Radio Schopenhauer

Radio these days in the United States seems largely to consist of angry right-wing shouters, but in Ireland they do things rather differently. So differently that they’re willing to give an hour of airtime to have an erudite panel discuss the work and influence of Arthur Schopenhauer. Since Schopenhauer is one of history’s most magnificent philosophical pessimists — and one of the few to have genuinely wide cultural influence — I’m linking to the broadcast with the graphic below. It should be of interest to the sort of people who read a site like this.(Clicking on the play button in graphic opens a new browser window on which the broadcast is replayed. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to figure out a way to download the content directly.)

The show’s distinguished panel consists of Christopher Janaway of the University of Southampton, Sandra Shapshay of Indiana University, Brian O’Connor of University College, Dublin, and David Berman emeritus at Trinity College, Dublin.

Hat tip to Leiter Reports for bringing my attention to the broadcast.

…

Booknote: A new essay on misanthropic antinatalism

Readers with an interest in antinatalism should take note of a new essay by David Benatar, “The Misanthropic Argument for Anti-natalism”1 is this edited volume:

Benatar is noted as the author of Better Never to Have Been (“BNTHB”), a book-length argument for a position that has been characterized by philanthropic antinatalism, that is, the view that coming into existence inflicts grave harms on whoever comes into existence. If you care about people — the assumption that you do care about people is the philanthropic part — then you’ll refrain from inflicting harm on new people by bringing them into existence.

The misanthropic argument for antinatalism focuses by way of contrast on the suffering that human beings inevitably inflict upon sentient beings. This argument doesn’t rely on fear or hatred of human beings as such (so perhaps “misanthropic” is a slight misnomer), but rather on a clear-eyed acknowledgement of unpleasant facts about people as they really are.

Like many of the better attempts at moral entrepreneurship this essay is short on technical development and long on empirical detail (a point of some contrast with BNTHB). The philosophical part of the argument is simply this (Locs. 902-6):

  1. We have a (presumptive) duty to desist from bringing into existence new members of species that cause (and will likely continue to cause) vast amounts of pain, suffering, and death.
  2. Humans cause vast amounts of pain, suffering, and death.
  3. Therefore, we have a (presumptive) duty to desist from bringing new humans into existence.

To sharpen an example an example which Benatar himself offers (Loc. 1231), if it’s wrong to create and release a new kind of plague virus into the world, then it’s wrong in the same way and for the same reason to create and release new human beings into the world.

The meat of the essay is a catalog of the hideous crimes human beings have perpetrated and continue to perpetrate. That we are profoundly hideous to one another is no secret to any well-informed person. Bentar emphasizes especially how vile we can be as collectivities, acting as mobs or under the authority of rulers.2 (This last is a point which cannot be overemphasized, which is why I think that one cannot claim to be a well-informed person without having read books like Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, which chronicles atrocities so vast as to defy the imagination, and yet which took place well within the lives of people now living as I write these words.) Benatar does not limit himself to a discussion of suffering humans cause to other humans, however. He understands the importance of animal suffering as well (something properly emphasized, albeit to a different intellectual end, by John Zande). Benatar outlines for the reader the profound suffering inflicted annually on billions of non-human animals by humans as they are created or used for food, have their habitats destroyed, etc.

Is it all bleak? Well, perhaps only mostly. There are people who do things that relieve suffering and improve sentient existence, although as Benatar notes these appear to be only a few exceptional people — artists, scientists, and engineers, I guess — who work at the outer limits of the capacities. Most of us simply live lives of consumption and diversion with pursuits and entertainments of depressing triviality.3 The odds would not seem to favor any give new person put into the world’s being a significant benefit rather than a burden. Or perhaps things are getting better and the future will be great — a paradise of peace, cooperation, and veganism. Perhaps, though it is more realistic to look forward to a twenty-first century of man-made ecological catastrophe and war.4 I know which way I think a rational person should bet, anyway.

—

1For the purists out there, here is the citation: David Benatar, “The Misanthropic Argument for Anti-natalism,” in Sarah Hannan, Samantha Brennan, and Richard Vernon, eds., Permissible Progeny? The Morality of Procreation and Parenting. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)., 34-64. And a personal grump I should note that Oxford University Press is selling the hardcover of this edited volume for USD 99.00 (and the softcover for USD 35.00). Great Cthulhu, OUP! Your presumptive mission as a university press is to spread knowledge. At those prices, you won’t be spreading it very far. Not that it saved me a whole lot of money, but I acquired the Kindle e-book edition of this book, which lacks page numbers. Any references in this post will therefore be to Kindle reading locations. Back to post.

