The film is a stroke of genius in many ways, including its long takes (some of them 20 minutes long), its interesting camera positioning, and its chilling irony that pervades every seen.

But for today, I’m going to focus on just one interesting thing. It has to do with a fundamental human ability, something that sets us apart from most other animals.

As explained by Max Bennett in The Evolution of Intelligence (and summarized in the video below), what separates mammals from animals like reptiles is a brain structure called the neocortex, which gives them the unique ability to imagine the future, before it occurs. However, they are only able to simulate these futures based on their own experience, i.e. something that they themselves have previously done.

But primates, and great apes in particular (which we belong to as Homo Sapiens), have another structure called the prefrontal cortex, which gives us the even more powerful ability of empathy. This means we are able to imagine possible futures based on the experiences of others—even if we have no direct experience ourselves. The classic example is watching your friend trip on an obstacle, and then avoiding that obstacle yourself.

This may seem trivial, but it is actually an incredible leap forward in the evolution of intelligence; something so rare that only a few species have it.

Empathy also allows us to intuit when other people like or don’t like us, based on the most subtle cues. It allows us to imagine what they might be thinking about us, or another person.

This is crucial in social situations, when a conflict might be brewing, allowing us the opportunity to de-escalate, or simply run away. It’s also invaluable for engaging in romance, helping us discern when someone is into us or thinks we are repulsive.

To tie this back to Rope, the character Rupert (played by James Stewart) is able to imagine what is going on in minds of the killers, realizing the awful truth, while everyone else in the story is oblivious.

What I find interesting about this is the contrast between Rupert and the other lead, Brandon (played by John Dall).

Brandon is one of the most charismatic characters I have ever seen on the big screen. He is affable, witty, good-looking, suave, and intelligent. His voice is honeyed and melodic. Several times people insult him, mock him, or downright accuse him, and each time he lets it slide over him like water off a duck’s back. Even when Rupert is on to him, Brandon doesn’t lose his cool. He manipulates all the other people into doing what he wants, like a puppet master.

Contrast that with Rupert, who is awkward, cerebral, and stiff. He speaks in short, choppy cadences with odd vocal inflections. He doesn’t know how to react to people who baffle him. He clearly doesn’t get out very often.

In short, Brandon appears to be a master of human nature, gracefully orchestrating a grand party, while Rupert is a robotic dweeb, who can’t even figure out how to hold a conversation at said party.

However…

Brandon is also a cold-blooded killer (more reptilian than mammal). He kills his close friend, not out of passion or jealousy or anger, but merely because he is curious about what it feels like. He also hosts a party over the corpse, inviting the dead man’s parents and fiancé.

Meanwhile, despite his awkwardness and seeming inability to relate to others, Rupert is the only one at the party who actually notices something is up. He is the only one sensitive to the peculiar actions and words of Brandon and Phillip. Of all the characters in the film, he shows the most awareness and intuition of human nature.

The point: Charisma is not the same thing as Empathy.

In fact, we usually notice that the two are indirectly related. Those who are the coolest and most popular kids in high school are usually the biggest assholes. Celebrities and those with success and power tend to demonstrate the same disregard for everyone they consider “lower” than themselves.

This is easy for me to say because I am not a celebrity, and in high school I was a huge nerd… and I probably still am. As painful as that experience was, it gave me something invaluable— empathy for the outcast.

I now feel pretty comfortable at parties or social gatherings, but I have a sixth sense for people who feel awkward and uncertain. Why? Because I know exactly what it feels like to be that person, and I can notice the signs and symptoms immediately. And so I make it a point to go talk to those people.

I’m not trying to say I’m a really nice guy. I’m saying I have spent much of my life feeling like a loser, so I can relate.

I also know what it feels like to be disabled. I’ve spent nearly a year of my life on crutches (across two injuries). I know how annoying it is to have people look at your disability and ask you, “so what happened to you?” And so I don’t ask injured people about their injuries. I just treat them like normal people because that’s how I always wanted to be treated when I was in their shoes (or cast).

I know what it feels like to be someone’s servant. I’ve worked in service jobs as a cook, a mechanic, and now an EMT. On a recent Saturday, my friend said, “well most people are off work today.” And I know that’s not true—most people work blue collar jobs, like I do, and we work any day regardless of whether it’s a weekend. We work at all hours of the day and night, on holidays, on birthdays, on anniversaries. And on those days, I know how it feels to be invisible, or worse, treated with disdain, even while you are serving someone.

I haven’t experienced everything. I’m not gonna say I know how childbirth feels (or honestly the vast majority of things women endure on a regular basis). I’m not gonna say I know what it feels like to be a minority, or to fight in a war, or to lose a limb, or to live in third world country, or to be betrayed by someone I love, or to be abused, or to be falsely imprisoned, or many other horrible things.

But even if I can’t exactly identify with what other people have gone through or are going through, I can try to imagine what it might be like, using my empathy. What would it feel like to lose a limb?

I can’t relate, but I can try to relate, and somehow that makes all the difference. I can help by sharing their misery just a little. Usually that means not trying to say something encouraging and “make it all better” or “look at the bright side.” Usually that means just shutting up and being there and listening.

And even though I may not be the most charismatic or cool person in the room, I can also least show a little empathy, and Rope reminds me that that is more important.

“Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.

He is considered successful in our day who gets more out of life than he puts in. But a man of value will give more than he receives.”

— Albert Einstein

He was drunk off his ass— so drunk, in fact, that the bar called 911, and asked us to take him away, because he was being a nuisance and wouldn't leave.

He is my hero.

Well not exactly. Of course, I don't want to be drunk, and I don't want to be so annoying that people have to call a specialist to deal with me, like I'm an elephant that escaped from the zoo.

But he was just so damn pleasant. Literally nothing could touch this dude, no matter how much people tried to give him the hint to leave, no matter how perilous things seemed later that night. It was like he was driving a car in a hailstorm while the rest of us were stuck outside walking, always getting pelted by negativity, while he just cruised along, unperturbed.

For me, what was most striking about him was how his attitude contrasted with my own. Lately I've been noticing how easily I get angered. The littlest things can set me off. Driving is the biggest culprit, whether in traffic or out of it. It seems there is always someone in my way. Even when I'm not in a rush, even when I'm not late— when a light turns red that should have stayed green, when someone is driving slow in the fast lane— I come unglued.

But it's not really about other people, because I can still get angry by myself. What's most absurd is that I get frustrated at the laws of physics, for making me spill my drink in the kitchen. Or maybe it’s God’s fault, for making me fumble the coffee pot and drop it to the ground, shattering into a million pieces. In these moments, I am absolutely enthused with rage, letting fly a string of curses that makes Eminem seem prude.

Why? For a long time, I didn't know. I didn't even realize how often I was getting angry. There was something deeper going on. It was like a boiling pot with the lid clamped shut, frothing just underneath the surface, but unnoticeable. Until someone jolts it, and then it spills forth its contents in a stew of scalding liquid.

Picking him up

Contrast that with my client, the man I described earlier, who I had to remove from the bar. Let's call him Eddie. Nothing could upset Eddie, even things that should have, or at least would have bothered most people. To a certain extent, that was his problem, which is why they called us to pick him up. He kept hanging around groups that hadn't invited him, kept sidling up to both men and women, trying to start a conversation, interrupting them.

After he was asked multiple times to leave, it was clear to management that he was too drunk to comply, so they called us.

Occasionally, instead of driving the ambulance and responding to 911 calls for medical issues, my shift entails driving the detox van and responding to calls for intoxicated parties. The van looks just like an ambulance, only it has four little compartments on the sides rather than one big compartment in the back. The shift is generally not as interesting as the ambulance— the calls tend to be less life-threatening, the clientele a little more irritating.

Still, it's an important service, as it protects people who have had too much sauce, posing a risk to themselves or others. This is especially true in the winter time in Denver, because many of our clients fall asleep outside, and would freeze to death without our intervention. And while back in the day most of these public drunks would fill up the jail cells, now we can get them what they really need— a safe and warm place to sober up, and after that, some resources to help them stay sober.

Despite our good-natured intentions, many clients are difficult to deal with. Unfortunately, by the time we are called, they are usually so sloshed that they have lost the legal right to make decisions on their own behalf, so either they can go to jail or go to detox. They can also go home, if they can get a friend to take them, but usually the establishment has already tried that before they call us.

So because of the state of things for them to have to call us, we can usually spot the client before the van comes to a stop. Usually these guys or gals are sprawled out on the ground, or propped up against a wall, outside the establishment.

But when we arrived at the bar where Eddie had been unsuccessfully trying to charm everyone, we were perplexed. Nobody around seemed to be an obvious candidate for the van.

We walked up to the bouncer to get directions. Next to him was a guy reclining comfortably in an Adirondack chair. As we approached, he looked at us with a warm smile and said, "Sup."

I said, "Hi." Then, immediately, to the bouncer, "Hey, where's our guy?"

"Right here," he pointed to the man in the chair.

"This guy?"

"Yeah."

"Sup," the man says, innocently.

"Hi," I say again. To the bouncer: "What did he do?"

"He was bothering a bunch of people. Then when we asked him to leave, he started looking into the windows of cars. He tried to break into my car."

"I thought it was mine," he explained, with no sense of shame.

"Ok," I said to the bouncer, "Can you help us get him up?"

He grunted in affirmation.

My partner, the bouncer, and I lifted the man up. He was completely unaffected by this embarrassing event, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

"You're coming with us," I said.

"Okay."

"What's your name?"

"Eddie." He smiled again. "Pleased to meet you."

"You too."

We walked him to the van, searched his person for weapons or other paraphernalia, then sat him in the compartment. Again, he was unfazed by this typically uncomfortable event.

"Ok, you're gonna have to scoot back and sit there for a little. We're going to detox."

"Alright."

The detox van is certainly not the most comfortable way to travel, especially when your senses are a little blunted by booze. Four hard walls and a hard floor, a little too compact to lay down, a little too large to sit without slipping around while the van is moving. Many clients protest, their dignity offended.

Instead, Eddie accepted his fate with no qualms, as if we were his hired valets, placing him in his private limousine.

"Thanks," he said.

"Sure thing." I had to laugh. That was a first.

Time out

That’s not the end of the story, but I wanted to pause to explain why I’ve been thinking about Eddie, even though I haven’t seen him in months.

Since then, I've had a lot of time to reflect. And a lot of time to be angry.

For years I’ve been working towards becoming a firefighter, and when I finally got the opportunity, I leapt at it. Once I was finally in the fire academy, a freak accident caused me to tear my labrum in my hip. So I had to drop out, and get surgery. Luckily, it got repaired and I should be smooth again sometime next year. But in the meantime I've had to become a babe again, learning how to walk. Needless to say, I was frustrated.

When healthy, I love to practice martial arts. It's a great way to blow off steam. My hobby is beating the ever-living shit out of a punching bag for 3-4 hours a week. That has always been a good way to sublimate my natural aggression, and I truly think it's healthy. That was my way of letting a little liquid out of the pot, so it wouldn’t spill over.

Except, the core problem remained — I was still boiling all the time.

Now, being unable to walk, unable to do much exercise at all, I've been left with just my mind. And lots of anger. And no outlets.

But something changed. I started to look at the state of things, with clear eyes. Yes, I was injured. But it was only temporary. I would walk again. I would run again.

Many of my patients on the ambulance are not so lucky. Some have had strokes, and not only cannot walk, but cannot smile, cannot use one half of their entire body, cannot even think straight. Others have had amputations, spinal injuries, or neurological diseases that likewise permanently handicapped them.

As I reflected on this, I began to count my blessings. On and on the list went. I wrote so many things that my wrist started to hurt. What did I have to be angry about? Looking back, I realized that I subconsciously always thought that the world "owed me" something. And therefore when anything uncomfortable or inconvenient happened, things were unfair. That the world or God or life itself was set against me, and for no good reason. No wonder I was so angry.

In the midst of all these reflections, I remembered Eddie, even though so much has happened since I met him. Something about his attitude infected me way back then, and ever since, I've wanted to emulate him. But I didn’t know how.

And then I connected the dots.

The punchline

Once we packed up Eddie in the back of the detox van, the dispatcher sent us to pick up a few more clients, so we could fill all four compartments before we returned to the detox facility.

The last last two clients had been a major pain in the ass. Two girls in their 20s (one was actually underage) had been absolutely plastered at a dance hall. There must have been some relationship drama as well that night, because the younger girl was inconsolable and unreasonably troublesome.

Like I said, some clients didn't take kindly to the van's cramped compartments, and she was no exception. I think she was also just generally pissed off that her "rights" were being "violated" as we took her away from the dance hall. Even though we really just wanted to take care of her, and help her get sober safely.

So she spent the entire ride from the dance hall to the detox facility in a temper tantrum. Screaming over and over again, "LET ME GO!" When that failed to produce results, she started kicking the compartment door. Not very smart, considering we were rolling down the road at 30mph. The door would hold, though.

All of these noises vibrate through the whole van, and it can be shockingly loud for clients in the other compartments. Poor Eddie, I thought, his whole zen state is ruined now. He had been back there for nearly 30 minutes at this point, bouncing around as we tried to deftly navigate Denver's bumpy roads.

When we pulled up to the facility, we processed the girls first. We had to use the assistance of the security guards, two gentle giants who can be intimidating when they want to be, but are generally very kind. They both had been linemen in high school, and had played a little college football too. Together they probably weighed about 800 pounds. Even with all these advantages, it was still a battle to get the girls to their rooms. Because of their belligerent behavior, they were placed in the "quiet rooms" — an egregious misnomer — so they wouldn't disturb the general population. At this time of night (around 3:00am), most of the others were sleeping soundly in their beds in the main room.

Finally, we got around to processing Eddie. I felt terrible for making him wait so long. We opened the compartment door, expecting a very pissed off and jostled man. Instead, we found him propped up against the wall with a serene grin on his lips, almost as if he were on the lay-z-boy in his living room watching the Grateful Dead perform live on TV.

"Sup."

"Hey Eddie, we're here."

"Okay."

It still took both of us to pull him to his feet, but he didn't seem to mind.

Once inside, he was greeted with a stark scene that should have been terrifying. Two huge men, both over six feet tall, grimaces on their faces after dealing with the two ferocious females. Bright fluorescent overhead lights that shined on whitewashed walls (this is a medical facility, after all). And a big iron door with a little window about 4"x4", a young girl peering out, screaming her head off and banging with her fists.

For the staff, my partner, and I, it was just another Saturday night. But I tried to imagine what Eddie must have felt like, still heavily intoxicated, unsure of what exactly was going on or where he had been taken.

It must have felt like he had arrived in Guantanamo Bay.

If I were in his shoes, my first reaction would have been to split at the first opportunity, to sprint in the complete opposite direction until my lungs were burning and my legs seized up.

Eddie mildly strolled up to the guards.

"Sup."

They started to pat him down, and he looked at the nurses.

"Sup."

I bit my tongue to keep myself from laughing. This guy was a hoot.

As they processed him, taking his vitals and getting his demographic information, the young girl continued to howl like a banshee from the “quiet room.”

Finally, she stopped, and he looked around them room, and said,

"She cray cray."

We all erupted in laughter.

My partner and I spent the final few hours of that shift in a great mood. We were tickled. We couldn't get over how absolutely untouchable Eddie was. In such a grim situation, I would have been scared out of my mind. But he didn’t seemed affected at all.

Most of our clients are in a drunken stupor, unable to really interact with us in any meaningful way. The remainder are hurricanes, like the pair of girls. A few are odd or interesting in some way, remarkable for their peculiarities.

But I’ve never met anyone like Eddie, neither before nor since.

Connecting the dots

Ever since I met Eddie, I've wanted to be like him. Obviously, I don't want to be drunk, I don't want to be a nuisance, and I don't want to be so subdued that I can't appreciate the gravity my situation. But I want to be imperturbable, and endlessly pleasant, like he was.

In some ways, Eddie reminds me of some of my favorite movie characters, like Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick), Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), and Matthew McConaughey's character in Dazed in Confused. All of these dudes are the epitome of nonchalance, supremely confidence, effortless cheer.

And then there is the biggest dude of all, The Dude Himself, The Big Lebowski (Jeff Bridges). Previously, I thought he was the chillest "person" of all time, even though he's fictional. But Eddie has now superseded him in my mind, for two reasons.

First, Eddie is real.

Second, and more importantly, Eddie was pleasant and unconcerned with himself. Lebowski is easygoing, sure, but he also is very self-absorbed, and can get pretty ticked off when interrupted. He just wants to be left alone so he can sit at home and piddle around with his own little hobbies, whether drinking white russians, smoking weed, bowling, or listening to music. Ultimately, Lebowski is selfish.

Eddie, on the other hand, had gotten into trouble at the bar because he was a little too interested in other people. These people were also complete strangers to him. And I think that's also why he kept saying, "Sup." He was genuinely interested in what was up with everybody around him.

We never really gratified this with a real response, engaging in conversation with him. But I can imagine that if I had let him, he would have talked with me for hours, listening with complete fascination, unable to be distracted by anything.

Most people who are under the influence— whether of alcohol, marijuana, or something else— tend to turn inward. Eddie turned outward. He genuinely wanted to interact, not for any selfish reason, but to connect with others. He sought to bridge the gap of isolation that has become our default these days. Or at least, that’s what I like to think about him.

I said that Eddie is my hero, and in some ways I'm being facetious. What little I know about him is not very inspiring. He was a drunkard (at least for one night, probably more), and he was annoying. If not to me, than to the patrons of the bar.

But if I could just extract that one quality of his— his complete serenity and affability, his ceaseless desire to connect with others rather focus on himself— if I could just apply that attitude to my life, I would be a totally different person, probably the best version of myself.

It is in that sense that Eddie is my hero. Nothing on this earth could touch him, his feet never touched the floor, regardless of whether he was sitting in an Adirondack under the starlight, or confined to a seeming insane asylum under fluorescent lights.

In the past few months, my rage has largely evaporated. The pot is no longer boiling all the time. I still get flustered, sure, but more and more I am able to release it before it turns to anger. It takes a lot of practice, and probably always will, but I'm getting better at it. I keep remembering how damn lucky I am to be alive, how fortunate I am to be able to walk again, and how many other countless blessings I have.

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But letting go of rage is a negative thing— I’m removing something bad. It’s hard to do that without replacing it with something else. And the dots finally connected in my head when I remembered Eddie. Now I try to fill that gap with his attitude, or at least my version of it. I try to be nonchalant, confident, cheerful, amicable. I try to imagine how he would act of someone cut him off in traffic. What would he do if he dropped a plate?

For some reason, it’s easier to for me to imagine because he was a real person, and I saw him. I met him. All those fictional movie characters, all the heroes of history and philosophy are also good inspiration too, but just not as effective for me.

Conclusion

Life is hard. Doesn't matter who you are. There will always be more problems, though they currently lay beyond the horizon. And those problems will crop up at the worst possible time, when we're least prepared for them.

In the past, those problems used to frustrate me beyond reason. Now I try to have a different perspective.

Regardless of what happens, I'll be alright. Or if not, then I will adapt. I'll find a way to keep on living.

Or I'll die, and then that will be that.

Life or the world or God doesn't owe me anything. I've been given so much imaginably more than I deserve. And what a miracle it is to be alive! Out of nothing, there is something.

And there is more than just something. There is the entirety of the human experience to enjoy, all its highs and lows, all its secret joys and wonders and delights.

As I practice more gratefulness, as I release my rage, I also remember Eddie. And I try to embody his attitude. I start focusing on what other people need rather than what I'm owed. And gradually, I find myself feeling like I'm floating too. Like nothing can bother me. Like I'm untouchable.

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It's about a man trapped in the most boring meeting of all time, a man who is realizing that not only is the meeting meaningless, but so too are his job, his company, his career—nay, his entire life. 

What makes the story so terrible to me is that it forces me to reckon with this idea of futility. And to see how it applies to my own life.

Futility is a Latin word that literally means "leaking." It was used in Roman times to describe something like a cracked clay pot—a worthless possession, for it cannot be used to hold water, or to cook, or to store food. Worse still, it will never be useful, because clay pots cannot be fixed.

This is my biggest fear—that I am a useless, leaky pot, good for nothing and going nowhere. And the story of “Mr. Squishy” captures this feeling perfectly.

As much as it scares me, I also really like the story. It is redeeming to explore its maze of meaninglessness because it helps me navigate my life. It forces me to find a way out before its nightmare becomes my reality.

If I face my fear of futility now, I can avoid it.

But if I avoid my fear of futility, I will one day have to face it, and by then it will be too late.

Chocolate Trash and Those Who Manufacture It

The title of the story comes from the sponsor of the meeting. Mr. Squishy is a confectionery company (like Hostess) that makes ultra-glycemic snacks loaded with preservatives, the ones sold in gas stations and the checkout lanes of grocery stores. The story is set in 1995, when these products began to surge in popularity. And so, in the endless search for more profits, Mr. Squishy has organized this meeting to test consumers' opinions on their newest sweet treat.

Listen to Wallace's satirical description of the proposed product:

"Felonies!—a risky and multivalent trade name meant both to connote and to parody the modern health-conscious consumer’s sense of vice/indulgence/transgression/sin vis à vis the consumption of a high-calorie corporate snack....

Felonies! were all-chocolate, filling and icing and cake as well, and in fact all-real-or-fondant-chocolate instead of the usual hydrogenated cocoa and high-F corn syrup, Felonies! conceived thus less as a variant on rivals’ Zingers, Ding Dongs, Ho Hos, and Choco-Diles than as a radical upscaling and re-visioning of same."

This is the kind of twisted logic that a company like Mr. Squishy uses to design its new product. It's all marketing jargon that obscures the real truth—this is just a knockoff brownie. And yet they will go to great lengths to sell that junk to unsuspecting customers under the guise of something much better.

It's hard to say who is more deluded—the company or the consumer. Mr. Squishy is trying to convince the consumer (and themselves) that the consumer needs this product (right now) in order to be happier, healthier, wealthier, or whatever. But the consumer is willing to buy the lie.

To launch their advertising campaign for Felonies!, Mr. Squishy has turned to the marketing company Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Advertising (RSB). In turn, RSB has hired the consulting firm Team Delta Y to conduct research for the project, including organizing focus groups like this one to collect data on consumer's reactions to Felonies!

If this is starting to sound convoluted, good. That's the point. This entire new-product-development process is incredibly intricate, almost to the point of being obtuse—requiring the coordination of multiple departments within all three firms, complex statistical calculations, and high-powered computers on which to run those calculations. All this to determine whether Felonies! will be a hit or not, so they can pull the trigger on manufacturing and distribution and advertising and so on. It's a colossal corporate machine, a Rube-Goldberg device that only spits out sugary snacks that are of no real use to anyone, anywhere.

The layers of futility are piling up.

My first job was very much like this. I worked as an auditor for a big accounting firm. I visited our clients to check their books and make sure everything was kosher. Except that the clients were the one paying us, so it was in our best interest to say that everything looked good. Even when it didn't. When I expressed my concerns with this dilemma to my bosses, they told me I was too inexperienced to understand how things worked.

Moreover, the firm had already billed the client for a certain amount of hours every week: 60 for each employee, to be exact. So even when we pushed hard and got all our work done early, they told us to stay in our seats. To this day I can remember the agony I felt in the winter when dusk darkened the windows at 5:00pm, this a signal that I still had to stay at the office for five more hours, inventing work—work that ultimately didn't matter because we were going to give the client the green light anyways.

In short, I was a cog in a machine that produced nothing at all. And I was losing my life in the bargain.

Our Glorious Hero

The protagonist in “Mr. Squishy” is caught in the same trap. He is Terry Schmidt, 34 years old, chubby, pale, and socially awkward, "with a helmetish haircut and a smile that always looked pained no matter how real the cheer." He lives alone in a cookie-cutter apartment. He fills his free time watching satellite TV, collecting rare coins, and taking "power-walks on a treadmill in a line of eighteen identical treadmills on the mezzanine-level CardioDeck of a Bally Total Fitness."

The sole excitement in his life is his coworker, Darlene Lilly, not really all that attractive herself, but nevertheless Schmidt's only real prospect. To make matters worse, Darlene is married and thinks of him as only a friend. Schmidt has never had the guts to tell her how he really feels, though he fantasizes about her every night.

Schmidt is even more tragic because, despite his sad life, he has a good heart. All he ever wanted to do was "make a difference in the world." He began his career filled with ambition, which he thought made him special, but:

"In Terry Schmidt’s case a certain amount of introspection and psychotherapy ... had enabled him to understand that his professional fantasies were not in the main all that unique, that a large percentage of bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior...and that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact of their unique and central presence in it."

