household tasks (which implies available non-work time)

• Pay the bills (which implies a salary sufficient to pay them and sufficient to do so while leaving available non-work time)

• Be fit and groomed (which implies, again, disposable cash for gym memberships, healthy food, groomit items, etc.)

• Show some “ambition” and “achievement” (degrees, promotions, etc.)

And of course these are fundamentally competitive items. Everyone in the company does not get promoted. If you get promoted, it means someone else did not. Income is fundamentally a zero-sum game; there is a fixed amount of currency in the system at any one time, and your ownership of any amount of it implies that someone else does not also own it.

To do the things that make you acceptable, you must beat other people to the punch—outperform them competitively in one of a variety of ways—leaving them relatively less acceptable in the process.

Those are the table stakes, the cost of entry, to being alive.

There seems to be this presumption baked into the kindness ideology that it would all be better if everyone was kind because then we could just pat them on the head and forget about them (the pat being “kind,” and them sitting idly by for the rest of their lives in a kind of placid, stagnant, ignorable kidness as well).

Nobody settles for kindness. Not women, not men, not anyone. People want a house. They want to eat. They want to paint the shed. They want to see Florence before they die. This is not a matter of kindness. This is a matter of competition.

And because it’s competition amongst 8 billion people and some of them are very motivated and not all that kind, it’s often brutal, zero-sum competition.

So the next time someone starts railing on about kindness, tell them to shut the fuck up, because they wouldn’t settle for it. They just wouldn’t. They’re demanding it from you and everyone in addition to everything else they unexaminedly want, and at the same time demanding that everyone else settle for kindness alone from them.

Not playing that game. And I bother to write this because for the first 3.5 decades of my life I was fooled by this entirely, in my naive lefty idealism, and it is one of my greatest life’s regrets—and one of the ways in which I feel most betrayed by parents, teachers, and others.

There are times, like today, when it makes me so furious I could spit.

Nobody ever sat me down and said, “When someone demands kindness, be very suspicious, because demanding kindness is merely a strategy to advance relative to the most naive competition in a zero-sum game, whether the demanders understand this or not; don’t be that naive competition that’s easiest to dispose of.”