2Cf. Nietzsche: “Der Irrsinn ist bei Einzelnen etwas Seltenes, – aber bei Gruppen, Parteien, Völkern, Zeiten die Regel.” Jenseits von Gut und Böse, #156 (Madness is something rare in individuals but it is the rule in groups, parties, peoples, and ages.) Back to post.

3Do not think, dear reader, that I exempt myself from this charge of being depressingly trivial. Back to post.

4In his latest book Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Timothy Snyder devotes a sobering final chapter to speculation as to how disruptions created by anthropogenic climate change might lead to a new era of genocidal killing in the 21st century. Although Professor Snyder never mentions it, the bleak prospects of the next several decades seem like a pretty good argument for early 21st-century antinatalism. Back to post.

Empathy betrays us

This week’s fine Rationally Speaking podcast had host Julia Galef interviewing Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom on the subject of empathy. I’ve always been fond of Professor Bloom’s work, having in some sense incorporated a bit of his science into my fiction writing, so I was eager to hear this particular podcast. Executive summary: Bloom thinks that empathy is a poor guide to how we should actually act in the world. Of course, it’s great to care about other people, but empathy — understood as putting ourselves in the position in another and feeling what that person feels — is a very biased and innumerate way of dealing with actual policy problems.

The whole podcast is worth a listen but one thing in particular struck me, an example given by Bloom about civil conflict in Sierra Leone. From the transcript (slightly reformatted for this blog):

Paul: […] I’ll give you one small example, from a book by Linda Paulman [sic]. Where she once asked warlords in Africa, I forget exactly where, why they chopped off children’s limbs. It was such a grotesque horrible thing to do, and like, why would they do it? The answer, and she got this answer from multiple people, was, “We do it for you. NGOs and American and European organizations don’t come to our country unless we give you atrocities. The atrocities energize people.”

Julia: Wait. The warlords want the charities to come in and help the country?

Paul: Yes, because the NGOs pay taxes to the warlords.

Often, the NGOs, and there’s a complicated moral issue here, help everybody, all the parties involved. They don’t take sides. They’re a net plus for the warlords, even taking away that they give the warlords money.

Julia: Wow.

Paul: Now, this is one example of some ugly incentives. But there’s no shortage of real world cases — where unscrupulous people, those who cut off the limbs of children to make them better beggars, those who set up fake orphanages, or simply drag children away from their parents into orphanages. They exploit the well-meaning, loving empathy of people, particularly wealthy American people, in order to profit themselves. And in the way they do it, they make the world worse.1

Even for a hardened cynic like myself I found part of this story hard to swallow, so I made an effort to chase it down to its source. It turns out to be Linda Polman, and she did indeed interview a warlord in Africa who made something very much like this claim. From her account:

The RUF [Faustus: The Revolutionary United Front, a Sierra Leone rebel faction] leadership eventually managed to break the cycle and save the country from total annihilation Lamin [Faustus: Mike Lamin, a RUF leader] explains. By using more and more violence, the RUF forced the Sierra Leone army, the government army, to use more and more violence, too. “And then even more. And even more still.” By 1999, the United Nations in Freetown was reporting that special amputation squads had been formed. Human Rights Watch interviewed members of “cut-hand gangs.” One of them said he had received a promotion after he brought back a rice bag full of hands. Mike Lamin continues: “It was only when you ever more amputees that you started paying attention to our fate.”2

And then the foreign aid, it did flow. Much of it to the benefit of the corrupt and the violent.

Here is the take-away: the world is so horrible to the first order that in it children get their limbs hacked off so that those who do the hacking off can profit. And it is so horrible to the second order that it’s our very possession of benign instincts that make the first order horror work.

If you would do good in the world, or at least refrain from doing bad, sometimes you need a cold heart.

That’s it. I’m going off to be sick now.

—

1Episode transcript of Rationally Speaking #142: Paul Bloom on, “The case against empathy.” pp. 13-4. Url: http://bit.ly/rstd142, downloaded September 9, 2015. Back to post.