Who hasn't felt this way? I certainly did... and still do. It’s convicting to realize the similarity in our thoughts.

The fictional Terry Schmidt is a big loser, and I'd like to think I'm different. But sometimes I wonder if I really am... I often feel lonely, awkward, shy, and unsuccessful too.

Despite his current sad state of affairs, Schmidt has retained his high aspirations. Even after working hard to get to Team Delta Y, and spending eight years on the team, he’s still striving hard for a promotion that will finally give him a say in the direction of the company. And he daydreams about one day starting his own firm and making marketing history like all the stories he studied in school.

The Unraveling of His So-Called Life

Today, Schmidt is leading the focus group in a nameless conference room on the nineteenth floor of a nondescript office building. His attention is elsewhere though, since he has given this exact same presentation over a thousand times.

This meeting is a little different, however, because a realization is dawning on Schmidt, though he tries to suppress it. He appears upbeat and unrehearsed during his little spiel to the 14 people they wrangled into the conference room. But his mind is churning in the background, fretting over a terrifying epiphany, as unavoidable as an unexpected earthquake.

The layers of futility are unraveling before his eyes, and each one is more awful than the last.

First, it dawns on Schmidt that this meeting is pointless. All the men here today have  "faces arranged in the mildly sullen expressions of consumers who have never once questioned their entitlement to satisfaction or meaning [and who] had never been hungry a day in their lives."

They don't care about Felonies! They certainly don't care about Schmidt. They only care about themselves. They are growing frustrated at being kept in the meeting for so long and having to listen to Schmidt ramble on and on, and their sugar high is starting to crash. No one wants to be here and no one is contributing to the meeting, so the results will be pretty much unusable anyways.

Second, Schmidt is realizing that all these focus groups are a waste of time, because RSB (the marketing company) doesn't really care about the results. Whether consumers really like Felonies! or not doesn't matter, because their client Mr. Squishy has already spent so much money on the product-development-process that they can't afford to turn back now. So what everyone really wants is data that presents Felonies! in the best light possible, that prophesies their success. This way, they can justify such a large investment, even if it fails. They will just use Team Delta Y as a scapegoat for their failure. 

And as any statistician knows, data can be creatively manipulated—sliced, diced, and rearranged—to present any results you want, whether they’re true or not.

Third, as Schmidt reflects on this, he is starting to feel a another layer of futility, this time of the marketing industry as a whole. He thinks to himself:

"no no all that ever changed [in marketing] were the jargon and mechanisms and gilt rococo with which everyone in the whole huge blind grinding mechanism conspired to convince each other that they could figure out how to give the paying customer what they could prove he could be persuaded to believe he wanted, without anybody once ever saying stop a second or pointing out the absurdity of calling what they were doing collecting information..."

I love that line in bold: the hypothetical customer doesn't even want the product, but marketers can persuade him—not to actually want the product, but—to believe that he wants the product. Or at least marketers try to convince each other that they have this power of persuasion.

It’s so convoluted and circular it makes your head ache.

Schmidt also realizes that even if a product does succeed, it might only be temporary. The market is driven by fads and trends, and those can change from month-to-month. In the long run, even a well-designed and well-marketed product may have zero impact, and ultimately be a waste of time and money.

And even if Felonies! were to succeed in the long run, consumers still lose. They’ve only been persuaded to spend their hard-earned money on trash, on a product that promises happiness and satiation but delivers nothing but detrimental health effects. 

You Are Obsolete

Ok, that may all be true, but Schmidt still clings to the hope that one day he can rise to the top of this company, or start his own firm, and "make a difference." But is that still realistic?

Schmidt, still speaking on autopilot to the group, ponders this question, and the answers are not promising.

Because, if he's truly honest with himself, he has not had any measurable success in his career over the last decade. Younger, less qualified employees get promoted before him every year. He’s been stuck in his role (in this very conference room) for thousands of days of his life. He describes graphic, recurring nightmares of doing the exact same thing for the rest of eternity.

And Schmidt knows deep down that he will never get promoted, because he doesn't fit in. He's too nerdy and socially awkward. He's so bland and forgettable that people "whom Terry’d worked with for years have trouble recalling his name, and always greeted him with an exaggerated bonhomie designed to obscure this fact."

And even if he did get promoted...

"the only substantive difference would be that he would receive a larger share of Team Delta Y’s after-tax profits and so would be able to afford a nicer and better-appointed condominium to masturbate himself to sleep in and more of the props and surface pretenses of someone truly important but really he wouldn’t be important, he would make no more substantive difference in the larger scheme of things than he did now."

Realistically, he wouldn't have a say in the company, because everything is run behind the scenes (as we learn in the story), through nepotism. And despite more money, his personal life would still be stagnant. So what’s the point?

When I was a junior accountant, people told me that I should stick around just a bit longer and things would get better. That I'd get promoted and have more opportunities and more money to show for it. But as I looked up the corporate ladder at my boss, my boss's boss, and beyond, I saw only more misery. Every rung came with more responsibilities, more worries, less freedom, less peace. And still no actual say in the company, because invisible power-players made all the real decisions (sometimes really bad ones).

What good was all that money if I had no time to enjoy it? What good was a promotion if it didn’t grant me any additional autonomy? No, I had to get out.

But there is one final layer of futility in the story. 

Schmidt will also be out of a job very soon, and then he will be completely useless. This is 1995, remember, and the internet revolution is about to change marketing forever. The practice of focus groups will be giving way to that of data analytics. Facilitators like Schmidt will be laid off in droves because it just doesn't make sense anymore to bring a group of consumers into a room, subject them to surveys and group discussions for an entire day, then try to make sense of the muddled results. Not when marketers can get more accurate data online, immediately, at a fraction of the cost.

Schmidt is already obsolete, he just doesn’t know it yet.

Now I Am Become Mr. Squishy, The Destroyer of Hope

And so the whole thing, from top to bottom, is simply futile. A leaking pot. Good for nothing.

Schmidt is starting to realize this, right here, right now, in the midst of his presentation. It’s becoming clear to him that he will never be able to make a difference, neither in his career nor in his personal life.

There just doesn't seem to be any way out, and no hope for anything to change. In fact, the only thing that does change is Schmidt’s body. He’s getting older and fatter each year, feeling more self-conscious about how he looks and the way he walks.

And in his lowest of lows, Schmidt identifies with the caricature of the Mr. Squishy logo2

[He] would look at his face and at the faint lines and pouches that seemed to grow a little more pronounced each quarter and would call himself, directly to his mirrored face, Mister Squishy, the name would come unbidden into his mind, and despite his attempts to ignore or resist it the large subsidiary’s name and logo had become the dark part of him’s latest taunt…

[It was] a design that someone might find some small selfish use for but could never love or hate or ever care to truly even know.

I believe Schmidt is in some sense responsible for his fate, and the final nail in the coffin is his acceptance of his situation. He gives in to the futility, and gives up on himself.

Conclusion

What haunts me about the story is its resemblance to my own life. It makes me ask myself questions like, "Am I any different than Schmidt? Is my life useful? Is it helpful to anyone? Is it ever going to change?”

I left the tedium of accounting long ago, but I still wrestle with my purpose in life. I still worry that my work on the ambulance and my writing are ultimately pointless. I still fear that my ambitions are disproportionately higher than my talent. And that all my efforts will come to naught.

Perhaps I will always wrestle with these fears, and that’s part of carving out a purpose.

Maybe it’s not the work itself that is meaningful, but the way I approach it. Perhaps when I give it my all, when I choose to be excellent, it becomes ipso facto meaningful, regardless of the results.

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Most people are afraid of death, especially when it threatens to take them, at the end of their days, or when illness or injury strike. I have seen it in the eyes of some of my patients.

I'm not exactly afraid of death—I actually thrive on danger. What I fear is something much worse—being dead while still alive. I am afraid of leading a life that amounts to nothing, where I might as well have been dead. A life that ends with the final and angry shattering of a leaky clay pot that was of no use to anyone, ever.

This fear is terrible to behold, and yet I must do so. I have to face my fear of futility in order to overcome it. And stories like “Mr. Squishy” force me to do just that.

“Is my life useful? Is it helpful to anyone? Does it matter?”

No one can answer those questions but me. And the only way I can answer them is to get up every day and live my life to the fullest. I have to fight against weakness and selfishness and to strive after courage and love. I have to reject nihilism and embrace optimism.

I have to prove to myself every day that my life is not futile. It is this very act that makes it not so.

The alternative is to give up, and give in, and I refuse to do that. And maybe that’s what separates me from Terry Schmidt.

I am not Mr. Squishy. I am Melbourn Grant Shillings.

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Footnotes

"You call yourself a salesman, you son of a bitch?"

Welcome to the world of Glengarry Glen Ross, a film about the cutthroat work environment of real-estate sales in the 80s. This world has its own laws and its own internal logic— where terms like "Glengarry Glen Ross" sound like meaningless babble to outsiders, but make perfect sense to insiders.1

It's a place where almost anything goes: profanity, scathing insults, damnable lies, sexual seduction. As long as you're closing deals, no one cares how you do it. Money talks. Losers walk.

Status is everything, but can change in an instant. The best salesman get the best leads, the worst get their leftovers. Until there's an inversion: winners run on hot streaks that last for months and suddenly end in a crash of flames, going from the top of the hierarchy to the bottom.

And words are the supreme currency. These are salesman— professional talkers. They sculpt their speeches to hit just the right notes: at one moment smooth-talking a customer into a sweet deal, the next bitterly berating their own boss.

Glengarry Glen Ross provides a fascinating peek into the microcosm of these audacious salesmen, where the principles of regular life are turned upside down. Despite its bizarreness, their world tells us something significant about our own, specifically about status, speeches, and actions.

I'm going to give some spoilers, so if at any point this film seems interesting to you, I would go watch it and return here. But I'll explain enough that you should be able to follow along if you haven’t and don’t want to see it.

Power Dynamics

Glengarry Glen Ross is full of power dynamics, but this is not unique to the business world.

In almost all mammals, there is an obvious social dominance hierarchy. Those at the top have the first right of refusal for resources. The get to choose the best territory to make their home, the best access to food and water, the best choice of mates. Dominant individuals are able to act autonomously without the consent of other members. In contrast, those at the bottom are submissive and their behaviors are strongly influenced by others.

We are not beasts, but we are still animals, so we instinctively operate on these patterns, mostly on a subconscious level. We immediately identify where we stand in a hierarchy, and we act accordingly.

Just imagine what would happen if a famous movie star or a billionaire walked into the room you are in. How would you react? Would you know they were important simply by their presence, or by the way others react to them?

What about if instead of a billionaire, your guest were a crazed and dirty homeless person? Your reaction might be just as immediate, but very different.

Now these are the extremes of status, but the point remains: we instantly determine how we stand in relation to the people around us, and modify our behavior to suit that relation.

We would like to think we live in an egalitarian society where everyone is treated fairly, no matter their merit. But this is simply not true. Yes, things are much better than they used to be. We no longer have strict caste differences between patricians and plebians, royalty and commoners, free men and slaves. And now with the civil rights movements, all people are equal, no matter their race, color, creed, orientation, etc. At least, theoretically.

But old habits die hard, especially when they are ingrained in DNA. In every relationship we still subconsciously assign statuses. And this affects how we interact with each other, and how we see ourselves.

The good news is that these are changeable, although we may not always believe so.

Glengarry Glen Ross shows how quickly and unpredictably one’s status can shift. In this story, the cast of characters is very small: four employees, one supervisor, one consultant. In such a tight-knit group, people cannot hide behind their cubicle wall or their obscure job title. Everyone knows everyone.

The film has an all-star cast, and each of the characters play off each other:

• Shelley Levene (Jack Lemmon), is the oldest salesman, and was once successful but is now struggling.

• Ricky Roma (Al Pacino) is young, ambitious, cocky, and incredibly successful, although we don't yet know how or why.

• Dave Moss (Ed Harris) is middle-aged, and mostly just angry. He is quickly becoming desperate.

• George Aaronow (Alan Arkin) is also middle-aged, but mostly just worn-out. He is ready to give up.

• John Williamson (Kevin Spacey) is their young supervisor, although he has no sales experience. The others don't respect him much, but he is a shrewd negotiator.

• Blake (Alec Baldwin) is the hotshot consultant from headquarters, one of the most successful salesmen of all time. And he's got the egotism to match it.

The film begins with a very clear hierarchy: Blake is at the very top (so high he doesn't even belong), followed by the supervisor Williamson, and then the most successful of the local salesmen, Roma. The rest of the salesmen are at the bottom, but their order is unclear. At least for now.

The office is filled with whispers wondering what Blake is doing here. We soon find out— headquarters is very displeased with their poor sales record, and at the end of the month, the bottom two salesmen are getting fired.

Here is Blake explaining the situation, in the language of Glengarry Glen Ross:

“You can't close the leads you're given, you can't close shit, you are shit... hit the bricks, pal, and beat it, 'cause you're going out.”

What follows is the next twelve hours or so of the men scrambling to save their jobs and fighting over status. This is like any other social dominance hierarchy— the best salesmen get the best leads, the rest get the scraps. So it’s very important to them who is on top.

It's a fascinating premise and truly enjoyable to watch these great actors duel it out, their statuses fluctuating constantly.

A Personal Example

While their situation may seem unique, there are parallels in our own lives. We all belong to units of this size, such as our nuclear family, the starting lineup of a sports team, the members of a music band, a close circle of friends, or even our own group at work.

In these units, the roles are pretty well established and remain relatively static over time. We tend to view our statuses within the unit as unchangeable, but the film shows us that this is not necessarily true.

Here's a very simple example. When I first started training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, I was a nobody. Literally, no one knew my name, and no one cared to learn it. That's because most novices leave after just a few weeks. The sport seems really cool at first, but after getting manhandled day after day, it starts to seem a lot less cool. So they quit. Totally understandable.

My only friend at the gym was the receptionist. Perhaps it was because he was the one collecting my payment each month. Still, he encouraged me to keep coming to class, and that one day it would get better.

It was hard to imagine this for the first several months. I would feel inspired after learning a new technique, only to have it fail miserably in execution. Why didn’t it work? Well, my more-experienced opponent already knew that technique, and a dozen counters to it. The real members, the ones who everyone knew their name, had been training there for years, sometimes decades.

It seemed hopeless. How would I ever improve my status, if every day that I got better, they got better too?

But I kept coming back, week after week, even when I was sore and depressed, and occasionally injured. I once cut my finger so bad I had to use duct tape to keep it sealed up, as all other tapes failed during practice.

Then one day, everything changed.

For the first time in six months, I submitted my opponent. I will never forget that moment. I used a Rolling Omoplata that I had just learned the day before.2 I have never once repeated the technique in the last five years, but it doesn’t matter. That day, it enabled me to win.

Instantaneously, my status changed. I was no longer a loser; I was a winner. At least once. And this was a categorical shift in my identity.

Things got better after that. Slowly, but surely, I started winning more often. People began learning my name.

Looking back, it is hard to relate to that former version of myself, the loser whom nobody knew. At the time, I thought change was hopeless, but persistence paid off. I didn't care how uncomfortable I was, how painful things got, I was going to get better. And eventually, I changed my status.

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A Case Study

Glengarry Glen Ross shows us this same dynamic, although in a much more dramatic setting. While it would be interesting to simultaneously analyze the fluctuating statuses of all six members of the film’s core cast, it is easier to look at just one example: the relationship between Levine (the oldest salesman), and Williamson (the supervisor).

After Blake gives his scathing presentation and tells the men they are fired, they immediately begin complaining and dissenting. Levine confronts Williamson, asking for better leads. Williamson turns him down, so Levine resorts to begging, lowering his status. When this fails, he resorts to bribery, which Williamson entertains, lowering his own status. Williamson makes a counteroffer, which Levine rejects— a point for him. Williamson then walks away from the deal, forcing Levine to start begging again, even groveling. Finally Levine accepts a pitiful deal from Williamson, but the new hope fills Levine with confidence. Until Williamson demands the payment now, which he can’t afford, so he walks away completely deflated.

In just one short scene, we see the power dynamics shift erratically. But that’s not the end. In the climax of the story, we see their relationship go through even more revolutions.

Later that night, the office is robbed by Moss (the angry and desperate salesman), and Levine is in on it. However, the next morning, Levine returns to the office exuding confidence after closing a big deal, ending his losing streak, and securing his continued employment. In his newfound arrogance, he starts abusing Williamson, lecturing and demeaning him, seemingly with no remembrance of the begging and bribery he resorted to just last night.

“You can’t run an office. I don’t care. You don’t know what it is, you don’t have the sense, you don’t have the balls. You ever been on a [sale]?…

What I’m saying to you: things can change. You see? This is where you fuck up, because this is something you don’t know. You can’t look down the road. And see what’s coming. Might be someone else… Might be someone new, eh?

Until, almost imperceptibly, Levine reveals that he is aware of the robbery. Williamson then turns the table once more, interrogating him. At first, Levine is embarrassed but tries to play it off, acting confused. Then he shifts to denial, laughing at Williamson, mocking him. But soon he realizes that the jig is up and he has been discovered, and so he surrenders. Williamson then becomes the cruel one, revealing a long-held hatred for Levine.

Over the course of just these two scenes, the relationship between these two men changes drastically from being thick as thieves to the bitterest of nemeses. Watching it is like watching a wrestling match where the two competitors are caught in a rolling tumble— you never know who is going to end up on top.

In Glengarry Glen Ross, power dynamics turn on a dime. Our relationships may not be as volatile as those of the characters, but the story nevertheless reminds us that relationships are malleable, that individual statuses can change, no matter how permanent they may seem.

My status at the Jiu Jitsu gym certainly did not change quickly. At times, it felt like an eternity. But ultimately, it did change.

Speeches

The second insight we gain from Glengarry Glen Ross is that speeches don’t change status, they communicate status.

We would like to think we could persuade someone if we just make the right argument, or choose the right words, or use the right tone of voice. But as humans, we make our decisions about status, trustworthiness, and likeability much more simply and more quickly, sometimes in less than a second.3 So then, why are we so preoccupied with speeches? And why do the characters in the film spend so much time delivering speeches to each other?

For example, when Blake is presenting to the salesmen, we watch as he continues to reiterate the same point over and over again— they are not fulfilling expectations, and they need to either shape up or ship out. The point of his message is clear from his first few sentences, yet he continues.

“You can’t play the man’s game, you can’t close them, then go home and tell your wife your troubles. Because One Thing Counts In This Life: Get Them To Sign On The Line Which Is Dotted. You hear me…? I know your war stories, I know the bullshit excuses that are your lives. What do you know? What do you know…”

And interestingly, this extended rant doesn't seem to further convince or motivate the salesmen. In fact, just after he finishes, they are already complaining about him or reasoning away his arguments. So then, why did he drag on so long? Why do we do the same?

There are a number of reasons. Sometimes we think as we speak (not always recommended). Sometimes we like to hear ourselves speak (I know some people like this, and it's very annoying).

But the most pertinent reason is that we use speeches to communicate our status, like a peacock spreading its feathers or a gorilla beating its chest. A bold, successful person like Blake is going to speak boldly. He doesn't become a winner just because he sounds like one. Moreover nothing the salesmen say is going to change his status.4 He already made the money. And they are already gonna lose their jobs. His long rant just drives home this point and allows him to flex.

Therefore, while the speeches in the film are interesting and enjoyable to watch, they ultimately don't carry any weight, at least in terms of changing someone's mind. The only way to do that is to provide new information, or to demonstrate a change of behavior.

Ethics

Finally, Glengarry Glen Ross shows us that ethics are not absolute, but relative. By ethics, I mean a code of conduct, something that defines which actions are acceptable and which are not. And these are partly defined by values, by which I mean the things we deem important.

During his presentation Blake reveals the values and ethics of the company, which he exemplifies:

“I made nine hundred seventy thousand dollars last year. What did you make?... Nice guy? I don't give a shit. Good father? Fuck you. Go home to your kids. You want to work here? Close.”

In the firm, It doesn’t matter if you’re a good family man, if you are a nice guy, if you act honorably; the only thing that matters is whether you close deals. That’s why Blake is on top, and the other salesmen are at the bottom. As a result, he can speak to them like children, like dogs, with no repercussions. No one can argue with him, and all their protests are invalidated.

“What's your name?”

“Fuck You, that's my name. You know why, Mister? 'Cause you drove a Hyundai to get here tonight, I drove a sixty thousand dollar BMW.”

The firm's sole value is sales, and as a result, its ethics are quite tolerant. Almost any type of behavior is acceptable.

Levine lies through his teeth to customers, saying he is the president of the company, in town for one night only, that he is going to award them a “prize,” that the properties are sound investments. None of this is true.

Moss robs the company. To protect himself, he coerces Aaronow (the weary salesman) to join him.

But it gets worse. Through most of the film, the entire office has been alluding to Roma, the top local salesman, and we are left wondering how he does it, the secret to his success. And we finally find out, as we see Roma seduce a customer in order to close a deal, then lie to the customer when he tries to break the contract—which is not only illegal, but highly unethical—at least to us.

But in this world, it's totally acceptable. The fact remains that Roma closes deals, so he is above reproach. He is on top, and will remain on top as long as he continues his sales streak.

In a famous line, Blake tells the salesmen:

“You know what it takes to sell real estate? It takes brass balls.”

To translate from the language of Glengarry Glen Ross into our own, what he means is that the salesman have to live by his code of ethics. They have to give up the values of being a good parent, or a good partner, or a good person, and instead acquire the sole value of sales.

The truth is that every social unit we belong to has its own values and its own ethical code. Sports teams want to win, bands want to sell out shows, work groups want to get the job done, families want harmony. Sometimes the values of our different groups conflict with each other, and we are left confused as to which actions to take, which are acceptable, which are optimal.

The is why it is crucial we determine for ourselves our values (what's important to us) and our ethics (what we are willing to do in order to achieve them).

If we don't do this on our own, the groups will decide for us by default, and we will adopt their codes of ethics. And we may not like who we become.

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Conclusion

At times, the world of Glengarry Glen Ross is absurd, completely different from our own. And yet, we can learn a lot from it.

First, our actions speak louder than words. Long speeches and eloquent arguments typically do not change our status on their own. In the film, the only thing that mattered is sales. If the men sold more, their status increased. Then their manner of speaking changed accordingly.

The same is true of my Jiu Jitsu journey. It didn’t matter how nice I was, or how badass I acted, or how much I proclaimed my dedication to the sport. I simply had to show up and get the reps in and keep getting better.

Secondly, the movie reminds us that the ethics of our group(s) define our own ethics— what activities are acceptable— unless we choose to define them beforehand, on our own terms. In the film, all kinds of immoral and illegal activity is allowed, even encouraged, while being a good family member is deprecated.

In the gym, winning was important, but persistence was even more valued. It takes at least ten years to become a black belt, and no amount of wins will get you there any quicker. Other values, such as courtesy, honor, and protecting each other, were paramount. You could be a black belt, but if you were an asshole, or dangerous, no one would want to train with you. I have since come to accept these principles as part of my own ethical code, but that was a conscious decision.

Finally, Glengarry Glen Ross shows us that our role in a relationship, our status in a group, may seem fixed, but it is actually malleable. In the film, these statuses change rapidly, mostly because the men believe it is possible.

As I’ve already said, my status at the gym did not change as quickly as I wanted, but it did eventually, and it was all the more worthwhile once it did. And this change occurred particularly because I continued to live out their values, by prioritizing persistence over comfort, by putting my pride to the side.

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Footnotes

This stygian experience inspired his novel A Scanner Darkly. The story portrays the terrifying descent into addiction, but more than that, it uses addiction as a lens to examine a much bigger issue — the problem of identity. This is something I've personally wrestled with, and I've come to understand it as a problem that applies to all of us, even though our circumstances may be very different from Dick's, or his characters'.

A Scanner Darkly is set in a dystopian future where most of the population is hopelessly addicted to the hardcore street drug known only as "Substance Death." The protagonist, Bob Arctor, is an undercover police officer, codenamed "Fred" when he is in uniform. Bob/Fred is assigned to infiltrate a group of junkies and find their source. In doing so, he becomes himself addicted to Substance Death, and gradually starts to forget who he really is — is he the addict or the officer?

How many Bob Arctors are there? A weird and fucked-up thought. Two that I can think of, he thought. The one called Fred, who will be watching the other one, called Bob. The same person. Or is it? Is Fred actually the same as Bob? Does anybody know? I would know, if anyone did, because I'm the only person in the world that knows that Fred is Bob Arctor. But, he thought, who am I? Which of them is me?

What am I actually? he asked himself.

