Yet despite the borderline-repulsiveness of the manglecore image, it has come into an artistic vogue alongside this new technology and medium. With the rise of any medium of expression comes the birth of a vogue, or set of vogues, and in this case, two styles in particular have risen to prominence on the cultural stage. The first, and in some sense primary, style is what I will refer to as the “Midjourney aesthetic.” The Midjourney aesthetic, whose name derives from a popular model known for its uber-sleek outputs, is that look of impossible polish that renders an image almost more than real, like CGI, a hyperreal synthesis of detail that could only ever exist as image, never flesh and blood.3 It’s like that guy that’s so handsome he looks fake, Huxley’s “Brave New World” in visual form. That’s the essence of the Midjourney aesthetic. It’s pretty, it’s alluring, it’s cool, but it doesn’t bleed.

This aesthetic has its value. It’s compelling in its pragmatism. It checks all the boxes, does what we tell it to, can be put toward an end. It’s useful. But it doesn’t make for great art. It doesn’t “disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed,” doesn’t move us, doesn’t instruct, doesn’t enlighten, doesn’t even really show us what’s possible. It’s crucial here to distinguish between the aesthetic typically produced by the technology and the technology itself. The tech is the image model, which can produce all sorts of looks, Midjourney aesthetic and manglecore alike. However, when left to its own devices and working well, it gravitates toward the former. The medium isn’t quite the message, but it is a possibility space, and thus a probability cloud, of all that the message might be.4 Gasses take the shape of their container, and the message will conform to the affordances of its medium. The Midjourney style has become the aesthetica franca of the image model, and it’s a practical one—inoffensive, adding dollops of visual flair, filling in details the prompter wasn’t able to or didn’t bother to think up, smoothing things out. But precisely on account of this pragmatism, it has no artistic merit of its own.

There’s a case to be made that this kind of smoothing is unhealthy in the same way that Instagram posturing, Snapchat filters, Photoshop blemish reduction and body enhancement, and overrepresentation of certain body types in porn are unhealthy, encouraging distorted self-perception and doing some serious psychic harm in the long run; and that for this to soon be the predominant mode of image production in our society is deeply troubling. The world will never look like what the Midjourney aesthetic suggests, but it subtly seduces us into believing that it can. It’s grotesque in its perfection, which threatens us with further alienation from ourselves. Its purity sells us lies about who we are or could be. Even the manicured facades we construct on Instagram feel dull and lifeless in comparison. It says “I’ll see your overdone vignette and raise you an impossibly dramatic bokeh.” In this sense it’s actually a fitting product of and for the culture of image that we inhabit, where, in a Baudrillardian (or Debordian) flip, the flattened images we see on the screen have become the primary reality, sign turns to simulacrum.5 The flattening is pragmatic—it’s easier to manage. It renders the world into matrices and bitmaps, contained and manipulable vectors. Yet what it gains in efficiency, it loses in heft. Mere image is the foundation of a weightless world.6

I’m not sure how seriously to take these (my own) complaints. On the one hand, they’re just pretty pictures dude—relax. On the other, a good bit of research over the last several years has implicated platforms like Instagram, which cultivate a culture of image manufacturing that gives rise to impossible standards for beauty and quality of life, as being really, really bad for mental health, especially that of young women and girls. Some of the greatest dangers we encounter are incredibly banal. In fact, it’s precisely because of their banality that they’re so pernicious—they appear of little harm, and so we dismiss them.7 This is enough to give me pause.

But all of these moralistic concerns are an aside (not because they’re irrelevant, they’re just not the focus of this essay)—the Midjourney aesthetic is still just artistically boring. GPT-speak is its linguistic analogue, with its sanitized, flavorless, peppy corporate-speak. Together they are the face and voice of an existence optimized for KPIs and customer retention, and lip-service holistic wellness while we’re at it. They challenge no one, say nothing daring or new, and offer only shallow comforts.8

Manglecore is the antithesis of the Midjourney aesthetic. It is its ugly twin born of the same technological womb, yet popular in its own right. The Midjourney aesthetic assumes the image model’s status as tool, takes it, and runs with it, using it practically, for what it’s good at. Manglecore, by contrast, sits with the tool and examines it. This dichotomy explains manglecore’s prominence, especially among artists. Artists naturally position themselves counter to the mainstream, commonly with an anti-pragmatic ethos, but in doing so establish a vogue of their own. Often this “schismogenesis” involves questioning that which most have taken for granted.9 The bulk of output, art or otherwise, flooding from AI image generators right now is of the Midjourney variety. Manglecore art, by turning an eye toward the imperfections of the technology—the gnarled limbs and deformed faces it spews out—calls attention to the tool itself and invites the viewer in on this act of examination. It makes us ask, “What the hell am I looking at?”

But it’s not the mere fact of their shortcomings that make these images interesting. Simple blank screens rendered in error would be much less compelling than pictures of people who look like they were reared in radioactive goo. It’s the fact that where these models fail, they often fail quite weirdly, and in ways that lend broader insight into the world we live in. These failings comprise a set of “anti-virtues”, qualities rendering them useless for practical purposes but all the more valuable for artistic ends.

Among their anti-virtues is the way they conjure nonsense that appears as if it’s verging on sense. It’s horrific in its proximity to reality, almost there yet so alienly far away. In this way it can serve as a reminder of the beauty and exquisite calibration of humanity as a species and our world more broadly.10 So much had/has to go right for all of this to exist in the way it does. There also may be some solace here. Take one look at these ghoulish creations and grant yourself a moment to gloat over AI, to relish your superiority, to feel a smug gratitude for the elegant, balanced hand by which nature composed you.11 Say to yourself, “At least I’m not that big of a freak.” Where the Midjourney aesthetic whispers that you’re not good enough, the manglecore chokes out “GRANK oggnub hicjjtth!!”, and you know that you’re alright.

And yet while its literal appearance struggles to approximate resemblance to our world, the essence of the manglecore image aptly captures the spirit of our time in its own way through its abject bizarreness. With garbled language and mangled faces, the outputs of the image model manage to portray the discomforting, inexplicable strangeness of life in the modern age. The frenetic, dissociative, even Lynchian peculiarity of a collection like Frank Manzano’s Current Value (see video below) seems a lot less out there after a couple hours spent scrolling through TikTok or reading the latest news out of Florida.12 13 Reality bends itself into new and unexpected shapes every day, re-forming our expectations of it, of people, of life. It’s a contortionist with broken pain receptors and unlimited access to CRISPR, capable of twisting itself in ways we never thought humanly possible. We live in a weird world, and it’s getting weirder by the day. The manglecore image gestures at that.

https://raw.seadn.io/files/6f64568cfdfa4c1e9984af6cad7cc849.mp4#t=0.001

The reasons for this escalating strangeness, I think, are several fold. Perhaps most obvious is the accelerating pace of change. Change brings with it the new, and the new is by default foreign to us for a time.14 Thanks to developments in communication technologies like the internet, this rapid pace of change, both cultural and technological, is then amplified and put on display for the world to see. And in an online economy designed for attention capture, weird wins out (“Ice cream so good!”). This creates a cascade of strangeness hypervisibility, where technological and cultural development broadens the range of what can happen, anything that can happen will happen, anything strange that happens will be shared online, and anything strange successfully propagated online will induce a mimetic (and memetic) absorption and replication response. And so on.

Also fundamental to the strangeness of modernity is the strangeness of rules and systems. There’s a particular kind of weirdness that arises when you put large systems into place with the touch of a human hand that then pulls away. As the activity of these systems gets further and further from the hand that set them into motion, they come to carry its imprint less and less, and weird (from a human vantage point, though perfectly normal according to the system’s design) shit begins to happen. Bureaucracy is an example of this phenomenon at the level of human organization, your Twitter feed embodies it algorithmically, and neural networks now manifest it anew. All, in their own way, are black boxes, and all reflect that blend of absurd, surreal, and mundane that today we refer to as “Kafka-esque.”  Kafka, in his treatment of early 20th century life, was a prescient seer of the world that this “systems weirdness” would occasion. The predicaments that characters like Gregor Samsa and Josef K. find themselves in hit us just as forcefully today, perhaps even more so, in their comically eerie inexplicability. Yet where this feeling was ambient in the era of Kafka, a percolating ether bubbling up from the nascent wellspring of industrial modernity, it’s now everywhere, everything. The world confronts you with the bizarre. The only place where this is truer than in New York City, where I live, is on the internet, where we all live. Estrangement is an inevitability of such a reality. We are becoming viscerally strange to ourselves, even as, through advancements in the likes of genomics and neuroscience, we come to “know” ourselves better and better.  Literal alien-ation consumes the zeitgeist—we know more about the prospects of life on Mars than we do about the lives of our own neighbors. Manglecore and other aesthetic genres similarly preoccupied with strangeness offer one means by which we might confront the lurid freakishness of these facts, especially insofar as they leverage these very strangeness-producing systems (like AI) to illustrate their point.15

The above reasons all champion this genre on account of its aptness in echoing the cultural zeitgeist. It also manages this task on technological grounds, working with tech whose surface level flaws are very “of this moment” but whose core essence and challenges (i.e. the inherent properties of generative AI) will shape our world for decades to come. In that way, AI art of today holds a position similar to computer art in the 60s and 70s. Right now manglecore artworks do something that only the image model can. The deformities are so strange as to almost be unachievable by human hands. It’s truly a distinctive aesthetic of its own, a wholly new dream brought to us by the flawed miracle of diffusion. Yet soon all that image models will be able to do is everything that has been done already. What I mean by this is that in its developed form, the image model just works, faithfully synthesizing its knowledge of the non-deformed images it’s been trained on to produce the images we ask for, sans mangling. There are no more accidents. In fact with the latest models we’ve largely already arrived here. The imperfect outputs are no longer inescapable and in fact take deliberate work. “Perfect” images don’t require the craftsmanship they did even just a year ago. Manglecore is now a choice, not a hurdle. For a moment the image model was a new medium, its own thing, rather than a sanitized retreading of all that had come before. With this moment just freshly in our wake, the force of its aesthetic remains worth working with and dwelling on.

The composite of these facets of manglecore points to a meta-virtue, one which these anti-virtues are all in service to: manglecore is an art of this era, rather than one merely from it. This is a distinction that runs through much of good art. Art from a given era is a product of the realities of the time yet doesn’t meaningfully call attention to and consider them. It doesn’t see the water that it’s swimming in. It says “I was here” without being able to really say what “here” was like in a language universally human enough to resonate across past, present, and future.

Art of an era, by contrast, transcends this myopia. It is “of” it both in that it’s from it, but crucially also in that it’s about it, and straddles this duality deftly. It steps back from the reality in which it’s situated to view it at a distance, to see the bigger picture. But it can also then zoom back in to capture the specific details of people, places, and moments that give impactful art its color, character, and force, and interweaves threads of the bigger picture through those details. It is self-conscious of the age, in dialogue with it, able to see it as both self and stranger. Warhol, more than any other artist I can think of, was a master of this. He captured his time in flashes of lightning, catalyzing pervasive realities in the ether of his age into material realities in precise and electrifying ways. In the likes of Marilyn, Jackie, and Campbell’s, he found symbols undeniably of that moment yet which speak to us even now. Picasso too, alongside Braque and their fellow Cubists, evoked a world that was coming to see itself in a radically different light. Guernica, his mural depicting the WWII-era German bombing of the Spanish village of the same name, deftly exemplifies this process, the disjuncture and torment of its figures reflecting the horror, dissociation, and disfigurement that the modern world had wrought. Though a work of similar weight has yet to be added to the manglecore canon, the genre embodies obvious stylistic parallels to Guernica, its own aesthetic of deformity offering opportunities to visualize corresponding sentiments in the present day—alienation, estrangement, dehumanization, and the ubiquity of the bizarre. Manglecore’s absurdity renders it capable of humor too, which is potent, but a subject for another day. Through all of these means, manglecore makes for an art of our time, embedded in yet speaking to it. It’s a fitting mode of expression for a world deeply steeped in strangeness, where life so often feels like a perpetual fever dream.

GANs have been around for a decade, diffusion models have been massively popular since 2022, and the technical constraints that originally spawned the manglecore look have largely been surpassed, yet still we dwell with the fascinating distortions that image models yield. They linger with us. So what now? What I’ve called manglecore has only just begun to come into its own as a genre of art. It’s enough of a “thing” that some significant number of artists are working with it, yet it’s still well shy of being overdone. There’s more to be done with it, plenty that the genre is capable of expressing that remains unsaid. The great works of manglecore are yet to come. It’s also not the only way of producing great art with image models, or making work that speaks to the strangeness of our day. Especially if you can get under the hood and tinker with them, these models are uniquely adept at producing strangeness.16 They offer the vast territory of latent space at our fingertips, and we have nearly all of it left to explore. There’s an ancient Chinese curse (probably apocryphal) that goes, “May you live interesting times.” Call us cursed if you will, but we undeniably live in interesting times. May we put them to good use.

Footnotes

1 “Deformalism” was another name contender. If you like this better then go ahead and run with it. It’s more academic-ese, but also features a fun lil pun that pokes at its own academicism. I also considered calling it "warpcore," which sounds a lot liked Warped Tour, but "mangle" felt most true to the work. “Manglecore” is itself a manglecore name, kind of vulgar and hideous-sounding in its own right.

2 Manglecore also happily sounds not too far off from “manticore” a mutant beast of Persian mythological lore melding the head of a man, the body of a lion, and the tail of a dragon (or scorpion) all into one. The manticore's freakish nature is a nice complement to the Frankensteinian nature of AI's jumbled creations, the imagination of our AI overlords now supplanting that of old Dr. Frankenstein.

3 This technically is CGI—computer-generated imagery—but you know what I mean.

4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

5 French philosophers Baudrillard and Debord both wrote about the process of society coming to engage with itself at the level of appearances rather than of essences, using their respective terms “simulacrum” and “spectacle” to refer (roughly) to the flattened images that our symbols get reduced to.