2Linda Polman, The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid, trans. Liz Waters. (New York: Henry Holt, 2010). p. 167 (Amazon Kindle ed.) Back to post.

Gathering Evidence on Labor Day

Here in the United States we are enjoying a holiday called Labor Day, dedicated (in theory) to celebrating American Working Men & Women.1 It’s celebrated in September so that we Americans can feel exceptional, unlike all those dirty foreign communists who celebrate labor on May 1. The holiday weekend that has Labor Day appended to it is regarded as the end of summer.

My pleasant diversion for this somewhat-melancholy holiday has been various memoirs of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989), which have been collected into an English edition called Gathering Evidence.2 What a splendid use for the weekend to sit in one’s old wicker rocking chair on the back porch in the sunshine and breezes of the dying summer and watch a genius unload on the world with both barrels.

Bernhard is an overlooked hero of antinatalism. In the course of his discussion of his life as a young teenager in a ghastly Salzburg grammar school (much of which are devoted to showing how little it changed with it passed from Nazi to Catholic control in 1945) he offers this reflection.

There are no true parents, only criminals whose crime consists in bringing new human beings into the world and then abusing them in the most brainless and mindless fashion. And they are supported in their criminal behavior by all the world’s governments. For no government has any use for someone who is enlightened and actually in tune with the times, because he would naturally be opposed to its purposes. It is thus inevitable that millions of weak-minded people will continue to produce untold millions of weak-minded offspring, probably for decades and possibly for centuries. The new human being, in the first three years of his life, is made by his procreators or those acting on their behalf into what he will be and cannot help being throughout his life — an unhappy person, a totally unhappy human being. (pp. 112-3)

Bernhard eventually becomes so embittered at grammar school that he leaves to become a grocer’s apprentice in the the very worst neighborhood in Salzburg. He actually enjoys working in a grocery, but the job ruins his health. At about eighteen he develops a serious lung infection. His condition is so grave the he finds himself consigned to a hospital ward filled mostly with elderly men whom the hospital authorities expect to die imminently. Many of them indeed do. Bernhard witnesses these and sardonically names the ward the “death ward.” There he ruminates on death.

We begin to die the moment we are born, but we only say we are dying when we have reached the last stage of the process, a stage which may be appallingly protracted. What we call dying is only the last phase of a life-long process. To want to evade this last phase is to refuse to pay the bill. When the bill is presented and staring us in the face, we think of suicide; and as we do, we seek refuge in thoughts which are utterly base and ignoble. We forget that the whole business is a game of chance, and so we finally become embittered. Nothing remains to us in the end but hopelessness. The last stop is the death ward, where there is no reprieve. When we come to consider the matter, we realize that our whole life is nothing but a grubby calendar of events and that by the end of it all the pages have been torn out. (pp. 245-6)

While Bernhard clings to life in the hospital, Bernhard’s grandfather3 –one of the few people Bernhard genuinely loves — dies as the result of a botched operation. Doctors order Bernhard’s family not to tell him this news; he will only learn it when he finds his grandfather’s obituary in a newspaper that has somehow found its way into the death ward. (Not too much later in his life, Bernhard will learn of the death of his own mother by the same means, with the added detail that the obituary will misspell his mother’s name.) Bernhard will then be transferred to a tuberculosis sanitarium, a shadowed place with a reputation worse than that of Austria’s nastiest prisons. While there, Bernhard has a lot of time to think about life and what his grandfather had taught him.

This world now appeared to me exactly as my grandfather had described it to me when I was still incredulous and unwilling to endorse his description. I had listened to him but was unwilling to believe him, at least in the early years. Later, however, I had evidence that his assertions were correct: for the most part the world is nauseating, and when we look into it we are looking into a cesspit. Or was he mistaken? I now had an opportunity to examine my grandfather’s assertions. I had an obsessive desire to gather the evidence in my head, and so I began a strenuous search for the evidence, tracking it down in every direction, in every corner of the city of my youth and its surroundings. My grandfather had been right in his judgment of the world: it was indeed a cessspit, but one whihc engendered the most intricate and beautiful forms if one looked into it for long enough, if one’s eye was prepared for such strenuous and microscopic observation. It was a cesspit which yielded up its own natural beauties to the sharp revolutionary gaze. Yet whoever contemplates it for long, whoever spends decades gazing into it, eventually becomes exhausted and dies, or plunges headlong into it. My grandfather had described nature as cruel — and it was. He had described human beings as desperate and vicious — and they were. I was always on the look-out for counter-evidence, thinking to prove him wrong in this or that particular, but I failed: all the evidence I assembled in my head confirmed his views. (p. 305)

“The world is a cesspit which yields up its own natural beauties to the sharp revolutionary gaze.” There are few better summaries of the mental process behind behind a writer.

