耀
a
r
o
4
e
d
g
2
l
p
a
n

a
r
o
n
h
s
i
a
o
w
a
s
h
e
r
e

 

About Me  

I need to reply to so many people. I have left everyone hanging. Now it becomes an insurmountable task.

It’s left over from birthday wishes, you see. I was working on my birthday, late into the night. There was about a two-and-a-half week stretch there during which I essentially did nothing but work and parent. Weekends, evenings, you name it.

I can think way back to the early days of tech—when the mere concept of email and mobile phones was futuristic—and I was telling people all the way back then, in posts very similar to this one, “sorry everyone, I’ve just been so busy.”

And I have, that’s legit. But what do I have to show for it? What’s that, thirty-five years of being not-caught-up-enough-to-reply, of just trying to keep my hat on as I race through the wind to try to… what?

Early on, it was to try to ensure a better future for myself.

That having failed to really materialize, it’s now to try to ensure that the bills are paid (including one very large student loan bill that will not be paid while I continue to breathe).

It was a bad deal.

All of the adults and the counselors and the advisors were wrong. I should have simply slacked off and replied. I’d be far richer, both socially and financially. The veiled threat was that you prioritize the work or someday you’ll suffer. The truth was that if you prioritize the work, you’ll suffer all the time.

But now, bills incurred, it’s too late to do much about it. The naive teen couldn’t have done anything else. Now the adult realizes just how brazenly he was lied to, albeit by people who didn’t realize they were lying.

— § —

I have had so many websites over the years. So . many . websites.

Some of them are immortalized here, having been rolled into this one, given that they were all blogs that happened in chronological order. In a sense, they were all the same site—i.e. from the visitor’s perspective, they were all “Aron’s blog.”

Under the hood, they were being rebuilt just about every year because technology marches on (and so do threats due to technology that would otherwise take a two-year-old site down, particularly in the early days).

But there are also multiple sites that weren’t ever rolled into this one.

Tonight, for no particular reason, I spent a bunch of time playing with a local instance of Apache getting one that I’m particularly fond of visible again, if only to myself. It was a shared blog I ran with my friends for six months in 2004. Eventually they trailed off (not everyone ultimately has the compulsion to blog forever) and I returned to blogging on my own individual site.

There are hundreds of posts there that no longer see sunshine, but I can’t really migrate them here, as the format was a group, talking to each other in successive posts that were woven together.

Thing is, even though I have it running locally after spending an evening on it, it can’t ever go online again. The site was run on Graymatter, a Perl-based CMS without a database.

Imagine that—a database-free CMS written in Perl!

I have no appetite to try to figure out if it can be secured. I doubt whether it can—I could invest a hundred hours in the underlying guts only to realize in the end it was pointless.

I could recreate the whole thing in WordPress or something, painstakingly duplicating the HTML and CSS on the front end.

But the result would be fake.

I am drawn to it enough to spend hours bringing it up just to look at it for a few minutes precisely because it is a historical artifact, of a particular time. The cadence with which things load as Apache cranks through Perl, server-side includes, and the odd PHP script has a particular flavor that’s of a piece with the site itself.

— § —

Sometimes I miss the very earliest days of my blog. Not because of what the reader’s experience was but because of what the writer’s experience was. Call it the “Twitter of 2000.”

At the time, being a hardcore Linux evangelist and open source contributor, I worked almost entirely at the command line most of the time. And my blog was populated by a bunch of local scripts that would append to locally stored, structured source files, then parse out HTML and dump it via FTP to my host. So I’d be working, right in flow, and just type something like:

blog post “What a nice day I’m having” “Crazy how the sun shines.|Crazy to write so much code while the sun is shining.”

I’d smash the enter button and in the background, up would go a post titled “What a nice day I’m having” a couple of paragraphs long.

That’s how I ran off so many posts early on, and why so many of them were just a few paragraphs long. Take that, Twitter. I was microblogging unwittingly in 2000.

Thing is, it wasn’t like today’s CMS systems, where making a post is this whole production. You’ve got to log in, which means not just opening a browser and visiting a URL and entering a username and a long, “secure” password, but also completing a captcha and then TOTP, and then when you’re finally in you’ve got to create a new item, and then you’ve got to type in this full-blown editor window staring back at you. And on today’s giant displays, you’ve got to get in a good thousand words just to make it feel like you’re not wasting everyone’s time.

And so, in the end, whatever you do post isn’t in-flow any longer. It just can’t be. You’ve been thinking about it while you go through the labor of logging in, and for the two hours of resistance that you felt about taking the time to log in. And you don’t do it very often, because it takes half an hour, even if you don’t proofread at all and leave the typos and miskeys in place.