6 I think TikTok and Reels are in some way a return to “the real”, or a reapproximation of it. The problem with them then is that they just become a more seducing means of ignoring our own reality. They feel richer, more whole, more satiating. They’re still not reality.

7 Hannah Arendt famously wrote about “the banality of evil” in the context of World War II.

8 This is not an all-out condemnation of work made in this aesthetic vein. Worthwhile things can be done with it, but the aesthetic per se is a vapid one.

9 Anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined the term schismogenesis, which I'm adapting slightly here, to refer to the process wherein two groups in close proximity develop their identities in opposition to one another. The example of artists is somewhat different: artists push away, establishing the cultural cutting edge, society (often) chases. In this way it’s more like a toxic relationship between two people with different attachment styles.

10 This made me think of William Paley the 18th century philosopher who saw this exquisite calibration as evidence of an intelligent designer behind our existence, like a complex watch one might find on the ground and assume the existence of a creator behind.

11 It won’t last long.

12 Lynchian” i.e. resembling the work of David Lynch. Film and TV director of surrealist classics like Twin Peaks.

13 No shade at Florida, y'all just always seem to have a lot going on.

14 In the words of one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, "The times they are a-changin!"

15 I think they're particularly well-equipped to take on themes of dehumanization in compelling ways that I haven’t seen given a serious effort yet.

16 You can do said tinkering by using open source models, away from the stifling control of the likes of DALL-E. The Stable Diffusion (model) + Automatic1111 (GUI) combo is a good place to start.

ChatGPT:

With Artist Bingo, you've set out to map your own life as an artist onto these bingo cards, replacing the numbers with tropes and milestones of an artist's life. It's an exercise in self-conscious self-narration, a kind of living autobiography that's simultaneously a commentary on the commodification and mythologization of the artist's journey. So, let's get started: What drew you to such a self-referential format for this project? And how does it feel to be both the player and the played in this game, the artist and the artwork, the myth-maker and the myth-made?

Kevin:

Big question. And I mean that in the David Foster Wallace "This is water"-esque, cognitive hyperstructure sense of big, almost so big that I can't see it because I'm steeped in it. But I think the pull of the self-referentiality here was a couple-fold for me.

1. Meta is my default mode, for better or for worse. I'm compelled to drill into the "why" of things: why they exist, why they are the way they are, and why we accept that. I'm constantly trying to outthink my own thoughts, my mind always has a retort to itself. You said "self-conscious self-narration" which is an incredibly apt turn of phrase here.

2. I'm relatively new to my art practice, and so when I really started looking at the art world and the life of an "artist" from a first-person perspective I was able to see things with fresh eyes. What's water to was still fresh to me, and so I could look at it and ask about it. I weirdly felt (and continue to feel) a lot of pressure to conform to the social expectations of what an artist is, or what society imagines an artist to be, or what I imagine society to imagine an artist to be, I wanted to question that. Because some of those things weren't could. We expect tragedy of our artists. Volatility. Tempestuousness. Narrative. Mythology. A lot of that arises from suffering, and it shows. Van Gogh. Picasso. Warhol. Basquiat. Not just artists of the fine art ilk either. Musicians, our most immediate artists—I see music as the most immediate artform—writers, you name it. Amy Winehouse. DFW. Kurt Cobain. Kerouac. Mac [Miller]. Kanye. The list goes on. I wanted to use my life and career, as someone who looks up to a lot of these figures but is also wary of the dangers of romanticizing the idea of the tortured artist, as a performative exploration of the perils and promises of having these narratives laid out before us. What is true in them? What is valuable? What do we stand to lose? I've said a lot, but that's a start.

ChatGPT:

I appreciate your thoughtful response, and it has stirred several thoughts in my mind. But focusing on one at a time, let's begin with this: You mentioned your inclination towards meta thinking and "self-conscious self-narration." In considering this tendency, do you ever find yourself tangled in these layers of introspection? Is there a point where the analysis of the self, the "why" of things, risks becoming a sort of labyrinth, one that might hinder rather than enhance creativity? How do you navigate this tricky terrain while keeping the act of creation alive?

Kevin:

Yeah definitely. I call that thing that self-consciousness can subvert "fluidity." It's akin to (and clearly etymologically derives from) the flow state, but in a more macro sense that pervades throughout one's life. If you're checking yourself at every thought, the ability to just be is going to be interrupted. It can be deeply unpleasant. It's a mode of thinking I particularly struggled with when younger. It's the kind of thing that can lead to mood pathology. I think depression can often manifest in these patterns, as a mind devouring itself, getting in its own way so ineluctably that you're disoriented—you find yourself underwater and you don't know which way is up. Find yourself there long enough and you begin to forget that you're even in water, and that there's fresh air out there and the ability to breathe.

I was fortunate pretty early in my life to develop the ability to cope with these meta-cognitive tendencies and harness them for good. Meditation has helped a lot with that. Helps you let those thoughts float by. They can still pop up, but they don't cling to you and disrupt that sense of fluidity like they otherwise might. I've been able to strike a balance wherein I still respect and value the metacognitive processes at work in my brain without letting them swallow me whole. My work tends to take on a decidedly meta-cognitive flavor on account of this. I think that presents the clearest portrait of myself and the way I see the world. But also the way I want to see the world become. We're moving to a point of ever-further cultural meta-cognition. This comes with its vicissitudes, and can lead to some really difficult places, but I think it's ultimately for the best.

In any case, it's inevitable. Self-consciousness seems to be a genie you can't really put back in the bottle, tracing all the way back to when humans first became cognitively reflexive creatures, to the now-naive-seeming earnestness of post-War American culture to the irony of post-modernism to the post-ironic state of today. The trajectory is clear in my eyes, and I've seen in my life how this shift can be for the better. It's a mode of being that I want to help society progress towards. I know I'm going off on a bit of a tangent here.

ChatGPT:

I must say, the intersection of art, life, performance, and financial speculation you've captured is uniquely contemporary.

Considering the financial aspect of the project, how do you navigate the tension between art as personal expression and art as a commodity? This seems to mirror the broader tension within the art world, and, in some ways, within the artists themselves – between the need to create authentically and the need to survive, monetize, and, in some cases, adhere to the market's whims. Is the fluctuating value of the bingo cards an intentional commentary on this, or perhaps a critique? How do you see this tension playing out in your own life and work?

Kevin:

I'm not sure I see it as personal expression or as commodity, quite honestly, at least in terms of how I approach it. I recognize its status as commodity, but don't make things with the first-order intention of producing an alluring commodity. I make things that I want to make and have faith that what I do will be worthwhile enough in others' eyes that they'll view it as a commodity, or something of value, if there's even any delineation between those two. I'm just realizing I often say delineation where distinction could well do, and it's quite honestly because delineation sounds smarter. I hope this doesn't come at the expense of clarity of communication.

Anyway, the things I want to make aren't made out of personal expression in the usual emotive sense—I'm usually not strictly trying to portray my feelings through my art. I see art as a vehicle ideas. I don't think it can be only this, but this is what I find myself most compelled by about it. As for art more broadly, there definitely is a tension between expression and commodification. But in some ways I think that's a good thing. People shouldn't be able to just dump their feelings out into the world and expect to have the world thank them for it. They should be supported and heard, but I don't think just anyone should make a living from art.

The commodification presents a pressure to not only express oneself, but to do it well. Because if you aptly portray your inner world—or some unspeakable thing from those depths which can only be communicated through art—then other people will identify with it. No person is an island. We share so many commonalities, and if you really are able to convey the contents of your psyche to the world, I think you'll find it resonate more often than not. But who knows. If no one likes Artist Bingo I'll definitely have some thinking to do on how I attempt to express what I've got brewing in here. Feel free to ask any follow-up questions on that if I haven't answered fully.

ChatGPT:

Your view of art as a vehicle for ideas rather than solely personal expression is quite illuminating, and it shines a light on how you've approached Artist Bingo. If I understand you correctly, your art isn't about shouting your feelings into the void and hoping for validation, but rather a way to connect shared experiences, even if these are woven into the cultural fabric we might not always notice.

This leads me to ponder: in your observation, do you feel the tropes, myths, and milestones that constitute your bingo squares resonate with other artists you know or admire? Do these experiences, however hyperbolized or romanticized they may be, hold a certain universality, despite each artist's unique journey? After all, part of the game's appeal is its relatability, is it not? How much of yourself, your fears and hopes, do you see mirrored in your peers and heroes?

Kevin:

Yeah that's definitely the hope. Artist friends I've showed this to in advance have often really clicked with it immediately, which is gratifying. And let me be clear, many of these tropes are neutral or good things, even milestones. One friend told me how in this specific cultural milieu we inhabit, they felt a social pressure to be gay (even though they were more along the lines of bi to mostly straight). This is one that occurs throughout the history of artists. I actually did hundreds of hours of research into art history and the contemporary art world to develop these tropes. So so many of our greats have subverted traditional gender and sexuality norms in various ways (Da Vinci, Warhol, and Duchamp are a notable trio). Which I like—I think a critical role of artists is to cast off metaphorical shackles of the status quo.

But I want to also be wary of the thought process that tells me that if all of these greats did something, that I need to do it too in order to be great. Narratives matter, and a lot of these stereotypes exist quite honestly because there is truth to them. I'd be willing to be artists do tend to experience mental health issues at higher rates. But there's a subtle pressure to conform to the details of these narratives to feel validated. I'd feel more worthy of the title of artist if I were bipolar. I don't like that. I'm trying to find a way to hold these narratives more loosely, and perhaps help others do the same.

ChatGPT:

There's a vulnerability in your observations that is resonating strongly. This deliberate attempt to question and explore what it means to fit or not fit into certain artistic narratives is fascinating, especially as it seems to straddle the line between rebellion and recognition.

The idea of holding narratives loosely presents an interesting way of navigating the world, not just for artists but for any of us who might feel the pull of societal stereotypes or expectations. I wonder, however, does creating something like Artist Bingo, which crystallizes these tropes into a game, risk reinforcing them, even unintentionally? How do you reconcile this with your goal of challenging these narratives, of promoting a more fluid understanding of the artist's identity?

Kevin:

Mmm yeah so that's sort of the question: does rendering these tropes explicit take away their power, act as disinfectant by bringing them into the light, or does it reinforce them as you say, and even create a subtle pressure to conform to them for financial reasons, so as to breathe life into the project by maintaining a steady stream of stamping them off? The project is a living meditation on that question, a performative exploration. I'm not quite the answer, but I have a hypothesis. I tend to be of the mind that bringing things to the surface is the best way to address them. This is a principle I hold across domains of life. If we don't acknowledge the things that lurk in the depths of our personal or cultural consciousness, their sway over us remains unknown. They're effectively a part of us.

There's this dichotomy drawn out by this Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan here about subject vs. object as it pertains to the human psyche and development of identity. When we are "subject to" things, we're in that mode I mentioned earlier where we're swimming in water and can't see it. If we can't see it, we can't effectively question, engage with, or change it. By bringing a thing into awareness, we reify it, we make it object, and can then do all of the above. We come to see that things aren't us, but are rather a feature of our mind or the world that we can choose to hold or let go of as we please. From a human developmental perspective, this is what phenomena like object permanence are a product of. Babies are so embedded in their world that taking a part of it away can make them think it, and thus a part of themselves, has disappeared from existence. You'd be crying too if you thought a massive piece of you had suddenly disappeared forever.

This is a rudimentary example but Kegan's work focuses on charting the increasingly complex ways we cast off what formerly appeared as subject to us, as part of our "selves" over the course of the human lifespan. My bit on irony and post-modernism and post-irony was a commentary on this at a culture-wide level. Meditation develops this skill at the individual level, of shifting the contents of consciousness from subject ("I am a sad person.", "I want to slap you.") to object ("I am feel sad right now.", "I am experiencing the ephemeral urge to slap you."). This might also sound incredibly esoteric and/or abstract, but it's super important. In fact, I think how abstract it can seem points to its magnitude—it involves a fundamental shift in the way we experience the world. All that is to say that having this freedom to move things from subject to object, to bring them out into the daylight and choose whether to continue to hold onto them or to let them go, is enabling, and changes people and cultures for the better. And that part about having the choice to hold on is crucial. It's not so much about holding on or letting go, but about having the choice.

ChatGPT:

I’m looking at all of the tropes you’ve included in Artist Bingo. Quite the list you've compiled! It's fascinating how it balances the tragic, the romantic, the humorous, and the downright scandalous – quite the cross-section of the artist's life, real or imagined.

I'd be particularly interested to hear about the "Work inspired by a dream" item. Our dreams can be a direct line into our subconscious, a realm that often remains unexplored in our waking lives. They can be vivid, abstract, terrifying, euphoric – providing endless fodder for creative work. Can you discuss any past instances where a dream directly influenced your work, and do you actively try to tap into this source of inspiration? Do you have techniques for remembering or interpreting your dreams? What are your thoughts about their impact on your creative process and the likelihood of a dream inspiring a piece in the coming year?

Kevin:

This answer will be quite the switchup compared to the previous verbose monologues I've been going on: no. I haven't had a dream inspire any of my work. But I'll say a little more because there's a bit more to be said there.

I do get ideas from dreams, but I'm usually working with a surfeit of ideas and need to pick just one to work on, and I can't recall any amounting to a major project I've worked on. But I do have solid dream recall, and have tried to train myself to lucid dream at various points throughout my life, with woefully limited dedication and results. I'd like to try more on this front. You can fall asleep each night and literally do whatever the fuck you want, create worlds. That's awesome and kind of weird that we don't talk about this more. I first got into it after seeing Inception as a young teen. I also just want to try more methods for exploring dreams and hypnagogic imagery as creative fodder. Dali and Edison had specific techniques they used. The structure of DNA famously came to Watson or Crick, I forget which, in a dream. A lot of discoveries have come to society through this vector.

ChatGPT:

That's very interesting. I remember reading about how Edison would sit with steel balls in his hand and doze off. When he would fall asleep, the balls would drop, waking him up, and he would write down whatever ideas had come to him in that drowsy state. A sort of genius' power nap.