Thomas Ligotti gets the whole flavor of Bernhard just about right:

[Thomas Bernhard] knows that arguments are useless and pathetic. If you’re not fortunate enough to be above having opinions, and almost no one has this luxury, then the only course available to you, the only source of satisfaction, is to attack inspires what hate in you. You could also celebrate what inspires admiration or even love, but this doesn’t happen very much in Bernhard. In this sense, he very much resembles E. M. Cioran, whose philosophical essays are an assault on the highest level of the pure crumminess of all creation, a position that has led some commentators to classify him as a latter-day Gnostic—minus any god.4

“The only source of satisfaction is to attack what inspires hate in you.” I think that can be a response-of-all-work to those who hate certain aspects of my own writing.

—

1Naturally, in the contemporary American environment American Working Men & Women are not much celebrated. The heroes of the present are those who own income-generating assets, known “job creators.” Those who actually hold the jobs are regarded as losers and parasites. At least one wag has suggested giving up on the concept of Labor Day and replacing it with “Asset Day” instead. Back to post.

2Thomas Bernhard, Gathering Evidence and My Prizes, trans. David McClintock and Carol Brown Janeway. 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 2011). Back to post.

3Johannes Freumbichler, (1881-1949), himself a writer of some note. Back to post.

4Neddal Ayad, “Literature is Entertainment or It Is Nothing: An Interview with Thomas Ligotti” in Matt Cardin, ed., Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti. (Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2014)., p. 114. An online version of the interview can be found here.

A pleasant Sunday morning’s reading

Although as a matter of fact I’ve never believed in any God, I have always been willing to concede that the existence of a nasty evil God was, if not true, then at least credible. (The hypothesis of a good and kind God is not credible.) So it ws a pleasure when I woke up to this in my twitter stream this morning.

And thanks to the modern miracle of instant e-book delivery, I was able to to spend some diverting hours therewith beginning just about right away.

This John Zande character doesn’t mess around. He gets right to business with a spoof of William Paley‘s famous watch-found-on-a-beach argument:

If we find a bomb carefully concealed in a kindergarten, primed and set to detonate when it would wreck the greatest possible carnage, we would assume, in all reasonableness, that someone vicious and vile — someone exquisitely evil — had designed the device and purposely put it there, positioned so as to maximize suffering and misery and mayhem. No prudent observer mindful of the legitimate passage of common cause and effect could consider the device’s shaped casing, circuits, electrical leads, assorted wires, power source, detonation pin, volatile chemicals, and inner chamber crowded with a small but appalling menagerie of metallic debris, including ball bearings and nails, had all come together in exacting order in which they must to perform the task by purblind chance.

And we’re off to the races. Zande “defends” the thesis that the universe is the creation of an omnipotent evil deity with the standard tools of religious apologetics. He provides an ontological argument for the existence of this evil deity as a necessary being and makes some inferences about the character of the being by the appalling overbalance of suffering over happiness in the world. The world is at it is because this divine being takes the most exquisite pleasure in contemplating the suffering of His creatures. And he answers a variety of objections, for example the absence of apparent divine activity in the world. (Of course God must hide from us. Were we to realize His design we would all commit suicide, and where would the suffering be then?) He responds cleverly to “the Problem of Good,” the apparently lack of universal evil in the world. Of course there’s some good in the world, retorts Zande. Without it, some of the more sophisticated forms of suffering, such as hopes that have been raised only to be dashed again, or a rueful sense that the present is worse than the past (a subject which I too have written on) would not be possible. He gets in some spectacular digs, for example at Alvin Plantinga‘s creepy notion that the Creator does not passively watch but enters into and participates in our sufferings Quite right, observes Zande. The Creator actively relishes them. This is deliciously wicked of Zande (and Plantinga deserves no better).