— § —

All of this time wasted doing things that used to take eight seconds are what both job and life increasingly taste like, and why I’m as slow to reply to everyone as ever—if not moreso. Now I have two teens, and also everything in the world is as slow as molasses, the promise of technology having largely failed to materialize.

— § —

I don’t know, I guess I’m just old already.

and they fall away one by one
and an impossible gulf opens between you
and time becomes thick like the air in dark places
and you think you won’t live that long anyway
and the pavement swallows your footsteps
and you lose the damp flavor of memory
and the set lights fade slowly
and you close your eyes and breathe
and you swallow
and tomorrow comes

There are people who I know and have long known who are annoyed by the fact that I can read and entertain, say, Orthodox Christian or Taoist or Buddhist texts but don’t have a lot of patience for religious traditions that are “closer to home.”

They put it down to ego and a kind of aesthetic obscuritanism, i.e. fashion.

“Oh, he went off and got educated and big Ph.D. guy can’t be seen standing next to the faith traditions of the average people he grew up with because it doesn’t look impressive and fancy enough for him. That’s why he reads those other books and chats with those other people, but won’t read our books or talk to us about our spiritual lives.”

— § —

I grew up in Utah. Utah, and the United States in which it sits, are heavily Protestant. I don’t make this point to try to characterize Protestantism definitively, but more to enable a border of a kind to be drawn between spiritual and philosophical universes.

That is to say that I’m doing the same thing here they’re doing when they say “Oh, you’ll engage with and consider all of that other stuff, but not our stuff.” We’re both talking about the same border, I’m just pointing to it from the other direction.

I’m aware that there are other kinds of Protestantism in other places, but I know less about them. I didn’t grow up around them, wasn’t steeped in them.

But American Protestantism I know well. It’s a dominant social, cultural, and political force here, to this day, and even among those who no longer practice it.

And despite denominational differences and what adherents believe to be irreconcilable sectarian differences, to my eye, they’re all the same in one important way.

— § —

Epistemology probably isn’t something I should be blogging about because I’m not a philosopher and whatever formal philosophical training I have comes to me through the “squishy” side of the American social science disciplines, with whom I’m less impressed every day.

But my particular tendencies at a personal level have everything to do with epistemology, so I’m going to have to go there to finally get to the point I’m so long-windedly trying to make.

Here’s the thing.

There is a particular epistemology that I associate closely with American Protestantism that I can’t concede. It goes something like this:

  • To believe is to have faith
  • To have faith is to know
  • To know is to be certain
  • To believe is therefore to be certain
  • It is Good (capital G) to have faith
  • Therefore it is Good to believe
  • And it is Good to be certain
  • It is a sin not to have faith
  • Therefore it is a sin not to believe
  • And it is a sin not to be certain

And ultimately:

  • I believe that my preferences are Right
  • Therefore I am certain that my preferences are Right
  • And I have faith that my preferences are Right
  • And because faith is good
  • My certainty is good

This is all over our culture, from Disney films to national politics to activism in civil society.

To believe is to have faith is to know. To know is to have faith is to believe. And the Bible tells us that faith is everything, and Disney tells us that belief is everything, and therefore it follows that certainty is everything.

Everyone strives to believe. Everyone is proud to achieve and hold faith. And for precisely these reasons everyone operates with certainty—they know.

And all of this is a force for good in the world and is presumed to be be right and moral.

— § —

I can’t be the only one who has spent my life being showered with testimonials from believers, both secular and non-secular, in American life. Whatever the cause, whatever the denomination, whatever the secular or spiritual claim:

  • “I absolutely know—I am certain that…”
  • “I believe with all my heart that…”

Usually if done in the course of proselytizing, these are prefaced with “I want you to know that…”

  • “I want you to know that I absolutely know that…”
  • “I want you to know that I believe with all my heart that…”

These are all seen as both fundamentally good claims—unassailable, claims that “you can’t hold against people”—and also as persuasive claims on the part of those who make them.

They tell you these things—how much they know, deep, deep down, how deeply certain is their certainty—that this thing or that one is True.

All these years later, I just can’t join them there. I find these claims of knowledge to be off-putting. More to the point, though I’m not a religious person, I find these claims of certainty to be, in some way, blasphemous.

The more they are made, the less seriously I take them.

— § —

But here’s the thing. I do believe (along with virtually every faith tradition, American Protestant or not) that faith is a fundamental good, for a variety of reasons that I won’t bother to go into here.

So how can this possibly be?

If I see faith as good, how can I be put off by people who believe, or who know?