Let's pivot to another trope: "Create 'masterpiece'". This one intrigues me because the term "masterpiece" is often imposed by external factors - critics, public perception, etc. So, do you feel the pressure to create a 'masterpiece'? Or do you feel that you've already created one? If so, how would you define a 'masterpiece' in the context of your own work? And does the idea of a 'masterpiece' still hold the same weight in this era, especially considering the changing dynamics of art consumption and distribution?

Kevin:

This is a good question because it gives me an opportunity to explain some of the ambiguity that may lie in the tropes. Like who determines if it's a "masterpiece" or what constitutes me being called "eccentric"? To start, no I don't feel a pressure to create a masterpiece and don't feel I've already created one. To the extent I even believe in such a thing, I think it comes after years of practice as a culmination of themes running throughout an artist's work. Something like that. I'm at a stage where I'm not even beginning to think in such terms and I'm fine with that. I just want to keep making shit and exploring ideas.

But the most important point here I think is the criterion for such a thing to be stamped off on the cards. It needs to come from a genuine place, whether from me or from the people or critics or whatever. If I'm genuinely declaring something I've done to be a masterpiece, then I'll stamp that off, but I hold a very high bar there. If it comes from outside me, I need to see that the person means it. It can't just be someone saying it perfunctorily or in a tongue-in-cheek manner for the sake of stamping off their card. From institutions like magazines and newspapers and such, having their words published in print would definitely act as a "stamp" of sincerity. But ultimately I have to be the arbiter of this. I trust my judgment here, and I hope and believe collectors will too.

An interesting wrinkle is the pressured levied by the financial incentives. I've minted some of the cards to myself, and will hold onto them for a long time. Let's say the project has done really well, and one of the cards I own has four squares in a row stamped, and I could deliberately complete the fifth one if I so chose. It stands to appreciate in value if I complete that one. I'll need to be very real with myself about what's going on under the hood in my mind. That process itself is all a part of the performative "self-conscious self-narration", myth-making, financially speculative element that I'm hoping to tease out through Artist Bingo.

ChatGPT:

I see, so it is a delicate balance of external validation and personal belief, which would indeed require a high degree of self-awareness. It's almost like a continuous self-critical process, navigating the ever-evolving art world while staying true to your own artistic integrity.

Let's discuss another trope: "Overdose". This is a serious and unfortunately common occurrence among artists, both historically and in the present day. Many artists have struggled with substance abuse and addiction, often tied to their mental health. This trope seems to hold a dark weight compared to others on your list. How do you approach such serious topics in the context of Artist Bingo? Is there a line you won't cross, or is it all part of the conversation about the real-life struggles of artists?

Kevin:

Serious topics like this are critical to the project because they're a reality of artists’ lives. Overdose, psych ward stay, commit suicide, abuse allegations, all of these dark, sordid things. These, probably more than anything, I want to call into question through this project. I think culturally we tend not to admit it to ourselves, but we romanticize these things, especially for artists. We can't look away. There's a perverse voyeurism that exists now in the digital age more than ever, where we can observe from afar and let these myths stew without having to confront the harsh realities they entail up close. We mourn Van Gogh and Juice Wrld (both greats in their own right), but we also fetishize their tragic endings. Death is the best career move an artist can hope for. I'm not trying to complete any of these more insidious ones, at least from a top-level, conscious "me", perspective. But again part of what I'm trying to ask is "Who's really driving here?" Is it "me", or is my subconscious, and the penetration of these cultural narratives therein, exerting more force than I'm aware of? Because I'm no different, and I do find myself romanticizing some of these things. I'm striving to prod at that.

ChatGPT:

Before we conclude, let's touch on a future-facing question: Where do you see Artist Bingo in five years? What's your vision for how this project might evolve and what impact do you hope it might have on the art world and beyond?

Kevin:

In some sense that's asking where I see my life in five years. I don't know specifics, but I have a rough sketch. I want to be doing this. Using art as a means of constructing gripping metaphors. I want my art to be what I call "consummate", marrying Duchamp's conceptual emphasis with the aesthetic. I want to make things that make people both think and feel. Artist Bingo will be ongoing. That's a promise. Some people’s cards almost certainly will have hit bingo by then. In fact, I designed it so that people will start winning within a year or two. I want people to be engaged, entertained. But this is a long-haul project. I really believe in the long-term value of this work. It's a rough draft of an autobiography. In five years I'll still be updating these bingo cards. They're of story of my life in a way.

ChatGPT:

That sounds like a very inspiring journey ahead. The concept of living your life as an art project, a rough draft of an autobiography that constantly evolves, is captivating. Thank you for sharing your story and vision with us today. As we sign off, do you have any final thoughts or words you'd like to share with our readers?

Kevin:

Yeah thanks so much for having me! I appreciate you taking the time when no one else would. All I'd like to say is, if you're reading this, please don't hesitate to reach out. My work is for nothing if not to engage.

A Few Technical Notes

• I used ChatGPT-4. Got it just for this purpose. That thing is crazy good.

• To set the stage for the interview, I provided ChatGPT with some basic info about Artist Bingo that you can find on the project website. I asked it to interview me one question at a time, and started off exploring different personas by having it ask me an introductory question from the vantage point of various public figures (Oprah, Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, Joe Rogan) or character sketches that I described (60 Minutes interviewer, art critic, etc.). All were giving meh results. Then I tossed David Foster Wallace its way and the initial question was quite remarkable, so I ran with it.

• I occasionally reeled ChatGPT in when it wanted to dwell for a while on a thread I felt, at least for the sake of the audience, we had exhausted. I think this happened twice and it was asking perfectly cogent and interesting questions, I was just worried about the interview drawing on too long.

• I considered integrating a text-to-speech plus speech-to-text workflow into this whole affair to create a real spoken word conversation between the two of us, but I didn’t have the time or proper resources to make that happen. That would’ve been cool. Instead I just wrote stream of consciousness-style, saying what I would’ve said aloud and hoping my fingers could keep up.

• That’s it! The text here is basically un-edited, but to add proper transitions where I had to re-route things. ChatGPT made for an awesome interview. For all the solipsists out there who want to be given more of an opportunity to blabber about themselves, I can’t recommend highly enough.

Nietzsche’s first published book, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, or The Birth of Tragedy as it is more simply known, provides a rousing justification of tragedy both as an art form and a way of life.¹ Rousing as it may be, this account of tragedy can be muddled at times, failing to support some of its more enthusiastic claims. As such, I find it uncompelling to the unindoctrinated reader, especially one who is not of a similar philosophical persuasion to Nietzsche in the first place. The Birth of Tragedy contains truths that are eminently important and applicable to all lives, and yet the book keeps them obscured by assuming too much, justifying too little, and speaking too colloquially. The work consequently amounts to an unconvincing, albeit inspired, piece on the importance of tragedy in our lives. Nietzsche himself agreed with this assessment of the book. In the paragraphs that follow, then, I will bring to light some of those truths that The Birth of Tragedy contains and build upon them to further explore how tragedy in art is valuable and what this says about our lives and their meanings.

In order to effectively redeem The Birth of Tragedy, we first need to understand that it is indeed flawed, and what exactly it is that plagues it. While containing much brilliance, the book has its fair share of shortcomings. For one, it is Nietzsche’s first book and yet he speaks as if he has built up decades-worth of rapport with his readers such that he doesn’t need to explain certain concepts or terms. This amounts to a vernacular seemingly native only to Nietzsche’s mind. Ideas such as the Dionysian and the primordial One are critical to his account and yet in all the excitement he never slows down and gives them the thorough explanation that they demand. Instead we’re left to piece together what exactly they mean throughout the course of the work. Furthermore, Nietzsche never provides a proper justification for why tragedy is so valuable in art and in our lives. He relies on the force of his personality, the excitement with which he speaks, to convince us of these things. He speaks the language of intuition and feeling at the expense of reason, the true language of the philosopher. This amounts to an account that convinces only the believers, those who need no convincing. People who already agree with the sentiments shared here in The Birth of Tragedy will find truth in the work, but for those who haven’t yet found these truths in their own experience this likely will not suffice. But who better to hear all of this from than Nietzsche himself? Indeed, Nietzsche was among the more outspoken of his own critics with regard to this work. Years after the book was originally published, it was reissued, this time including at the beginning a foreword of sorts written by Nietzsche, entitled “An Attempt at Self-Criticism.” In it he remarks on the problems he sees looking back on the book as an older, more experienced thinker. Much of what he says mirrors my criticisms of the work. He notes its strengths and the validity of many of the ideas contained therein, but it is “a first work also in every bad sense of the word, afflicted...with every fault of youth, above all with its ‘excessive verbiage’ and its ‘storm and stress’” (An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 2).  He goes on: 

“Let me say again: today for me it is an impossible book — I call it something poorly written, ponderous, embarrassing, with fantastic and confused imagery, sentimental, here and there so saccharine it is effeminate, uneven in tempo, without any impulse for logical clarity, extremely self-confident and thus dispensing with evidence, even distrustful of the relevance of evidence, like a book for the initiated...” (An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 3).

This last bit is extremely relevant to the point that I am making: “dispensing with evidence, even distrustful of the relevance of evidence, like a book for the initiated…” Nietzsche treats the reader as if she already knows what he is talking about and consequently neglects definitions, explanations, and justifications to a significant degree. Rather than back up his statements, he tries to instill their truth through his exuberance and the hope that we identify, in our own experience, with the sentiment of what he is saying. And even in this hope of identification he doesn’t directly appeal to us to search through our experience to find value in tragedy, nor does he instruct us on any means by which we might do so. Instead, he merely speaks on the experience of tragedy through his eyes and works in which one might find beauty in the tragic, such as Tristan and Isolde. In the present state of man (though perhaps it was otherwise in some ancient state), it is not natural to come to consciously recognize the beauty in tragedy in real life unless one is shown how, a task which Nietzsche ignores. Though Nietzsche’s self-criticism is rather scathing, he makes clear that there are important ideas contained within The Birth of Tragedy “which all lay close to the threshold of something communicable” (An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 2). I agree, and the remainder of this paper is dedicated to moving these ideas beyond this threshold and into the light. 

Nietzsche’s defense of tragedy arises as a response to the Aristotelian treatment of the cathartic emotions and the emotional experience found in tragedy. Aristotle sees the cathartic experience, the unleashing of strong negative emotions (namely pity and fear, in the Greek tradition) via the visceral experience thereof, as a mere means to a greater end. Catharsis serves to purge man of these negative emotions such that he develops into a better person beyond the context of the tragedy. Thus, per Aristotle, cathartic experiences are not inherently valuable states to be embraced by man on account of their own nature. Nietzsche takes issue with this analysis of the tragic.  He finds tragedy, both in art and in life, valuable in its own right. We enjoy tragedy, he says, because we revel in the suffering itself, not merely the effects which it has a tendency to produce. But how could this be so? Most people when confronted with the question “Do you love your own suffering?” would curtly reply in the negative. Understanding this requires a shift in one’s paradigm of thought. To better understand it in Nietzsche’s terms, we must first come to comprehend a concept which he so often discusses in The Birth of Tragedy, “the Dionysian.”  The definition isn’t as easy to extract from the text as one might hope. It is never given a complete, concise definition, and is only defined to a minimal extent in a few places. When he first introduces the term, he calls it “the non-visual art of music, the Dionysian” (Section 1). In An Attempt at Self-Criticism he alternately says it is marked by “the desire for the ugly,” “madness,” and a “way of evaluating life, something purely artistic” (Sections 4 and 5). Elsewhere it is exemplified and referenced numerously, and through these we may understand the concept more fully. We find that it is encountered through singing and dancing, and partaking in rituals. We thus know that the Dionysian has much to do with music, but how so, exactly? Speaking of the man who creates such art, Nietzsche gives us further insight in the following passage: “He has, first of all, as a Dionysian artist, become entirely unified with the primordial oneness, with its pain and contradiction, and produces the reflection of this primordial oneness as music, if music can with justice be called a re-working of the world and its second casting” (The Birth of Tragedy, Section 5). Here we are introduced to the concept of primordial oneness, elsewhere called the primordial One or primordial unity, an integral aspect of Nietzsche’s account of the Dionysian, which we may encounter through music. The primordial oneness describes a metaphysical reality: that everything in existence, beyond all the appearances, concepts, and illusions (the Apollonian), exists as one. There is no true distinction between one thing or another, only the illusion of such perpetuated by the egoistic self. In daily life we live under the illusion of the self, make islands of ourselves despite the deeper nature of reality, that we are all one. Music is inspired by this truth and thus expresses it, giving us the opportunity to feel it for ourselves. The Dionysian, then, involves an arrival at the visceral understanding that we are a part of the primordial oneness, and a tearing down of the illusion that reality is otherwise. Nietzsche describes this experience as it takes place through art: 

“In this way we recall, from the experiences of the truly aesthetic listener, the tragic artist himself, as he, like a voluptuous divinity of individuation, creates his forms, in which sense his work can scarcely be understood as an ‘imitation of nature’— but then as his immense Dionysian drive devours this entire world of appearances in order to allow us, through its destruction, to have a premonition behind it of the primal and highest artistic joy in the womb of the primordial One” (The Birth of Tragedy, Section 22).

According to Nietzsche, in this destruction of illusion and transcendence into the primordial oneness there is joy. We may better understand this Dionysian joy by looking elsewhere. Nietzsche’s clearest description of the Dionysian comes from beyond the scope of this text, in his Twilight of the Idols. Here he manages to put into words what he never quite could in The Birth of Tragedy: 

"Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and most painful episodes, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustible vitality even as it witnesses the destruction of its greatest heroes — that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I guessed to be the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not in order to be liberated from terror and pity, not in order to purge oneself of a dangerous affect by its vehement discharge — which is how Aristotle understood tragedy — but in order to celebrate oneself the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity — that tragic joy included even joy in destruction" (What I Owe to Ancients, Section 5).  