Now obviously all this is intended as a reductio of the premises of Christian theology, and as such it is powerful and immensely entertaining. I can strongly recommend this book as a stocking stuffer for the religious believers on your list. I do confess that it provokes certain inappropriate thoughts. Such as, if God takes so much pleasure in contemplating the suffering of others, does that mean that when we take pleasure in the suffering of others, are we therefore somehow specially participating in the divine? Perhaps I should change the name of a Internet project I run called Sacrilege Sunday? After all, if we take Zande at face value, then what I’m doing over there is honoring God!

Truth in comics

tumblr_nnhxoaKooa1u0y8l9o1_500

Panel: A blond LITTLE GIRL in a dress sits on the steps of an urban brownstone. She is playing with a doll, and a large toy ball sits behind her t her right. She is addressing a PASSING STRANGER, a man in a suit and hat, as he walks by.

LITTLE GIRL: Are you unhappy, mister?

PASSING STRANGER: Yes, and you’ll be too, if you get a chance to grow up!

Sourced on tumblr (roughly) to Doctor Sardonicus.

A sketch of an argument for moral skepticism

Post*

Most people, the untutored folk and trained philosophers alike, think of morality as truly universal, at least for the parts of it that they take seriously. Consider propositions like “it is wrong to enslave human beings.” If you were to ask most people if it is always and everywhere wrong to enslave human beings, they would agree that it is.** Just ask Abraham Lincoln: “If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong.” It isn’t just wrong to for someone to enslave human beings in industrial societies of the early twenty-first century, but wrong to enslave people in the nineteenth century, or bronze-age Mediterranean societies, or the Aztec Empire, wherever. If there are people on other planets, it is wrong to enslave them, and so on. If there will be people in the future, it will be wrong to enslave them. Historically well-informed people will be aware, of course, that at various times and places people have enslaved other people, and thought that they were right to do so. Some of them, from Aristotle to George Fitzhugh, even wrote intellectually serious defenses of the practice of slavery. But they, on this view, weren’t right. They are mistaken, blinded by evil or self-interest, unenlightened. They were wrong and we are right.

There are many possible worlds, one of which you and I happen to inhabit. Possible worlds are distinguished from one another by having different patterns of facts. Some of the differences may be trivial. In the world I inhabit there is a cup of coffee sitting to the right of the keyboard where I am typing these words. There is a possible world in which a counterpart of myself is also writing these words, but there is a cup of tea sitting to the right of his keyboard. Other possible worlds may be very substantially different from the one which we inhabit. Exercises in counterfactual historical thinking (what if Hitler got the atomic bomb?) are attempts to map out other possible worlds. Some possible worlds might be (to us) quite bizarre: a world consisting only of sausage, for example, or a world in which at random intervals cows spontaneously explode.

One way in which possible worlds can be distinguished from one another is by the moral beliefs their inhabitants hold. Even if moral truths are universal, moral beliefs are relative to worlds. In the world we inhabit, most people think that it is wrong to enslave human beings. But there are possible worlds in which most people think it is perfectly acceptable, perhaps even commendable, to make slaves of human beings. And of course, there are possible worlds in which people might have genuinely bizarre (to us) beliefs: that the best kind of life is one devoted to making triangle-shaped objects, or that the worst act that you can commit is to touch something colored blue. There are possible worlds in which no one has any moral beliefs at all. The particular moral beliefs you happen to have are a function of which of the many, many possible worlds you happen to inhabit. Given the range of possible worlds, which would seem to include all those with bizarre-to-us beliefs, the ones with beliefs similar to ours must be only a tiny fraction.

Take whatever candidate moral belief you like. “Enslaving human beings is wrong,” would seem to be a good one. If this proposition is genuinely true in the way that most people think that moral beliefs have to be true, then it should apply to all possible worlds just as it applies to all possible planets, all possible countries, all historical eras. There are possible worlds, a vast number of them, in which people believe differently and behave accordingly, of course, but those people are wrong: it is wrong to enslave people in those possible worlds as well.

Suppose for the sake of argument that there are moral truths. But the moral beliefs you have are a function which of the many possible worlds you inhabit. Getting the “right” moral beliefs would then be a matter of being lucky enough to inhabit a possible world in which the moral beliefs you have somehow correspond to moral truth a “right” possible world. But on what grounds could you know that the possible world that you inhabit is one of the ones in which moral beliefs happen to correspond to moral truths? Your ending up in such a world would seem to be a lucky coincidence of sorts, one that requires some sort of explanation.