This question is what I’m getting at with this whole discussion. It points to how the cultures on the two sides of the border differ.

I am able to think and talk about and read certain Orthodox, or Catholic, or Taoist, or Buddhist thinkers with generosity and seriousness because faith is not an epistemic quantity for them.

That is to say that—at least for those that I find interesting and agreeable—faith is not at all the same thing as belief, and neither has much at all to do with knowledge or certainty. Belief is not a way of having faith and faith is not a way of knowing.

  • Faith is faith
  • Belief is belief
  • Knowledge is knowledge
  • Certainty is certainty
  • These are each different things
  • To have faith is good
  • To have belief is understandable
  • To have knowledge may be useful but is risky
  • To have certainty is bad

This road—this is a road that I can travel as a tourist all day long.

Because the older I get, the more it becomes clear to me that I don’t know. I am not certain. They don’t know, despite their certainty. And certainty is not a good thing—and it is not the same as faith.

And when you consider the equivalences that these other traditions draw, they do not overlap with the American Protestant ones.

Not:

  • Belief is faith
  • Faith is knowledge
  • Knowledge is certainty

But rather:

  • Belief is human nature
  • Faith is hope and trust
  • Knowledge is practical
  • Certainty is error

Despite the superficial similarities (both being Christianity) between, for example, American Protestantism and, say, Coptic Orthodoxy, at the core of things—at the transcendental level—their universes are very different places.

— § —

Every time someone purports to know, I am put off, particularly if this is expressed with certainty.

I know that there is irony here, that the claims to know are a way of attempting to demonstrate both faith and moral value, the only move they know how to make when it comes to persuasion about things beyond the practical and empirical.

But in the same way that I have little patience (and getting less every day) for the activists who “know” in our social and political life, I have little patience (and getting less every day) for religious folk who “know” in their religious lives.

If you tell me you have deep faith, and leave it at that, I’ll be interested in hearing what you have to say—and talking about it seriously all day long.

The moment you tell me that you know, you’ve lost me. Becuase you don’t know. And more to the point, that’s the claim of the tyrant, and the criminal, and the Pharisee.

In all things, religious or secular, I am unconvinced that it is for us to know.

And every bit of practical wisdom I’ve managed to accumulate over the course of my life (which admittedly isn’t all that much) tells me that people who know are both going to cause conflict and are probably going to make things worse in the end.

— § —

I’m mildly amused imagining how some of my American Protestant compatriots might react to this explication.

“How is it possible to have faith without knowing? Surely if my faith is real, then I know?”

If only we could excise this particular epistemic ethos from our culture, we might be able to have a society again—without all the internecine, zero-sum conflict that we have today.

But we are who we are as a people.

And at a personal level—I’m just not there with you. I haven’t been there with you since I was about ten years old.

Yes, I understand that you are certain that you know, and thus that you also believe and have faith, and that all of these are good because they are the same, because Disney and the Bible and your schoolteachers assure you that faith and/or belief are moral goods, and therefore you must go out and change the world and its people based on what you are certain that you know.

I understand what you feel. I can understand it because I grew up here. I breathed the same air.

But this understanding doesn’t mean you’ll ever fundamentally persuade me—or anyone else—about any one thing. Because persuasion doesn’t have much to do with knowledge, but rather a lot to do with faith. Which is why—and how—faith and knowledge are completely different things.

— § —

So if you want to reach me with an open mind for heart-to-hearts, bring me your faith—but don’t expect me to be impressed by your knowledge, and for God’s sake, spare me your certainty.

Anyone that has studied anything in any of the humanities or social sciences departments of Western systems of higher education knows the standard form of the successful essay:

Text X ostensibly says Y, but in fact a closer analysis reveals that, in fact, it actually secretly says Z, and I will now step through why that is the case, point by point. (Followed by a step back to some meta level and a few dozen steps that inevitably can b traced back to continental philosophy.)

Though at first glance this may seem a bit of a stretch—after all, there are many more things to do in the humanities than analyze a text—in fact, it’s not. Not for a long time now.

You see, for half a century at least we’ve generally “understood” that any social object—that is, anything that at least one human mind experiences—is in fact a “text.” Naturally this includes people and their biographies as well. (Thanks, language and literature departments!)

And for a similar amount of time, we’ve also generally “understood” that all texts secretly carry with them the agency of some power, and are thus in fact exercises of, or themselves exercise power. (Thanks, social science departments!)

And so it is that that in effect, the entire project of the humanities and social sciences for the better part of a century in the West has been to point to just about anything or anyone that can be seen or that anyone cares about—including people and things that were previously considered beautiful, or sacred, or funny, or trivial—and demonstrate how it—or them—is actually a liar out to manipulate you for it—or their—own ends.