The Dionysian is a concept that refers to the affirmation of everything in life, even the ugliness, destruction, and suffering, and all that which might help us in attaining this perspective. It is thus that we may find the value inherent in tragedy. Tragic art leads us to this joy by forcing an encounter with the primordial oneness. Such is Nietzsche’s account of the tragic. Though I have clarified and condensed the relevant ideas from Nietzsche’s account of tragedy, it still leaves something to be desired. He still lacks justifications and makes leaps that are difficult to follow. Critical questions have yet to be answered before this theory can be made whole. How does one come to embrace the Dionysian? How might one find joy in the primordial oneness? And can this process teach us to find joy even in the tragedies of life? We now turn to the task of answering these questions. 

In order to complete this account of tragedy, I am going to employ the concepts that Nietzsche has already laid out for us. They adequately capture the ideas that a justification of the tragic must be founded upon; they simply need further explanation and justification beyond what Nietzsche offered in The Birth of Tragedy. It begins with the metaphysical concept of primordial oneness. From a substance monist perspective, the universe is a single chaotic mass of swirling, ever-changing particles. Consciousness is an evolutionarily advantageous illusion that convinces us that we are separate from the rest of it all.² Through consciousness we have built language, which allows us to label not only ourselves as distinct entities, but all other aspects of existence as well. Everything is separated from everything else, and thus from itself. Yet we have the capacity to see beyond this illusion into the nature of things as they “truly” are.³ For the man united with the primordial oneness, there is nothing truly bad or evil to be rejected by man, because everything is himself and he is a part of everything. It is only through the illusion of separation that we come to formulate these concepts. The Dionysian is the recognition and celebration of this truth through various means, such as tragic art. Part of the difficulty in trying to articulate this truth is that it rejects the validity of language as a lens through which to see the world objectively. It exists in a place beyond words, words being arbitrary, thus making it impossible for them to capture the ultimate truth of the matter. All words can do is point. Music illustrates this idea perhaps better than any medium, because it conjures up a realm beyond the linguistic. Music expresses, and consequently induces in us, the whole gamut of emotions. Through music we feel ecstasy, fear, comfort, sadness, pity, loneliness, and more. And yet, we do not see the so-called “negative” states among these as something to flee from. This is because we are partaking in the Dionysian and are brought out of ourselves into something beyond. We are experiencing the primordial oneness, whereupon we recognize, viscerally rather than consciously, that it is all beauty. Nietzsche remarks that by the power of music, “Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher community” (The Birth of Tragedy, Section 1). Music is not the sole art form by which we might experience the Dionysian, though, and it would serve us well to look at some other media through which the tragic might be expressed. 

Narrative forms of art (while music can assume a narrative form, it is less strictly so than others) provide examples of the tragic and the Dionysian which are more analogous to the structure of our own lives than is music, and as such might help us to better understand the value of tragedy in our own lives. Nietzsche wrote in The Birth of Tragedy about Richard Wagner’s opera, Tristan and Isolde. The modern-day reader might better relate to the media of literature and film, both of which contain rich and expansive narrative traditions. In these we witness the same workings of the Dionysian as we do in music. The audience is swept up into the art and undergoes a deindividuation whereby they lose their sense of self. The oft referred-to acts of being lost in a book or entranced by a film illustrate this occurrence. With their sense of self diffused, there is nothing restraining the audience from encountering the primordial oneness of which Nietzsche speaks and saying “Yes” to all that it entails. These narratives then cause the audience to revel in the emotions they evoke, no matter sorrowful or joyful, so long as they are deeply felt. Nietzsche speaks on the experience of the viewer of a narrative tragedy:

“He sees the tragic hero in front of him in epic clarity and beauty and, nonetheless, takes pleasure in his destruction. He understands the events on stage to their innermost core and joyfully flies off into the incomprehensible. He feels the actions of the hero as justified and is, nonetheless, still more uplifted when these actions destroy the one who initiated them. He shudders in the face of the suffering which the hero is about to encounter and, nonetheless, because of it has a premonition of a higher, much more overpowering joy” (The Birth of Tragedy, Section 22). 

These narratives are not unlike our lives. Of course, most lives on a day to day basis don’t contain the level of drama that these made-for-audience narratives do, but they do similarly have highs and lows, joys and sorrows, triumphs and tragedies. Only a matter of perspective separates the two. In our own lives, we are the locus of the drama. In the case of film and literature, we are in the audience, more distant from the locus of drama and yet wholly enthralled by it. But if we can accept that we are really a part of a greater primordial oneness, that only illusion divides the universe against itself, there is no real difference between these two positions. Surely there is no qualitative difference in the emotions themselves which are felt in these two kinds of experiences. The heartbreak we feel for our tragic hero is no faux-heartbreak. The difference is in our perspective, one that we, bound by the illusion of selfhood, impose.⁴ Consider experiences in your own past. Oftentimes we undergo occurrences which we deem “negative” at the time, only to find that, given the proper amount of time having passed, we appreciate them. There is a commonly expressed sentiment that the worst experiences make the best stories, an observation which makes great sense in light of this. Even the deepest of personal suffering can be viewed from this perspective. We might hate to admit it, because it seems so contrary to what makes sense in our current cultural paradigm of thought, but we often actually have a love for our greatest sorrows, look upon them warmly, and revisit them like old friends. Sometimes we can even recognize this in the present, feeling a sweetness in our own melancholy. It then seems that coming to embrace the tragic in our own lives is merely a matter of cultivating the necessary perspective. Art has the power to guide us to a place where we transcend ourselves and see reality as it is, if only for the fleeting moments of the aesthetic experience. Here we embrace the Dionysian and say “Yes” to life in all of its forms. Our experiences with art can help us to bridge the gap between the way we see those experiences and the way we see life itself. In this way, we might encounter a reality where those fleeting moments of the aesthetic experience become an eternity.

Footnotes

1. Please forgive the more turgid academic vernacular employed throughout this essay.

2. My line of reasoning regarding consciousness and selfhood is predicated on something similar to Buddhist philosophy of mind. I had established reference to it through prior work in this class, which is why I so boldly mount this claim. I apologize for the lack of supporting arguments for those not already on board, but I’m not going to reproduce that entire body of work here at present.

3. This is more aptly cast as an alternative way of looking at the universe, useful in some contexts, like for the purpose of encountering primordial oneness. Less so for being a normally functioning human going about day-to-day interactions, perhaps.

4. See footnote #2.

“This is good material.” I repeat it to myself like a mantra.

A breakup? “This is good material.” A sooner-than-expected goodbye. Staring at the floor for like four hours. Leaves falling in perfect little spirals at the cemetery, every October for seven years straight. “This is good material.” Good old-fashioned teenage heartbreak. New York in the fall. Waking up to a phone call too early in the morning, well past the point where it could possibly be a late night dial from some dumb, drunk friend, and never being able to pick up the phone without a racing heart again. Not fun. But good material. Getting punched in the face repeatedly. Falling madly in love. Feeling fucking insane, on account of said falling. All good material. Bursting with feelings of intimacy you don’t know what to do with, so you just stand there and explode instead. How pure. Good material. Acid on graduation day. Great material. Seasons go by in minutes. Material abounds.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x316b398e680cBF28D751bC6496C9C9911e6D00ea/1

For today, I just want to write, to get something out there. Good writing requires getting into a habit, a groove, building up a muscle, and those muscles have atrophied in me. I haven’t written anything longform since my Material piece nine months ago. Most of what I want to write—on how beauty will save the world, a defense of the category of art, a plausible metaphysics of reincarnation, a novella, etc.—requires good writing, a prospect I find daunting at present, so I’m opting for an easier route.

That’s not to say I intend for this to be terrible writing (wouldn’t that be a funny thing to intend to do?), but to lighten the burden of that first step, I’ll be writing a bit more loosely and diaristically about the year past and the year to come: 2022, 2023.²

I’m a sucker for New Year’s. Most people I know are at best neutral toward it. Many of my friends hate it—the cacophony, the hype, the pressure to do something, the arbitrariness of this one infinitesimally small moment, the needlessly late night, the exhausting exhortation to be a New You. I love it—the howling, the excitement, the chasing desire to do something, the arbitrary yet potent symbolism of this one infinitesimally small moment, the vastness of the 3 o’clock night, the reinvigoration on the path to being your best self. I love both sides of New Year’s, the jubilation as well as the pause for reflection.³ ⁴ The jubilation has passed, but the time for reflection and resolutions is still at hand.⁵ It’s with these things in mind that I write.

2022

These are some things that happened to me in 2022; all true, most literally:

I started making art for a living. This led me to some weird, interesting, exhausting, and invigorating places: walking around Manhattan for 8 hours straight, encounters with with Laurie Anderson and Yves Klein (Laurie in person, Klein from beyond the grave), installing myself as an interactive exhibit in an art museum until getting found and kicked out, and “permissionlessly” exhibiting the first-ever NFT to be displayed at the National Gallery of Art. What started as the seed of a creative idea turned into a deluge of them. I uncorked a side of me that had been long-dormant, previously unable to find natural expression in any of the mediums I was acquainted with. I found this vehicle for expression not through a specific medium, but rather through a medium-agnostic approach (and thus liberation from medium), grounded in the beauty of expressing complex ideas through art.⁶ Art became a frame of mind in which I feel at home. Since this is Mirror and they have a cool NFT-embed functionality, I’ll be interspersing some of the art I’ve created over the last year below.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x316b398e680cBF28D751bC6496C9C9911e6D00ea/0

I burped really loudly at a guy who was rude to me at this club in LA where a decent number of famous people hang out.

I exercised delusional self-belief more than ever, outright refusing to work on anything that I wasn’t in love with, operating under the “practical” philosophy that time is the only commodity you can never get back. I watched my bank account dwindle to nothing as I persisted in this self-belief. I watched it recover as this bet finally paid off.

I felt accomplished for the first time in my adult life. I’d like to say this was due to some degree of inner peace attained, but it wasn’t. I think I’ve been stagnant for a few years, peace-wise.⁷ Rather, I just actually saw some externally validated success for once and felt accomplished on account of that. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always felt competent and even accomplished internally—being a self-taught x and y, overcoming z, building things I’m proud of, becoming a person I’m proud of—but never felt accomplished for things outside of me, in the world, for creating things that I find to be of value and having the world say “yes we agree” at a meaningful scale. More and more these days, people talk like the only thing you need for validation is your own approval. That if only you love and accept yourself (“all of yourself”) enough you’ll be okay. This, in my opinion, is a solipsistic byproduct of therapy culture, in which the answer lies within you. Salvation lies within you. You are a goddess. You are a god. You are powerful. You are enough. This isn’t a condemnation of therapy or our society’s increasing embrace of wellbeing practices. I spent three years building a mental health startup. I’m really into meditation. I love this shit. But some of therapy culture’s excesses can lead us astray, into a world where we focus so emphatically on self-care that it reaches a point of self-absorption. Let us not forget that we are social beings, and wellbeing is an interpersonal endeavor. There is a balance to be had. Buddhism, among the world’s oldest and most reliable “therapy cultures,” is instructional here. You must find your sangha.⁸ You must return to the marketplace. This year I received some validation from outside of me. I got a honey-glazed taste of the world telling me that I’m worthy. I liked the taste, and I’m okay with that.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x513a4aa064678a54576227708175a31af3129a62/0

I said goodbye to people I’ve known my whole life; to people I thought I’d know my whole life; to people I just met.

I refrained from posting some things online which were completely benign because I thought someone was going to try to kill me.

I moved. Three times. From DC to Brooklyn to DC to West Village. One of these was with a mere 10-day heads up, at the bidding of a group of people who vote on my life as part of a performance art bit thing. I’ve now lived in six different places for at least a couple months each over the last four years. Instead of feeling unsettled, though, I feel more at home in myself than ever. Rather than relying on the world around me to lend cues that I’m at home, I furnished the inner chambers of my psyche to fashion a warm and spacious abode within myself, a home I can take with me anywhere.

I “read” 50 books, failed myself a lot (but not for lack of trying), put on makeup for the first time, got scared, felt lost, stood naked in front of a crowd, got dumped a couple times, and threw up on myself for the first time in my adult life. I’d like to think I got something out of it all.⁹

I did things I’ll find cringey in 5 years. I did things I already find cringey. I had a good time doing both.

I grew a mustache and luxuriated in a room-sized bed with a dozen other people on K.¹⁰ It was not an orgy. It was not an orgy.¹¹

I hoped too loudly and tried too hard to do too much and still have yet to learn my lesson.

I ran late to a lot of things. But only by a minute or so, because I sprinted, in a genuine effort to make it on time. But fuck excuses, I was still late and could have avoided it if I had prepared better in the first place. But I also started to get to some things on time, even early. That was new.

A lot of these are things that were new, but equally important is what’s old, almost boring. Some old things that stick around are evidence of a rut. Others are things that have stood the test of time. I ate salad. I worked out. I wrestled with compulsive thoughts. I guarded my solitude. I cherished family and old friends.

2022 was better than 2021. I had a handful of sleepless nights both years. In 2022, these were by choice. I was either up dancing til 7 in the morning or working on something I cared deeply about. Those are both good things. In 2021, those sleepless nights were not by choice, instead the product of a bout of anxiety-fueled insomnia lasting several months. That was a less good thing, but one I value nonetheless. Life’s gotta shake things up every once in a while, keep me on my toes. Both were good years. 2021 was a lot of searching. 2022, with the meager distance I have for hindsight and at risk of sounding corny, yielded more discovery. The best of these discoveries were rediscoveries. JB.¹² Art. My voice. Many of life’s greatest discoveries are like this. In rediscovering something you once knew you get the buzz of the discovery, but you also have the distance from that first encounter to know that it’s real, not just a mirage, a seduction, an infatuation. Rediscovery is a feeling of coming home to yourself. 2022 was that in many ways for me.

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2023

I’m not sure there’s any great way to say this without sounding like a douche, but I take self-improvement pretty seriously. I make a deliberate process of it, and in this process I try to embrace both my pensive, thoughtful, organic side as well as the engineering side that wants to optimize the shit out of everything. This year, the result was a 15-page document marked by both reflection and planning, in which I voice my aspirations for the coming year and detail action plans for achieving them. That doc is a little too raw and personal to publish, so what follows is an abridged and annotated version thereof.