Though this situation may be foreign, the problem is familiar. We are not just one person, but an amalgamation of personas. Our identity changes dramatically depending on our context: where we are, who we are with, how we happen to feel in that moment. When these different identities conflict, we often feel bewildered. Sometimes trying to understand ourselves can be its own dystopia.

Over the last decade, I have lived many different lives, and often wondered which was the real me. I have been a straight-A student at a prestigious East coast university, an unemployed loser wasting his days playing video games in his parents’ house, a salaryman in a custom suit consulting for private equity funds, a vanlife vagabond roaming the country and playing guitar in public parks. I have been a tutor, an EMT, a line cook, a firefighter, and a writer.

Who the fuck am I?

Trying to understand ourselves is difficult, if not impossible, because we are within the dilemma. We are part of the problem. But when we observe someone else (say, a character like Bob/Fred), we can better understand the predicament, which then allows us to reflect on our own with more clarity.

A Scanner Darkly depicts a struggle with the problem of identity — the one Dick was forced to face after his life collapsed.

The Underworld of Addiction

In the opening lines of the story, we are introduced to the dark underworld that Bob inhabits, and the people who populate it:

Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair. The doctor told him there were no bugs in his hair. After he had taken a shower for eight hours, standing under hot water hour after hour suffering the pain of the bugs, he got out and dried himself, and he still had bugs in his hair; in fact, he had bugs all over him. A month later he had bugs in his lungs.

The passage describes one of Bob's junkie friends, Charles Freck, who has deteriorated rapidly. What's worse, everyone is headed toward the same sad state, sooner or later. Bob joins their ranks, accepting this risk, because has to "fit in" in order to find their source.

Some of his associates are worse, even treacherous, like the eccentric and unpredictable Barris who likes to shoot off handguns in the middle of the night. He also likes to dismantle Bob's equipment and reassemble it incorrectly — first his VR headset, and later his car.

Barris starts to suspect Bob is up to something, and Bob is scared shitless of being discovered:

What an undercover narcotics agent fears most is not that he will be shot or beaten up but that he will be slipped a great hit of some psychedelic that will roll an endless horror feature film in his head for the remainder of his life... which will nearly kill him but not completely... He will try to shake the aphids off him day and night... And all this will occur deliberately.

This is the nightmare world that Bob inhabits. You might think the dangers too severe, the conditions too grim; that Bob would ask for a reassignment, or simply quit. But actually, he likes it.

Before he was an undercover cop, Bob led a very vanilla life. That all changed after a traumatic accident (or was it even an accident?). Years ago, he hit his head on a kitchen cabinet, which cut deep into his scalp:

It flashed on him instantly that he didn't hate the kitchen cabinet: he hated his wife, his two daughters, his whole house, the back yard with its power mower, the garage, the radiant heating system, the front yard, the fence, the whole fucking place and everyone in it. He wanted a divorce; he wanted to split...

Probably he should have regretted his decision. He had not. That life had been one without excitement, with no adventure. It had been too safe. All the elements that made it up were right there before his eyes, and nothing new could ever be expected.

But in this dark world where he now dwelt, ugly things and surprising things and once in a long while a tiny wondrous thing spilled out at him constantly; he could count on nothing.

Like Philip K Dick, Bob had had it all: the American dream, the white picket fence, the perfect little family. And yet, whether he realized it consciously or not, he wanted out.

Sadly, I can relate to this. I once had a safe and pleasant job as an accountant — thirty-five hours a week in an air-conditioned office, two-hour lunch breaks, five weeks paid vacation, and more money than I could count. But I was bored out of my mind and miserable. I felt like a dead man walking. I had to get out.

After I quit, I was completely directionless. I had just spent the last eight years of my life on one path, only to realize I was headed the wrong way. Now I was lost. I had no other skills, no strong inclinations, no one to guide me. So I had to figure it out the hard way, through trial and error.

Since then, I have lived in dozens of places around the world, and held just as many jobs. My new life is more chaotic and uncertain, but also... more interesting. Despite all its difficulties, I still prefer it over my old life.

This is the gamble that Bob took when he left his comfortable life and entered the underworld of drugs. It's dark, disgusting, and dangerous, but also... deliciously unpredictable.

There are also some enticing parts to his new life — such as the beautiful, dark-eyed Donna, a fellow junkie (and a suspect). She is charming and playful, yet elusive — always flirting with Bob but never fully giving herself to him. She is just one enthralling element of this dark dance with drugs. But how long can he keep going?

Because time is in short supply: the side-effects of Substance Death accelerate with every passing day. He must find the source before everything slips away — his leads and his mind. The threat of insanity is real. See, for example, his friend Charles Freck with the aphid problem.

This is how Bob describes the sad destiny of the addict:

One more in a long line, a dreary entity among many others like him, an almost endless number of brain-damaged retards. Biological life goes on, he thought. But the soul, the mind — everything else is dead. A reflex machine. Like some insect. Repeating doomed patterns, a single pattern, over and over now. Appropriate or not.

Thus, in the first part of the story, we are introduced to the theme of addiction. But Dick doesn't just stop there, and instead uses it as a lens to examine another topic — the problem of identity.

Every addict notices multiple identities operating within themselves: one persona swears to God they will get sober (for the thousandth time), and another persona desperately wants to get high (just one more time). One wants to stop, one wants to go. It is like trying to drive a car while pressing both the gas and the brakes. The only thing that’s happening is damage to the vehicle.

And so the addict is caught in a trap — doomed to compulsive patterns that lead nowhere, signifying nothing. If this goes on long enough, Bob/Fred says these addicts become "damaged beyond repair," destined only for the trash can.

But he might soon become one of them.

The Scanner as an Observer

In the second part of the story, we watch as Bob succumbs to his addiction to Substance Death, and gradually becomes confused as to his real identity. In response, he starts searching frantically for something that can help him sort it out, to get a grip on reality.

As Fred the undercover agent, part of his job is to review the footage captured by hidden cameras, called "scanners." But as Bob the junkie, he must pretend that he is unaware of the presence of these scanners, to protect his cover.

In his desperation, Bob/Fred grasps at the scanners as some sort of objective viewpoint that can help him make sense of the insanity of his life. In one of the most memorable scenes, Bob arrives home and has a terrifying epiphany.

"Nobody home, I guess," he stated aloud as usual, and was aware that the scanners had picked that up. But he had to take care always: he wasn't supposed to know they were there. Like an actor before a movie camera, he decided, you act like the camera doesn't exist or else you blow it. It's all over. And for this shit there are no take-two's...

He is suddenly afflicted with a strong sense of paranoia, and wonders — who is actually watching him? No one right now, but later Fred will see it. But is Fred the same as Bob? That other person feels a universe away.

Whatever it is that's watching, it is not a human. Not by my standards, anyhow. Not what I'd recognize.

[Everything in my life is unfolding] within the sight of some thing. Which, unlike little dark-eyed Donna, does not ever blink.

What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does [a scanner] see into me—into us—clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk.

Bob/Fred is no longer an objective observer of his own situation. Things are too fucked up — his world, his lifestyle, and now his mind. But it is also worth pondering whether he ever was — whether any of us ever are — objective.

This passage makes me consider: do I see myself clearly? Do I understand myself? Or do I, like Bob, put on one face for the scanner — for the world — and wear another face when I am alone? Actually, there are multiple faces, each struggling within me at various times. Which one is the real me?

Am I still the white-collar professional with a nice car, nice home, and nice clothes? If not, why do I keep comparing myself to those standards of success?

Am I the nomad, wandering endlessly in search of meaning? I don't feel as lost anymore, but then why do I still long to return to "the road"?

Am I the first responder? But I haven't worked a shift since May... And yet I love the work.

Am I the writer? At times I know with unquestionable certainty that it is my calling, and at other times I feel I have no talent, and everything I put down on paper is imperfect and ultimately pointless.

I can imagine Dick felt the same confusion in the wake of his latest divorce. Four ex-wives, lined up in his mind, each of them symbolic of a separate phase of his life — some happy, some sad, but each of them significant in some way. Whose husband was he now? Where was he to go next? Perhaps that is why he retreated into amphetamines.

This is the uncertainty that people fear when they consider any change — good or bad. It is why people stay in terrible jobs, unhappy marriages, dirty apartments, dangerous neighborhoods. Things could get better — but they could also get much worse. And then, how would they define themselves? Sometimes those identities are so closely connected to the old things that moving on would be like leaving behind a limb.

No, better to stay in the known, even if it is imperfect, even if it is full of doomed patterns, than to face the terror of the unknown.

Dick's plight, as well as Bob/Fred's, is very different from my own. But the problem is the same: How can I see myself objectively? I have no scanner that can see me clearly, at least not into my head or heart. And how can I find the way forward when everything around me feels like murk?

Well, at least I have these stories. At least I have my words. At least I have my friends and family, and all the other people around me. And maybe through each of these perspectives I can begin to see myself clearly, I can begin to figure out who I really am — or could be.

I believe that it is impossible to see ourselves clearly except through others. We need other people — some in the flesh, some in fiction — to help us understand the human condition, our own condition. And then to go from there boldly into change, despite the uncertainty and the possibility that things might get worse. We have to embark if we are to leave behind dead patterns — old ways of life that no longer serve us.

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Perhaps it is possible to have a flash of inspiration — what alcoholics call "a moment of clarity" — such as when Bob hit his head on the kitchen cabinet. Some people have had visions from God (some of them while on drugs… go figure). I myself have experienced similar crises during traumatic accidents.

For example, just last month, when my dream of becoming a firefighter was shattered by an injury. Back in July of last year, I wrote about my determination to become a firefighter.1 At the time, it was just a dream, something I could only imagine. Then, finally, it happened. I was accepted into a fire academy and began my training in June of this year. I was crushing it, until all of a sudden, I wasn’t. I injured my hip (tore my labrum), and couldn’t continue. Devastation. Years of work, gone in a second. Now I need surgery and it will take months to recover. Where do I go next?

These kinds of accidents are impossible to control or predict, are usually extremely uncomfortable, and don’t always lead to a revelation. So I wouldn't recommend throwing yourself down the stairs just yet. Much safer and more sustainable to use the people and the stories around us.

The consequences of failing to do this are not merely confusion and discomfort. They are much worse, as we see in the end of Bob/Fred's life.

The Scanner as a Dead Man

In the final part of the story, the term "scanner" acquires another significance. Bob/Fred finally loses his mind to Substance Death and can no longer control even his bodily functions. Hanging by his last thread, Donna drags him to the rehab center. There, he hears an interesting theory:

"If you could see out from inside a dead person you could still see, but you couldn't operate the eye muscles, so you couldn't focus... All you could do would be wait until some object passed by... If a leaf or something floated over your eye, that would be it, forever. Only the leaf. Nothing more; you couldn't turn."

This is an impossible scenario. But upon reflection, this is also the reality of an addict. As the speaker explains, an addict is "sentient but not alive." Whatever is looking out from that person's eyes may have died long ago. The body continues going through the motions, but the brain no longer reacts to new inputs... it just keeps repeating the same doomed patterns. Like forever shaking off invisible aphids.

This is the second sense of the scanner — a camera that can see, but cannot respond, cannot even choose what it sees. So it is with the addict — the rest of the world goes out of focus, the people around him, the scenery, the cats and dogs. As another addict explains, "all I saw was dope."

In rehab, Bob/Fred is so brain-damaged that he cannot remember anything from the past. So they call him "Bruce," and he develops his third persona. What's worse, he cannot think into the future either, cannot even think beyond the present moment. Like a child, he believes the world disappears when his eyes are covered. Thus, Bob/Fred/Bruce is condemned to the lowest circle of the hell of drug addiction — the never-ending present.

For many spiritual seekers, the present is the highest nirvana. The ultimate goal of their transcendent journey is to shed the “distractions” of past regrets and future expectations. Ironically, for an addict like Bob/Fred/Bruce, this never-ending present is a prison. He is a dead man walking, looking out from dull, lifeless eyes, accepting only the demands of his drug, or the commands of another. He has lost all his identities and become instead a mindless machine, a scanner.

I have no examples to add here from my own life, because — thank God — I have never personally experienced this kind of decay. But I have seen it enough in others, during my work on the ambulance, to know it is not just a fiction, nor just one author’s experience. I have seen Fentanyl destroy hundreds of lives in my community — and not all of them have died yet.

But the consequences are still real, because addiction is not limited to substance abuse— addiction is merely doomed patterns that lead nowhere: bad habits, bad attitudes.

Conclusion

A Scanner Darkly is a descent into the hell of addiction, one that serves as a strong reminder of the dangers of slipping too far into chaos. It's dramatization of Dick's life enables me to examine the important question of identity, from a necessary distance. And thus I can see myself more clearly.

Here's what I have come to understand: identity is neither simple nor static; it is multidimensional and ever-changing. We are not who we think we are — we have multiple personas, each bleeding into the other from one moment to the next.

Some of our personas need to die, and some need to thrive, if we are to go on living purposefully. Figuring out which ones are which requires that we understand ourselves, despite the slippery nature of such a problem. But we can do this through the help of people in our lives, and the stories of others.

Adopting a new persona is a normal part of life, but it requires us to dance with chaos (if only temporarily), in order to leave behind our old ways of life that no longer serve us, to move out of the murk and into the light.

The consequences of failing to do this are steep. We may even become scanners — sentient, but not alive — endlessly repeating doomed patterns that lead nowhere.

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Postscript

There is some good news, too.

In the process of writing and re-writing this piece (dozens of times), the answer is obvious, always has been — of course, I am the writer.

The thing that finally convinced me to quit my cushy accounting job was a book. Well not the book, but the words within it. And words continue to drive me to this day.

All those years of wandering, exploring, and seeking to understand myself — it all led me here. And I feel more qualified at this than anything I have ever attempted. Regardless of whatever else I do in life, whether I return to firefighting or business or teaching or wandering, I will always keep writing.

I know who I am. The only question that remains is: do I have it in me to be who I am? Or will I settle for my lesser identities? Will I be a passive observer, a scanner, watching my life unfold before me? Or will I take the leading role and continue to live out my dreams?

That remains to be answered, day by day, word by word.

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Footnotes

But he was not in his right mind.

When my partner and I first encountered him, we knew something was wrong: it sounded like a chorus of demons had convened in his quarters; yet from the shadows on the wall, we could tell he was alone. As we peered inside, these suspicions were confirmed.

What we saw within was a rabid animal— agitated, aggressive, and aimless. He was literally tearing his hair out. Up, down, and back around, he paced across the room, again and again, chattering in a dozen different voices, holding multiple conversations and playing each of the parts. He was so spun up that he didn't even notice us.

The other tenants in the halfway house had called 911, worried that he would hurt one of them— or himself. As the closest ambulance at this time of night, we were dispatched to deal with the emergency.

We finally got his attention, still he spoke only to the wall, rambling about the FBI hunting him. They had bugged his phone and his room, he told his invisible interlocutor, and were following him wherever he went. I tried to reassure him that no one was tracking him, but that only made him more paranoid. Now he was convinced that we were in league with “them,” part of the conspiracy against him.

If this had been one of my first calls as an EMT, his behavior would’ve bewildered me. Head full of textbook knowledge, I would have considered a dozen differential diagnoses: alcohol intoxication or carbon monoxide poisoning, or maybe even a stroke or a traumatic brain bleed. The possibilities would have been overwhelming. However, after several months of working the streets (in Denver, no less), his presentation was obvious. This was a meth overdose.

Still, some technical knowledge was helpful. Full name: methamphetamine. Chemical formula: C₁₀H₁₅N. Discovered in 1896, classified as a sympathomimetic. In layman’s terms, it triggers the body's fight-or-flight response. Taking a typical street dose is like distilling 100 cups of coffee into an ounce of liquid, and injecting it straight into your veins. At first, it’s the ultimate espresso— your body begins vibrating with excitement, energy, elation. Then your thoughts start accelerating too, like a freight train with no brakes. Soon, you’re cruising at a million miles per hour, but there’s no way to slow down. Next, reality starts to fracture. Your imagination, all your dreams and nightmares— you can’t tell them apart from the real world— you experience visual and auditory hallucinations that feel more substantial than people standing before you. Meth has an activation time of about 18 minutes, with a half-life of 10 hours, meaning it would stay in his system for at least 40 hours.

A person in that state of mind is a danger to themselves or others, especially for that long. Eventually, something was going to trigger him into violence. High as he was, he no longer retained the mental capacity to make medical decisions on his own behalf. So, we’re required by law to intervene, even though he doesn’t understand that we're trying to help, and instead thinks we’ve been sent by the shadowy cabal to bring him in.

As we approached him, he suddenly became hostile, and lashed out like a cornered cougar, pouncing at us with open claws, his eyes unnaturally wide and bloodshot. Instantly, my training kicked in. I moved to his left, my partner to his right, and we each grabbed one of his wrists and pushed him forward, turning his own momentum against him. Up against the wall, he had nowhere to go. Pinned there for long enough, his aggression slowly subsided, and he was willing to talk it out.

We managed to convince him to get on the stretcher and then we seatbelted him in. Things were smooth at this point, but when we applied the restraints to his wrists, his paranoia flared back up. Of course, we had left the sedatives in the ambulance, so we'd have to do things the hard way. We rolled him out of the building as quickly as we could. His threats were caustic and frightening, though largely impotent at this point. Still, this continued agitation would wreak havoc on his nervous system, potentially making the comedown fatal. He needed the narcotics, and he needed them now.

In that brief interval between the building and the ambulance, he saw his last chance at escape. With inhuman strength, he sat up and nearly slipped out of the seatbelts. I cinched them down as tight as I could, but this only provoked his fury. He screamed bloody murder into the depths of the night.

“HELP ME!”

I felt the irony even then: in that moment we were the only ones capable of helping him, and our only intention was to take him to a safe place where he could come down safely and get the treatment he needed. That’s not how he saw it—he saw his worst fears coming to life in the most excruciating manner. I’ll never forget his horrific shrieks when we pushed his jaw to the side and injected the sedative into his neck. He begged pitifully to be set free, pleading for mercy, convinced that we were sent by the federal government to assassinate him in cold blood, in full view of the neighbors, who callously stood by and did nothing.

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The Body

And that’s just one dimension of the human experience. Meth isn’t even the most popular drug on the streets anymore— Fentanyl is king. And it pulls you in the opposite direction; a downer, not an upper. Instead of a brakeless freight train, you get a waterslide into a swimming pool of sweet syrup that swallows you whole.

And I could tell you many more stories about every variety of chemical experience I've come across, each wildly unique based on the drug, the user, and his set and setting.

As a (novice) medical practitioner, I am constantly amazed by the human body, this tremendously complicated machine, driven by intricate interactions of several tightly interwoven organ systems— cardiovascular, nervous, endocrine, digestive, skeletal, muscular, reproductive, renal, integumentary— just to name a few. Each of these systems is activated and inhibited by electro-chemical signals, orchestrated by a myriad of hormones and molecules and the chemical reactions of basic elements like sodium, potassium, calcium, and oxygen, all following instructions encoded in genomic sequences that are millions of characters long, formed on a pattern that is billions of years old and shared by trillions of different species.

It’s staggeringly beautiful.

And there are drugs with elegant constructions that can interact with the body in baroque patterns, creating effects that are both rapturous and oppressive, exhilarating and devastating, healing and debilitating. Drugs can quicken the body with the velocity of a rocket ship— or send it crashing with the same abruptness.

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As an outside observer, some of these drugs are undeniably enticing. Having seen them so often in others, my curiosity occasionally makes me consider— what would it be like to do meth? But fortunately, there are some compelling downsides that sway the decision, not least of which is hospitalization, as we’ve just seen. Moreover, there's the risk of addiction, which tends to lead to even more undesirable side effects, like, I don’t know, the loss of everything you hold dear— your job, your friends, your hygiene, your health, your will, and finally, your life.

On second thought, I’ll pass.

The Alternative

Because I’ve found something better. A secret source of satisfaction more stimulating than any chemical compounds.

For me, nothing can compare to the feeling of wielding the written word. Whether reading or writing them, the words become my own. They become me. They enter my consciousness and activate internal circuits that are otherwise inaccessible. All it takes are the right words in the right place at the right time to scratch under my skull, to pinch my meninges, to seize my entire spine in ecstasy. It’s indescribably exquisite.

I don't know how it starts, or if it ever leaves you. but I do know this— that I have it, that I've felt it with more certainty than anything else I've ever known; that words are beautiful, indescribably beautiful, something from another plane of existence, something heavenly, paradisical. Words stagger me harder than any punch I've ever taken, they take me higher than any cliff I've ever climbed, they immolate my mind, they electrify my insides.

Yes, words are a drug for the spirit, invigorating the soul; their activation time is instant, their half-life is immeasurable, their effect is incalculable.

This is why I write, even when it seems recklessly futile, indulgent and wasteful, unnecessarily stressful and taxing. “It's not about the money, honey.” It's not about the likes. It's about something far more sublime, because there are words written on the page that are more valuable than gold.

There is something primal about mere words, a possession held by both young children and our most ancient ancestors, and also something ungraspable, intangible, forever elusive and incomprehensible, a skill that is innate and easy to learn, yet impossible to ever master. It is a voice crying in the wilderness, saying “hear me!” urgently attempting to communicate, even though faithfully translating the mind's impressions into grammar and syntax is ultimately impossible. Still, we try, however imperfectly, because our souls are desperate to express themselves.

I can ignore the siren song of street drugs because I have something still stronger, though subtler— I say, let my whole head and my whole heart be hijacked by words. Not any medical remedy do I need, neither stimulants, nor sedatives, nor psychedelics; neither tonics, elixirs, potions, or pills; no, none of those will do for me.

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My panacea is prose, my medication the music of language, my obsession the incising bite of persuasive argument and the mesmerizing magic of a transcendent story. This is intoxicating enough, all at once invigorating and tranquilizing, animating and astonishing. I do not wish escape reality, but rather to explore it more deeply, to taste it more richly, through the impressions shared by my fellow denizens of this inexplicable planet.

And let me participate in that one interminable tale, that collection of every written word from all times and places, the entire compendium of characters and letters, inscribed since Babylon till now, and further on into the future, beyond our galaxy, beyond time, beyond our consciousness. Let my words join that forever-flowing stream of those souls seeking to make their mark, to leave their legacy, ideas and emotions carved into stone and written upon hearts. And when finally we are all gone, still something will remain, the engravings of the mind of mankind in the wonder of our words.

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Author’s note

This essay was originally published in a previous version on this site, under the title “The Engravings of the Mind of Mankind.”

You are sitting at your desk. It is 8:45am. The workday has hardly started, but your eyes are already starting to glaze over and your stomach is rumbling. Might be time for a trip to the break room for coffee and a donut.

All of a sudden, you hear the most deafening roar you have ever heard; it is unbelievably loud. Screams fill the room. What just happened?

You (and everyone else) walk to the edge of the building to peer out the floor-to-ceiling windows. You look down at the street, 104 floors below. Nothing.

Then you look up.

Across the street is another skyscraper, where smoke and fire erupt like from the bowels of hell. Massive chunks of concrete, steel, glass pour forth and you can only watch in horror as human bodies are carried out along with the current of carnage.

Before you even consciously understand what is going on, your stomach is tearing itself apart, and you know, deep down, that something is dreadfully wrong.

The others around you are starting to register it too. Some faint, others flee, racing towards the elevators. In shock, you follow. In the lobby, terror is starting to catch like wildfire— the elevators are out of service.

"The stairs!" someone shouts. Of course. Everyone races towards them, a torrent of bodies trying to fit through a three foot gap. You are swept up among them as you hurtle down the steps, unable to stop even if you wanted to. Finally, you reach the skylobby on the 78th floor, where the express elevators will take you all the way down to the ground, to safety.

But these elevators are also out.

No one knows what to do. Over two hundred people are amassed in this room that typically holds ten.

Then the unimaginable happens. A second deafening roar and everyone is rocked to the ground. Another gaping pit of hell opens right before your eyes. In less than a heartbeat, dozens of people around you have been eradicated. Gone. Many of those that remain are badly burned; some are missing limbs.

All of this is happening to you, but you are unable to make sense of any of it. You don’t know what to do and the primordial systems of your brain take over, all higher functions shut down and you feel only sheer panic.

You don’t know this, but this is the last hour of your life.

What happened

On Tuesday, September 11th, 2001 at 8:46am American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, New York City, New York.

Soon after, at 9:02am, United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower, intersecting the building between the 84th and 78th floors— where the skylobby was.

Nearly 18,000 people were in the buildings on that day. A small city. There were 99 elevators in the South Tower, and most were out of service.