— § —

Amazingly, all of this aggravated nonsense falls somehow under the auspices of “making life better.” Usually the claim is that power that’s out to manipulate you ought to be neutered (thus explaining why all art, science, people, and things also have to be neutered, given that they’re all deceptive texts in service of said power), or even more sadly that we are edified when we pursue Truth and thus it is imperative to demonstrate just what a totality of all that is is clearly Lies.

And so it is that we end up in 2024 with the West in collapse and wondering why there are so many conspiracy theories and why so many are so very angry, and of course everyone is marching around trying to “make the world a better place” by pointing their fingers at their fellow citizens, their social and cultural institutions, and all the traditions that have made them who they are, and trying to neuter the lot.

— § —

In fact, anyone who tries to make the world a better place can only make the world a worse place. The meta is a poison. It’s amazing that one of the largest companies on the planet—and by all accounts one of the most poisonous and destructive—is, in fact, called meta.

— § —

What you can not do in any modern humanities or social science department or journal article or even in idle humanities or social science chit-chat over wine with fat heads is naively say that you simply like a work, or simply don’t like it, or that you think it means exactly what it says.

The failure to elevate oneself immediately to the meta level in such situations isn’t just gauche, but is seen as evidence of some form of mental retardation, i.e. you look to be thirty but in fact you’re clearly seven, as you have taken something in life at face value. How embarrassing.

And in fact the most revered amongst us, the people who will make emeritus or who will run the hedge fund, never have to “elevate” themselves to meta because they have achieved a permanent meta state and are admired far and wide for it.

They never see what is in front of them; instead, they see the power that it secretly carries, the message that it secretly conveys, the shapes of the shadows that it casts and that are clearly the actual immanence of the thing in the world.

They never see naively, in other words—they see first, last, and always only the conspiracies that lie behind the toothbrush, the Shakespeare sonnet, the Coca-Cola can, and the waste management engineer.

And of course as they would freely admit, they, too, are a text, and their calling out of these conspiracies is just so much more text, and anyone who fails to regard both they and their statements first and foremost at this level of meta analysis deserves everything they have coming to them.

— § —

In short, our best and our brightest know very well and have known for generations that all of it—the paintings and the people, the novels and the natal, the consumer goods and the calcuations that enable their manufacture—are lies all the way down, conspiracies all the way down, in the service of power.

And they can point to a dozen passages in Derrida or Lacan or Foucault or Lyotard or Saussure or Pierce and so on to make their case—not like the plebes who merely assert it naively. (Naivete, after all, is the enemy of those trying to make the world a better place; all accusations must be made in a state of engaged meta-level blase that borders on trance, but can’t be trance, because of course trance is naive.)

— § —

And then we all sit around and muse about why the public is so suspicious, and so gripped by mistrust, and why we all feel a gaping hole in our hearts where the meaning and truth used to be.

It took me decades to turn myself into one of these monsters, and with luck, by the time I die, I will rediscover naivete and be able to say “gosh I like it because I think it’s pretty” or “gosh I like them because I think they’re nice.”

— § —

When politics invades aesthetics and claims of Truth-capital-‘T’ you know you have a totalitarian culture on your hands. Fascist, communist, whatever. That’s one of the general conclusions drawn after Hitler and Stalin.

Maybe that’s the strong form of the argument, but I think at the very least what we’ve got here is something of a gravity vs. quantum mechanics problem for human being. Both history and experience tell us, if we’ll listen (but we won’t because that would be naive), that art and the analysis of art and the human using scientific methods simply does not work. It seems to work, but in the very moment at which the the Actuality is revealed, the subject instead suddenly vanishes. Analyze them this way and art ceases to be art; people cease to be people, and thus nothing is revealed. To examine anything outside of science using methods broadly drawn from science is to extinguish it. You call it a lie because it is one and it vanishes on you, and you become the liar calling out other liars.

Yet we know that the methods of science broadly work, as they have given us the Amazon Truck and the Smart Coffee Maker.

And so we have a core irreconcilability. It’s the pit that Marx and everyone else fell into on the way to the future. We know how to find Truth. We also know that to seek Truth using Truth methods in the domain of Truth is to extinguish Truth.