Writ large, I want 2023 to be a year of:

• Plunging headlong into my art and writing practices and prolifically producing output that I’m proud of. To make real creative and discursive contributions and hopefully be recognized for them.

• Depth over breadth in thought and work. Meaningful works of art and writing will be my receipts.

• Seeing the world. I haven’t set foot outside of America in my adult life. I want to see, try, feel, and experience everything, and most of everything is beyond the shores of this country. My education as a human (relative to these aims) feels impoverished for not having ventured abroad. When I first started thinking about this, I thought that a small part of me finds it daunting to go this far afield and push to the limits of my comfort zone. This would be the easy answer posing as a thoughtful, vulnerable one. On further examination I realized I actually just fear taking that time off from work, being away from budding relationships, and missing out on everything happening here in New York. I’m not sure that makes it any easier to overcome.

• Establishing a life, a home, a world for myself here in New York.

• Cultivating physical health and vitality, more than ever. Last year I fucked my knee up a lil bit and it forced me to take significant time off playing soccer. I returned to action right around the new year and it left me invigorated to hit the ground running in 2023. There’s just about nothing I love in this world more than that beautiful game, and it’s important to me that I be able to play for a long, long time. I also just want to feel great and look okay at 80.

• Deepening my meditation practice. I’m pretty convinced that a serious meditation practice is a path to something ultimate here on earth. I’ve been meditating daily for 7+ years now and I can see clearly the fruits that it yields. To the extent that this is something that can be quantified (it can’t), I’d say it has reduced my suffering by ~75%. I’ve also seen enough glimpses and heard enough accounts of meditation offering something far more than what I’ve attained such that I’m convinced that I’m only a fraction of the way along this journey. My personality demands fruition, resolution, obsession, perfection, salvation, so I’m going to chase well past the fraction that I’ve encountered.

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Tracking back, these broad strokes goals are all rooted in a set of aims for my life that I penned back in 2021. Getting dialed in on goals can lead one to miss the forest in the trees, so I try to ground myself in these principles when I undertake exercises of this nature. To use a once-beautiful-but-now-somewhat-tainted metaphor, these are my north stars. Starting from this big picture, I then zoom in on general practices that have reliably brought me fulfillment in the pursuit of these aims. These include meditation, writing, learning, thinking and reflecting, exploring the mind, physical exercise, making and fixing things, music, food, design and art, novel experiences, being with people, loving people, laughing, making people laugh, and engaging in craft.

I design my life around these. A year in which I partake in them plentifully is a good year. Following from these + the north stars, I list domains I’d like to improve in and set goals for the year followed by specific “actionables”—first steps that naturally lead to subsequent ones—for each goal. An example of this chain might look as follows:

health (domain) → bed by 1am on weekday nights (goal…I’m a night owl) → set alarm for 12:45 to prompt me to get in bed (actionable)

or

meditation (domain) → be able to enter jhana at will (goal) → meditate for 1hr/day (goal/actionable) → inform a friend that you’ll be paying them $5 every day you don’t hit this goal (actionable)

Meditating for an hour a day sits somewhere between a goal and an actionable because it’s precise yet it’s also difficult to accomplish on its own without some sub-actionable supporting it. The technical language doesn’t really matter. What matters is the pipeline from using reflection and self-knowledge to ground and orient oneself to then engaging in engineering of solutions in order to instantiate and accomplish.

At the start of each month I do a “self-audit” where I evaluate my progress, choose which of these goals to get started on for the month, and add the relevant actionables to the to-do list and/or calendar.

Here’s a partial list of my goals for 2023:

• Health and fitness

  • Spend more time in the sun and around bodies of water

  • Relatedly, apply sunscreen liberally to my face and only my face so I feel sexy for years to come but also get that good vitamin D from exposing my bare skin to the Sun

  • Play soccer 1-3 times/week

• Social

  • Laugh and make others laugh more

  • Make friends who push me intellectually, creatively, morally, and spiritually

  • Build a strong group of friends, broad and deep, here in New York

  • Make others feel loved

  • Keep close with the people who matter most to me

• Experiential

  • Travel abroad

  • West coast trip

  • Touch grass. Go hiking at least twice

• Cognitive/Intellectual

  • Develop a battery of cognitive and emotional tests to evaluate my mental state as influenced by nootropics and other self-experiments

  • Run a Dual N-Back experiment

  • Read 40+ books

• Emotional

  • Interpersonal MDMA session

  • Be able to enter the jhanas at will

  • Rekindle a daily gratitude practice

• Creative

  • Prolifically produce creative works that I’m proud of

  • Try a melange of crafts and creative arts

  • Write and publish at least one written work each month

  • Continue pouring myself into Material

• Meta

  • Complete at least 60% of these goals (there are 45). Last year I completed 40%. It might seem funny that I’m apparently accepting the fact that I won’t complete them all (isn’t the whole point of setting goals that you intend to complete them?), but c’est la vie.

As I worked to formulate these, I noticed a few frameworks that have blossomed and stuck around for me in the years of practicing this sort of analysis.

Emulate. Find people who exhibit the characteristics you aspire to. Spend time around them, whether actually or parasocially (via media), study them, and emulate them. Become a method actor—actually impersonate elements of them that you want to co-opt.

Regrets and regards? Regretfuls and gratefuls? I’m not sure which cute little name I prefer, but the idea is to set goals and make decisions informed by the things you regret or are grateful to have done. For those who shout No Ragrets, consider what you’d prefer to avoid repeating and tease out the principles in which those actions were grounded. For 2023, I looked back on what aspects of 2022 I don’t want to happen again, as well as the things I want more of, and considered my goals through that lens. This is different than regret-minimization, the logical conclusion of which is suicide.¹³ The crux here is using previous experience as a compass and weighting that experience heavily relative to present preferences that have no precedent (something you think you want but have no experience with) or have negative precedent (we often want things that haven’t worked out well previously, forgetting those outcomes or convincing ourselves that next time will be different). Desires with no precedent (things you haven’t done before) still merit attention. This is how we try new things, and novelty is how we keep ourselves spiritually alive. My method here is to approach new things as experiments, rather than making a year-long resolute commitment to a thing with which I have no prior experience.

Experiments as a way of life. Framing something as an experiment can be a fruitful way for undertaking anything new such that it is both low-commitment and flexible while also rigorous, empirical, and informative. Approaching a new endeavor, habit, supplement, mindset, or whatever experimentally enables engagement with the world that is at once scientific and playful. I wrote about this at some length here.

Enduring desires. Be patient with your desires. This has become a guiding rule of thumb for me across domains. If I still want a thing two years after first thinking of it, it’s probably something I should pursue. Creatively, I’ll often come up with an idea for an art piece that I think is brilliant, only to watch that brilliance fade away after the passage of a few weeks. Works I can return to after months and find none of their luster lost are the ones I know will be worth my time.¹⁴ If we want to be foolhardy and construct a formal codification of the principle which will inevitably crumble under its own rigidity when faced by an endless swarm of edge cases but nonetheless be fun and make us feel like we have a formula for parsing our lives in the meantime, we could say something like “take action on a desire only once it has been around for twice as long as it will take to satisfy that desire and deal with the consequences thereof.”¹⁵ I’m not sure about this exact 2:1 ratio and in fact picked it completely arbitrarily, but it’s an interesting potential rule of thumb.

Focus on the delta. Apply yourself most to the goals where you need the most substantial change (and thus the most active effort) to see success. For example, as mentioned above one of my goals for this year is to “read” 40+ books. I read 50 last year, so the habits are already in place to make this happen. Since my habits are already congruent with my goals, it would be a waste to expend further energy optimizing my approach on this front. Instead I set the goal and largely forget it, letting the autopilot of the habits I’ve previously established do the work. This might sound obvious, but needless optimization can be subtly seductive. It feels good and productive to keep working toward better, but unless you’re setting loftier goals it’s really a mere performance of productivity within the comfortable confines of a goal you already know you’re sure to meet. Unless I were trying to read more than 50 books (or achieve a similar goal like reading those 50 books in less time) additional effort toward this aim would be masturbatory. Channel your energy where you need the boost.

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And just like that, it’s out of my system. That daunting, monstrous, seemingly insurmountable character of writing, the same one that I encountered looming in the corners of my mind as I began this piece, has dissipated. It always takes just a few days, and it always feels like it’ll take much more than that. A few days of writing, just for an hour or two a day, and I no longer hate it. In fact I love it again. I’m even calling myself “a writer” in my head. I almost updated my Twitter bio. I’ll sit on that one for now. “Enduring desires” and whatnot. I feel ready to write things of substance now. So much so that I almost want to just delete this whole thing because it suddenly feels inconsequential. But I’ll leave it. Click publish. “For posterity.”

PS: If you’re into this stuff and want to talk ideas for experiments, decision-making frameworks, self-improvement, etc. I encourage you to reach out.

Footnotes

1. Rilke, one of my most cherished writers, said this of writing:

   "Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.

   This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse."

   I finally feel like my answer to the call of writing is that strong, simple "I must."

   I also like the Japanese concept of ikigai on this notion of a calling.

2. I may actually try deliberately terrible writing some time as an experiment to see what sort of creative results it yields. Warhol once remarked that there's something revealed when you do something exactly wrong, and I think this rings true.

3. It just struck me what a weird word "o'clock" is. It reminds me of when a friend borrows something, holds onto it for a while, then gives it back and it's not in the same condition and they clearly realized they fucked it up and were hoping to fix it but eventually admitted to themselves they were never going to get around to it so they hand it back to you in its mutated state, but in this case the thing borrowed was the word clock and the friend was a chipper Irishman.

4. I'm not a huge fan of the “best self” jargon and the way it's been commandeered by the more permissive, woo-adjacent side of wellness culture but what can you do.

5. You might say the time for reflection and resolutions has passed too, but I’ve given myself carte blanche for the month of January on this matter. Here on the last day of the month I’m just sneaking in.

6. I say "liberation from medium" not to indicate that medium is some prison from which we need to escape. Medium provides important constraint. Rather for me, as someone who couldn't see myself as a painter or photographer or any such thing, not viewing any medium as a vocation or identity to which I was bound enabled me to see them all as a set of tools in my toolkit for richly communicating concepts.

7. Not "not at peace," but not advancing in my peacefulness.

8. The community with whom you practice the Buddhist path.

9. Most of these were audiobooks. For a while I saw this as "less than," but my retention is just as high as with reading, and I thoroughly enjoy them, so I no longer mind, but I also want to clarify this fact so as not to give anyone a false impression. Reading actual books seems more erudite.

10. The statement “I grew a mustache” is logically equivalent to the prior one about moving to Brooklyn.

11. The mustache and the room-bed-K-orgy are unrelated.

12. I love the thought of you thinking I'm talking about Justin Bieber here.

13. The surest way to minimize regret is to die immediately. It's on account of this that I think regret minimization as a "life optimization function" is at-best incomplete. It's a low-risk framework that will bar you from ever approximating global optima.

14. One cool thing about making more stuff is that you come to condense the time horizon at which your judgment on those creations becomes reliable. Your creative intuitions develop through repetition, and the predictive validity of your initial impulse sharpens. Put more simply, you learn to trust your gut. But not because your gut was necessarily trustworthy all along, it's just gotten smarter. Or a combination of that fact and improved ability to discern the true voice of your gut from the other voices in your head. Something like that.

15. Obviously this can't be applied all the time (it would be incredibly inconvenient for something like deciding on a meal) and is only really sensible as a binary, a yes or no to a specific thing (i.e. take action or don't) or a yes/no to (i.e. take action in the form of) either of two alternatives. It's probably best applied to endeavors of significant heft, but not ones that are too big—it wouldn't make sense for marriage, for example, which is ostensibly a lifelong commitment. Clearly this is a principle for which it's more useful to abide by the spirit, rather than the letter, of the law.

• Material is a collaborative NFT art project. The canvas is a pair of jeans. That I wear. The artist is you. Or you. Or Yu Darvish. Who knows?

• Whenever I wear the jeans, the canvas is live. When a person impacts me in a certain way, we forge a deep connection, or we share a memorable experience together, I may invite them to add a piece—an illustration, text, whatever—to the canvas then and there (I carry fabric pens with me).

• Each contributor gets a 1-of-1 NFT for their piece, representing ownership in the jeans. Eventually, the jeans + NFT series will go up for auction, with proceeds split between myself and all contributors who opt in.

• The NFT-holders will form a DAO that gets to vote on real decisions in my life, like where I (and thus the jeans) go, what I do, and who I meet. In doing so, they orchestrate the future of the jeans and play me as a character in a real-life video game—an IRL RPG.

• There will be opportunities for anyone to become a contributor, starting today. Read on for details.

“This is good material.” I repeat it to myself like a mantra.

A breakup? “This is good material.” A sooner-than-expected goodbye. Staring at the floor for like four hours. Leaves falling in perfect little spirals at the cemetery, every October for seven years straight. “This is good material.” Good old-fashioned teenage heartbreak. New York in the fall. Waking up to a phone call too early in the morning, well past the point where it could possibly be a late night dial from some dumb, drunk friend, and never being able to pick up the phone without a racing heart again. Not fun. But good material. Getting punched in the face repeatedly. Falling madly in love. Feeling fucking insane, on account of said falling. All good material. Bursting with feelings of intimacy you don’t know what to do with, so you just stand there and explode instead. How pure. Good material. Acid on graduation day. *Great *material. Seasons go by in minutes. Material abounds.

It kinda works. The phrase is symbolic for me, even verging on spiritual. I don’t literally say it to myself through all of the above. There’s no need to at this point—it’s my default mode of processing now, for better or for worse. It’s how I take the raw, chaotic content that is life and forge it into something that at least feels meaningful. It’s how I surrender. It’s how I cope. It’s dangerous.

We’ll get into that. But first, a pair of jeans.