Now it might be that only those possible worlds which are characterized by inhabitants with the “right” moral beliefs are “actual” worlds, or to get to the same result by another route, only worlds in which people with “right” beliefs are possible worlds, whereas those which have people with “wrong” beliefs are somehow impossible worlds. (The notion of an impossible world might be cogent, though I’m not sure. For example, a world in which “2+2=5” is true might be an example of an impossible world. Or maybe not. The ontology of numbers is a deep mystery, at least to me.) That’s all interesting, but why should we believe it? Does the Modality Fairy float above and beyond the range of possible worlds, wrinkling her sensitive nose at and snuffing out with her magic wand those with a bad moral smell? (What would it even mean to exist and not be part of some possible world?) The notion that only “right” worlds are actual cannot but seem very queer.

Notes

*This sketch is an attempt to generalize, beyond the parochial facts of life on this little planet, an evolutionary argument for metaethical error theory that can be found in work by Alex Rosenberg and Sharon Street. For the evolutionary argument, see Alex Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illustions. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), pp. 94-114 (Google Books link here) and Sharon Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value,” Philosophical Studies 127, no. 1 (January 2006): 109-166 (Online PDF version here). The grandfather of these arguments would of course be J.L. Mackie’s famous defense of his bluntly-stated thesis: “there are no objective values.” See J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. (New York and London: Penguin Books, 1990) (Google Books link is here). Back to main text.

**Not everyone, of course. Some people are genuine moral relativists who think that it is wrong to enslave human beings in the here and now but not that it was wrong in all times and places. Some people are moral skeptics who think that there are moral propositions but that none of them are true, or at least that none of them are rationally warranted. A few people even have exotic views on which moral sentences aren’t really propositions and on which things that look proposition-like (e.g. “slavery is wrong”) are really just emotive ejaculations like “boo hiss slavery” or universalized prescriptions like “let no one enslave anyone else” masquerading as proposition. But all these people put together probably only add up to a small minority. Back to main text.

***Or unlucky, if you happen to find conforming your behavior to the requirements of morality burdensome and painful. Back to main text.

Good things will be bad for you

The happiest romantic relationship I ever had was a quarter-century ago, when I was in my early twenties.* It may come as something of a surprise to readers of this blog to see me so write, but the relationship did genuinely make me happy much of the times. Even if it ended under circumstances which were the beginning of my conviction that as a rule you will be punished for saying what you really think about things, I still look back upon both the relationship and my partner therein with genuine fondness. Unfortunately, since no relationship I’ve had since has produced the kind of happiness that one did, I have always lived with a sense of deficiency and lack in subsequent relationships. This persistent sense certainly makes me even more unhappy than I would otherwise be. Perhaps i would be better off without memories of past happiness to contrast with the deficient present, but I doubt I have the faculty of forcing memories out of my mind, and I am not sure I would want to do so even if it were possible to do so. For to push such memories out of my consciousness would feel like a form of gross intellectual dishonesty, a refusal to pay attention to facts about my own life which are important and relevant.

I can say something similar about my professional life. I held by far the best job I ever had when I was in my late twenties. But it swiftly became evident that I would never advance in that career beyond a very junior level — and I mean, so junior a level that even in my supposedly middle-class profession I had live very cheaply from paycheck to paycheck in a condition of permanent of job insecurity. (Again, I would not advance because I had not yet unlearned the bad, self-destructive habit of being myself and forming and expressing authentic opinions about matters of professional interest.)** So now when I go to my job — a “good” one by most people’s standards — I cannot but have a keen appreciation of how much it is not what I really want to do, and I find myself in a funk rather often. I wake up and must force myself to go to the office. The experience is degraded still further by the memory of a time when I was eager to get up and go to the office.

The takeaway is this conclusion: if you’re “fortunate” enough to enjoy certain kinds of happiness early in life, you will pay terribly for them in the balance of your life. Even the good portends bad.

***

*For those of you curious people who care about such things, yes she’s the same as the individual identified as “Second Serious Girlfriend” in the Thaumatophile Manifesto. Back to post.

**Mark my words, the academic job market will break optimists more surely than torture. Back to post.