Maybe because there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. But of course that can’t be, because it’s naive; that’s clearly saying something else, something that Power wants us to think…

(And here the professional philosophers and epistemologists jump in and begin crafting new chapters of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at me. They miss the point, but then missing the point is the point, because to not miss the point would be naive. I am calling them out here and now as naive liars who are making facile, perhaps even nonsensical arguments in the service of their own power, in the same way that they will be calling me out under their breath as a naive liar who is making facile, perhaps even nonsensical arguments in the service of my own power, in the same way that the left is calling out Donald Trump as a naive lair who is making facile, perhaps even nonsensical arguments in the service of his own power and the right is calling out Joe Biden and the CDC as naive liars who are making facile, perhaps even nonsensical arguments in the service of their own power…)

— § —

Oh yes, there’s an anti-elite feeling about, and as a former “elite” I want to say—it’s fully justified. There are few things so vile as stealing the general supply of the numinous by way of cynical signs and wonders, then taking it out behind the shed and murdering it in cold blood.

We are going to suffer for our sins in the West. The die is cast.

— § —

P.S. Get off my lawn.

I try to avoid LinkedIn and always have done, but this year as a part of my professional duties, I’m there for a while as the new year kicks off and it’s positively disturbing to see.

Armies of well-groomed, wooden professionals in “family photos” in which they’re surrounded by props that only look like children, somehow never with a spouse. They’re sharing their hard-won wisdom on how to properly live life and make resolutions for the new year, which as you might imagine on a platform like LinkedIn is another way of saying they’re unwittingly indicting themselves to an ugly degree.

Where else can you see middle-aged men and women sharing with you that “what’s worked so well for their family” is to review the “performance targets” and “execution strategy” they’d set as a family for the previous year, find “quantitative measures” for how they’ve “overperformed” or “underperformed,” then perform a “gap analysis” to understand the “shortfall” and “iterate on the strategy” for this year, along with “frameworks” for establishing “new family KPIs and performance targets for the quarters ahead.”

They’re so proud.

They’re so alienated, inhuman, and devoid of souls. Their furniture, of course, is elegant—and very sanitary, I have no doubt. I’m sure they’ve tipped their housekeepers well, and paid sufficient lip service to regretting the retrograde masses in the rural areas of flyover states.

Facebook and Instagram and TwitterX are terrible, but at least on those platforms you get to see people, even if primarily their dark sides. How long ago did these people on LinkedIn die? How long before their tormented children die a similar death? Impossible to say.

Terrifying.

I have long had a tradition of making an end-of-year post, if nothing else.

This year, I haven’t done it. I thought instead, I’d make a New Year post. But I haven’t done that either.

Or rather, this is it.

I keep reading these books and playing these games and performing these tasks (including for much of today) that I think I’m learning from, and then as it turns out, inevitably I haven’t learned and I don’t learn.

There are multiple people I intended to message with a “Happy New Year” or at least with a simple reply to their prior message to me, but I haven’t done so, and, after all, won’t manage to do so tonight.

So that’s how things are. Happy new year.

Discussions about faith have become more and more a part of my life over the last decade. I think this is due to several things:

  • My own generation reaching middle age and beyond. People begin to survey their lives, to take the measure of things, and to reflect on the state of their legacy. We are far enough along that there have been divorces, and cases of ruin, and the loss of grandparents and increasingly even parents. There is a moment in life at which you look around and know, viscerally, that the end is coming for you, and that most of your life is behind you, and that time is running short to achieve a satisfactory “totality” when the end arrives.

  • Our children reaching a certain age. With the characteristic delayed fertility of advanced industrial societies, it’s in our forties and fifties that Generation X (a certain socioeconomic slice of Generation X in particular that seems to be mine) find their children at that age—namely the early and middle teens—at which questions of religion begin to emerge with substance, and we are confronted with some “tough questions” about the meaning of life and the foundations of morality and being.

  • Our particular shared present. The culture wars, the return of international relations and global warfare as forces in history, the pursuit of artificial intelligence, and a budding but highly sought after transhumanism all sponsor, just underneath the surface, a larger civilizational debate on moral commitments and, lurking even deeper, the metaphysics that underwrite them. We don’t tend to admit it, and in fact even try to suppress and deny it, but our epoch is an epoch of grand debate and reflection about this frame.

So it is that I find myself consuming all sides of this debate. As a professionally trained social scientist with multiple degrees in anthropology and sociology, up to and including the doctoral level, religion has always been of interest to me. I have for decades owned multiple translations of the Bible, the Koran, the foundational Taoist texts, the Bhagavad Gita, translations of the Egyptian burial scrolls, and so on, as well as all the usual suspects, i.e. Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religions Life to play off against the works of Marx and the maudlin corners of the Frankfurt School and so on.

It has, in some very strange ways, been uncomfortable to situate myself, however, in this landscape of religious practice and thought, both because it’s long been an unsettled question for me by now, and because as someone with both this kind of training and with the social roles that I inhabit (father of children becoming teenagers, son of parents reaching the ends of their lives, the “educated in this topic” friend of people struggling to meet the challenges of the same stage of life, and so on).