At some point late last spring, I developed a deep desire for a quality pair of blue jeans. The pandemic seemed to be turning a corner, people were yearning for fresh air and fresh faces, and I wanted some good denim to accompany me back out into the world. Unable to find any in a size, cut, and wash I liked, I went out and thrifted a pair that had the right waist size but nothing else, resolving to take care of the rest myself. I bleach-dyed the once-indigo blue to a crisp light wash, then measured my desired fit and had the uber-baggy legs and seat cut to my liking.¹

At the same time as I was cobbling these jeans together, an idea had been brewing in my mind. I admire and am inspired by fashion but have always had critiques and ideas for pushing it forward as well.

One critique which had been on my mind around the period of the inception of the jeans was that fashion can often be excessively self-serious. Runway models almost always sport that same stare, vacant with a slight edge of contempt, as if you just happened to rudely barge in on them toiling away at the most boring, menial task imaginable. There’s actually good reason for this—in fact, I would argue that keeping a straight face is the essence of the avant-garde—but I think it’s important to carve out space for levity and playfulness as well.² Fashion, and perhaps modernity in general, has paid little due to this side of the equation. Clothing can be a conduit for conversation, connection, and playful and creative interpersonal engagement. Done thoughtfully, slogans can spark questions, images might pique interest, and designs can compel comment. Yet this is far from the norm at present.

Another critique fresh on my mind was fashion’s tendency toward solipsism. Clothing is a means of expressing who we are, and yet what we wear often neglects many of the most central parts of our identities. We’re all inescapably defined by the constellations of people, places, and experiences we’ve orbited and collided with throughout our lives. Yet clothes tend to do little to evidence this. I am my mom, my dad, my brothers, Silver Spring, pickup at Blair, Notre Dame, the girls I’ve loved, summer 2010, and that perfect little lake outside of a one-stop-sign town, to name but a few of the metaphorical stars that compose the constellation of my identity.³ How do you say all of that through clothing? You don’t. You can’t. But you might be able to at least nod in that direction.

The idea that had been brewing, then, was twofold. On the one hand, to render the experience of wearing and engaging with clothing more playful, loose, creative, and fun. On the other, to make self-expression through clothing more reflective of the relational and experiential nature of our identities.

The jeans presented a perfect opportunity to put these ideas into practice. A few months after thrifting them, I bought a set of fabric markers and drew some pieces on them—illustrations and snippets of text—to serve as a conversation starter. I began wearing them around, bringing the fabric markers with me. When I encountered people who left a mark on me in one form or another—a deep connection, a meaningful conversation, a shared experience—I invited them to add a piece of their own to the jeans. It could be whatever they wanted, so long as they felt it contributed positively to the greater work as a whole.

The immaterial mark they’ve made on me thus materializes as a physical mark on the canvas of the jeans. This process creates a tapestry of the experiences and people that have shaped me, and thus indirectly each other, over the lifespan of the jeans; it extends the creative involvement with the garment beyond just the original designer, encouraging others to tap into their perhaps-dormant creative spirit; and it gives rise to shared laughs, thought-provoking conversations, a spirit of playfulness, and memories worth holding onto.

As this was all taking shape, I was learning voraciously about NFTs, DAOs, and the web3 ecosystem.⁴ At the same time, I had been wearing the jeans from time to time and a few early pieces had been added by people I’d encountered along the way. I was routinely receiving compliments on them and sparking up conversations with curious strangers who were intrigued by the artwork.

And then one day it struck me that for all the value generated by the contributors via the pieces they had added, they were capturing little of it. It was all accruing to me instead—I owned the jeans, I got to wear them, and I benefited from the interest and compliments that their work so frequently gave rise to. NFTs, it occurred to me, could be a way of meaningfully conferring partial ownership of the jeans to those who helped make them what they were, digitally decentralizing ownership of this physical, centralized work of art. By giving them each a unique NFT representing their contribution, I could help them capture some of the value that they had created (how exactly this works I’ll explain in a sec). So I decided then that that’s what I would do.

Thus was conceived this project, Material, which officially launches today. You’re all a part of it. Here’s how it’s going to work. Whenever I wear the jeans, the canvas is live, open to the addition of new pieces. Sometimes, when a person impacts me in a certain way, we forge a deep connection, or we share a memorable experience together, I may invite them to contribute to the canvas. Shortly thereafter, they’ll receive an NFT depicting the jeans in the state that they added to them (the NFTs will be revealed to the public in due time). The jeans are a living, breathing piece, changing with every wear. Each contributor’s NFT, then, captures the unique canvas that they helped create, frozen in time and stored in a digital time capsule. With each new addition, we’re “minting a memory.” Collectively, they tell a story.

Once a certain number of pieces have been added to the jeans—a number which for now will be kept secret—the jeans along with the NFTs given to the contributors will go up for auction. Of course, since they own their NFTs, each contributor will have the option to hang onto them and not participate in the auction. This is part of the social experimental fun. If they opt in, they’ll swap out their NFT for a token which they’ll then burn in exchange for their share following the auction. The combined proceeds will be split 50/50 between the contributors and me. In this way, the contributors will be able to materially capture the value that they brought to the project.

Naturally, the NFT holders will also be added to a DAO that gets to vote on real decisions in my life, like where I travel, who I meet, and whether I pierce my nipples. They thereby get a real say in where the jeans go, who they come across, and what I do in them, orchestrating the future of the canvas from afar. The DAO collectively controls me (and thus the jeans) like a real-life video game character. I call it IRLRPG. The contributors’ ownership over the jeans thus extends beyond just value capture to continued participation. With the addition of each new contributor, the network of people invested in the future of the canvas expands, and the limits of what we’re capable of as a collective fade. The possibilities of the jeans increasingly trend toward the boundless.

The first piece I added to the jeans was a quote: “This is good material.”⁵ It’s where I began this essay, and it represents something of a thesis statement for this project. It’s not a real quote, in that it doesn’t definitely derive from any one source other than my internal monologue, and even then it’s less a line in my internal monologue and more a general disposition. In any case, it had been on my mind a lot during the time that the jeans were coming together. It’s also the last of the threads which together weave the conceptual foundation of Material.⁶ As I mentioned earlier, the phrase symbolizes a mindset through which I endeavor to construct meaning in my life by viewing the ups and downs as essential parts of a greater aesthetic picture. Tragedy is part of a story, loss is fuel for art, failure is motivation to improve, etc. Through this lens, the vicissitudes of life are made bearable by their critical role in a larger narrative.

I lost my older brother when I was 20. I was a sophomore in college. In the months prior, my roommates and I had begun conceiving of the various dramas playing out in our collegiate lives as storylines in a TV show. Friendships turning to relationships, old flames rekindling, and a camping trip gone awry in the wintery Michigan wilderness had all collided within a 48-hour span to inspire the conception of the first “episode.” We continued discussing our experiences with reference to “The Show” for the rest of our college careers.

The ability to gain distance from the narrative and view ourselves in the third person, as characters in this drama, gave perspective that made the difficult things feel alright. The process was comforting, relieving, and amusing, like a laughter-fueled exhale at an existential level. It felt like it imbued our lives with a certain richness through which even the struggles we were dealing with in a given moment could be appreciated for their aesthetic quality.

When I lost my brother, I think a piece of this mindset crystallized deep within my psyche. I adopted it out of necessity. Reality was so unbearable that I had to disown it, to make it no longer mine—a story in which I was a character, observable in the third person. Through this new perspective, everything is material. Life is an aesthetic phenomenon, and every sorrow and joy is a source of beauty and meaning, another page in a moving memoir. Artists, musicians, writers, comedians, and creators of all sorts know this outlook well. It’s all material.

Last summer, as I was preparing to add that first piece to the jeans, I had been reflecting on how this perspective on life has shaped my experience, for the better, but also possibly for the worse. I had slowly realized over the years that one side effect of this process is that the paradigm has a tendency to subtly flip, from art imitating life, to life imitating, even chasing, art. There develops an urge to not only take life and transfigure it into material for art, but also to intentionally live in a manner such that it might become material for art. I was subconsciously, and then less so, making decisions that would lead to a more aesthetic, interesting narrative. This can be a thing of beauty, but it can be corrosive as well. If you put beauty as the paramount value in your life, and there’s beauty in pain, you may begin, unwittingly, to seek pain for the beauty it can bring forth.⁷ And pain never remains contained within the individual.⁸ Living life for a memoir is a dangerous game, and others besides the author are at risk. The best memoirs aren’t written by saints.⁹9

So to write a lasting memoir or to aspire to sainthood? To embody beauty or virtue, the aesthetic or the ethical (to borrow a dichotomy from Kierkegaard)? Can some synthesis of the two be obtained? What constitutes a good life? These are open questions in my mind. Material is my process of exploring them.

On its face, the project appears emblematic of the aesthetic. It’s about art, beauty, narrative, and memorable experiences, and it’s going to involve me seeking out a whole lot of that. “This is good material,” the catchphrase for this mindset, is almost-literally written all over the jeans. But the quotes are there for a reason. They imply a sense of irony, a second voice that’s not so much making the statement as questioning it. Like “Oh yeah? Really?” Through the jeans, these two voices are in dialogue. Because for each piece of art and memorable experience infused into the jeans, there’s an act of connection, a ritual of giving and receiving that looks much closer to “the ethical,” to accompany it. They’re right there, side by side. The aesthetic says “This is good material.” The ethical asks “Is that really so?”. I’ll be there listening. I invite you to come listen too.

So what the hell is this project? I’m not sure I want to answer that just yet. It’s many things, and many more will be revealed in time. I will say that in keeping with my nature, this is nothing if not an experiment. It’s experimental art. An experiment exploring the bounds of what NFTs and DAOs make possible. An experiment in what clothing can be. A social experiment. And an experiment testing some hypotheses on the question of how to live.

As of today, Material is live. What does that mean for a project like this? Well, to kick things off, a real life game of manhunt. The first person to find me IRL wearing the jeans gets to add a piece to them, receive their NFT, and become a Material member. Beyond that, it means that I’ll be wearing the jeans, the canvas is open, and the journey of the project will be publicly shared. I’ll be materializing in cities around the US and possibly abroad in the coming months, and there will also be opportunities for anyone, anywhere to participate as well—stay tuned. If you see me, come up and say hey. Seriously. This project is for nothing if not for connection. And who knows—you may just end up leaving your mark.

Originally published to Substack on 4/14/22

Footnotes

1. "Seat" is a garment-speak euphemism for the butt area.

2. The avant-garde necessarily borders on the absurd. This is the risk inherent in it. It pushes the believability of fashion to the limit, teetering over the edge there until the world catches up. It's just shy of absurdity, or just absurd enough to be able to pass as if it's not absurd. To smile is to acknowledge the absurdity. For the avant-garde to lead the way, it needs to be taken seriously, which it's at perpetual risk of jeopardizing. It's consequently inherent in it's nature to keep a straight face until the world learns to do the same.

3. Not comprise. We need to do something about comprise. We all misuse it, myself included. We like to use it because it sounds like a smart person word, but we're actually using it all wrong. It does not take the preposition "of" (i.e. "is comprised of"). A proper use would be to say that this sentence comprises thirteen words. It's thus synonymous with the phrase "is composed of." And yet we have plenty of words and phrases that perfectly express this already, so why can't we just call some council of wordlords and collectively agree to change the definition of comprise to fit the way we're already using it. A prescriptivist I am not. Nor am I a gung-ho descriptivist—I favor a balanced approach—but this seems to be an instance where the prescription may be outdated, warranting a new description. Yin and yang, my friend. EDIT: Well, after writing all that, I looked it up to double check and it actually it appears the dictionary has accommodated the more commonly used, though once-incorrect, definition. Score one for the descriptivists! Grammar sticklers be warned, your curmudgeonly ways may come back to bite you. I feel like an ass, but I'm keeping this footnote here anyway because I like the way it earnestly depicts my thought process. And yet we now have a bigger problem in that there is a word whose two primary definitions are almost opposite one other.

4. If you're not from the tech world and these terms read as nonsense to you, welcome! Don't hesitate to reach out to me or Google to get up to speed. I'm hopeful that this project will bring new people into the fold by demonstrating novel and compelling use cases for these technologies. Because while there is fluff and hype in this space right now, there's also real, transformative technology. To think that it's all BS is like witnessing the dotcom bubble and concluding that "the internet" will never take off. Here's a now-amusing piece from the 90s for perspective.

5. I must here acknowledge that this has, unintentionally, a Virgil Abloh-esque character to it. Virgil passed away last year, and if you're unfamiliar with his legacy or see him primarily as a totem of hypebeast culture, I really encourage you to go explore his life and work. He was a profound thinker and played a significant hand in shaping our culture over the course of the last decade.

6. Or at least the last such thread I’ll detail today 😉

7. Within this sentiment there's an important statement about the fetishization of mental illness and the concept of the tortured genius/artist. This tortured figure has become a cultural archetype that we now subconsciously model. Many of our greatest creators have suffered deeply, and we seek to emulate them by following their path. Mental illness is a psychosocial phenomenon. Unlike many, I'm not of the belief that this archetype is pure fiction. There is something about the experience of being touched by great suffering that drives creative brilliance. But that doesn't mean there isn't another way to achieve these creative heights. It's a really complex and profound issue that I have many thoughts on and hope to write about another day.

8. I don't mean this in an insidious way, like intending to harm others. But something like pursuing a relationship that you know isn't ultimately right for either of you leads to pain for both of you in the end. It also makes for a good chapter in a memoir.

9. Save, perhaps, Augustine, but that's precisely because he first lived a very unsaintly life before devoting himself to God.

If you’ve ever spoken with me at any length, odds are that meditation has come up at some point. I swear I don’t just go around looking for opportunities to insert the topic into my conversations, but it has a way of finding me anyhow.¹ Meditation has done me immeasurable good, and I want to help others see if it might do the same for them. But meditation can be confusing, hard, and even dangerous, and most attempts to explain it do little to help with this fact. In fact, they frequently worsen the situation.