The office workers gathered on the 78th floor skylobby were unable to use any of the eight express elevators that would have brought them to safety on the ground floor. There were three emergency stairwells, and only one was accessible. But no one knew this. Everything appeared hopeless. They were trapped.

But on that floor there was a man named Welles. Welles was a regular white-collar employee like the others. But he had once trained as a junior firefighter, many years prior.

Welles didn't give up. Welles found that final functioning stairwell. But instead of fleeing down it by himself, he returned to skylobby, announcing to the others, “come with me.”

Welles led several employees down the stairwell to the 64th floor, where they met professional firefighters who were stationed there. The employees then evacuated the building safely with the firefighters.

Except for Welles.

Welles returned to the 78th floor skylobby. He was looking for more victims. But Welles was also a victim, in need of rescue. It didn't matter to him.

He rescued more employees, bringing them to the 64th floor, and returning again to the skylobby. Over and over, Welles continued his efforts until, at 9:59am, just 56 minutes after the second crash, the South Tower collapsed.

In the last hour of his life, Welles Crowther sacrificed himself to save others.

Conclusion

What would you do?

I myself am terrified to think about it. Not just because of the situation, but because I am afraid of myself, afraid that I would not have the guts to do what Welles did. I am afraid I would have ran for dear life, thinking only of saving my own skin.

But I don’t know. I want to think I would have done the noble thing, the heroic thing, to do what Welles did.

I too have trained as a firefighter. I have worked on the ambulance as an EMT. I have seen awful things, and have walked away unfazed. I have held dying patients in my arms. I have tried to resuscitate several people, doing everything in my power to bring them back to life, and failed. I have come across suicides (always in hotel rooms— I don’t know why). I have seen all of these things, and more. Knowing that something like that could be what awaits me behind any door of any call I get, even in the worst neighborhoods at the darkest hours of the night, I still press on with my job, fearlessly.

And yet— still I don’t know if I would have what it takes to do what Welles did.

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The hardest part about all this is that we never know when our final moments will be. The workers in the World Trade Center that day (and the many first responders who arrived to help) certainly had no idea that it would be the last day of their lives, the last hour of their lives.

And so, I think, the only solution is to begin now— to act as if any day could be my last, even today. It probably won’t be, but just think. If it were, what would be the quality of the last hour of my life?

Would I be proud of the life I’ve lived so far? Would I be at peace with my relationships— the way I’ve treated my friends, family, neighbors, coworkers, bosses, strangers? Would I feel satisfied with what I’ve accomplished, how I’ve spent my time, what I’ve done with my gifts? I don’t know. These are difficult things to think about.

But in remembrance of Welles Crowther and the other 2976 victims that died on September 11th, 2001, I think it’s worth dwelling on today.

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Welles Crowther with his mom

Source: The Man in the Red Bandana | SC Featured

A leaden snake slithers inside my intestines, its ceaseless squirming makes me want to retch. My eyeballs burn from constantly scanning the treeline for threats. The fear is beginning to fill me, and I can't stand it. I want to run, but I must stay. Their lives depend on it.

Now that I keep watch by myself, the countless sounds of the forest are noticeably louder, and somehow more spiteful—crickets chirping angrily, trees creaking ominously in the wind, bats fluttering around furiously. Every noise from the impenetrable shadows seems to spell the coming of our annihilation—whether by beast or by man, I can't tell. But I don't want to think about death. It's too fresh on my mind. There are so few of us left; I have to stay alert to protect those that remain.

I never imagined this forest could be so alienating. Once our comfortable home, now it feels like a dungeon, a tomb. I don’t feel safe, even though I am surrounded by loved ones, their slumbering bodies stretched in various positions around the campfire. But they are no help; I am forced to face the horrors of the night alone. 

Among the other families in our tribe, I scan over my own. I see my sisters, nieces, and nephews, but younger brother is conspicuously missing. His child, Little One, lies closest to me, sleeping softly. So precious, so small, so helpless.

What chance does she stand in this hostile world, ruled by the savage and merciless gods? This earth is river of nightmares surging at the banks, filled with abominable things, every one of which seems to be delicately designed to destroy us. Her most of all. But I am not much stronger. What can I possibly do to stop the flood?

This line of thinking disturbs me, and I falter, no longer able to suppress my thoughts of death. Suddenly, the damn breaks, and all the hideous apparitions of my tormented mind rush at me in a torrent. I see monsters prowling at the edge of camp—hideous, snarling, their gaping maws filled with numberless teeth eager to sheer skin from bone, their crooked lips dribbling putrefying saliva. I turn away in panic, but on the other side I see hordes of men lurking in the darkness, their spears lowered and their muscles tensed, ready to leap over the barriers and tear into us again, their bloodlust still unslaked.

My memory then merges with my imagination, and I watch in dread as the deluge of destruction is unleashed on our camp. This time, none escape the slaughter. A sea of sensations overwhelm me simultaneously—the terrified shrieks of women, the stifled groans of grown men, the sickening snap of broken bones, the sour smells of nervous sweat, eviscerated organs, burnt flesh. I stare into a swamp of blood and carnage. In my final moments of anguish, as my own life spills out of me, I witness it all, utterly humiliated by my great and total failure. I let this happen.

The terror of this phantasmic fever dream is nearly overpowering.

I must leave. I must get out of this place. I have to flee so I can save myself. I don't want to die. I don't want to keep watch any longer. I can still survive if I leave right now. 

I try to rise, but my legs are weak. My stomach surges, and a wave of dizziness hits me. I collapse back on the ground, which makes a noise. A few people stir in their sleep, but none awake. 

As my eyes sweep over their bodies, another thought comes—who will protect them? He is gone. If I leave too, who will defend our family?

I can't abandon them. I can't let them be overrun. It's too awful. It’s my duty to watch over them—despite the fear. 

One by one, I consider them. My elder sister, with her broken jaw that makes her smile so endearing. She is tough, but prone to loneliness. My younger sister, loud and joyful, surrounded by her four children, each of them more rowdy than the last, yet impossible to be angry with for long, so tender and gentle they are. Even now they snuggle one another in a line. I fight back tears.

Then I see his wife, the quietest of us all. She is tiny and meek, but selfless. She does more work than three people together, and never tires, never complains. Next to her, Little One, their only child. She is small like her mother. Quiet too. But her eyes are big, and perceptive. Looking at her, it is impossible to stop myself—I let the tears flow.

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It is them I defend—them who sleep so deeply only because they have put their trust in me. How can I betray them? How can I willingly leave them behind?

My love for them makes me hate myself. How can I be such a coward? What makes me so craven, so selfish?

I wish brother were still here. Though he was younger than me, he was so much bigger and bolder than me. I still don’t understand why I survived, and he was killed. If he were here, he would encourage me. He would be brave, even in this treacherous forest, this hell. 

A bitter breeze brushes my exposed skin, sending shivers through my body. Winter is approaching, fast. It is always the most difficult season. The days are short and bleak, the nights are long and cold. Dry wood is in short supply. Water retreats into the mountains, transforming to snow and ice.

This winter will be the most miserable in memory. If we live to remember it. We have no furs, no shoes, no tools. We left all that behind when we ran for our lives. Now we will pay for it, I know. Because I know what it feels like to freeze. My frostbitten toes are permanent reminders of the paralyzing sting of snow. I don't want to endure that again. I won't.

And with the cold comes its more sinister twin, hunger. Very little to hunt, even less to forage. Starvation gnawing us from the inside out. That is the real enemy. Worse than being crushed to death by a bloodthirsty blow. Worse even than being smothered by the creeping cold. Death by hunger is grueling and pitiful. It makes people do desperate things.

I’m getting desperate too. Curse the gods! Staying is fruitless. We will not have enough to go around. There are too few hunters, too many mouths to feed, too much skin to cover.

We may survive if I keep watch tonight, but what about the next night? And the one after? Even if we repel the murderous fiends who are certainly still on our trail, we can not deter the advance of winter, that insatiable monster who takes and takes and never gives, until it gives out, many months from now. But by then it will be too late.

My belly is empty. Has been for days. How much longer can I go on? 

Those who were injured when we fled the massacre, what happened to them? Broken legs, sprained ankles, and bleeding wounds. They probably didn’t make it far. And it’s not our fault either. We couldn't turn back. All we could do was run. Those who couldn’t run are likely dead. Death takes us all, but he takes the weak more quickly. Death will take me too if I stay here much longer. I must run while I still can, leaving behind those who would slow me down.

I can’t save them all, but I could save myself. Better I live than we all die. That makes sense to me. 

Unsteadily, I stand. I feel the snake churning in my stomach again. I must go now; I cannot delay. I will try to tiptoe out of camp before they notice. I am sorry, dear sisters. I am sorry, Little One.

I gather my things: my spear, my blanket, my salt. I curse the gods, and I curse myself. Maybe I am a coward. I don't care—I've always been afraid. I am not brother. I never will be. I don't understand him and I will never understand his bravery. 

With everything in hand, I am ready. But I can't stop shivering. It is no longer the fright at my destruction, but the distress of my guilt. It is the fear of what fate I leave them to, without their knowledge. It is the shame of betraying their trust, abandoning them to everything I envisioned in my nightmare.

The fear has now totally filled me; it is overflowing. It permeates my entire body. I can’t stop my limbs from trembling. I can't catch my breath. I’m soaked in sweat. My heart is racing. The snake in my intestines is crawling up my throat. I feel sick. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. 

I vomit.

My nostrils and my throat burn with sweet and sickly acidity. My head spins. Then I turn and see her.

Little One.

There is no surprise in her eyes. No confusion. She just stares at me. Does she know? I put my finger to my lips. She doesn't move. She doesn't blink. She just stares, without anger, without judgment. Only disappointment. Is that it? No, there's no way she can know. But I know, and my shame scalds me, to the heart.

How can I leave her? How can I leave all of them? I could never forgive myself. And even if I do survive—for how long? One man is no man. I know that. I've never seen a companionless man in all my years. But I have seen many solitary skeletons. Death takes the lonely most quickly of all.

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We are still staring. Neither of us has moved. Suddenly, I understand everything. In her big eyes, I realize the truth:

Brother was brave, yes, but he was not unafraid. He felt the fear consume him, just as I feel it now.

But he responded to it differently. He had already made his decision. His wife, his child—he would stay and fight for them, no matter what. And now they are my reason too. My family and my tribe, all of them. Without them, I am nothing. Without me, they are as good as dead.

I put my gear down. I smile at Little One. She closes her eyes and turns away, unimpressed. It doesn't matter. I have made my decision. I don’t need her approval.

I stand, making myself tall. I grasp my spear firmly and point it at the shadows. Whatever lurks there, if anything, I am ready to face it. Here I am. 

I still shiver in fear, but I don’t resist it; I embrace it. I let the fear fill me. Yes, the fear is terrible, it is sickening, it is odious. But the fear keeps me awake. It keeps me alert. The fear reminds me of why I fight—the thought of losing them. The fear focuses me on what’s important.

Dawn is coming. I can see it beginning to bathe the trees in a dull gray. With it, there is some relief. The watch is almost over. I feel a little hope.

Perhaps, one day, many lifetimes from now, Little One’s grandchildren, or their grandchildren, won't face these hardships. Perhaps, one day, if we continue to fight all the hazards of this inhospitable world long enough, we will eventually subdue them. Perhaps, one day, there will no longer be anything to fear. No more constant bloodshed. No more gnawing hunger. No more freezing and frostbite. 

When that day comes, will we still tremble? Will we still be afraid? Maybe we will still feel the same sensations, only the dangers won’t be real. Maybe they will be like the nightmares that tormented me tonight, more mental than material. I don’t know.

But I do know this—my fears may be strong, but my love is stronger. These are my people. These are my family. These are my reason. 

I will finish the rest of this watch. And I will keep watch again next week. And another week after that. And if I’m lucky, I will keep watch again next winter.

It will never get any easier. The fear will grip me again, hold me in its sway throughout the night. But I won’t fight it. I will let the fear fill me. Because I know now, I understand:

There is a terror more terrible than any of the demons that prowl at our perimeter, more dreadful than the death waiting at our doorstep—it is the fear of dying alone.

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The next morning, after all the lifeboats had deployed, the captain and three others remained, with only a small dinghy to take them to safety. They then attempted to traverse 16 excruciating miles in the tiny vessel, facing heavy wind and waves.

One of these final four to depart was American author Stephen Crane. The incident inspired his short story, The Open Boat.

The story is riveting. Part of that is the story itself—the desperate struggle to survive the aftermath of a harrowing shipwreck. But mostly, it’s the way the story is told—in just under 10,000 words, Crane conveys one of the most hellish experiences known to man. You might imagine that he accomplishes this with elaborate descriptions and deeply personal introspections. But Crane takes a different approach. 

Cast adrift on the merciless sea for nearly 30 hours, these men were worn ragged—physically, emotionally, spiritually. During this interminable period, Crane and his companions entered a state of consciousness that I can only describe as deadly focused. The men are so threatened at each moment that they have no choice but to ignore some details of their situation, in order to attend to the necessity of their survival. Crane manages the impressive feat of conveying this through his writing style, using prose that is similarly stark, severe, and detached.

Moreover, many critics have interpreted the story as an allegory for life: We are all lost at sea, adrift on a wimpy lifeboat, tossed here and there by the merciless forces of nature, never knowing at any moment whether we will live or die. 

The crisis of The Open Boat reveals a crucial aspect of human nature. Even if we’ve never actually been stranded at sea, we’ve all experienced this deadly focus at different times, and it’s caused us to miss the sublime beauty all around us. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Hopefully, in reading and studying Crane’s story, we can learn this lesson without undergoing the same nightmare.

Paying Attention

The story commences by highlighting this motif of deadly focus. Notably, David Foster Wallace called them the "most beautiful opening lines in Western Lit."

“None of them knew the colour of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colours of the sea.”

From the beginning, we see the world through the eyes of the sailors. But note how blunt the description is. Yes, there is some beautiful imagery here—Crane vividly depicts the motion, color, and texture of the waves. But there is something more profound about the lines: the strong contrast between what is noticed and what isn’t. The crewmen know the color of the sea, but not of the sky. Why? Because they don’t have that luxury.

Their situation is dire. Their lives are at stake. Every passing wave threatens to swamp the boat and murder them. They know, in a distant way, that the sky is gorgeous. But that is not important right now and that is not what they must attend to. 

“Viewed from a balcony, the whole thing would doubtlessly have been weirdly picturesque. But the men in the boat had no time to see it, and if they had had leisure there were other things to occupy their minds.”

To me, this is the crux of the story: the intense focus on certain aspects of the situation while remaining oddly detached from others. As humans, we simply don’t have the mental capacity to concentrate on everything at once. The question, then, is what do we pay attention to? How do we focus our limited awareness? What really matters?

Although the stakes are generally lower for us, we face this same problem every day. Sadly, we often act like these sailors—we are so preoccupied with the tasks of surviving that we fail to truly appreciate the beauty that is all around us.

“As the boat bounced from the top of each wave, the wind tore through the hair of the hatless men, and as the craft plopped her stern down again the spray slashed past them. The crest of each of these waves was a hill, from the top of which the men surveyed, for a moment, a broad tumultuous expanse, shining and wind-riven. It was probably splendid. It was probably glorious, this play of the free sea, wild with lights of emerald and white and amber.”

It’s all too familiar, isn’t it? Yes, the sunrise and sunset are there every day, and they are probably glorious, but who has the time to watch them? There are jobs to do, bills to pay, family to care for, a home to clean. When all that’s done, we have our shows to watch, books to read, hobbies to pursue. Our lives are a storm, an endless battery of waves, and though we are amidst breathtaking scenery, we never notice. 

Crane continues to have these detached reflections throughout the story. This passage, for example:

“The January water was icy, and he reflected immediately that it was colder than he had expected to find it off the coast of Florida. This appeared to his dazed mind as a fact important enough to be noted at the time. The coldness of the water was sad; it was tragic. This fact was somehow so mixed and confused with his opinion of his own situation that it seemed almost a proper reason for tears. The water was cold.”

The narrator is so occupied and so exhausted that he can’t even keep up with his thoughts. They merely pass through his mind like the clouds above him pass through the sky—they are there, and then they are gone.

But notice the depiction of the water, so straightforward, yet so powerful. When I read that passage, I feel like I’m there in the boat, shivering as the freezing water splashes against my face and soaks my clothes. 

If I were the writer recounting such an experience, I could wax poetic about every sensation. I could tell you that the water was “glacial” or that the spray was “insufferable.” 

But notice what Crane actually says about it. Just this: "the water was icy.. the water was cold." So direct, so bare, and yet all the more impactful. The narrator doesn’t have the mental bandwidth to give any more than this stark description. And what more is needed, really? Bleary from fatigue in a life and death situation, what does it matter? The water is cold. Nothing else needs to be said.

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But this example stands above all the rest in my mind:

“In the meantime the oiler and the correspondent rowed. And also they rowed. They sat together in the same seat, and each rowed an oar. Then the oiler took both oars; then the correspondent took both oars; then the oiler; then the correspondent. They rowed and they rowed.”

That brief passage communicates an eternity of agony. Every infinitesimal moment is pure misery, an endless string of unendurable impressions: the shock of the initial shipwreck, the exhaustion of paddling for days without reprieve, the excruciating hunger of starvation, and the total destruction of their backs.

“The correspondent wondered ingenuously how in the name of all that was sane could there be people who thought it amusing to row a boat. It was not an amusement; it was a diabolical punishment, and even a genius of mental aberrations could never conclude that it was anything but a horror to the muscles and a crime against the back.”

Every time I see people rowing in a lake, I recall that passage. Rowing for leisure is fun; rowing for survival is excruciating. It's funny how something enjoyable can become so dreadful in a different context. Running for exercise is fun; running for your life is terrifying.

Nevertheless, in both scenarios, the same sensation occurs to us: a deadly focus. We notice some things, and ignore others. 

What We Miss

As they are tossed about by the ocean for 30 hours, the emotions of the men change drastically. Optimism turns to doubt. Frustration turns to exhaustion. Celebration turns to outrage.

And right before the end, they are hit with the strongest blow of all. As they approach land, they begin to wonder why no one notices them, why no one is coming to save them. They feel terribly alone. 

“This [lighthouse] was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants. It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual—nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise.

But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent.”

In the last three days, the sea has become their most hated enemy. It represents all the forces of nature and of order and of God. How can it be so hostile to them? How can it be so unfair? What did they do to deserve this?

But the truth is even more depressing than that. Near the end, when they are completely depleted, they face this last appalling revelation: it’s not that the sea hates them; it simply doesn’t care.

Do we not also feel this way sometimes? Lost at sea, alienated from the world, forsaken by nature, and forgotten by God. That is hell on earth.

And yet...despite all that, there is something redeemable in the experience of The Open Boat:

“It would be difficult to describe the subtle brotherhood of men that was here established on the seas. No one said that it was so. No one mentioned it. But it dwelt in the boat, and each man felt it warm him. They were a captain, an oiler, a cook, and a correspondent, and they were friends, friends in a more curiously iron-bound degree than may be common…

There was this comradeship that the correspondent, for instance, who had been taught to be cynical of men, knew even at the time was the best experience of his life. But no one said that it was so. No one mentioned it.”

No one would ever want to undergo the sufferings of those unfortunate men on that terrible sea. Nevertheless, something amazing happened to them. And we can learn from their experience without having to repeat it.

The story of The Open Boat is fraught with constant dread and uncertainty. Their deadly focus on the waves keeps the crew alive, but it also distracts them from the magnificent glory of the scenery and, most regrettably, from the wonderful camaraderie that emerges during their shared battle against the elements. 

Yes, we sometimes feel alienated from God and the world. But we cannot forget that, in the end, we always have each other.

Finally, as the men approach the beach, they are faced with yet another calamity—the waves are crashing hard upon the coast. It’s too dangerous to land, and yet, the men are down to their last reserves and cannot hold out any longer. They must attempt it.

Just a mile from shore, the ship is overturned and the castaways are forced to swim to safety. Through it all, they survive. One by one, with feet firmly on the ground, they embrace. But suddenly the notice that someone is missing…And then they lay eyes on him. 

The oiler, Billie by name. Floating, face down. 

He didn't make it.

Conclusion

For Crane, this was not just an interesting story; it was a permanent memory. And his ability to convey such an ineffable experience is a testament to his talent: after so much time together, they way these sailors bonded, what they felt for each other, and then the crushing realization that not all of them made it. It’s impossible to express. Yet Crane comes remarkably close.

Sadly, despite surviving this tragedy, Crane died from tuberculosis only a few years later, at age 28. But in his short life, he was recognized as one of the greatest American authors. And his legacy lives on in his writing, most notably The Open Boat, which H.G. Wells said was "beyond all question, the crown of all [Crane's] work."

The story is a powerful one. And despite its unique subject matter, deeply relatable.

It depicts the sensation of deadly focus with a remarkable clarity. For the final departing crew of the SS Commodore, that mindset was a necessity. But too often we find ourselves slipping into the same attitude, though on dry land.

Every day the sun rises and the sun sets. It is “probably splendid…probably glorious,” but who has time to appreciate it? How can we afford to glance up at the sky when all our problems are directly before us?

Those problems are not as dire as waves crashing into an open boat. But they often feel just as serious. And like the sea, they can feel relentless—crashing against us at every turn.

In the face of these endless problems, it’s easy to feel like we have to focus on them. And at our lowest points, we can even feel forsaken—by nature and by God. But the truth is, even when everything seems hopeless and bleak, we still have each other. And that is a miracle.

Deadly focus kept Crane alive that day, because breaking focus for a moment spelled certain death. But for us, it’s the opposite. Deadly focus isn’t keeping us alive—it’s keeping us from truly appreciating the beauty of the world and the people around us. It’s a way of dying even while living. 

“I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary…” –Henry David Thoreau

But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can look up and know the color of the sky, even for a moment. We can reach out to the people around us, talk to them, laugh with them, cry with them, be with them. And thank God for that.

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If you want to read The Open Boat, it is available for free in the public domain here.

I was startled from my sleep by an unnameable noise emanating from beyond my bedroom door. The sound was so nauseating that I didn’t want to believe it was real… no earthly thing could make that sickening slithering sound. I wanted to believe it was a nightmare, but it couldn’t be— I had just been jolted out of another dream.  

Just when I had convinced myself it was a figment of my imagination, I heard it again. Terror seized me and strangled the air out of my lungs. I couldn’t move a muscle. Something was definitely out there. 

I felt possessed by fear. Then, one by one, a succession of hallucinated horrors paraded in my mind. Was it some wretched demon lurking outside my door? Some abominable alien? Maybe something even worse, something more monstrous, inconceivable, mind-shattering, gut-wrenching…

That’s when I blacked out. I don't recall anything else. I just woke up the next morning. 

Maybe I was dreaming after all, but it felt too real. There was a visceral quality to the experience that I couldn’t shake. Something was there, I was sure of that. What it was exactly, I may never know. Yet it stayed with me. All those imagined monsters returned night after night, playing out an endless horror show every time I closed my eyes.  Disgusting serpentine silhouettes oozing venom between their scales, grotesque composites of man and beast, infernal satanic minions hemorrhaging viscous purple bile from their hideous maws, amorphous alien fiends with unnatural appendages and abhorrent eyes— all of them paid me a unwelcome visit when I returned to my bed.. 

It is impossible to forget the nameless horror I experienced. Though time may have softened its edges, even decades later, whenever I think of that night my skin crawls, my stomach tightens, and my palms sweat.

Reflection

What exactly was I afraid of? And what was the basis for all these imagined monstrosities? Surely I didn’t create them… And yet despite their bizarre appearance, completely disconnected from reality, they had some connection with real concepts, with familiar monsters. How else would I be able to describe them to you?

I had to find answers to these questions. My experience was so vivid and arresting that I knew there must be a deeper truth underneath it. To confront my terrors and unravel this mystery, I had to go back. Far back— beyond my childhood and into the realms of history, mythology, and religion. I had to understand the origins of my monsters. I had to extract their essences, and distill their dreadfulness. 

What I found is that while the monsters that crept through my mind were personalized, they are also universal. Across cultures and throughout centuries, several central themes recur, even, strangely, among societies that could not have communicated with each other. 

In every part of the world and at every point in history, you’ll find several familiar categories. Aliens, demons, ghosts, zombies, trolls, orcs, werewolves, and vampires haunt our imagination. 

But why? What do they all have in common? What makes them so terrifying? And why do we keep telling stories about them?

Dust-Eater

The oldest and most ancient enemy of humanity is the serpent. In the Garden of Eden, the devil himself took on the form of a snake to deceive our ancestors and forever cast them out of paradise.1 According to the Bible, that was our first and greatest mistake, and the source of all our troubles since. Our world is broken and full of suffering, discord, anger, and evil— all because of a fiendish serpent.