But—I just stumbled onto two formulations that I very much appreciate, whose language and sensibility appeals to me. I wish I had the courage to attribute them to their source, but for the moment I do not. (You’ll all find that I become much more courageous once my children reach adulthood and are no longer potentially impacted as significantly by the things I do and say in public, even if “in public” means on an obscure blog that nobody reads anyway).

Note that in particular, the third bullet above draws tight circles on just how forthcoming we can be in public about the things that we consume; it is bold enough to say these days that one consumes “everything from all corners” and leave it at that. To go farther isn’t, at the moment, a good idea.

— § —

The first formulation that I have fallen in love with is an inversion of the phrase that one hears everywhere around our society, and I can’t believe that I never really came to it before. It doesn’t fit me precisely, but I am taken with the notion of calling myself “religious but not spiritual.” Like I said, that doesn’t quite fit, in that I don’t go to any church and don’t belong any denomination, either within Judeo-Christianity or beyond it, but at the same time it is in keeping with the way in which I’ve tended to address these questions with my kids.

I tell them: that in my experience, there are moral adherents and immoral adherents in every belief system, but that what’s also true is that the religious texts and bodies of tradition, across all cultures, are in some sense the collected wisdom of the ages, and are amongst the greatest literary and philosophical treasures of humanity; that for this reason it is a deep disservice and also the height of error to approach them facilely or with literal or tribal smugness, as to approach them this way is to surely get them wrong; that any person who truly plans to become culturally literate should have some reasoned, reflective, and critical engagement with them all in the end, not least because the substantial majority of the people on the planet are adherents to one tradition or the other; and that in a great many ways they are strikingly similar in their ultimate content, though this is not at all immediately evident in many cases and relies on an understanding that is hard-won, requiring wisdom and discrimination.

I also tell them that I don’t practice any particular faith in the practical sense—I don’t attend, I don’t belong-to, etc.—and that it is not my place to either encourage or discourage anyone’s adherence to any of them.

It would be easy, having read that, to say “well that’s not at all ‘religious but not spiritual’ so what are you on about,” but when placed alongside the other formulation that I stumbled across this morning, things take on a different patina.

The other formulation, which was given in reference to someone else, was that the person in question was not becoming stuck in questions about “belief in the metaphysical,” and was instead “noticing that they were already” an adherent to a tradition in many ways—in the values that they hold, in the ways that they interact with the world and the moral positions that they take, and that they have spent recent years “pulling at the threads” of the positions that they already take and the behaviors in which they already engage—quite apart from metaphysical commitments, ritual practice, “personal relationships” with deities, and so on—and “coming to see that there is something foundational” behind them that points back to the religious universe.

More than a few people in life are familiar with some of the formulations I’ve used in the past—for example that if I “look for the people like me, who think what I think and act the ways that I try to act”—that I notice “where most of them are standing,” so to speak, in the demographics of religion and morality, and wonder “if those are actually my people.” I’ve also said that I’ve engaged in serious reflection on whether one can be a Catholic, or a Buddhist, or a Taoist, etc. without actually being “a believer,” a question about both the metaphysics and the practical utility of “belief” and the borders of “practice” that has remained unresolved for me for some years now.

But taken together, these two formulations I think hit home for me very much. I’m functionally unable to engage with “belief in the metaphysical” for whatever reason, but for a decade I have been “noticing that I am already” holding particular values and engaging in a set of moral and ethical habits and commitments that situate me very clearly in some ways, and I continue to “pull at the threads” of what this all means to try to arrive at foundations and first principles, leaving me in some sense in the state of inadvertently being religious in some sense in relation to everyday behavior, without necessarily being someone whose practices are highly spiritual or ritualistic.

— § —

This is a word soup, but these are hard questions, particularly in relation to what Christianity calls a “fallen world.” It is for the very reason that we humans are noisy (in the information theory sense) in both our belief and practice that religion matters to begin with. It is, empirically, a force that functions to constrain this noise, both at the personal level and at the social level—noise that would otherwise grow out of control, exponentially, and to devastating effect in my opinion. But that means in practice that understanding is hard-won; to get there, you have to fight your way through throngs of “merely humans” that all, to one extent or another, betray all of it—and are expected to do so, otherwise they shouldn’t be there (in a state of practicing, in a state of believing, in a church, in a set of stated moral commitments) to begin with, because there would be no need.