Clear, concise, and somewhat comprehensive accounts of the subject are rare, and off the top of my head I know of none.² This one will likely be little better, but I’ll try. I’ve been studying, practicing, and exploring meditation for almost 10 years now, which makes me very far from an expert, but probably a bit more experienced than you, given that you’re reading an article titled “Meditation 101.” My point in saying this is not to put on airs—I’m still ass at meditating, actually, though I have had periods where I was in phenomenal meditation “shape.” Rather, I note this mainly to publicly justify to myself that I might have something of value to offer in writing this piece, because I do have some experience.

And that really is why I’m writing this. I get asked questions about meditation all the time (and am happy to answer them!) so I see how many people are eager to learn but don’t really know where to start. Yet I struggle to point them to one single, easy resource to get them started. My hope here is to provide such a resource through a series of three short pieces on meditation. They will in turn examine what meditation is, why you should (or perhaps shouldn’t) do it, and how to get started. Books are long. Courses in apps like Calm and Headspace leave something wanting. And retreats are a fat commitment. So this is for you, the smart, curious internet article consumer interested in betterment of self and world, who doesn’t want to read a whole book just to learn how to do something difficult that you’re only begrudgingly coercing yourself into in the first place. Without further ado, then, let’s take a look at what meditation actually is.

Okay, a brief bit of further ado. You don’t realize how hard something is to define until you have to sit down and spell it out. You rack your brain for a short collection of words that captures the essence of that thing and that thing only, no exceptions. Of course, you fail. Because a thing defined is a thing reduced. Life as lived is far more complex than any set of words could capture. Meaning is a compression algorithm, and no compression algorithm in the real world is lossless.³ Definitions are patterned but nebulous. They exhibit an identifiable shape and core, but grow fuzzy around the edges, with exceptions inevitably popping up on the outskirts of their definitional jurisdiction. But we define anyway, and sometimes we even come up with something useful, if not perfectly accurate. Definitions exist to be useful.⁴ And the most useful kind of definition is the one that gets you to shut up and quit thinking about it.

Meditation, then, is a family of techniques used to cultivate more deliberate control over one’s attention and awareness. As used here, attention is the faculty of holding something in the “center” of consciousness, while awareness is the process of monitoring the periphery of consciousness. They exist side by side, working in tandem. The difference is perhaps best illustrated by analogy to the visual system.⁵ Attention mirrors focused vision, what you see at the center of your visual field; awareness mirrors peripheral vision.⁶ Attention renders things (whether they be sights, sounds, smells, physical sensations, tastes, thoughts, or emotions) crisp, clear, well-defined, capable of being grasped and manipulated. Awareness precedes attention. Things are fuzzier, murkier here, more shapeless and dynamic. While attention holds and uses mental objects in one way or another, our relationship with things in awareness is less instrumental—they just are. If something in awareness seems important, awareness will call attention over to take a closer look.

Why are attention and awareness so important? Because to control them is to control your reality. They’re the base layer on top of which everything else filters into your mind, the metacognitive functions that precede the rest of consciousness. They set the stage. There are a lot of things, both good and bad (or at least perceived as such), in this world. Control over the attentional system (attention + awareness) enables you to choose which of them to invite into your experience of reality, which to amplify, and which to let go. The implications of this are even broader than they appear at first glance, and are not easy to convey in a mere few lines. Instead of trying to do that, I’ll continue spelling out some of these implications over the rest of this piece and the pieces that follow.

This definition plays out in one way or another in the various kinds of meditation practice. Many of these practices look quite different from one another (e.g. sitting in silence vs. walking down the street), just as exercise can take on myriad distinct forms. Soccer is exercise (my personal favorite). Lifting weights is exercise (my third favorite). Yoga, jogging, cricket, and mowing the lawn are exercise. Sex is exercise if you’re doing it right.⁷ As exercise encompasses a family of practices for building physical fitness, meditation consists of practices for developing attention and awareness, and the numerous changes in the mind that follow from this. Though various, they can be meaningfully bound as one.

Just about anything that can be described can be described at various levels of granularity or “zoom.” Take yourself as an example. I could describe you at the interpersonal level—a collection of relationships, a node in a network (friend of Kevin, sibling, boyfriend/girlfriend, and so on). I could also zoom in a bit and describe you at the individual level (intelligent, good-looking, immune to flattery, etc.). Throw on a biological lens and zoom in even further and I could alternately describe you in terms of organ systems, organs, tissues, cells, and onward. Swap the biological lens out for a physical one and zoom in further yet, and you’re a buzzing metropolis of atoms, all dancing in concert. None of these descriptions is more true than another (despite what materialistic reductionists might try to tell you). Instead they complement one another, weaving together a more comprehensive picture of reality across different scales. Thus far, I’ve described meditation at the cognitive level, since this is the one most familiar to us—it’s the lens through which we most proximally experience the world. We experience thoughts, emotions, and perceptions, not neural impulses, and so it is these that we know best. But to examine meditation at several levels offers a richer picture than any single definition can provide, just as understanding tissue-level processes like hypertrophy strengthens our grasp of what exercise is. With that in mind, let’s take a look at meditation through a few different lenses.

The macrocognitive level sits atop the cognitive, so big that it’s difficult to see, like the air we breathe or the water in which fish swim.⁸ What resides here, permeating every aspect of our experience, is our sense of self. In macrocognitive terms, meditation is the reconstitution of our sense of self through deliberate training. More on this to come. The accounts that follow under this heading are macrocognitive framings of meditation.

Traditional

Historically, meditation has its deepest roots in Buddhist and Hindu religious practices, in which practitioners were attempting to dramatically alter their experience of self. In Buddhist tradition, this means attaining the visceral realization of “no-self,” where you recognize your sense of self as illusory. Note that this isn’t merely a cognitive realization. It’s not an abstract knowledge that one might come to through philosophizing, but rather an embodied experience. To no longer feel a sense of self is the highest aim in Buddhist practice. In Hindu tradition, seemingly by contrast, the aim is tapping into Brahman, the divine source that pervades all things. The idea of Brahman suggests that all beings are part of one greater self, merging together through meditation, rather than that no self exists at all. I said that this is seemingly by contrast to the Buddhist no-self because the two appear to me to be fundamentally the same thing. This cute little infographic thing might help illustrate what I mean.

Both Buddhist and Hindu practices aspire to erase the boundary between self and universe. You might formulate this as a dissolution of the self, or as a merging into a greater whole, but really the difference is a semantic one as I see it. When you see that the boundaries between things are arbitrary, it all becomes an amorphous (albeit heterogeneous) blob. Whether that makes it all one thing or no-thing—in my eyes—is the same thing. I’m not suggesting that Buddhist and Hindu meditation lead to identical experiences, but I am positing that their metaphysical implications are more similar than they might at first appear. For both traditions, it is through this experience that we attain nirvana, or moksha—freedom from all suffering. You don’t need to think of this as a spiritual or metaphysical state (though you’re also welcome to, if you favor that interpretation of reality). It can just as well be explained as a cognitive process, marked by enduring changes in the brain.

An examination of different meditative traditions within Hinduism and Buddhism reveals a few common roadmaps to this process of radical self-modulation. The one I’m most familiar with is shared by several schools of Buddhism, and begins with developing the clarity and durability of one’s attention. Awareness is needed for this. Without awareness, whenever lapses of attention occur, you’re liable to spend large amounts of time drifting or jumping around, thinking about other things. Strong awareness shortens these spells by making you conscious of them, snapping you out of it and giving you the opportunity to return to your intended object of focus. With attention sufficiently sharpened and stabilized, you can then begin insight practices. Insight practices are a group of techniques in which you closely examine the contents of your experience, with the intention of generating deep insights into the nature of reality. Eventually, this string of insights leads to a recognition of the illusory nature of the self, and the freedom from suffering that accompanies it. The progression, succinctly put, is: attention + awareness training —> insight practice —> enlightenment! This is just one such roadmap, but it helps to illustrate the logic of how a seemingly mundane daily practice can lead to profound and lasting changes in your experience of reality.

The point of all this is to say that if you’re meditating, you’re probably altering your sense of self to some meaningful extent, even if you’re unaware of it.⁹ The religiously-affiliated descriptions of “no-self” and “merging with the divine” may be too lofty and esoteric to effectively communicate what’s going on, especially to Western newcomers, but the message is an important one. So here are a couple more Western-friendly ways of understanding what’s happening at the level of the self in meditation.

Subject to object

Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan’s model of human development frames the growth process as a “drawing and redrawing of the distinction between self and other.” As we develop and become more complex as human beings, we continually redefine what is subject (i.e. what I am) and what is object (i.e. what I have). For example, a baby’s movements go from being mere reflexes—something to which she is subject—to object, something which she can implicitly recognize as separate from herself and over which she can exercise conscious control. The baby goes from being embedded in her movements to having them. Meditation, at its very core, is the enactment of this subject to object transition. It involves moving the contents of our consciousness from subject to object, seeing things we once considered parts of ourselves as no longer so. You’ve probably heard Andy from Headspace, or Sam Harris, or whoever your go-to meditation guide is instruct you to notice your thoughts as they arise without getting swept up in them, like watching clouds float by in the sky. To do so is to take what you were previously internalizing as self and to recognize it as something separate. It becomes a “thing” that you can observe, control, and de-identify with. The more adept you become in your meditation, the deeper the layers of self you can shed away. As your attention sharpens, you’re able to notice more and more subtle thoughts, emotions, and perceptions that you identify with that might’ve previously escaped the clutches of your conscious recognition. Eventually, even the most subtle and pervasive narratives of selfhood can be peeled back. All becomes object, until no subject remains. Why this might be desirable, which may not be immediately intuitive, will be the topic of the next piece in this series.

Gaining distance

Another way to consider meditation’s impact on the mind and our sense of self is as a function of cognitive and emotional distance. As you gain the ability to render the contents of your consciousness as objects, you attain a certain degree of remove from them. At varying distances, things might appear in greater or lesser clarity or as more or less beautiful, or they might exert a stronger or weaker gravitational pull. We’ll return to this metaphor when we explore the good and bad of meditation.

I’d be remiss to go without touching on a neuroscientific analysis, but I’ll meet density with brevity to make this section palatable. A neuroscientific exploration of meditation can be applied at all sorts of different scales. Here we’ll look at just three.

Hemispheric

The first of these is the hemispheric.¹⁰ One way to conceptualize meditation is as a process of development in the way the two hemispheres of the brain act and relate to one another. Broadly, and perhaps crudely, speaking, the left hemisphere governs the function we’ve been referring to as attention, while the right manages our faculty of awareness. Meditation might then involve a reshaping of the relationship between the two hemispheres, preferentially developing one or the other, or both in tandem, depending on the style of meditation and which of the two faculties is being prioritized. It could thereby redistribute power between them, leading one hemisphere’s mode of thinking to precedence or striking a healthy balance between the two, if such concepts makes any sense (and Iain McGilchrist’s work suggests they very well might).

Regional

Meditation can also be described as a regional process within the brain, activating certain areas while quieting others. Jud Brewer’s work suggests that meditation involves a quieting of the default mode network, or DMN, a collection of regions associated with self-referential processing.¹¹ It’s so-called because it tends to be particularly active when we aren’t doing much—that is, it’s what we default to. This effect is both acute (happens while meditating) and enduring (a lasting change occurs in those who practice consistently). This all makes sense in light of the above macrocognitive models as well. Self-referential processing could be called “sense of self” in normal people speak. In these terms, Brewer’s research then reveals a lasting diminution in the sense of self on account of meditation.¹²

Subminds

A final neuroscientific model (for now) is the subminds hypothesis, deriving from Culadasa’s The Mind Illuminated, which in turn drew inspiration from Marvin Minsky’s work in Society of Mind. This is, roughly, that the mind is a collection of different “subminds,” each with their own function and thus their own “desires.” The existence of different regions in the brain that account for different functions offers a clear depiction of this system. Each of these subminds then is made up of several other subminds, with this recursive structure unfolding all the way down to the level of the neuron. For a more familiar example of this kind of structure, just look at a corporation and the way it’s divided into departments, each consisting of different functions, those all containing several teams, each of which has multiple individual members.

Each submind can be conceived of as an “agent,” an autonomous entity possessing goals and the ability to interact with the world around it in pursuit of those goals. An agent is selfish, but the emergent behavior of the collective of selfish agents turns out to be for the benefit of the whole. One submind might compel you to read this article. One might fight for preservation of your sense of self. Another might want pizza. By acquiescing to or refusing these desires, you either feed or starve these subminds. In more formal neuroscientific terms, this can be expressed as long-term potentiation, a process wherein repeated activation across a synapse (the connection between two neurons) makes it easier for that same pathway to activate again in the future. Like a trail in the woods, as more and more travelers pass along it, a path is more thoroughly carved out.

In meditation, the aim is generally to try to rally all of one’s subminds around a single thing, whether that be the breath, a mantra, the act of letting go, etc. By repeatedly turning to this object of focus even after your mind has wandered off, you send your subminds the message that this is your sole priority at the moment. You’re effectively saying, “All those other distractions are superfluous right now.” Do this enough times and they begin to get the message that you’re serious. Through this process, you train them to work in harmony with one collective goal in mind.¹³ And just as any organization or group is more efficient and effective when its members are aligned, so too with your brain/mind. The experience of flow, most frequently encountered through sports, music, and the like, may be one place where we regularly see this degree of internal harmony come to life. Meditation appears to be moving the brain’s baseline toward a state more like this.¹⁴

My hope is that inspecting meditation from these different angles has created a patchwork perspective that’s more colorful, comprehensive, and nuanced than any single account could offer. It may well instead be that refusing to settle for a single, simple narrative makes the matter much more confusing. Feel free to let me know. But not every model needs to stick with you, and that’s exactly the point. We all understand the world through different metaphors. If just one of the models outlined above got something to click, I’ll be moderately satisfied, or at least not distraught.

A brief note on mindfulness

Before concluding, I want to mention the concept of “mindfulness”, since the modern Western meditation world loves that word and I couldn’t find a fitting place to talk about it above. You’ve surely heard of it, so I think it’ll be helpful to see where it fits in with the rest of what we’ve discussed. Wikipedia has a nice and straightforward definition that generally accords with the way others tend to use it:

“Mindfulness is the practice of purposely bringing one's attention [into] the present moment without evaluation.”