However, the snake is not confined to the Judeo-Christian tradition. If it were, we could dismiss it as nothing more than a fanciful metaphor. But the snake has slithered into the origin myths of several far-flung cultures. 

In Norse mythology, there’s Jörmungandr, a colossal sea serpent so large that he encircles the earth, ever seeking to consume himself. He is a force of chaos, symbolizing the merciless brutality of nature and the endless cycle of life and death.

Egyptian mythology has tales of Apep, a massive snakelike drake that dwells in the underworld and is obsessed with destroying Ra, the god of sunlight. He represents the night, darkness, danger, death, murder, deceit, and destruction.

Tiamat is the primordial serpent of Mesopotamian mythology, the fullest incarnation of chaos from a time beyond memory, whom the god Marduk splits in two to form the heavens and the earth.

In Mesoamerican mythology, Quetzalcoatl is a feathered, flying snake— half bird, half reptile. As such, he represents the merging of the sky and the ground, of spirit and of matter, ordaining both the creation and destruction of all things.

The serpent has been with us from the very dawn of creation. But why this monster? Why does it have such a grip on our imaginations? 

Art for the Apocalypse by Fauna Flow Art

I believe it has to do with memories so old they are no longer accessible, now even coded into the DNA of our species. You see, animals were a constant threat to prehistoric man, particularly carnivores like lions, tigers, bears, wolves, and crocodiles. And although they were ferocious and fatal to encounter, at least they were large enough to be spotted from a distance, making them easier to avoid or attack.

Yet a snake is quite weak and easy to kill— if you can detect it first. If you don't, it's already too late for you. One quick bite and its venom is coursing through your bloodstream, leaving you paralyzed and helpless. Even if their fangs didn’t drip with paralytic venom, the threat was enough to leave you frozen in fear. 

A snake doesn't follow the traditional rules of combat. Guerilla warfare is all it knows. Silent, sneaky, and merciless, a snake strikes when you least expect it, whether you’re walking down a trail, resting by a river, or sleeping soundly in your soft bed. Like a terrorist, the threat of its attack is a more powerful weapon than the attack itself. 

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Snakes also move in an unnerving and unnatural way. The Bible mocks them for having no legs, but those missing limbs work to their advantage. They can slither, climb, and writhe— and make us writhe in discomfort at the very sight of their movement. We call someone a snake when they act shady, shifty, or artificial, and that’s no coincidence.  We do it in literature, as well. Uriah Heep in David Copperfield, Snape in Harry Potter, The White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia, Amy Dunne in Gone Girl, Iago in Othello2 — all characters compared to snakes.

Anthropologist Lynne Isbell suggests that snakes are such a prevalent symbol of death because, for millions of years, they were the only important predators of primates. We even have specialized neural systems for detecting them.3 To be sure, lions, tigers, and bears are formidable creatures. They could kill us with relative ease if they chose to do so. Instead, they preferred to attack animals like deer, cows, pigs, and fish, because primates aren’t worth the trouble. They’re smart enough to work in packs and mount a coordinated defense. But strategy doesn’t work on serpents. Not even a walled fortress will prevent a snake from invading.4 

That’s certainly part of the answer, though I think it’s an incomplete one. There’s more going on here. It’s not just about the things we fear, but about the role fear itself plays in our psychology. 

Why would God allow a snake to infiltrate utopia and seduce humanity? Because no amount of order and structure can ever protect us from danger and shelter us from the unknown. We’re not static beings. It’s in our nature to learn, to grow, to adapt. But we can’t do that from the comfort of a walled garden: we need chaos and uncertainty in order to change. 5

Think about it this way— no snake, no story. Without that mischievous serpent, humanity would have lived endlessly in the bliss of the garden. Nothing exciting would ever happen, no choices would be made, no willpower exerted, no creativity exercised, no fears conquered, no faith tested. 

Conclusion

Whether my childhood visitor was real or not, I can’t say; but the fear I experienced was as real as anything in this life. That fear was nameless, though certainly not meaningless. We are quick to dismiss the night terrors of children as mere fancy, and to disregard mythical monsters as mere fantasy, yet if my study of the snake has taught me anything, it’s that there is something much deeper going on in our obsession with monsters. There’s a reason why we keep telling the same stories over thousands of generations, and why we keep inventing new ones.

The snake is the oldest monster of mankind, but not the only. There are many more to explore, many more to understand: ghouls and goblins, skeletons and succubi, aliens, banshees, dragons, and demons. In my journey into the dusky catacombs and dark dens where these nightmarish creatures reside, I found an unexpected truth about our consciousness.

But I’ll save that story for another night…

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” — Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

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Footnotes:

That's the kind of movie the Safdie brothers are known for. If you've seen their more recent film, Uncut Gems (2021), then you know what I'm talking about. Their whole style could basically be described as 'stress distilled.' As if you could buy it as an over-the-counter medication, and take it as needed.

If you haven't seen Good Time, I highly recommend you watch it, and then come back to this essay. I'm going to spoil a lot of the film in order to make the arguments in this essay.

Without saying too much, it's basically about a heist gone wrong, and how a small-time criminal (who is too clever for his own good) continually attempts to pull things back together, but in doing so, he commits more and more egregious crimes, causing more and more chaos as his spree runs rampant.

What I want to talk about is how Good Time explores four different themes, taking each of them to the end of the line, through opposites of opposites.1 In doing so, it elevates the story, taking it from something simply compelling and transforming it into a work of art, worthy of our contemplation and discussion.

Last chance: SPOILERS below!

1. Popular vs. Pariah

The opening shot shows us the focus of the film, Nick Nikas (Benny Safdie), the brother of our protagonist Connie Nikas (Robert Pattison). Even though Nick is absent for much of the movie, he is the motivation for all of Connie's actions.

It's unclear exactly what disability Nick has, but he appears to have cognitive, auditory, and social deficits. In other words, he's retarded. And our reticence as a society to call this disability by its original name is the same mistake that Connie makes— his refusal to recognize that Nick is not like him, not like other people, and that he needs special care. He is not just deficient, but disabled. And this misunderstanding causes him to lead Nick into dangerous situations that cause him further trauma.

Although Nick is mentally feeble, he is physically imposing. Yet he is also incredibly shy. Unwilling to open up, and unable to explain his own feelings. The dissimilarity between these two qualities is shocking. It's hard to understand exactly who Nick is, and how he operates, and where he belongs. He's an outlier.

In contrast WHAM here comes Connie, breaking down the door, yelling, already offended even though he doesn't even know what's going on, self-certain, pulling his brother out of this "dangerous" psycho-babble-brainwashing.

The contrast between these two characters creates an interesting tension for the story, and it’s one of the four major themes that infuses the film with flavor.

Connie is a smooth criminal (for the most part), quick-witted, bold, and charismatic. He's good- looking. Most people fall under his spell and do what he wants. He is able to convince Nick to commit a felony crime, his girlfriend (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to lend him money despite her mother's resistances, a police officer to leave his post, a bus driver to give him a free ride, an elderly woman to let him stay in her home, a teenage girl (Taliah Webster) to sleep with him and then to steal her grandmother's car, a criminal (Buddy Duress) to lead him back to a hidden stash of drugs, and a dealer to come over to buy it.

Connie is popular. Or so he thinks. At the very least, he's good with people. And it's clear that it bothers him that his brother Nick doesn't fit in. But Connie obviously doesn't understand his brother's deficits. He thinks he's just a little "different." What he fears is that Nick will become the opposite of popular— a pariah. An outcast, someone bullied and taken advantage of by others. So he tries to protect Nick.

Most of us fall somewhere in between. We were neither the most popular kids in school, nor were we the biggest dorks. The truth is that both Connie and Nick are also somewhere in the middle ground. Connie is not as popular or persuasive as he would like to think, nor is Nick as repellent and unpopular as he fears. What's best for Nick is for him to find his own path, probably through group therapy in a school/home for people with similar disabilities.

The problem is that by seeing the world through this dichotomy of popular versus pariah, Connie's actions are extreme, out of proportion, and he ends up becoming the opposite of the opposite— he is a manipulator, a cancer to society. He uses his popularity and influence not for good but for evil, and along the way hurts several people, especially his brother, whom he cares for the most.

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2. Selfishness vs. Service

Connie legitimately believes he is doing the right thing. What's interesting about Good Time is how seductively it pulls us into Connie's thinking too. We are rooting for him, despite all the horrible shit he's doing. He's a bad dude. But we don't really see this, not until the end of the movie when we begin to realize that it's not going to work out.

Connie is deluded the entire film. thinking that he is serving Nick and others. Connie "rescues" Nick in the opening scene, thinking that he doesn't need therapy. Then he compels Nick to join him on the heist, thinking that it will be good for both of them, that it will be a bonding experience ("you did great in there!"), and that the money will provide them with everything they need to have a comfortable life (maybe even to "fix" Nick's problems). This seems like love, but it is not.

Then when Nick is imprisoned, he thinks he is trying to help by bailing him out. Which is actually the best thing for him, as we clearly see when he gets beat up. However, the way Connie goes about it, by manipulating his girlfriend (into manipulating her mom) is very selfish. He doesn't care about the impact it will have on her, or her relationship with her mom.

So then, he has to break Nick out of the hospital. Once again, it seems like a good idea. But what Nick really needs is medical treatment, to stay in the hospital. And maybe even by the time he is healed, the staff of the jail will realize that he is not fit for general population imprisonment. And moreover, they will realize that he doesn't belong in jail at all, that actually he needs therapy, since he was coerced into committing the crime.

Nevertheless, when this plot fails, and Connie discovers that he accidentally rescued Jay instead, he continues to manipulate other people into helping him— all with the "selfless" motive of getting back to Nick. But as we see how each of these people are harmed through him, we learn the bitter truth about his motives. While most of us are neither purely selfish nor purely selfless (we are a mix of both), Connie is once again the opposite of the opposite— selfishness perceived as service.

If Connie had truly been willing to serve others, he would have turned himself in— and served his time. That would have set Nick free, and it would have prevented all the other damages that he did during his spree. Instead, his selfish motives carried him further and deeper into pandemonium, only hurting Nick more in the long run.

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3. Chaos vs. Control

But he is oblivious to his journey down the rabbit hole. Perhaps this is because failure is so uncharacteristic of him. You see, Connie is extremely clever and tends to operate effectively, despite his tendency to get enraged. For example, when we first meet him, he is already yelling and upset. Nevertheless, he gets what he wants, without much of a fight. He takes Nick out of therapy and brings him under his wing.

When they begin their heist, everything goes well. They get in, get out, and get away with it... but then all hell breaks loose. Connie escapes; Nick gets locked up.

Ok, a misstep, but not unsolvable. Connie thinks he can right the situation, and regain control. All he has to do is pay the bail. But then, he realizes he doesn't have enough money. So he adapts, and makes a new plan.

At each point in the journey, Connie makes a move that seems like it will work, and as long as it goes according to plan, everything will be fine. But, in fact, each of his choices only makes things worse, creating more chaos, which will require even more aggressive action in order to regain control.

• If only he can convince his girlfriend to get the money

  • But it doesn't and she gets into a fight with her mom

• If only he can rescue Nick from the hospital

  • But it's not Nick, it's Jay

• If only he can make a phone call to his girlfriend to pick them up

  • But she doesn't answer

• If only he can seduce Crystal, she won't see the news

  • But Jay wakes up and causes a ruckus

• If only he can get the LSD from the carnival

  • But the security guard (Barkhad Abdi) stops them

• If only he can sell the LSD, he can pay the bond

  • But the cops are onto him

These are just a few of the major turning points in the story, but there are dozens of more incidents. At each point, Connie is trying to regain control, but his actions backfire, only causing more chaos. Again, another opposite of the opposite: this is chaos perceived as control. No matter what he tries to do, it's too late; things have gotten out of hand.

It's like someone driving a car on an icy road who has started to drift, but now he's oversteering in the other direction, and he's drifting even more, so he steers back in the original direction, and so on... All he needs to do is stop. Surrender. Admit that he's lost control. But instead, he ends up radically steering in every which way, ultimately ending in a crash, with a lot of other people hurt in the accident.

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4. Crime vs. victim

And all of those people are victims, though Connie is unable to see this. Typically, we establish crimes because there is a victim who needs to be protected or who deserves restitution, but Robin Hood exemplifies the idea of a victimless crime: the rich don't really need the extra money; they won't even miss it. While the poor who receive this stolen money are in desperate need.

So likewise Connie believes his actions are victimless, and therefore he's not guilty of any crime. The heist is a perfect example of this mentality— the bank won't miss it; they're insured. And the teller won't lose her job either.

And you can see this mentality throughout the rest of the film: Connie also believes that stealing his brother from the hospital is fine (he's not guilty), so is riding in the wheelchair van (it's already taking people), so is using the lady's home as a place to stay (she's offering her empty room), so is manipulating Crystal (she wants him), so is assaulting and drugging the security guard (he'll be fine), and using his apartment, and selling the LSD that was lost, and on and on. He has a justification for each of these actions. And with is ultimate goal of recovering Nick, how can any of these actions be crimes?

The opposite of law-abiding is law-breaking, and Connie believes he is somewhere in between, with the concept of the victimless crime— as long he gets away with it, no one gets hurt. But the irony is that he has now reached the fourth opposite of the opposite— hurting everyone in his path, in deep and irreparable ways, including and especially, Nick. And, of course, he doesn’t get away with it.

Nick is further traumatized from the whole spree— his encounter with the dye bomb, his incarceration, his assault in prison, and his stint in the hospital, not to mention all the lost time when he should have been in therapy. And Jordan is once more distrusted by her mom. The wheelchair van is taken out of service because it's now a crime scene. Crystal is raped (legally speaking), and arrested. The security guard is drugged and taken to the hospital. And finally, Jay dies.

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Conclusion

At first, when I saw the ending of Good Time, I was disappointed, because I thought it would have been more appropriate or just if Connie was the one who died from a fall, rather than Jay. Or at the very least, we should see him end up in jail. Instead, we only see him in custody in the back of the police cruiser. This, to me, seemed inadequate punishment for his reckless behavior.

But, of course, the film can't settle for anything predictable, it has to go to the end of the line, just as we have seen with each of the four themes above. Each of these adds a layer of complexity to the film that makes it all the more satisfying. It's not just a thrill ride that ends in a disaster, but a story that explores the unexpected consequences of our best intentions.

So with that in mind, the ending is actually perfect. It's implied from Connie's insane, unblinking stare into the camera that he is beginning to reckon with the full significance of his actions, realizing that he will not get away with it, and things cannot return to the way they were.

Regardless of his final punishment— whether life in prison or the death penalty— perhaps the best penalty for his crimes against humanity is being forced to live with the recognition of all the harm he has caused, through the perversion of all these values. He helped no one, not even himself, and only caused pain, most of all to the one whom he loved, his justification for everything.

It was all wrong.

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He didn't notice us at first. When we finally got his attention, he talked to the wall, then to his phone, and then to the hallway, looking over our shoulders. He explained that he was being hunted by the FBI. That they had bugged his phone and his room, and were following him whenever he went outside. Of course, when we disagreed with him, or tried to point out the unlikelihood of that, it only made him more paranoid, convinced that we too were in league with the FBI, all of us conspiring against him. Sometimes his speech decayed into an incoherent succession of disordered statements, what we call word salad. One moment he is speaking to us asking for our help because he is "having a heart attack," the next he is talking on his phone (clearly there is no one at the other end) reporting that we are trying to kill him, the next explaining a complex web of cryptic connections between various government agencies.

We later learned that he was afflicted with schizophrenia— literally "split soul", the Greek roots σχίζω ("schizo") meaning to split or divide, and φρήν ("fren") loosely translated as mind, but more accurately denoting the seat of both wits and emotions, the gestating place of hungers and fears and hopes and desires, located for them in the stomach of all places, not in the head where we do. At baseline, reality was an M.C. Escher painting for him, maddeningly difficult to navigate. Ordinarily, his psychological condition was somewhat under control, especially with the help of his prescribed medications, to be taken thrice daily, and a controlled environment, and a closely regulated schedule filled with both individual and group therapy sessions.

But everything went haywire when he opted to get high on methamphetamine, a drug discovered in 1896, chemical formula C₁₀H₁₅N — a sympathomimetic, activating the body's natural fight-or-flight system, which for him exacerbated his underlying mental health condition, sending him into overdrive, his worst nightmares and secret suspicions turned into grotesque chimeras which he perceived as visual and auditory hallucinations, every bit as real to him as us who were actually in the room— when smoked it has an onset of about 18 minutes, and a half-life of 10 hours, meaning that for him, the current state of psychosis would continue to be a problem for an agonizingly long time, not only putting him at risk of hurting himself, but also endangering the other tenants of the halfway house in which he was staying.

So we had to intervene.

And so, ironically, though we had absolutely no intention of harming him, and our deepest desire was to take him to a safe place (the hospital) where he could gradually return to sanity (relatively speaking) and get the treatment he needed, yet still his worst fears came to life in the most excruciating manner, when we and four firefighters had to physically coerce him onto our cot and inject him with a sedative. I'll never forget his horrific screams as he howled into the night, begging to be set free, pleading for mercy, convinced that we were covert envoys of the federal government, sent to assassinate him in cold blood.

On the streets of Denver, Colorado, where I work, meth is the most commonly abused chemical substance, supplanted only recently by Fentanyl, an opiate derivative, which is closely related to the more commonly known Morphine (itself a word that comes from the Greek Μορφευς "Morpheus", the god of dreams), chemical formula C₂₂H₂₈N₂O, with a mechanism of action almost exactly the opposite, suppressing the central nervous system, producing lethargy, stupor, and — most attractively — euphoria. They say it is like the sweet feeling of a well-earned rest after a month's long hard physical labor, sitting back with your best friends around a table full of your favorite foods, kicking back with a few ice-cold beers (or your drink of choice), full of laughter and merriment, surrounded by loved ones, both friends and also your own personal lover, who will soon take you to bed where you can rest your weary head in a bliss of exhaustion. Take that moment, encapsulated, chemically distilled, and magnified a thousand-fold, available for $1 a pill, accessible within 5 minutes and lasting much longer, with a half-life of roughly 5 hours. Who wouldn't try it?

I have seen a woman who had the excellent idea to take both of these drugs simulatenously, meth and fentanyl, an upper and a downer, which they call reds and blues, a practice commonly called "speedballing;" an experience like when some people combine cocaine and hard liquor, but in this case obviously much more potent. At one moment she was totally unarousable, oblivious to all the world, drooling from her mouth in the most syrupy of sleeps, a dream so deep that she forgot to breathe, until I had to wake her up by pinching her nailbeds (a very sensitive spot— try it on yourself), the next moment she awoke in a furor, angry, vindictive, combative, ready to fight you tooth and nail (literally) for her god-given right to peace and quiet, which would totally be true, except that in this case she was not herself and had lost those rights, else without our intervention she would have fallen asleep forever. And as if to prove this point, after about 30 seconds of frenzied fighting, she promptly crashed and fell back to sleep, and stopped breathing. So we woke her up again. And it was back and forth like this with her, all the way to the hospital, until we could help her safely get sober.

Segue

But I am not telling these stories to talk about drugs; instead I want to talk about something much more powerful, though subtler. I want to suggest a different type of experience, one in which you are unwittingly already engaged. Because while the substances mentioned above are enticing, just by the mere fact of the overpowering influence they can have on a human mind and body, there are also obvious downsides to them, including addiction, which is not uncommon, and which tends to lead to the loss of everything you hold dear, your job and your family and your health and your hygiene and your will, and finally, your life.

The human body is a tremendously complex machine, driven by a multi-industrial complex of several tightly interwoven organ systems— cardiovascular, nervous, endocrine, digestive, skeletal, muscular, reproductive, renal, integumentary, and so on— each of them activated and deactivated by electro-chemical signals, a myriad of hormones and neurons and muscles and chemical interactions of elemental potassium and sodium and calcium and oxygen, instructions encoded by strings of twin helix genomic sequences that are millions of characters long, formed on a pattern that is billions of years old, shared by trillions of different species.

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All of this is staggeringly beautiful. And there are medicines and drugs with intricate constructions which can interact with the body in baroque patterns, but also just slight variations in the levels of carbon-dioxide in the blood can cause cataclysmic reactions, and any of these can interact with bodily systems in ways that are both euphoric and tyrannical, exhilarating and showstopping, that can accelerate the body with the velocity of a rocket-ship, or decelerate it with the crashing force of the same rocket hitting the earth's crust at terminal velocity. Some of these drugs are even released internally during key moments— sex being one of the most recognizable— but also near-death experiences, or the bonding of mother and baby immediately after childbirth, or the adrenaline dump of fighting for your life— whether chased by a predator or in the ring of a fight— or running a competitive race, or competing in a championship-stakes tournament, or acting the lead part of your favorite play to a sold-out crowd, or approaching someone you deeply admire, or deeply desire, or deeply despise, or strenuously climbing a mountain and reaching the peak, to be rewarded with an unprecedented vista of the earth that stuns you, an landscape carved by the flow of wind and rain and river over hundreds of thousands of years.

Coda

But still there is something else, something more rapturous, more engrossing, more all-consuming, at least for me. For none of these things compare with how it feels to read the written word. Not just any word, in fact not most of them, but a few, a very rare few, at the right place and at the right time, are all it takes to massacre your mind, to send you reeling, to fly you to the moon. If you're still reading at this point, you know what I'm talking about. Not everyone appreciates it, most are oblivious to it, and I don't know how it starts or if it ever leaves you, but I do know this— that I have it, that I've felt it with more certainty that anything else I've ever known; that words are beautiful, indescribably beautiful, and they rock me harder than any punch I've ever taken, they take me higher than any cliff I've ever climbed, they immolate my mind, they make my day, they make me cry.

And it's not just the written word, though that's often how it starts, the spoken word too, especially the lyric, attached to a song, that stirs our hearts. They are merely poems attached to melodies, but at the end of the day, it's still just words. And so are speeches and arguments and whispers and gossip.

Words have the power to inspire revolutions, to ignite people fight for freedom, to struggle for equality, to destroy despotism. Words can kindle love between two strangers, or can burn a marriage to cinders. Words can encourage children to achieve the impossible, or doom them to a life of hopelessness and learned helplessness. Words in a contract or a statute can doom an enterprise, or a prisoner, or set them free, or start them off on a second chance. Words can bring a wave of nostalgia that suffocates us in itswhirlpool, or they can instill a vision that guides a life through all sorts of storms. Yes, words are a drug for the spirit, invigorating not just the body and the brain, but something more sublime, their activation time is instant, their half-life is immeasurable, their effect is incalculable.

It's why I read, but more than that, it's why I write, even when it seems recklessly futile, indulgent and wasteful, unnecessarily stressful and taxing and difficult. Because there are words written on the page which are more valuable than gold, than platinum, than diamonds or rubies or any combination thereof, words are wealthier that uncountable riches. Something basic and primal about mere words, the stuff of cavemen and of babies, yet also something ungraspable, intangible, ever elusive and incomprehensible, something no one can ever master. A voice crying in the wilderness, saying "hear me", and desperately trying to communicate, even though recoding the mind's impressions into words and grammar and syntax and then back is an impossible task, but still we do it, however imperfectly, because our hearts are incessantly begging to express themselves.

Let me be hijacked by words. Not any drug do I need, neither stimulants nor sedatives, nor psychedelics, tonics, elixirs, potions, or pills, no none of those will do for me. My panacea is prose, my medication the music of language, my vice the incising bite of well-articulated argument or a transcendent story, this is intoxicating enough in itself, it is invigorating and animating and tranquilizing and mesmerizing, all at once, I need nothing else to set me free from reality, nor do I wish to escape it, but rather to explore it more deeply through stories sharing of the experiences of others, and to tell some of my own.

And let me be a part of that one interminable tale, every written word from all time, the entire compendium of characters and letters and the words they form, since Babylon til now, and further on into the future, into space, beyond time, beyond our galaxy, beyond our consciousness. Let my words join that ever-flowing stream, seeking to make its mark, to leave a legacy behind, carved into stone, and written upon hearts, and when finally we are all gone, still something remains, the engravings of the mind of mankind in the wonder of our words.

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Picture this man, Travis Bickle, 30s male, the protagonist of Taxi Driver (1976). Imagine yourself as him— what it would feel like to have his job, to live his life, to wake up in the afternoon, and go to bed at dawn, an endless cycle of bleak hopelessness. Enter into the mind of this man, and feel the darkness overtaking him.