It’s a particularly difficult thing to do as a parent. I’m glad I’m not the parent positioned and committed such that I simply tell my children “this is what’s True” so “just go to church,” which is what I experienced as a child. I saw how that went over for me—and it took me decades to find my way back to (and be to able to tolerate) questions like these in the first place. I’d love to have been raised without developing a kind of oppositional defiant disorder about the religious question that colored my thought about the whole pile of it for decades, and I see an awful lot of that in my generation.

In some sense it should be a warning to parents—dogma for dogma’s sake is bad. Understand your commitments and the reasons for them before you try to convey them to others, and never do this by force.

Hopefully my children will be able to tackle this without all of the same baggage, as the questions are fundamental to a meaningful life.

“For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies.”

Older member of my extended family asked whether I was ever going to date again. I was brutally honest and said I don’t know, probably not, and they were troubled by that answer, and then we went a few rounds of whys and wherefores.

Here’s the thing.

I’ve been in a larger number of legitimately long-term relationships than most people have, I think. I started almost right away. I’ve had five relationships in my life that went at least a year. Four of those went at least two years. Two of them went five years or more.

All of them started wonderfully, and ended miserably.

— § —

In my early ’20s, I wasn’t established yet, but for a young twentysomething, I don’t think I was a bad catch. I had done TV interviews about science on the evening news, had entered college early at 15, was technology expert who also studied human culture. Very well read. Had stock options, my own car, a steady job as an editor, and plans to go to grad school. And I was six feet tall, slim and muscular, not bad looking (I wistfully say now, looking back), and not at all a geek. Other young people called me a ‘rock star.’ Not just my professors, my peers.

At the start of that relationship, she was “so lucky” to be in a relationship with me. And for several years, it was like a match made in heaven. And then it wasn’t. Over time, I was compared to other people, and found to be lacking.

Thing is, no matter how hard you’re working, no matter how ahead of the game you think you are, there is always somebody who’s going to out-play you, out-look you, out-tall you, out-hustle you.

I was out-hustled and eventually, cheated on and left.

— § —

Big interim, let’s skip to me as I entered my 40s. Double bachelor’s degree, master’s degree from the University of Chicago, Ph.D. from a legendary school in Manhattan. Seven books to my name. Ten years as a professor, then a pivot to private industry where I became a technology industry executive with a strong career. Unusually well-read, literate, even, yet down to earth, decent conversationalist. Still six feet tall, still not some awkward geek.

Still getting called a loser who will never amount to anything and routinely compared to other guys who have done more. This guy founded a company that became a hot startup. That guy traveled the world and has lived on multiple continents and speaks five langauges. I just don’t match up, such a mistake to settle for me when men like them were available. When will I earn a quarter of a million? When will I become a CEO? Obviously no ambition. Loser.

— § —

It generally has always gone the same way. Great start, then a pivot somewhere over a middle period to “why did I settle for you?” And then dissatisfaction. Nagging and bitterness. Eventually a period of deep and bristling contempt for me. Then end.

Yet I have never cheated on anyone in my life (though I have been cheated on multiple times). I have never forgotten a birthday, an anniversary, a Valentine’s day. I have taken people on dreamy road-trip dates to restaurants a thousand miles away and to Radio City Music Hall and Carnegie Hall on black tie dates. I do housework. I am thoughtful. I write notes. Not because I think I have to, but because I want to. I have myself actually yelled at a woman maybe twice in my entire life. I’ve never hit one. I don’t call people names and it’s not in my nature to do so. I’m easy to get along with—so long as by “get along” you don’t mean “Aron has to do what I say he does and make the choices I say he must.”

Still, by the end, there is always someone (or someones) that I just don’t measure up to. The grass is always greener somewhere. Well, yes. It is. I’m a solid performer—recall, masters and Ph.D. from significantly brand-name schools, VP in technology, seven books, six feet tall, holiday-rememberer, dishes-doer, romantic dater, reasonably masculine (or, when being lambasted, “so unapologetically guy”)—but still that’s all it is. No, I’m not a founder and CEO. No, I do not earn half a million a year or have 10 million in my 401k. I don’t drive a late model BMW. I don’t have a rolodex that stretches to the halls of political power. I haven’t run for elected office (yes, this comparison has been made in my life, and I have lost out to the guys that have).

And in the end, it’s miserable. Not only because I don’t compete at that level, but because I don’t want to compete at that level. I’m already too posh for my own comfort. I was raised a lower middle-class kid, with TV sitcoms and clutter in the kitchen. I don’t want to stray too far from that because I like it. It feels like home to me. I don’t want to live in an immaculate architect-rendered house with an atrium and a Zen garden and snap photos of us in the sauna for Instagram. I just don’t.