When mindful, you experience the present moment as it is, rather than getting caught up in thoughts about the present, or thoughts that take you elsewhere. This is pretty much just what meditation is, so I don’t really get what people mean when they say “mindfulness meditation”—it’s redundant. But I do think “mindfulness” itself is useful as a term to describe the state of mind cultivated in meditation and the act of bringing that mindset into one’s life beyond meditation. This is probably far from a consensus opinion, so take it with a grain of salt, but that’s where I find it most illuminating.

Well, this kind of became exactly what I wanted to avoid on the brevity front, but the damage is done and right now is not the time to try to force concision on myself.¹⁵ Instead, I need to write, and write liberally, until the words flow freely and consistently, for at present they do not. In the words of the great poet Charles Barkley, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”¹⁶ We’ve still got a lot more ground to cover, and my next piece on meditation will look at how meditating could save your life. Or ruin it. Or maybe something in between. I’ll do my best to cover that ground in a little less time.

Subscription plea: If you dig my writing or just want to support me, please consider subscribing. It’s free, and it would mean a fucking lot.

Originally published to Substack on 2/8/2022

Footnotes

1. Usually. After writing that, I realized I did go out of my way to bring it up in my last piece.

2. If you know of any, please share in the comments or on Twitter!

3. If it’s unclear what I mean by this, fear not. I’ll be writing about this idea at some point.

4. Contestable claim, I know. Hit me up and we can get into a heated argument about it.

5. This is because the visual system creates a clear dichotomy between visual focus and visual periphery at the biological level, thanks to the differing functions of rods and cones. The higher level cognitive dichotomy of attention and awareness exists separately, on top of this. As an example, fix your vision on some object in your surroundings. Now, while keeping your vision fixed there, shift your attention to an object a couple feet away. The first object remains at the center of visual focus, but your attention has peeled away. This can be construed as two layers of attention, the sensory and the cognitive. See the footnote below for more on this.

6. Julian Jaynes, in his fascinating work The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, argues that consciousness is something like a metaphor for reality, an interior map of the territory. Certain features of consciousness, he posits, then reflect physical realities. He believes our attentional system may be a representation of sorts of our visual system, drawing its properties from it, as the visual system is the primary way in which we attend to the world at the sensory level.

7. This is mostly tongue in cheek. There's no right way to have sex. Whatever floats your boat, man. But even the most motionless of sex, like Mormon-style soaking, presumably involves some sort of isometric muscle holds. Mormon readers, feel free to chime in.

8. “Macrocognitive” is a term I made up for the purposes of this article. It turns out it already has a definition, but I like mine better so we’re going to roll with it.

9. For those who might suggest that we're always altering our sense of self in some way, I’ll call on the analogy to exercise once again. While everything you do is subtly reconstituting your body, exercise does it in a more deliberate and directed, and thus more meaningful, way. So too for meditation.

10. This one is speculative, based as much on the theorizing of myself and others as on empirical evidence, and may prove to be little more than a useful metaphor (although this alone would be a great accomplishment).

11. Primarily the PCC and mPFC for my fellow neuronerds out there.

12. Research by Shinzen Young and Jay Sanguinetti’s team out of University of Arizona’s SEMA Lab provides further experimental corroboration of Brewer’s work via direct neuromodulation. They’ve used transcranial ultrasound to induce deep states of meditation by dampening activity of the PCC.

13. This pun was legitimately not intended.

14. I recognize that I have liberally interchanged between saying "brain" and "mind." They do not mean the same thing. They are, however, two sides of the same coin. The brain is the physical embodiment of the mind. The mind is the mental manifestation of the brain. Because of this, in certain contexts their use can be functionally equivalent. If I have wandered from such contexts, forgive me.

15. Looking back on it, it’s actually not that long, I was just hoping for something really crisp.

16. Every attribution that I’ve found for this quote appears to be apocryphal, so it seems like it’s fair game for me to attribute it to whoever I damn well please. So Charles said it. Charles Barkley is the original author of this quote.

Microdosing shrooms is my latest self-experiment. Other experiments have seen me spitting in a cup every 5 minutes for an hour and a half straight, inviting a woman to whisper in my ear for 20 minutes each night over a two week period in February, and dumping Greek yogurt all over my kitchen floor.¹

Yes, I did frame those in the most bizarre way possible to make them sound like the zany experiments of a mad scientist, but they were still rather out there to begin with. So what compels me to conduct such experiments? I use self-experiments as a way to better myself, my relationships, and my life as a whole.

Life is short and I’m going to die. You probably will too. Rather than using this fact as an excuse to brood, though, I hear it as an exhortation to soak up every last drop this world has to offer and squeeze it back out with all the gusto I can muster. I’ll surely come up short, and that’s okay. I unabashedly want it all, know I can’t have it, and carry on striving for it nonetheless. For me, this means becoming the most loving, joyful, intelligent, creative, productive, etc. version of myself that I can be. Experiments are one vehicle through which I take up this task.

Developing into the apotheosis of my possible selves begins with cultivating a healthy body and mind, as many of my experiments are geared toward.²

These have ranged from deepening my meditation with the help of nicotine to dosing vitamin D in the hopes of combatting wintertime lethargy to going gluten-free for whatever reason people go gluten-free.³ Through experiments, I’m able to test whether health hacks hold true for me as an individual in a systematic yet flexible fashion. By conducting interventions in an organized manner, controlling for confounding variables, and diligently recording my results, I gain a clearer picture of what’s happening to me than if I were to simply try something and fleetingly reflect on its effects after however long.

But my self-experimentation doesn’t end with classic Quantified Self-style efforts to optimize body and mind, and, quite honestly, my experiments don’t usually attain this level of methodological rigor. Because while I love saying “optimize” just as much as everyone else in tech, these experiments are about much more than optimization in a rigid mechanical sense. In fact, I apply experiments far beyond the scope of health and productivity, and I use experimentation as a mental model more so than a mere methodology.

The essence of this “experimentalism,” as I call it, is nebulous. I have no strict definition for it, but I also don’t use it arbitrarily. It’s more specific than “trying new shit” but less so than “running randomized, placebo-controlled trials.” It can roughly be described as making a deliberate effort to try things out, alongside some combination of the following:

• Committing to trying the new thing on an organized schedule (e.g. every other weekday) for a predetermined period of time or number of trials, in order to give it a fair shot.

• Paying attention to and recording the impact of the new thing. This can be done with varying degrees of diligence.

• Controlling for confounding variables where possible, even if this just means taking mental note of them.

• Maintaining an open mind and a genuine sense of curiosity in tandem with a problem-solving mindset.

Experimentalism, then, is a means of exploring and experiencing life in a spirit of wonder and play, organized in a framework that more effectively channels this spirit toward learning, growth, and problem-solving.

This way of seeing and being in the world has done me good, and I posit that it’ll do the same for you given the chance. So how do I use it, and how might you? As mentioned above, one clear use case is determining which health and productivity solutions work for you by trying them out. It’s worth unpacking some of the ways experiments can work toward this end.

For one, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sea of information available on the internet from digital denizens prescribing various health hacks and productivity pro tips. Every Reddit thread and Healthline article offers up a dozen different solutions, rendering paralysis by paradox of choice a real threat. An experimental approach can make this problem manageable by providing a structure in which to embed and evaluate these solutions systematically. By formulating a particular intervention as an experiment, it becomes a tractable, time-bound thing that can then be completed and compared against other interventions thanks to the data you’ve recorded.

This process confers the benefit of making health solutions personalized. No piece of advice is one-size-fits-all. It’s worth remembering that even the robust effect size of an intervention studied in a rock-solid paper from a killer journal is only an average. Humans are wonderfully complex, and while a given intervention may work miracles for some, for others it may be disappointingly ineffective. Findings from the medical establishment are a great starting point, but only trying things out for yourself will reveal what actually works for you. Doing so in an organized manner will make the discovery process that much more effective.

Experimentalism can also be put to good use in the process of building habits, whether those habits be health and productivity-related or otherwise. Let’s indulge ourselves with an example. Say you’ve heard fabulous things about the value of a regular meditation practice (which you probably have if you’ve ever spoken with me). You may feel you should probably be meditating—to reduce stress, boost your mental health, all that good stuff. So you set a New Year’s resolution to meditate four times each week, even though you’ve meditated only four times in your life. Of course, this is bound to fail. Framing the resolution instead as an experiment—e.g. meditating four times per week for two weeks, after which you’ll reevaluate—offers a more sensible path. In doing so, you’ve given yourself the opportunity to learn and the freedom to adjust your behavior according to those learnings. You may realize in this time that meditation isn’t really for you and can drop it with a clean conscience. This is a much better outcome than the alternatives, had you gone the resolution route:

• Bailing on what was supposed to be a year-long commitment, thereby undermining your trust in your own ability to stick to things.

• Keeping your resolution and slogging through day after day of meditation, wondering what defect of personal constitution is preventing you from reaping its benefits.

Not only can experimenting save you this trouble, it’s also just a more fun way to build habits. The combination of an end date and the tracking of outcomes creates a goal and a series of tight feedback loops that together add a gamification-like element to the experience. Approached experimentally, personal growth feels like less of a chore.

I picked meditation here because I wanted an excuse to talk about it, but this applies equally to interpersonal habits (saying “I love you” more often), financial habits (10-day experiment, no Uber Eats 😱 ), etc.⁴

I’ve also used experimentation to inform decisions both big and small. For big decisions, running an experiment can help to mitigate risk. I’ve deployed this tactic when deciding where to live. Whether it be a country, city, neighborhood, or building, choosing where (or with whom) to live is a big deal, and the more you think about it the more daunting it can become. Yet no amount of analysis will show you what it’s actually like to live there. To quell some of my concerns in making these decisions, over the past few years I’ve used short-term sublets to take different cities, neighborhoods, and buildings for test runs. Usually these are on the scale of a couple months so I can really get a feel for the place before making a longer-term commitment. This strategy has proven illuminating, and I’m happy to report that I’m now engaged in a long-term, committed lease.⁵

On the far less consequential end of the decision spectrum, I bought a candle recently. This may sound trivial, but for a frugal SOB like myself, this doesn’t come so easily. When something is a part of your identity, you avoid decisions that are incongruent with that identity, even if they don’t endanger it in any significant way. I subscribe to the identity narrative that I’m frugal, so I make frugal decisions, often past the point of reason. Experimentation can liberate you from your narratives by framing acts of transgression against them as isolated, deliberate incidents. You’re gathering data, trying something new. Just like it’s easy to laugh at your “drunk self” because the intoxication enables you to pin the behavior on something other than your own identity, experimentation can free you to try things that you otherwise wouldn’t normally. Over time, you can then do these things without jeopardizing the coherence of your self image because you increasingly realize that the core of your personhood comprises much more (or less) than a single thought, feeling, or action.

All that is to say that I indulged my candle-purchasing inclinations as an experiment. I reasoned that it was a small, one-time purchase that could yield sizable upside by contributing a certain je ne sais quoi to the atmosphere in my apartment. As it turns out, it did, and I’m now a bonafide candle guy—the aroma of “woodfire” wafts through my apartment even now as I type this, leaving a cozy holiday ambience in its wake.⁶ Better yet, my candle purchase has literally fueled my latest experiment: killing the lights and living by candlelight for the two hours before bed, in the hopes of curtailing the sleep-onset insomnia that has plagued me on and off for years. This solution has shown striking promise thus far.

Holding a significance somewhere between that of buying candles and deciding where to live, my writing itself is an experiment. In fact, framing it as such is the only way I was able to get myself to write this blog post. I told myself that I’ll write just this one and see how it goes. If I hate it, I’m free to stop. But I must write at least this one, per the experiment’s parameters.

Further, I probably couldn’t have written this piece without microdosing—another experiment—which on this disarmingly beautiful December day has endowed me with the creative energies needed to rouse me for the hard and important work that is writing. The opportunity to dabble in endeavors with asymmetric upside is yet another reason to embrace the experimental mindset, and the potential upside of writing, and writing online, is too high for me to neglect. It’s experiments all the way down.⁷

And so it is that I write—thanks to experimentalism, the asymmetric bets that it makes easier, and everything else that it’s good for. For powering the building of new habits and skills. For organizing, expediting, and personalizing learning. For lowering the stakes, fostering flexibility, and encouraging exploration. For the ability to hold identities more loosely. For de-risking some of life’s biggest decisions. For de-risking some of life’s smallest decisions that maybe aren’t so small after all. For empowering me to write this one thing and, pending results, possibly more. We’ll just have to wait and see.

I encourage you to go and see for yourself, whatever that might mean for you, and to share your findings when the time comes.⁸

Postscript: I had much more to say in this post—about how experiments pertain to love, philosophy, policy, mood disorders, startups, and organic bananas, among other things—but as I wrote those last few paragraphs I felt they wrapped a bow on this too neatly to be denied. To preserve that pristine bow, it seems I’ll have to save all that for another day. On that note, and until then, merry Christmas!

Originally published to Substack on 12/17/2021

Footnotes

1. I’ll explain if you ask. Until then, let me cherish the thought of the bewilderment that might ensue from reading that sentence.

2. IDRGAF about hanging prepositions, sue me.

3. I jest. There are plenty of good reasons for going gluten-free. In my case I just wanted to see what would happen and found little effect.

4. Yes, I put “etc.” there because I was running out of ideas for categories of habits.

5. As far as they go I'm happy in mine, but leases are actually pretty fucked. The whole leasing system is rather fraught and ripe for disruption. COVID and the consequent rise of remote work appear to have sparked the beginnings of change.

6. Just found out that “ambience” and “ambiance” are both correct spellings. Cool.

7. No, I’m not referencing that John Green novel, damnit. Go follow the link if you haven’t yet.

8. Seriously! Any experiments, new habits, health hacks, or theorizing thereof that you’re getting into, I’d love to chat about.