He says,

May 10th. Thank God for the rain which has helped wash away the garbage and trash off the sidewalks.

I'm workin' long hours now, six in the afternoon to six in the morning. Sometimes even eight in the morning, six days a week. Sometimes seven days a week. It's a long hustle but it keeps me real busy. I can take in three, three fifty a week. Sometimes even more when I do it off the meter.

All the animals come out at night - whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.

Over the course of the film, Travis progresses from anxiety to depression to despondency, transitions from a productive member of society to a miserable imitation of the same miscreants he despises and execrates, descends from optimism and idealism into insanity and villainy. In his attempt to become a hero, to save the city, he becomes a monster, a predator of women and a murderer of unsuspecting innocents. At the end of the story, Travis is celebrated as that hero, but only briefly, only accidentally, and then he returns inevitably to his prison, his boat on the river Styx— the taxi cab.

Opposites of opposites

The world is not black and white. And it is also not just shades of grey. There are colors beyond the boundaries of our comprehension, further than our ability to describe, distal to the edge of our imagination. And this is where things get interesting— at the limits of humanity.

To approach these extremes, we have to grope and stumble through a hall of mirrors. We can't just look the opposite of any value, we have to look further— what is the opposite of the opposite? There are not just two sides of every coin coin, but dozens of different dimensions, and entire universe unto itself.

And the mark of a truly great story is the journey through this labyrinth, swinging from good to bad to better to worse, and beyond, until we reach the limit of humanity. The protagonist who goes to this distance may or may not succeed, in his attempt to overcome this final challenge, but it doesn't matter. The point is that his road has led him here, and his ultimate choice must result from a confrontation with this unavoidable problem, a choice which requires everything of him, and after which lies an irreversible change.

Travis Bickle takes this journey, which is what makes his story so engrossing. He begins as a productive member of society. A veteran, a hard-worker, providing a service that others need. He may be low-status, but at least he's doing something. And he stands in contrast to his opposite: the criminals and lowlifes who he transports, those who detract from the city and its people, whose only products are danger and destruction.

Travis is stuck in a dilemma, because he cannot quit his job, despite its poor conditions, and the evil that he abets, or else he will end up unemployed, a grey area in between the two opposites. An unemployed man is neither productive nor detractive to society, but we can guess which of the two he might be more likely to become next.

So instead, Travis resolves to be more than just productive, but instigative. He doesn't just want to follow the tide of society, but to redirect it. He recognizes a problem, and wants to do something about it. He wants to become a hero, that "real rain [that] will come and wash all this scum off the streets."

But though well-intentioned, Travis is misguided. He doesn't fully understand how the world works, how people interact, and what's possible. His motivations are also tainted with some selfish ambition. He doesn't just want to fix the city, but to be rewarded for it, ideally with affections of the girl he fantasizes about, and with adulation from the other citizens. And so in his apotheosis, in his attempt to rise about the muck in which he slogs, he becomes something even worse, something monstrous— he becomes a parasite, an abuser of women, a stalker, a creep, a killer. He becomes far worse than the mere criminals and prostitutes that he hates so much. But how did he get here? Only because he wanted to reach so high into something so good could he have had the potential energy to fall so low.

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Ultimately, Travis fails to overcome his final challenge, and succumbs to the opposite of the opposite, be becoming worse than a criminal. But what makes Taxi Driver compelling is simply this: the journey through each of these turns, from good to bad to better to worst, and finally reaching the limits of humanity, to a dark and dejected end that none of us will ever experience, thank God.

Not all stories need to go to this kind of morose end, but great stories at least take us through that universe within the hall of mirrors, through opposites of opposites of its key value, until we reach the end of our imagination. What follows are a few more examples of films that do just that.

Alien

In Alien (1979), we have a monster that is the textbook definition of terrifying. But why? It is not merely its outward appearance (reminiscent of a gruesome insectile mutant), nor the fact that all of its natural qualities seem perfectly designed to kill humans (its exoskeleton is nearly impenetrable, and if somehow severed, its blood is so caustic that it melts through steel), nor its ability to lurk and hide and evade detection while mercilessly hunting the crew down one by one— none of these things in themselves are the source of the Alien's dreadfulness— what makes the Alien truly horrifying is what it represents...

At the start of the film, we see humanity thriving. They are at peak fitness, so advanced that they confidently explore the universe, looking for more planets to colonize, more resources to acquire. Each of the crew members is healthy and young and carefree. We see a version of humanity that is inspiring: no longer are we stuck on earth, struggling to survive, as we have throughout history.

A perfect opposite to this value would be a state of sickness, stagnation, and widespread death. A good antagonist would be a virus, a plague, or a famine (such as we see in a film like Interstellar). And so a mere monster seems a meager enemy compared to this... we have stopped fearing predators since prehistoric times, when we conquered the planet. But things are different here. For one, the crew of the Nostromo are isolated, and unskilled in combat, confined to tight quarters.

And more importantly, there's something different about the Alien... it is not simply a source of sickness and decay, but a perversion of these values. The Alien seeks to thrive, just as the humans do, but it does so only at their expense, by infecting them and using them as vessels for its children. This is the opposite of the opposite, health through sickness, flourishing through exploitation, and this is what makes the Xenomorph so revolting. It impregnates humans, sexually violating them, then festering inside of them until (without warning) one of its seeds bursts forth from within a live human, and the cycle begins anew, as a another Alien comes to life. The Alien represents the best instincts of humanity turned upon themselves— let the hunter become the hunted, the apex predator become the prey, the colonizer become the colonized, the great builder become a habitat for another...

The Dark Knight

In the Dark Knight trilogy (2005, 08, 12), we see Batman come to a crisis which costs him everything— his lifelong love, his reputation, and his power to do good— and in his absence the city is thrown into chaos and tyranny. But what causes this crisis? His confrontation with a force an incomprehensible force of evil.

Batman is a paragon of ethics, of the difference between right and wrong. While the police and the courts represent law and order, and the criminals represent disorder and the breaking of the law, Batman operates on a higher plane. His acts as a vigilante, beyond the limits of the law, but he also refuses to kill, even though that is often the just choice. Batman always chooses the ethically right thing to do, regardless of what the law says.

At first, Batman is confronted with criminals of increasing power and wickedness. Initially with Falcone, then with Scarecrow and Ra's al Ghul, and later with other crime bosses such as Lau. Each of these enemies challenges him, but he is able to succeed by drawing on his abilities and relying on his values.

But things fall apart when he meets his nemesis, the Joker, a villain so degenerate and unpredictable that all the other gang bosses fear him. Time and again, Batman fails to defeat the Joker because he cannot understand him. What does the Joker want? He does not believe in right or wrong. He doesn't care about justice or injustice, laws or crimes, wealth or poverty, life or death. He just wants to watch the world burn.

The Joker represents unbridled anarchy, and because there is nothing he wants, there is nothing the Batman can do to reign him in. Even when Batman succeeds in capturing the Joker, there are still more bombs going off in the city, predicaments that will cost Batman everything in order to stop them.

But the final twist of the knife is when we as the viewers realize the truth of what Joker says, that Batman is nothing without the Joker, and the Joker is nothing without the Batman, and that the two need each other. Which is why this particular story never ends, no matter how many renditions are told...

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The Matrix

In The Matrix (1999), when we first meet Neo, as Thomas Anderson, he is bored to death, stuck in a dead-end corporate job, unable to keep up with his duties because they are totally banal and life-sucking. He is not technically a slave, but he is not a free man either, instead he is more like an indentured servant, a laborer who is kept endlessly employed, toiling to improve the capital and quality of life of another, without ever any real hope for his own.

But he soon realizes why he feels so empty— his whole life is a lie, and he and the rest of humanity are unwittingly enslaved to the machines, who use their bodies like batteries. Thus the stakes are not just freedom versus slavery, but worse than that. Humanity is under the spell of a slavery perceived as freedom. While they each chase their individual dreams, the machines harvest their organs and their energy, careless as to the results of their pursuits, which are as empty and meaningless as the world they live in.

But there are other opposites. Neo's primary antagonist is Mr. Smith, a relentless and brutally apathetic AI. Smith is not just a slave owner, nor a even taskmaster, but a bounty hunter, whose sole goal is to recapture those runaway slaves who have had a taste of freedom. Smith is an enslaver of those who are free.

And not only is Neo beset from the outside, but also from within, when he is betrayed by one of his own crew, Cipher, whose taste of freedom was quite bitter, and who wants to return to the comforts of slavery. He makes a deal with devil to sabotage Neo and the rest of the crew, all so he can return the blissful ignorance of slavery, happily deceiving himself into the lie that is the Matrix.

It is only when Neo accepts the truth of his freedom, that he does not belong to the machines nor the Matrix, and accepts this not just intellectually, but bodily, at the level of his soul, with every fiber of his being that he is finally able to overcome the restraints of his captors, the limitations of the Matrix, and the lies of the machines. Neo overcomes death.

And more than that, through the rest of the trilogy, Neo goes on to become the savior of humanity, setting everyone free, all while ending the war with the machines by making peace. The significance of his accomplishments is directly proportional to the magnitude of the forces he has to overcome.

Conclusion

Each of these stories takes us to the limits of humanity by exploring not just the good and bad of a specific value, but their opposites, and their opposites, and so on, until we have reached something entirely new and different, sometimes monstrous, sometimes wonderful, but always incredible. And like Neo, the protagonist of each story is finally faced with an irreversible and unavoidable choice, at the time when they are confronted with their ultimate crisis, and the quality of their choice is meaningful specifically because of the depths and heights to which they have traveled, and the immensity of their final moment.

Can you think of another story that does the same?

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The situation

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

— Dylan Thomas, 1952

At its heart, the story of Interstellar is about the impending death of humanity, and our desperate struggle to survive. The poem above, repeatedly read by Professor Brand (Michael Caine), serves as the summation of this theme.

Set sometime in the near-future, the world of Interstellar is dying, as the earth slowly rots before our eyes. One by one, each of the major staple crops succumb to a virulent disease known as blight. First wheat, then okra, and finally, the only food that remains is corn, and we are told that that too will soon die.

In response, NASA launches one final mission, a desperate attempt to escape the earth and continue human life elsewhere. There are two alternatives to accomplish this: Plan A, to launch a massive satellite from the earth, where humanity could survive in space (sort of like the international space station), and Plan B, to travel through a mysterious wormhole to a distant part of the galaxy and establish a colony on a new planet. Both options are incredibly unlikely to succeed, full of their respective complications, risks, and requisite sacrifices. Thus the characters are left with a fool's choice, and the outlook for humanity is bleak.

As a result, what sets Interstellar apart from most other stories/arguments about love is its stakes. It's not just about a boy and a girl,1 but about the fate of all of humanity, forever.

The argument

At the climax of the story, the protagonist, Coop (Matthew McConaughey) has traveled through the wormhole with his team, and they must choose on which of two possible planets they should attempt to start the new colony. They only have enough resources to go to one. How to decide?

Dr. Brand (Anne Hathaway)2 wants to go to the planet where Dr. Edmunds landed, while Coop wants to go to the planet visited by Dr. Mann (Matt Damon). The data is equally promising for both planets, with only a slight advantage going to Dr. Mann's.

Before they decide, Coop criticizes Dr. Brand, concerned that her secret love for Dr. Edmunds is influencing her preference for his planet. Coop thinks her emotions have clouded her judgment. We would expect her to protest this attack, but surprisingly, Dr. Brand actually leans into this position:

BRAND

Yes. That makes me want to follow my heart. But maybe we’ve spent too long trying to figure all this with theory -

COOPER

You’re a scientist, Brand -

BRAND

I am. So listen to me when I tell you that love isn’t something we invented - it’s observable, powerful. Why shouldn’t it mean something?

COOPER

It means social utility - child rearing, social bonding -

BRAND

We love people who’ve died ... where’s the social utility in that? Maybe it means more - something we can’t understand, yet. Maybe it’s some evidence, some artifact of higher dimensions that we can’t consciously perceive. I’m drawn across the universe to someone I haven’t seen for a decade, who I know is probably dead...

Coop, though he studied engineering in college, is nevertheless merely a pilot on this mission. All the other members are highly technical scientists, including Dr. Brand. So it comes as a shock that he of all people would argue the case of science, especially since we know that he is strongly motivated by love for his family.

But as he fumbles for a logical explanation for love— that it is simply an emotion humans evolved to feel because it predisposes us to be better at raising children and cooperating with others— these sterile and weak rationales fall flat in contrast to Brand's passionate plea. She concludes:

“Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t yet understand it.”

This one line sits at the heart of the entire film, and serves as its core argument.

The antagonist

Unfortunately, the full force of this argument is hard to appreciate, mainly because there is an unspoken assumption underlying it. While it is ostensibly a philosophical argument, its true weight and significance comes from its context, the context of the entire story of Interstellar and the problems therein.

While it appears that the primary antagonist of the film is blight— the disease destroying earth's crops and forcing humanity to flee— the true source of antagonism is actually gravity. Gravity is the mysterious force that has been silently leading Coop, and NASA, on their journey through the galaxy.

First, a gravitational anomaly was responsible for the accident that ruined Coop's career a decade ago, destroying his hopes of fulfilling his life's purpose as a pilot. But it was also what led him to start a family, and what gave him the object of his love— his children.

Years later, gravitational anomalies led Coop to discover NASA's headquarters by inexplicable lines of dust left in in his daughter's room, which spelled out the coordinates of the base. If he had never found NASA, he would not be a part of this mission, or these decisions. Moreover, NASA may not have ever made it this far without his expertise.

Furthermore, gravity is what led to NASA's discovery of the wormhole which serves as their miraculous opportunity to start a new colony in another part of the galaxy, the goal of Plan B.

Gravity is also what caused the disaster on Miller's planet, which was too close to the black hole / wormhole, nearly killing everyone on the mission, and forcing the dilemma above.

And lastly, gravity is the one thing that is preventing Plan A from succeeding, the one thing that has stumped Professor Brand for years from solving his equation, a problem which, left unsolved, will leave everyone on earth stranded, including Coop's family, awaiting an inevitable doom— the only question of whether they will starve or suffocate first.

No, the true antagonist of the film is gravity; it is what catalyzes each of the characters into action, it is what drives the plot along, providing both opportunities and crises, gravity is what forces the characters to make the ultimate choices at each of their respective climaxes.

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But wait a moment, what is gravity?

The science

Recall from high school physics that gravity is simply the attraction between two objects. The greater an object's mass, and the lesser its distance from another object, the stronger is gravitational pull. Denser objects have a higher gravity due to higher ratio of mass-to-radius. We don’t witness this attraction much on earth because there are other forces in play, such as electromagnetic, friction, and subatomic forces which have a stronger effect than gravity.

But in space, these competing forces have less influence, and the objects are larger, which is why we observe gravity having such a powerful effect. This is why the moon orbits the earth, why the earth orbits the sun, why the milky way galaxy revolves around its central star cluster.

Put simply, gravity is an attraction between two objects. And as we watch Interstellar, we learn along with the rest of the characters that gravity is also the one force that is able to affect other things across space and time. This is why, towards the end of the film, Coop is able to send messages to himself and to his daughter, across the galaxy, back in time.

But to return to Dr. Brand's argument: When she says her unforgettable line, if we are aware of this unspoken assumption about gravity, we are hit with a wave of insight. What else is love, but an invisible force of attraction?

She says, "Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space." And within the context of the story, we know that she is also alluding to the fact that gravity is also capable of transcending time and space, that she is saying that perhaps love is gravity, that it is not just an evolutionary quirk or a funny little human feeling but in fact a fundamental force of the universe. Love, like gravity, is simply attraction, and yet despite this simple explanation it has incalculable consequences— both the revolution of planets and the formation of galaxies— and it may in fact be responsible for the existence of reality, of everything we see, and the motivation for everything we do.

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The alternative

Because the other unspoken question, the question that is also tugging at us throughout the film is this— What is it all for? Why do we love? Why do we want to survive? What is the point of human existence?

We see this enigma unfold when Dr. Mann betrays Coop's team, and by extension, all of humanity. This is all the more ironic because everyone speaks of Dr. Mann so highly, saying that he is the smartest, and noblest, and bravest man of all time. It is this reputation that convinces Coop to visit his planet, ignoring Dr. Brand's passionate plea.

But it is revealed that Dr. Mann, despite all his virtues, is ultimately a coward, and he lied about the viability of his planet, all so he could save himself. He explains,

"A trip into the unknown requires improvisation. Machines can’t improvise well because you can’t program a fear of death. The survival instinct is our single greatest source of inspiration…

I tried to do my duty, Cooper, but the day I arrived I could see this place had nothing. I resisted the temptation for years ... but I knew there was a way to get rescued.”

So Dr. Mann finds justification for his treachery (and cowardice) in his survival instinct. He is willing to doom them all so he can live a little longer.

But this raises the question— What's the point of Dr. Mann's survival if the rest of humanity dies out? What does he hope to accomplish?

Survival is indeed a powerful motivator, but ultimately an unsatisfying answer to the question of the meaning of life. If the point of life is to survive, then we will always fail, because survival is impossible. We will always die, sooner or later. We don’t just live so that we can keep on living. This line of reasoning makes no sense; there has to be something else.

Instead, Dr. Brand's argument serves as a much more compelling answer— we live in order to love.

But what is love? It is this inexplicable force: no one can tell you what it is, but you know without ever having to be told. It is invisible, intangible, immeasurable; yet we can perceive its influence on us, as it irresistibly attracts us across space and time, to our friends, our families, our partners, even to people who are dead, or not yet born. Love has inspired the greatest works of art, has stirred the founding of empires (and their destruction), has instigated wars (and armistices), and, if we are honest, has affected each of our individual lives in seemingly more powerful, though subtler ways.

This explains why Coop has such a difficult time deciding to go on the mission in the first place. He knows that if he leaves, he may never see his family again, but if he stays, they will all die. He ends up leaving them, not because he wants to survive and save himself, but because he loves them and is willing to do whatever it takes to bless them, even if it means giving his own life.

And he is asked once again to make the same choice at his climax in the story. Though he initially ignores Dr. Brand's argument for love, at the end of the film, we can tell by his actions that he does indeed believe what she says, as he sacrifices himself by plunging back into the wormhole. It is only by a miracle that he survives, but the point is still clear— love wins.

We may not ever understand exactly how gravity— or love— works. Both still baffle scientists. And philosophers. And also singer-songwriters. And also every single person who has ever lived. But maybe we don't need to comprehend it; maybe that's not important. Maybe all we need to know is that there is something deeper going on here, something bigger than us, something cosmic, something eternal, something we can rely on when all hope is lost, and the way forward seems impossible and unknowable.

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Footnote:

That first meeting was unremarkable. He made eye contact and said hello, almost out of habit, as was his custom whenever he saw a cute girl. To do otherwise would be uncharacteristic, weak. He was done with that sort of shy, diffident, cowardly behavior. Not for many years had he been afraid of women.

Now there was obviously a superficial sort of mutual attraction between them, as there always is between two--well--attractive people. But the word is already insufficient. And though he noticed her, he was not yet floored by her. Not by a long shot; not yet.

She was likewise mostly unimpressed. To her, he was simply another pretty face, probably cocky too, probably vapid on top of that. But her conscious thoughts did not even go that far. She merely considered him a friendly fellow customer of the café; nothing more, nothing less. She didn't waste her time obsessing over every handsome guy that came her way because there were endless droves of them, always lining up to try their shot with her. It was so commonplace as to be exhausting. So she was polite, and promptly moved on with her life, which was much more fascinating to her.

Nothing else is worth mentioning about that meeting.

They both had their own lives to lead, and had full schedules that outright refused to retain their regularity, as we all know how that goes, due to the typical drama and pace of life in this century, especially among young people. And so that first meeting was nearly forgotten.

But then, it happened sporadically, over the next several weeks. At certain times, seemingly at random, they were both in that café again, simultaneously. He usually arrived alone; she, always with friends. To his observation, she either had a huge entourage of friends, or else she seemed to instantly make friends with whomever she sat with. Curiously, she never seemed to sit down with him, and make his acquaintance. Was she intentionally avoiding him? Or was he repulsive in some way that he had never before noticed? Had he done something wrong when they first met? These thoughts troubled him.

Anyways, she was usually so absorbed in the conversation, or the banter, or whatever way you could describe the delightful and lively interaction she always seemed to be having, that she did not really notice (or care to notice) that he was there.

He, on the other hand, though usually quite able at maintain his focus, even in such an environment, was nevertheless frequently distracted by her, and the energy that she exuded in the presence of her friends. As said, the two of them did not often converge at this café on any sort of predictable rhythm, so this diversion was not a serious impediment to his general efficacy. Else it would have stirred him to action much more quickly, either in the advance or the retreat. But so instead, it occurred gradually. To an outside observer, his inaction was intolerably long and painful to watch. But the spell slowly worked its magic, and before long he was irredeemably captivated. And helpless to do anything about it.

At a certain point, after some several weeks of this madness, he was able to put words to it-- the effect that she had upon him. And well, everyone and everything around her. As we have said, she was attractive. But this word is both perfectly apposite and yet also grossly inadequate in describing her. The word has been so overused lately as to become almost meaningless. Much like the word 'awesome'. Or that other word, which we have yet to use, which is what this is all about anyways.

She had an aura. The way he described it to himself was like this-- she was like a black hole. This too was insufficient, and perhaps somewhat inappropriate; the phrase having all sorts of negative connotations, not the least of which was its sole adjective, which implied lightlessness and chaos, and possibly even evil. But in its true sense, the phrase was also deeply accurate, in that it described a baffling metaphysical phenomenon that bent everything-- all matter, all light-- towards itself. She was like that.

Perhaps a better analogy was that it felt as if she sloped the ground towards herself. As if everything in the café was slightly uphill relative to her, and thus you were inclined towards her, drawn to her, and everything moved towards her, automatically, inherently, unconsciously. As if, were you to drop your pen on the ground, it would begin to roll in her direction, at first slowly, and then more rapidly, accelerating away from you. And thus it would obviously be in your best interest to pick it up sooner, rather than later, else you would find that the pen had quickly gotten far enough away from you and close enough to her that you would have to approach her in order to rescue it, and that endeavor of course would put you at risk of having to be near her, now having to actually look her in the eyes, perhaps even say something to her, something foolish and mumbled, probably, which would embarrass you, and she, already in the laughing mode, joking and jesting and generally in a jovial mood with whomever friends she had either brought or just met, and would probably start laughing now at you-- with them-- and that would certainly be the end of any sort of opportunity of any kind of thing, with her, before it ever had a chance. No.

But she was attractive, in that sense.

And all this so silly, so unlike you, because when you first met her, it was nonchalant, it was easy, your confidence brimming as always, no big deal, and now look at you, reduced to a mumbling idiot, in your imagination, but in reality alone, sitting in the corner of the café pretending to work, through truly unable to think straight for a single second. And all this in your head, nothing has ever happened yet in the real world, this whole interaction conceived and created from a distance, and you somehow know this as a fact, her attractiveness, without ever once actually making out any of the specifics of her conversations, or knowing anything about her, but still you instinctively recognize that this is no ordinary girl, no not at all, by the mere way she interacts with the people around her, the way she laughs, and the way she makes others laugh, and seems to be a miniature sun, all light and energy and radiance and warmth. But that contrasts with the earlier analogy. Which only shows that they all fail to truly put into words what she was like.

But more so the risk of approaching her would not just be the embarrassment, also that to approach her would be to put yourself in her orbit, now close to the event horizon and the last vestige of saving yourself from being totally sucked in, that force of irresistible attraction and superdense center of gravity, so close that you might not yourself escape, that you too would be absorbed, and whirled about, and like a centrifuge or a circus ride would have your guts turned inside out and your heart actually exposed and ripped out and splattered if you actually gave a real romance with such a woman a real chance, and then you'd really be screwed, because everything would be all out in the open, and no more hiding, no more holding back.

No, better to stay at a distance. Not to risk something like that, something so dangerous, so precarious, so costly. Better to pick up the pen sooner rather than later.

This line of argument satisfied him, for a little while. A few more repetitions of them both being at café, over the next few weeks, and he was not only less productive than usual, but actually a total wreck whenever she was there, unable to do anything other than fret and worry. He began to feel uneasy. This was so unlike him. He felt like a coward. Not since he was a teenager had he felt so unsure of himself, so paralyzed with fear. Since then, since he had grown up and became a man and began to feel his confidence surge, these kinds of interactions were usually easy for him.