— § —

Older relative says there is someone out there for me, I just have to look, it’s important that I not be alone.

Maybe, but I don’t care. I’ve done the long-term relationship ending in a painful breakup where I’m just a loser by comparison too many times. I’ve been cheated on, yelled at, belittled, even belittled in public while standing next to other high-achieving guys. It’s a whole bunch of no fun.

All of this was too much to try to explain to my older relative. He’s from another time and genteel as they come. But the thing is, I just don’t care to do it again, to keep looking. I don’t care to try to compete again. A Ph.D. and a pile of books is enough for me. I’m done questing and conquering. I’m almost 50 and I’ve been at this life thing for a long time, and been through too many “hell-like final years” during which I was beaten over the head with my “loserdom” relentlessly, while thinking to myself “really, am I such a poor catch?”

I just want to raise my kids now and think about what kind of legacy I can leave.

Dating feels like this competition that you have to win, and the guys I end up competing with, I frankly already lost to. I don’t have the energy (or at least, want to have the energy) to be a founder and CEO, or to run for political office. I want to tend my own garden and just appreciate the buds and the bees and watch the seasons turn and reflect on life.

Maybe there’s some woman who will ultimately just come and sit beside me as I do it, and not ever actually leave, and that’s fine. But I’m not going out looking.

And if she starts to compare me to other men or tell me I could and should have been so much more, I’m throwing her out earlier, not later. I’ve already earned my terminal degree, been married, had my kids, written my books, traveled internationally. My bucket list is done. Ain’t nobody going to convince me this time around to try to get back into that game.

It’s so much extra, hard work, and now that I have my kids, there’s no reward it can offer that I actually think is worth the investment.

Archives »

March 2024
February 2024
January 2024
December 2023
November 2023
October 2023
September 2023
May 2023
April 2023
March 2023
January 2023
December 2022
November 2022
August 2022
June 2022
May 2022
April 2022
March 2022
January 2022
December 2021
November 2021
September 2021
April 2021
March 2021
February 2021
January 2021
December 2020
November 2020
October 2020
September 2020
August 2020
July 2020
June 2020
May 2020
April 2020
March 2020
February 2020
January 2020
December 2019
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
May 2019
April 2019
March 2019
February 2019
January 2019
December 2018
November 2018
October 2018
September 2018
August 2018
July 2018
June 2018
May 2018
April 2018
March 2018
February 2018
January 2018
December 2017
November 2017
October 2017
September 2017
August 2017
July 2017
June 2017
May 2017
April 2017
March 2017
February 2017
January 2017
December 2016
November 2016
October 2016
September 2016
August 2016
July 2016
June 2016
May 2016
April 2016
March 2016
February 2016
January 2016
December 2015
June 2015
February 2015
January 2015
December 2014
October 2014
September 2014
August 2014
July 2014
June 2014
May 2014
April 2014
March 2014
February 2014
January 2014
December 2013
November 2013
September 2013
August 2013
July 2013
June 2013
May 2013
April 2013
March 2013
December 2012
November 2012
October 2012
August 2012
July 2012
June 2012
May 2012
March 2012
December 2011
October 2011
September 2011
August 2011
July 2011
June 2011
May 2011
April 2011
March 2011
February 2011
December 2010
November 2010
October 2010
September 2010
August 2010
July 2010
June 2010
May 2010
April 2010
March 2010
February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
March 2009
February 2009
January 2009
December 2008
November 2008
October 2008
September 2008
August 2008
July 2008
June 2008
May 2008
April 2008
March 2008
February 2008
January 2008
December 2007
November 2007
October 2007
September 2007
August 2007
July 2007
June 2007
May 2007
April 2007
March 2007
February 2007
January 2007
December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006
June 2006
May 2006
April 2006
March 2006
February 2006
January 2006
December 2005
November 2005
October 2005
September 2005
August 2005
July 2005
June 2005
May 2005
April 2005
March 2005
February 2005
January 2005
December 2004
August 2004
July 2004
June 2004
May 2004
April 2004
March 2004
February 2004
January 2004
December 2003
November 2003
October 2003
September 2003
August 2003
July 2003
June 2003
April 2003
March 2003
February 2003
January 2003
December 2002
November 2002
October 2002
September 2002
August 2002
May 2002
April 2002
March 2002
February 2002
January 2002
December 2001
November 2001
October 2001
September 2001
July 2001
June 2001
May 2001
April 2001
March 2001
February 2001
January 2001
December 2000
November 2000
October 2000
September 2000
August 2000
July 2000
June 2000
May 2000
April 2000
March 2000
February 2000
January 2000
December 1999
November 1999

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

twenty − fourteen =