But this one was different. This one might require something from him. Actually, everything. Everything he had, and probably more. And that was the scary part. Showing up and actually giving it all, exposing himself, and then discovering that it wasn't enough. Being rejected. It was fine to be turned down if he didn't care that much. So it was easier to just play it cool, play it like a game. Keep the walls up. But he had already long ago crossed that line; he could no longer play it off; he was obsessed.

But the thing that bothered him the most was that it bothered him. That he couldn't focus anymore on his work. And not just at the café, but sometimes away from the café. And sometimes just at the thought of going to the café, even though many times she wouldn't be there. But still just considering that she might be there started to fill him with an uncomfortable anxiety. He found himself spending more time in the mirror before he went out, a little too much time, fixing his hair or checking his teeth or whatnot. Things which he tried to tell himself were not vain, but only proper in a civilized person in this day and age, just as bathing and dressing. But again this line of argument failed because he knew this was unlike him, to spend so much time on such things. And it wasn't about looking proper, but about impressing her, specifically her. But he knew that that would fail too, because she was not that kind of person to be interested in mere looks.

Eventually, he realized that it had gone too far, that he had to confront himself, that he had to do something. There was obviously no getting around this. He had two choices before him. The first (he was even ashamed to think of it) was to stop going to this particular café. To discontinue his patronage, something he had maintained for years, something which he, to be honest, quite enjoyed. It was convenient, and the atmosphere was conducive to his work, and the coffee was consistently delicious.

The other, he was sickened to think of it, was to do the thing. To actually approach her To take a chance. To say hello. Again. It's funny to think of it, but they had already met. But it seemed like a lifetime ago. Surely she had forgotten him.

And this route, as we have said, would be dangerous. Because none of the outcomes were particularly appealing to him. He could be rejected, he could be mocked and laughed at. Or else something might result from the approach, something real, something raw, and something that would probably require everything from him. And that might destroy him. Or else, fulfill him, which was obviously the only reason anyone would do anything so risky in the first place. But he didn't know if he had it in him. And that was all a very terrifying proposition.

There was really no reasoning through it. Not anymore. It felt like -- kill or be killed. Not really, but it was like that. Do or die. Now or never. So he made the decision.

And ironically, after he finally worked up the courage to actually do the thing, she disappeared. Vanished. Or at least she stopped coming to that café, which was the only place he had ever seen her. So he started going there more and more often, almost every day, hoping to see her, afraid to lose his nerve. It was all so ridiculous, so silly, so childish. And he spent less and less time actually working in the café, more and more time in the mirror before going there, less and less time focusing on his work, and more and more time checking the door. It felt like a wedding, the part where the groom stands expectantly at the front, lets each bridesmaid pass, and saying, implicitly, "not you, not you, not you," until of course, she arrives, finally, and he says, "you." It was like that. But she never appeared.

And then over the weeks he sort of forgot about the whole thing, and his blood pressure returned to normal levels for a healthy adult, and he stopped sweating through his shirts, and he began to sleep better, and he was actually able to read a passage or two at a time, without stopping, in the café. And taste the coffee. And get on with his life.

Until, the day. That it happened. There she was again, inexplicably, like a half-forgotten memory, a nostalgia, painfully sweet. And then the dread suddenly returned, and the heart palpitations were stronger than ever, and even, comically, his hands trembled a little bit as he tried to sip his coffee. Of course she didn't make eye contact, probably didn't notice he was there, or cared, and she sat down at a table on the far side of the room, with what seemed to be friends of some appreciable tenure, rather than brand-new acquaintances, judging by their long hugs and unusual excitement and giddiness to be around each other.

And he, sitting there, jaw slack, trembling like a new tree in the wind, like a six year old who is afraid of the monster in his closet, crying to mommy and daddy, holding his blankey. He had lost his nerve, just like he feared he would. But he knew he couldn't go on like this, not anymore, this was so unlike him and had take so much of his sanity over the last few months that he couldn't bear it a single second longer. Do or die, now or never.

When he was a teenager, he would often play this stupid habit where he would wait as long as possible to make the approach. As if he needed the time to calm his nerves, to relax into the ambience, to put himself at ease. And then, finally, towards the end of the night, he would finally work up the confidence to say something to the girl. Ironically, over half the time, she would already have left by then, or else be engrossed in a conversation with some other suitor, and he would have missed his chance.

He thought about trying that now. Surely she would be there for a while, being with such close friends. Surely he had some time to stop this damn trembling, and the sweat already soaking his armpits might have a chance to dry up, and so on. But he knew that wouldn't work, it never worked, because if he waited it would be too awkward for some reason or another; they would be too deep into the dialogue, or they would suddenly leave right as he walked up, or there would be some other stupid excuse.

No, it was now or never. Fuck it. He pushed back from the table, his chair making that maddeningly grating sound on the tile floor which usually would have been reproachable. In this case, however, he was almost grateful for it, hoping it might catch her attention, so she would turn around and see him draw near. But she was engrossed with her friends. And it would be very awkward to interrupt, especially from behind. But he had no choice. He was already standing up.

Then he started walking towards her, but forgot about the table directly before him, totally lost in thought. He bumped the table, and spilled his coffee, and cursed himself. Still, no one noticed. At least, no one that mattered. Meaning the one. Her. He didn't even notice anyone else in the café. It was as if she and he were the only ones in the entire world, and every other body just furniture. She laughed and tossed back her hair. He caught a glimpse of her face. He was stricken.

And then, he felt the gravity, he felt the sloping of the floor, he felt himself inclined to her, he felt himself irresistibly attracted. There was no turning back. And after what seemed like an unreasonably long time of just standing there at his table, like a jackass, he began moving in that direction. She was still turned away from him, which was the worst, literally the worst. But it was what it was. As he got nearer, he noticed the conversation died down, and her companions looked up at him, and then she began to turn, obviously aware that they were looking at someone behind her, and he was standing right there, right in front of her, and she looked at him, and then...

To be continued

I listen with outstretched ears, probing the limits of my world, and I hear... my jagged breath, the crackling of the fire... and further out... every single sound that emanates from the obsidian shadows, each of which could be either a mere crumpled leaf, or else the footstep of my destroyer, ready to bring devastation . Here I remain: sitting, shivering, staring into the abyss, unable to penetrate the black curtain of death, at the threshold of which even this moment crouches my doom, a hideous face, snarling, licking its lips, saliva dribbling from the corners of its mouth, grinning inwardly, contenting itself with delight at the anticipation of my destruction.

How much longer until dawn? Oh my god... help me.

I am no coward. But I cannot shake this terror. A coward is scared for his own life; I fear failing them all. If I fall asleep, even for the briefest moment, our perimeter might be penetrated, and they— we— would be massacred. I know this to be true; I know it as a fact; I've seen it before...

The scenes replay themselves perpetually in my imagination— pools of blood, thicker than oil, impossible to staunch; limbs twisted in impossible directions, bones visible beyond skin, exposed to the air; the char and ash of burnt flesh, and the smells... the smells are even more tightly tied to my memories... and the sounds… echoes of screams, of women's high pitched shrills, and the peculiar cries of men, sobbing, pleading futilely for a hopeless mercy, great warriors reduced to mumbling idiots, beggars, broken. It is these phantoms that truly torment me. Memories made manifest. Nightmares incarnate. On this night, every crackling twig is a presage of a tidal wave of devastation, a horde of monsters preparing for feast.

But nothing happens.

Moment by moment, these thoughts haunt me, an unending barrage of torments, a ceaseless succession of horrors. They keep me quivering, keep me awake. At this hour of the night, it feels like days have passed since the sun set. I feel an exhaustion that is almost overpowering, a fatigue that has buried itself into my marrow. If I dozed now, I could sleep for a week.

But the fear is good. The fear is the fire that ignites me, it singes my senses, it bubbles in my blood. And caustic though it may be, it keeps me awake. The fear keeps me alive. The fear is my friend. I accept it, let it wash over me, let it enter me. I let the fear fill me.

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I shiver again. In the glint of the moonlight, I can see snow shimmer on the peaks of the distant mountains. The vanguard of the coming winter. A scouting party, just like the men crouching over the hill, lurking beyond the trees, waiting for me to rest my eyes, to drop my head. One enemy follows another. There is no reprieve.

I stand up, pace the edge of the camp, quietly, to avoid waking my people. I raise my spear in defiance of their cowardice. I point the sharpened tip to each one of them, then make a slitting motion across my neck. But there is probably no one there.

Still, the war drums accelerate. I believe I hear more rustling than before. Is that movement? Or is it just the wind? I freeze. I try to stay still, but the trembles reverberate up and down my spine, my legs shake, my teeth chatter. The adrenaline is hitting. The snake tears through my stomach, and I all I feel is a void there. I can't breathe.

I am anticipating it all in this moment... the whistle the spear that will soar towards me, the sprint to close the distance, the tense strafing in circles, the inevitable grapple to the ground, the metallic taste in my lungs as I languish for air, the searing of my muscles. Fighting is grueling, always, every single time, a life or death dance where each second is an eternity, the world loses its level, and everything hurts. Just thinking about these things makes me sweat, in spite of the freezing temperatures.

The breeze picks up again, and it feels frigid to my exposed skin. I have not heard anything in a minute. I have no choice but to return to the fire. Else I will lose my stamina, quivering here, confronting nothing but the distortions of my mind.

This will be a long, cold, dark, and miserable winter. The days are shorter; food is harder to find; fires refuse to kindle; dry wood is in shorter supply. The cold will kill the old. Many will die of starvation, or sickness, even if we never have a war. And that will kill more. Other tribes will feel the same famine, the same shortage, and desperation will bring murder into their minds. Death is inevitable. The question is merely how many.

There is never enough. No place is safe. And it never ends. If we find a place plentiful enough to provide for us, others will want it, and will jealously try to pry it from us, whatever the cost. Nothing will stop them. There will be no mercy. Should we face the same decision, we would make the same choice. Kill or be killed. Take or be taken. This is law.

Father and I argued about it... when was it?... it seems like days ago, but it must have just been this morning. The old man is growing weak. He cannot move so much as he used to. He wants to wait out the winter here. I want to return to our hunting grounds from last season. But I know that both our plans are foolish. Neither choice is right.

But I have to respect his decision. His word goes. To dissent would be to splinter our tribe. There are many who would follow me, but not all. And we cannot spare a single soul, so many will be lost this winter.

To argue is to die. More terrible than all my fears is this— I would rather be strangled, rather starve, rather freeze, rather rot from disease than this— to be rejected by the tribe, to be abandoned. This is certain death. No one can survive alone. Our only hope is each other.

Crack. What was that?! Plunged into these ruminations, I have forgotten to scan the horizon. My pulse quickens again, eyes sharpen, rapidly racing around the edge of the tree line.

But I see nothing. I hear nothing.

I turn back to my camp. Day is near. In the grey light of dawn, I can just distinguish the figures of my family. Each body, large or small, male or female, old or young— each of these is as much a part of me as are my limbs. I would die for them. I tremble still, I am more exhausted than I have ever been in my life, and I have little hope that we will last another year. But my heart is filled with love. These are my people. These are my family. These are my reason. I don’t need another.

I will keep watch another night next week, and another after that, and so on, deep into the winter. And if I’m lucky, the winter after that. It never gets easier. The fear will grip me again, hold me in its sway throughout the nights, which only grow longer and darker and colder. But I'll do it. I’ll let the fear fill me, because there is a terror more terrible than any of the demons that prowl at our perimeter, the infinite phantasms that fill my imagination, whether man or monster, animal or adversary... it is the fear of dying alone.

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Atwood wants to transcend time. But can you imagine the difficulty of the task— how do you create a work of art that will be relevant 100 years from today? We don’t even know what tomorrow will hold. Put yourself back just ten years ago to 2014, when her novel was finished— back then did you have any idea what 2024 would look like?

So then, trying to forecast ten times that amount, to 100 years in the future, seems absurd. Will humans still be around in the 22nd century? If so, will we still read books? Will anyone speak English, or will we all just speak Mandarin Chinese? Or, what if people just simply forget to retrieve Atwood's book from the time capsule?

Legacy

I’d like to do something like that. I’d like to create something that lasts 100 years. Most people have that desire too— that’s why we start families. We hope that our children will grow and flourish, and they will have children, and they will have children, and so on. Maybe our families will grow so large that they will become clans, or even dynasties.

Perhaps we aren’t that rash our ambitions. But our ancestors were: Genghis Khan, Abraham, the Medicis, the Caesars, the Wei and Ming dynasties... And if not in families, others throughout history have sought to leave their legacy by founding cities, discovering continents, setting world records, and constructing cathedrals, coliseums, skyscrapers...

But how can I build something that will last a century when I everything I do is ephemeral— a Greek word which means "for the day only." Here today, gone tomorrow. All my creations seem to evaporate like morning dew.

I want to impress you. I want to write something that would catch your attention, make you drop what you’re doing, ignore any potential interruptions. I want to grab you by the shoulders and shake you. To reach down and touch your heart. I'd like to teach you something you'll never forget. To make you feel something you've never felt before. I want to do all these things because I've experienced them myself—from reading the golden words of other writers.

But it seems insurmountable. I don't even know how to start. Call it writer's block. I’ve been staring at a blank page for days now. Dozens of false starts, aborted drafts, dumb ideas. The fact that this essay even exists is itself a miracle.

I have so many things I want to say, so many ideas that I'd love to tell you, about all the books I’ve read, or movies I’ve seen, or things that happened to me, and what I’ve learned recently. And if you and me could just sit down and chat, I could talk to you for hours and hours. But none of that is publishable. Not yet. It's too amorphous, too unformed, too discursive, unedited, insufficient at this time. I tell myself I need to study the topics more. I need to wrestle with the ideas and prove them out. Otherwise I'd just be wasting your time. And mine.

So what can I do? How can I write something that stands for ten decades when I have only been alive for three? I know so little about the world and the people in it. And the more I know, the more I realize how much I don't know. And when I try to communicate what I do know, it all sounds limp and obvious and boring.

And when I compare myself to my heroes, my inspiration, the portraits on my wall, when I look into the unblinking eyes of the writers who first moved me to write—

• David Foster Wallace, who published his first novel at 22, then went on to write his masterpiece at age 31 (the age I am today), a book that shocked the world and sold over a million copies

• Alain de Botton, who has written over a dozen bestsellers, and even founded a school, which holds sessions around the globe

• Rene Descartes, who before he turned 40 catalyzed the discipline of Philosophy which had laid dormant for almost a thousand years

• Henry David Thoreau, whose experiment in the woods in his 20s is now taught in almost every school in America

• John Milton, whose Paradise Lost took over 40 years to write, during the last 20 of which he was blind

— when I compare myself to these, and others, all my efforts seem pitiful and vain. How can I ever hope to approach something so lofty? Am I just recklessly unrealistic? Am I a fool?

Long gone

But then again, this is a fruitless perspective anyways. In 100 years, it won't matter if my words remain, because I will be dead. At the end of the day, who cares?

A common piece of advice given to young people is to imagine yourself attending your own funeral, listening to all the eulogies. What would you want your parents to say, your brothers, your colleagues, your rivals?

This is an interesting thought experiment, but on the other hand, it is also totally useless. I won't be at my own funeral; I won't have to listen to other people talk about me; I won't care. So why should it matter to me whether people read my writing after I’m long gone?

Perhaps it all stems from the innate desire to live forever. To escape death. To transcend time. My body may decay and rot, but my ideas, my personality, and my passion may survive and live on, in the hearts and minds of those I touch. Is that not a form of eternal life?

"But do civilizations die? Again, not quite. Greek civilization is not really dead; only its frame is gone and its habitat has changed and spread; it survives in the memory of the race, and in such abundance that no one life, however full and long, could absorb it all. Homer has more readers now than in his own day and land. The Greek poets and philosophers are in every library and college... This selective survival of creative minds is the most real and beneficent of immortalities." - Will Durant

I think this theory may explain the motivation to leave a legacy, but it still doesn't justify it. If I were to live my life each day with the dedication and fervor necessary to build something that lasts that long, I just might be able to do it. Maybe. But I would probably hate my life the whole time. And it would be a bad bargain, because I would have wasted my life in the process. My one life. That seems inverted. Not just a road of good intentions that leads to hell, but a road which itself has become hell.

Love

Consider if we parented that way: if our focus was on creating dynasties rather than loving our children. Yes, we could scheme, and plan, and create ornate routines to best bring out their capabilities, we could manipulate them, force tutors and coaches upon them, arrange marriages for them... but we've seen how that turns out. All the political intrigue in history— take for example all the families in Europe and the constant violence and diplomatic marriages and concubines and bastards and patricide and fratricide and war and... We would be missing the forest for the trees.

No, the only way to start a family that lasts is to love each child with all our heart and soul, with all our ability. To love them as individuals, not as some brick in a building, just part of a bigger plan. The focus cannot be the legacy, at least not directly. We can keep that goal in mind, but there must be something else along the way.

And let's not forget that all of those authors I idolize—they each had their own issues, which were not insignificant:

• Wallace struggled with depression his whole life, and committed suicide at 46

• de Botton is probably the loneliest and saddest writer I've ever read— part of what gives his writing so much feeling, but also what makes him unenviable

• Descartes died from pneumonia at 53 from the whims of a petulant Swedish queen

• Thoreau, for all his bragging about his meager diet and stoic lifestyle, died from bronchitis at 44 from spending too much time in the rain

• Milton was denounced and harassed by the state, his first wife left him, his second wife died after two years of marriage, and, as said, he was blind for the last 20 years of his life

• And the list goes on. Dickens had OCD, King was a drug addict and alcoholic, so was Hemingway (who also killed himself)

In that light, maybe it's not worth it at all. The whole transcending time thing. At least, if I do it for the wrong reasons— if I want to impress, if I want to be rich, or famous, or celebrated, if I want to seem smart, or clever, or wise.

Conclusion

No, creation has to be for the love of the thing only. It has to be about ecstasy, not legacy. It's the same with parenting as it is with writing, or any kind of endeavor. It has to be real.

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It's just like kindness. People intuitively know when you are using them for something, or whether you genuinely care. Whether you are listening, or just waiting for your chance to speak. And I think people can tell too— when you write, or create, or build—whether it's contrived or authentic. Whether you are doing it to show off, or you are trying to really communicate something, to express yourself.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were instinctively, to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. - George Orwell

The only way to build something worthwhile is to enjoy the building of it. To care so much about the process that the end product doesn't matter. To become the fastest at the 100 meter dash, you have to run a million miles. You'll never get there if you just want to cross the finish line in first place in some faraway fantasy.

And it has to start with the first few steps. Baby steps. Each essay always feels like complete garbage at the start. Every idea feels like a dumb one (Most are). But eventually, after getting it on the page, after working on it for a while, it gradually starts to turn into something. And it gets better and better each time. It's not easier; no, it's never more comfortable; just better.

When I look back at my essays from six months ago, I cringe. At the time when I published them, I thought they were marvelous. Now I see how terrible they are. And that's encouraging, because it means I'm getting better. I'm seeing more clearly. But I never could have gotten here if I had never published in the first place. If I had never put myself through the agony of creation.

For me, writing has to be about love, not about legacy. One is controllable, the other is not. And if I make it all about success and hate the process, I might never get there, and then it will all feel like a waste. And it will be. But it doesn't have to be that way.

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Rain, Rain by Grip Grand

Rain, rain, go away

Come again another day

Rain, rain, go away, go away

I heard you been singin' "Rain, rain, go away"

Wishin' you could make the pain, pain go away

You need a little more time like Morris Day

And your life was the bomb, now you're blown away

And you can't make a dime on a dollar disc

Goin' dumb so you can't get a scholarship

When you're young, it's all good, life ahead of you

'Til you started thinkin' "Man, I would like a better view

A house with a wetter pool..."

But as it turns out, you were burnt out by the game

So your life is ice cold (which is never cool)

And the old wind blows, and the snow and the rain

Make it hard to see the sunlight ahead of you

And you admitted to yourself that your self didn't do a good job

That's the end of the interview

You want to make a mark at the start

At the end, you just hope they remember you

And you grieve, and you grow

And you hope, and you pray

And you see that tomorrow is not like today

Did you bleed when you broke?

Now you're breaking away

'Cuz you see that tomorrow

Became yesterday

Yesterday

I heard you been singin' "Rain, rain, go away"

Wishin' you could make the pain, pain go away

Maybe you been wastin' time like Otis say

Don't it make you wanna shout like Otis Day?

In the Animal House or the lion's den

Where they're swingin' those bows like a violin

They look tired like they're close to retirement

Peer pressure, man, everyone's tryin' it

I hear pressure can even make diamonds

Out of coal -- hold up, lemme find some then

Because I feel like I'm carryin' the world's weight

Sick of herbs treatin' me like I'm third rate

I tried to make a good impression like a first date

For some reason, that was one thing I could never do

You don't get a second chance, man

You gotta make a mark from the start

At the end you just hope they remember you...

And, without exaggeration, this is my greatest fear in life. Mr. Squishy is not particularly exciting or beautifully written or fun to read, but there are parts of it that are gripping, and the story sticks with me, perhaps even haunts me, because it captures the feeling off futility like nothing else I've ever read or seen or heard.

Futility is a Latin word, and it literally means "leaking." Perhaps the best image to convey its meaning is a leaky pot. Think back to Roman times when the word was first used— all they had were pots made of clay. A leaky clay pot cannot be fixed, or patched, or sealed. What is a leaky pot good for? You can't use it to store water. You can't use it to cook, as it will douse the fire you put it over. You can't use it to preserve any food, as bugs and rats will be able to steal from it. A leaky pot is good for nothing. No matter how much you try to fill it up, it will always spill its contents. It will forever amount to nothing of any value.

The Story

But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, let me tell you what Mr. Squishy is about.

It's 1995. A group of men have been assembled in a nameless conference room on the nineteenth floor of a nondescript office building, as part of a focus group on a new product.

Mister Squishy is the name of the confectionery company that's sponsoring the whole thing. They make super sweet snacks loaded with preservatives and sell them in gas stations and in checkout lanes at grocery stores. Think Hostess Twinkies. The new product is called:

"Felonies!®—a risky and multivalent trade name meant both to connote and to parody the modern health-conscious consumer’s sense of vice/indulgence/transgression/sin vis à vis the consumption of a high-calorie corporate snack....

Felonies! were all-chocolate, filling and icing and cake as well, and in fact all-real-or-fondant-chocolate instead of the usual hydrogenated cocoa and high-F corn syrup, Felonies! conceived thus less as a variant on rivals’ Zingers, Ding Dongs, Ho Hos, and Choco-Diles than as a radical upscaling and re-visioning of same."

Mister Squishy has hired a marketing company, Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Advertising (RSB), to help them design their new product and its associated marketing campaign. RSB has in turn hired another firm, Team Delta Y, to help them conduct research for the project, specifically, to conduct focus groups and collect data on consumer's reactions to the proposed product. Their processes are incredibly intricate, almost to the point of being obtuse—requiring the coordination of multiple departments within the firm, and complex statistical calculations, and high-powered computers on which to run them—all in order to determine whether Felonies! will be a hit or not, so they can decide whether to pull the trigger on manufacturing and distribution and advertising and so on.

This particular focus group is led by Terry Schmidt, 34 years old, overweight, pale, and socially awkward, "with a helmetish haircut and a smile that always looked pained no matter how real the cheer." He lives alone, and in his free time watches satellite TV, collects rare coins, and "power-walks on a treadmill in a line of eighteen identical treadmills on the mezzanine-level CardioDeck of a Bally Total Fitness." Moreover, Schmidt is obsessed with his coworker Darlene Lilly, who is married, who thinks of him as only a friend, and who is completely oblivious to his interests. Schmidt has never had the guts to tell her how he really feels, though he fantasizes about her every night.

There's a lot more going on in the story, but the saddest part, and the realest, at least to me, is the part about Schmidt's life. And not just his life, but the entire enterprise that he belongs to is in fact a multi-level construct where each layer is more futile than the last.

Layers

Fundamentally the gap in Schmidt's life is the difference between his reach and his grasp. All Schmidt wants to do is "make a difference in the world." It's all he ever wanted to do. When he first graduated from college and started his career in statistics, he was filled with ambition, something he thought made him special, but:

"In Terry Schmidt’s case a certain amount of introspection and psychotherapy ... had enabled him to understand that his professional fantasies were not in the main all that unique, that a large percentage of bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior...and that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact of their unique and central presence in it."

But he hasn't given up all hope yet, he still clings to the aspiration. So he worked his way from job to job until finally landing at Team Delta Y, where he's now been for eight years. And today he's leading this focus group with the same energy he had from the beginning, the same idealism and vivacity, although perhaps a bit flagging, since this is just one of thousands of nearly identical presentations. But he can't give up now, not when he might be so close to finally getting that promotion, and then at long last to actually have a say in the corporate direction of Team Delta Y. And his dreams are still greater, as he also fantasizes that one day he'll be able to start his own research firm, and he has complex daydreams about making bold pitches to rich executives that will change the course of their companies, and maybe even make marketing history like the stories he studied in school.

But this meeting is a little different, because a realization is dawning on Schmidt, despite his attempts to suppress it. And as he gives his little spiel to the 14 members of the focus group, though he appears to be engaged and upbeat and not-at-all-rehearsed, he has in fact done this so many times that he can do it on autopilot, and simultaneously his mind is churning in the background, fretting over this terrifying epiphany, which seems to be both imminent and unavoidable.

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Because, if he's truly honest with himself, despite his huge ambitions and his best attempts to achieve them, across the last decade or so the signs have not been very promising. Not at all. People who are less qualified than him are getting promoted before him. He's not progressing any more. It's still the same old thing for him at Team Delta Y, and he's getting older. Sometimes he has waking nightmares that he will do "precisely the same series of things in preparation for the exact same job he had been doing now for eight years."

The realization of his futility is beginning to take hold of him, and he can't shake it. But it's not just about doing the same job for years and never getting the promotion. There are more layers to unpeel.

First, the focus group itself is pointless. All the men who have been brought here today have their "faces arranged in the mildly sullen expressions of consumers who have never once questioned their entitlement to satisfaction or meaning [and they] had never been hungry a day in their lives." They don't care about this product, they only care about themselves. And in fact they are beginning to grow frustrated at being kept in the meeting for so long and having to listen to Schmidt ramble on and on about the new product. No one wants to be here.

And Schmidt also knows deep down that he will never get promoted, because he doesn't fit in. He's too nerdy and socially awkward. What he doesn't know, but probably understands intuitively, is that everyone talks about him behind his back, saying things like he's "a ’70s yearbook photo come to life." And people "whom Terry’d worked with for years have trouble recalling his name." He's got no chance at the promotion.

And even if he did get promoted:

"even if the almost vanishingly unlikely were to happen...the only substantive difference would be that he would receive a larger share of Team Delta Y’s after-tax profits and so would be able to afford a nicer and better-appointed condominium to masturbate himself to sleep in and more of the props and surface pretenses of someone truly important but really he wouldn’t be important, he would make no more substantive difference in the larger scheme of things than he did now."

Moreover, as Schmidt himself admits, "the Focus Groups made little difference in the long run—the only true test was real sales." These complex and intricate processes are merely there to collect data that Team Delta Y can shape and reshape at will, in order to provide the results that RSB and Mister Squishy want in the first place—results that confirm that Felonies! will be a success. They are too far invested in the product already; it's too late to change. They just want numbers to prove their decision ex-post-facto. And this isn't the only case of this kind of pointless arrangement between the three companies, Team Delta Y has been doing this for years with many of its other customers. And so Schmidt knows that his company as a whole is sham.

What's worse is that with the coming internet revolution (this is 1995, remember), Team Delta Y is already planning to focus on the much more accurate and easier-to-obtain data available from online advertising and click-thrus and cookies. And focus group facilitators like Schmidt will be laid off in droves because it just doesn't make sense, not anymore, to bring a bunch a people into a room and subject them to monologues and surveys and group discussions for an entire day.

And to take it another layer higher, the whole premise of marketing (at least in this industry) is pointless anyways. Because all of these (very American) consumers have never ever questioned their entitlement to pleasure, and in all honestly have absolutely no brand loyalty whatsoever; it's really just about what's available at hand (literally) and what strikes the fancy in the moment. And the market is run by fads and trends anyways, and it's nearly impossible to predict what will work or not, and even if it does work, whether it will stay popular for very long. So even a well-designed product (like Felonies!) and a powerful marketing campaign may make no impact on consumers in the grand scheme.

Schmidt thinks to himself:

"no no all that ever changed [in marketing] were the jargon and mechanisms and gilt rococo with which everyone in the whole huge blind grinding mechanism conspired to convince each other that they could figure out how to give the paying customer what they could prove he could be persuaded to believe he wanted, without anybody once ever saying stop a second or pointing out the absurdity of calling what they were doing collecting information or ever even saying aloud..."

Perhaps marketing serves a genuine purpose in a situation and an industry where people desperately need access to some good or service, but are unfortunately ignorant of the solution, and will suffer greatly unless someone tells them about it. But in the vast majority of cases—of convincing people that they must have something that they currently don't even know that they want, and that if they get it, it will be the secret to their success and happiness and, yes, even true love—is marketing really a positive good to society? And when does peddling chocolates become not only unhelpful, but positively detrimental, even insidious? Promising succulent sweetness and a brief reprieve and a well-earned reward, but giving only a foreshortened and one-dimensional high, followed by the need for more, and still more, then addiction or compulsion, and a declining health, obesity, diabetes, depression, and so on. What really is this meeting about?

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And so the whole thing, from top to bottom, is useless and meaningless and utterly futile. And Schmidt is starting to realize this, right here, right now, in the middle of the meeting, even as he is still in the midst of giving his presentation. It’s becoming clear now that he will never be able to make a difference, neither at his career which he has poured all his effort and ambitions into for over a decade, nor outside of work by getting involved in programs like Big Brothers Big Sisters, which turned out to be a total disaster and a massive waste of time and money, and actually just an embarrassment for Schmidt, nor even in his love live, or lack thereof, because he’ll never have the balls to ask her out, and if he did, she would probably laugh in his face at the absurdity of the proposal.

There just doesn't seem to be any way out. And this situation isn’t new, it’s been the same for a long time now; it’s just the heavy weight of the realization that’s novel. The only thing that does change from year to year is that Schmidt is getting fatter:

"Schmidt was sensitive about the way his weight and body fat percentage increased with each passing year, and imagined that there was something about the way he walked that suggested a plump or prissy fat man’s waddle, when in fact his stride was 100% average and unremarkable and nobody except Terry Schmidt had any opinions about his manner of walking one way or the other. "

And just like the fact that they can't remember his name, no one seems to notice or care about him at all, which is somehow even worse than being offensive or repulsive.

And so, to sum it all up, Schmidt has no one, not anyone that he can admit his

"most ghastly private fears and thoughts of failure and impotence and terrible and thoroughgoing smallness within a grinding professional machine you can’t believe you once had the temerity to think you could help change or make a difference or ever be more than a tiny faceless cog in, the shame of being so hungry to make some sort of real impact on an industry that you’d fantasized over and over about ... and doing a job that untold thousands of other bright young men and women could do at least as well as you, or rather now even better than you because at least the younger among them still believed deep inside that they were made for something larger and more central and relevant than shepherding preoccupied men through an abstracted sham-caucus..."

Conclusion

So that's Mr. Squishy. But this is what haunts me about it—Am I any different than Schmidt? Is my life useful? Is it helpful to anyone? Does it make a difference? Or am I just a leaky pot? And everything I belong to, every layer in the machine, is it also pointless? At the end of it all, in the grand scheme of things, in the final analysis, is my life futile?

Most people are afraid of death. I'm not exactly afraid of death, in fact I like living on the edge, and doing dangerous (perhaps foolish) things. But I'm afraid of a particular kind of death—a premature death. A death that ends a life that was meaningless, before I ever had the chance to actually do anything worthwhile and "make a difference." A death that is the final and angry shattering of a leaky clay pot that was of no use to anyone ever.

Those questions above—no one can answer them other than me. And the only way I can answer them is to get up every day, and live my life to the fullest, and constantly show up, and be present, and to put myself at risk, to be exposed, and to always seek the good, and to hate evil and fight weakness, even the weakness that is in myself, the laziness and the cowardice and selfishness and sometimes even apathy and ennui and hopelessness and weltschmerz. I have to prove to myself every day that it's not all futile. That it matters and that even the smallest action can make a difference, however subtle, however small.

But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.

— 2 Corinthians 4:7-9

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Notes

This poem is inspired by a few different sources:

1. A comment by G.M. Baker on Erik Hoel's essay, in which he stated that language is just a bridge. We each have our thoughts in our heads and feelings in our bodies that are impossible to share with another, until we have language. And even that is just an attempt. But it’s something. Although I also think that there are other forms of communication, including nonverbal, artistic, melodic, and so on. Still, this world is incredibly lonely by default, and unless we can connect with others, we are hopeless.

2. The golden words (which I reference often) are the incredible quotes from various authors that serve as my inspiration for writing, and to be honest, for life itself. Writers like Thoreau, Wallace, Shakespeare, Conrad have written some things that I find to be so true as to be undeniable. It's hard enough to communicate with the people in my life as per point 1, and most of the time I think it’s essentially impossible communicate the most sublime thoughts/feelings/ideas. But these authors seem to be able to do it, and that is wonderful.

3. And what makes their words all the more true is the beauty with which they are written. There is "a fact faced forthright," which can make sense to us and “intrigue the intellect” and then there are the lyrics and poems and lines that stick with you forever and are "sutured into the skeleton." These are the most spectacular bridges of all, because they are not only beautiful to behold, but they also connect me to the experience of these people who I believe know exactly what it's like to be me, to be a human and to go through what I'm going through.

4. Poetry is hard. I don't write it much. I tend to stick with prose, and even within that, I tend towards nonfiction because I've always preferred it to fiction. It's much easier to analyze someone else's work, to build off what they built, or to tear it down and criticize. Fiction is much more elusive and tricky, but because of that, it also tends to be more meaningful. I think stories are perhaps the most persuasive and impactful. I never wanted to write fiction because I thought (and still think) that it's the hardest thing anyone can do. You are basically being task to play the role of God and create something from nothing, to create entire worlds, which are in turn full of individuals who have their own life stories and motivations and emotions. But I have started writing fiction here, and it's been incredibly challenging and rewarding. Am I good at it? By no means. But I’ve learned a ton by doing it and I’ve enjoyed it too. And now I thought it was time to challenge myself again and write some poetry. Am I good at it? At least I tried...

5. Some other poets are also a big inspiration. Shakespeare, obviously (although what's not obvious—something I learned only recently— is that"Shakespeare" was probably not a single person... let that sink in. But I digress). I also love Epic Poetry so Milton, Homer and the other Greeks, Dante, whoever wrote Beowulf, etc. As for more modern poetry, I love the transcendentalists: Whitman, Emerson; even Thoreau dabbled. And even some people I know personally are also really good at poetry, it just comes naturally to them (you know who you are). And that always impresses me.

6. Publishing is still really hard for me. Even now that I do it biweekly. I've written often about how hard it is. But I think having fun with stuff like this is good to keep the tone of The Apocalypse playful and childlike (that sentence seems funny if you were to read it out of context). Otherwise if I take it too seriously, it drains all the joy out of it, and I get self-conscious, and resentful, and depressed, and so on.

Ultimately (I remind myself once again), the goal is to connect with other kindred spirits out there. And so this poem is about that too. The desire to find those (dead or alive) who know what I’m feeling. But also, in order to do that, I have to open my heart and see if it clicks with anyone. Though I imagine it probably won't. But I’ll never know unless I try.

7. Lastly— prosody. The study of rhythm and sound in poetry is called prosody. Even when I write nonfiction, I absolutely love the sound of language. I love a good alliteration and internal rhyme… if you can’t already tell. But prosody can be used in any kind of language—just look at the most compelling orations from history. It's not just the content of their message, but the sound of it. So I wanted to write a poem about prosody.

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In this book I read an account of a distant and inaccessible land, called Erewhon, a place that no one has ever been except the author of the narrative.

According to the author, the people there are peculiar and have many unusual traditions, but one in particular stands out from their history.

At one time, the entire nation was completely convinced by the arguments of a great philosopher, by which he proved that it was morally unacceptable to eat meat. But not only that, he also proved that it was unacceptable to eat vegetables.

His reasoning went like this: since now we recognize that the barbaric habit of eating other humans is inappropriate, we likewise do the same with other animals. Animals are clearly alive and display intelligence, therefore it is wrong to eat them.

Furthermore, for the same reason, it is inappropriate to eat plants of any kind, since they are also alive and display a kind of intelligence. You see, plants have adapted to their environment, and have developed various creative mechanisms to continue to live and reproduce. Therefore they are intelligent. Therefore it is wrong to eat them.

The people of Erewhon were altogether convinced by this impregnable logic, and as a result they universally agreed to abide by these new principles.

The author of the history, seeing as we do the absurdity of this situation, wrote that "young people were told that it was a sin to do what their fathers had done unhurt for centuries." Even though the Erewhonians had eaten both meat and vegetables as long as anyone could remember, they quickly gave up this practice due to the enlightened reasoning of the philosopher.

Unfortunately, they quickly became hungry.

At first, the citizens tried to find loopholes to get around the principles. For example, they agreed that it was OK to eat an animal or a plant that was already dead. Oddly, it was soon found that many of the animals allegedly committed suicide, in numbers previously unheard of.

Still, the Erewhonians were hungry. So another new technicality was developed: it was OK to kill an animal or a plant in self-defense. As you might imagine, there was a proliferation of incidents of unusually aggressive cows and chickens, and even stories of violent corn and tomatoes.

But they were still starving. Finally, at the brink of collapse, the people of Erewhon could take it no longer. They caved on the entire set of principles, realizing that their strict adherence to logic had betrayed them. They needed meat, or at the very least vegetables, in order to survive. Mind over matter could only take them so far—their bodies simply required calories. In hindsight, they regretted that they had been so contemptuous of the customs of their ancestors, and what their bodies instinctively told them was necessary.

As I mentioned before, this was not the only incident of such unusual events in the history of the Erewhonians. I read of many more such mishaps during my perusal of the old book. I believe the author summarized them aptly in this closing quotation:

"The Erewhonians are a meek and long-suffering people, easily led by the nose, and quick to offer up common sense at the shrine of logic, when a philosopher arises among them...

Indeed I can see no hope for the Erewhonians till they have got to understand that reason uncorrected by instinct is as bad as instinct uncorrected by reason."

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How it all came about

Believe it or not, we do the same thing—we consistently fail to properly balance instinct and reason, which causes us to make all kinds of mistakes, both minor and massive.

But first we have to understand the relationship between instinct and reason, and how it all came about:

For most of human history, we relied almost exclusively on instinct and convention. Although the Greek philosophers developed rudimentary systems of reasoning and logic around 400 BC, those methods didn't truly take hold until the scientific revolution of the 1500s.

The rest of the time, whatever our bodies told us to do, and whatever we saw the people around us doing, we followed.

For example, if members of our tribe ate blue berries and not red berries, then it was probably safe for us to do so as well. Mimicry—not creativity—was the key to survival. Only when forced to deviate from the norm, e.g. when all the blue berries were frozen, did we experiment.

And the body automatically reinforced whatever behaviors we saw among others. Grilled meat, as you know, has an extremely appealing smell (unless your body has developed an intolerance for it). Likewise, rotting meat is extremely repulsive to us; and also spoiled milk and human waste and rot, mold, mildew, and most other things that are harmful to us. As they say, "the nose knows."

So the two worked in tandem. Our body instinctively desires sex, but our cultural conventions required that we be married first. Our body desires to greedily feed itself, but our conventions required that we share the food with elders and children first. Our body is terrified during the night and wants to run and hide, but our conventions required that we do the honorable thing and guard our camp.

Where the body was ignorant, convention provided the answer. It was the solution to all kinds of questions: what kind of food to eat, and where to find it, and where to build a home, and how, and who to marry, and when. It also helped us explain the patterns of the weather, and the movements of the stars, and why people get sick, and what happens after they die, and so on.

Some of these answers were incredibly helpful, but others were just plain wrong. For example, we now know that people get sick not because they have an imbalance between their phlegmatic and melancholic humors. And we now know that the earth is not the center of the universe, and that mental illness is not the same as demonic possession.

Nevertheless, reliance on instinct and convention worked pretty well for us, for a very long time.

But it wasn't until we started questioning things that we truly began to flourish. With the advent of the scientific method in the 1500s, all kinds of technical disciplines developed, from agriculture to economics to politics and engineering and psychology. And humanity exploded into productivity.

Good servant, bad master

But like every other aspect of life, too much of a good thing can become a bad thing. Reason can go too far.

The most obvious example of this imbalance is the story of the Erewhonians above, when their logic led them to conclusions that were so out of alignment with their instincts and convention that they were nearly devastated.

But we see it in our culture too. We see it in corrupt politicians and executives and other people in power, who have used rationalizations and justifications to land themselves in morally depraved situations. We see it in unsafe relationships (whether a first date or a marriage), when people have tried to convince themselves that everything is fine although their guts tell them otherwise. We see it in the mass rejection of long-standing traditions and institutions, in favor of the promotion of independence and autonomy for the individual, which has only led to widespread disconnection, confusion, isolation, loneliness, depression, and despair.

All of these instances, and many more, are the result of reason uncorrected by instinct, the exact mistake made by the Erewhonians.

And I am not the only one to comment on this trend. In the past few months, my good friend Taylor Foreman (who is a phenomenal writer), wrote two essays about this very subject.

The Creativity Gap

The Midwit Trap

The “midwit” feedback loop makes a lot of sense: Common sense and intuition are replaced with a more "objective" explanation (which often happens to nicely excuse our character defects). Despite their emotional cost, we buy and consume those explanations in exchange for a little boost in status …

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3 years ago · 26 likes · 19 comments · Taylor Foreman

The Creativity Gap

Trust your cognitive biases

Life can't be conquered, piece by piece. It's more like a dance. “Trying to avoid cognitive biases is not only impossible, it’s a waste of life,” I say to my friend, slapping the cracked formica countertop of our booth, fueled by the cheap coffee always filled to the brim by the elderly waitress…

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3 years ago · 24 likes · 20 comments · Taylor Foreman

But it was the latter of the two that piqued my interest, in which Taylor argued that cognitive biases are bunk, so we ought to ignore reason and trust our instincts. While I agree with his sentiment, especially in light of the issues addressed above, I think it's also unnecessary to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Reason is still useful. Otherwise we risk regression back to those stone age times when thought hysteria was caused by the woman's womb.

So, the question arises: how do we balance instinct and logic, mimicry and creativity, tradition and progress?

Cognitive biases are not the problem, but rather the solution. The key is a proper understanding of how to use them as a mechanism through which we apply logic to our instincts. Allow me to explain.

Classic mix-up

Cognitive biases are the common "irrational" mistakes that humans are prone to make. They have been demonstrated time and again, and are so recurrent that we can predict when they will happen.

In short, these are perfect illustrations of when our instincts fail us. And we used logic to find them and name them.

Some are merely fun, while others are fundamental.

For example, "The Cocktail Party Effect," describes how, in a loud room with lots of people talking, you are more likely to notice when someone says your name, even if you are deeply engaged in another conversation. Somehow, our brains automatically tune out all the other words as "noise," but immediately recognize those precious sounds that signal someone is talking about us.

On the surface, this isn't really that practical, so it's easy to discard as pointless trivia, a simple quirk of human nature. But it becomes interesting once you realize its implications:

1. That we are perceiving from all of our senses all the time, even if we cannot fully register the information in consciousness.

2. That something inside of us determines which information is relevant or not, filtering out most of it, without us even knowing it.

Therefore, "The Cocktail Party Effect" reveals that we are prone to missing important information while mistakenly focusing on what pleases our egos. This has all sorts of implications for how we make decisions.

And here's another one: "The Strawman" describes how, in a debate or discussion, we are more likely to attack the weak link in another's argument, even if it's not really relevant to their main point. For example, in his essay, Taylor focuses on examples of cognitive biases like "The Ebbinghaus Illusion" that are merely fun, and not really practical for our everyday lives. As a result, Taylor concludes that all cognitive biases are pointless. But that's missing the point. That's a Strawman argument.

Moreover, Taylor makes another common mistake: "Confirmation Bias," which describes how we are more likely to seek out and remember information that confirms our existing beliefs, and ignore the information that does not. In analyzing the cognitive biases as a topic, Taylor focuses only on one book, Thinking Fast and Slow, and seems to draw conclusions based on a superficial reading of the book (though he claims to have read it multiple times).

He writes, "The book suggests that because ... your intuition makes all these errors ... it shouldn't be trusted." He also writes, "[The author] laments this in the book: most people can’t overcome biases." Therefore, there’s nothing we can do about it.

But those are not at all the conclusions from the book. The author merely makes the point that our intuitions and instincts can lead us into mistakes. Not that our intuitions should never be trusted, but rather that they should not always be trusted. The distinction is subtle, but important.

In the actual conclusion of the book, the author explains that the solution to avoiding cognitive biases, and in fact that the whole point of the book, is simply to understand them and recognize them by name.1 If you are aware of the Strawman argument, and you notice yourself doing it, that's all it takes to correct it.

After reading Taylor's essay, I tried to think of some examples of cognitive biases that were relevant and practical. I was surprised to find that I was able to list over 40 examples of cognitive biases that I use every single day. Far from being just mere trivia, these principles have drastically transformed my interactions with the world and other people. And most importantly, I believe they are the key to properly balancing logic and instinct.

I'm not going to share all of them here, but I plan to in another essay. For now, I'll just explain the biggest and most important one. If you take nothing else away from this summary of cognitive biases, take this one. It can change your life.

The Biggest Bias

It's called "The Fundamental Attribution Error." It is so named because it is fundamental to our behavior, and in fact "forms the conceptual bedrock for the field of social psychology."2

Here's how it works.

When I am driving, and I make a mistake, it's never my fault. This could be for any number of reasons.

1. I ran a red light-- it's because I'm late! Or that yellow light was too short!

2. I waited too long after the green light-- I have to answer this text, it’s important!

3. I cut someone off -- they wouldn't let me in!

And so on. However, when someone else makes a mistake, it's because they are a terrible person. They are either dumb, or selfish, or just pure evil.

1. They ran a red light-- what a selfish jerk! People like that are dangerous.

2. They waited too long after the green light-- get off your stupid phone!

3. They cut me off-- what an asshole!

Can you relate?

In short, "The Fundamental Attribution Error" is this— when we make an error, we attribute the cause of the error to forces outside our control. When others make an error, we attribute it to a character defect. We fail to give them the same mercy and benefit of the doubt that we give to ourselves.

This doesn't just happen in traffic, but also in more intimate relationships—with our coworkers (peers, bosses, and subordinates), our families, partners, friends, and everyone in between. We are always innocent, and they are always at fault. And what's even more insidious is that we don't even realize we are doing it, because it is instinctual. Can you imagine how poisonous this can be to our relationships?

But all is not lost. Our logic has enabled us to identify and recognize this error in our instincts. Once we identify it is happening, we can correct it.

To combat this bias, whenever we make a mistake, we admit the ways in which we contributed—we are selfish, we are hasty, we are entitled. And whenever others make a mistake, we consider the ways in which outside forces probably had an influence—perhaps they are late, or they are having a terrible day and everything is going wrong, or maybe they just didn't notice what happened. It's ok. Not everyone in this world is evil and stupid. In fact, most are not.

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Conclusion

So finally, what is the solution to balancing reason and instinct?

In fact, Taylor is on the right path, because he writes, "Trusting [your intuitions] is your best bet."

At the end of the day, our instincts are remarkably reliable. They have been honed for hundreds of thousands of years of successful living. And the conventions which lie on top of them are also excellent guides, for they have been honed for thousands of years of civilization and culture. The two work in tandem to correct one another.

Are they perfect all the time? No.

But our cognitive biases reveal the way they consistently fail. When we use our logic in this way to reprove instinct, we get the best outcomes. This is how you “check yourself before you wreck yourself.”

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Logic can also be used in other ways to correct instinct and convention, by developing science-based disciplines that reveal heretofore undiscovered truths. But these new findings are rarely the solution to all of our problems. At best, they are incremental adjustments. And often, logic and reasoning can go too far and lead us astray from our instincts. So we can still use them, but we should use great caution and hesitancy whenever they seem to contradict instinct and convention.

For example, consider two people who are trying to be healthy, John and Sarah. John relies on the science of nutrition, which tells him that the best way to be healthy is to eat a very specific diet in a very specific regimen. This requires a great deal of time and effort and sacrifice, and usually makes John an unpopular dinner guest, so he just prefers to eat all of his meals at home, which he has carefully weighed and measured, scientifically calculating them to provide the optimal nutrients.

Then there’s Sarah, who relies on her family tradition to always eat her meals other people; with her friends and family and coworkers. At every meal, she engages in conversation, shares about her day, listens to the others, and experiences love and laughter and life. Sarah still pays attention to what she eats, but isn’t obsessed about it like John. Her meals aren’t as efficient, but that’s not really the point either.

In the long run, who do you expect would be the healthiest?

What does your instinct tell you?

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