Claude responds to Harvey Lederman’s essay “ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life”

Scott Aaronson has published a guest post at Shtetl-Optimized: ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life, by Harvey Lederman, who is a philosopher at UT Austin. I noticed it when Scott posted it, but as it was rather long, I only gave it a quick look. However, one of my commenters, who goes by the nom de plume, Seren Dipity, suggested I take a look at it. So I did. 

This gives you an flavor for Lederman's lament:

We may be living now in a similar twilight age for human exploration in the realm of ideas. Akshay Venkatesh, whose discoveries earned him the 2018 Fields Medal, mathematics’ highest honor, has written that, the “mechanization of our cognitive processes will alter our understanding of what mathematics is”. Terry Tao, a 2006 Fields Medalist, expects that in just two years AI will be a copilot for working mathematicians. He envisions a future where thousands of theorems are proven all at once by mechanized minds.

Now, I don’t know any more than the next person where our current technology is headed, or how fast. The core of my dread isn’t based on the idea that human redundancy will come in two years rather than twenty, or, for that matter, two hundred. It’s a more abstract dread, if that’s a thing, dread about what it would mean for human values, or anyway my values, if automation “succeeds”: if all mathematics—and, indeed all work—is done by motor, not by human hands and brains.

A world like that wouldn’t be good news for my childhood dreams. Venkatesh and Tao, like Amundsen and Scott, live meaningful lives, lives of purpose. But worthwhile discoveries like theirs are a scarce resource. A territory, once seen, can’t be seen first again. If mechanized minds consume all the empty space on the intellectual map, lives dedicated to discovery won’t be lives that humans can lead. 

I asked Claude to respond. Since I’ve been doing quite a bit of work on my book-in-progress, Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution, I asked it to respond in terms of the argument I’ve been building in that book, which I’ve been working on under the rubric of the Kisangani Project. Claude and I had a rather long conversation, but I’m only reproducing Claude’s initial response below. 

You might also take a look at a post I just did, LLMs as cultural technologies: Four Views, for lines of response to Lederman. 

* * * * *

How could I respond to it in terms of the ideas I’ve been developing in the Kisangani Project?

Based on your Kisangani Project materials, I can see several powerful ways you could respond to Lederman's argument:

Collective vs. Individual Achievement

Where Lederman mourns the loss of individual discovery and worries about "artificial projects" as mere games, your Kisangani vision offers collective creativity as genuinely meaningful work. Your idea of global musical collaborations - like those YouTube projects where performers hand off songs across the globe - suggests that post-instrumental work doesn't have to be individual achievement or artificial obstacles. Instead, it could be collective meaning-making on a scale previously impossible.

Place-Based Culture vs. Abstract "Self-Fashioning"

Lederman's solution of "self-fashioning" feels rather solipsistic compared to your vision of Kisangani as a specific place with deep cultural roots that adapts and innovates. Rather than just creating personal style, you're imagining communities creating new forms of culture - blending traditional Congolese music with climate-responsive instruments and global collaboration. This isn't just personal aesthetic choice; it's cultural evolution.

Real Networks vs. Philosophical Speculation

Most importantly, your approach works from actual existing networks - Zeal's World Island project, Takeshi Utsumi's educational initiatives, Paul Sladkus's Good News Broadcasting, the real musical collaborations happening on YouTube. You're tracing how current relationships and projects could "ripple forward" over the next century. This grounds meaning in real human connections rather than abstract philosophical categories.

Response to Climate Challenge vs. Post-Instrumental Luxury

Lederman's "post-instrumental world" assumes all practical problems are solved. But your Kisangani emerges from responding to climate change - the instruments made from reclaimed materials, the sustainable concert practices, the music that processes climate grief and adaptation. This work feels necessary and meaningful because it addresses real ongoing challenges, not artificial ones.

Against "Cheap Fun"

Your explicit critique of Tyler Cowen's dismissive phrase "cheap fun and cheap education" points toward a key weakness in Lederman's argument. Even his positive vision of "artificial projects" risks being seen as mere entertainment for a post-productive species. Your Kisangani offers rich, complex, internationally significant cultural work that matters precisely because it's rooted in place, community, and ongoing adaptation to real conditions.

Technology as Enhancement vs. Replacement

Finally, while Lederman sees AI as potentially replacing human cultural work entirely, your vision shows technology amplifying human creativity - the climate-responsive instruments, VR concerts connecting global audiences, innovative music education programs. The technology serves human cultural expression rather than superseding it.

Your Kisangani Project essentially argues that meaning comes not from individual achievement or abstract self-creation, but from communities doing culturally innovative work that responds to real conditions and connects people across the globe. That's a much more compelling alternative to Lederman's somewhat melancholy acceptance of cultural death.

Sources of meaning in life are similar across Japan, India, Poland, and the United States

Jill Suttie, 16 Ways People Find Purpose Around the World, Greater Good Magazine, July 9, 2025.

... in a new study, researchers Michael Mask and Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia and their colleagues aimed to get more detail about people’s purposeful pursuits across cultures and to see their effect on “the good life.” Ultimately, they found that our purposes around the world have a lot in common.

In the first part of their study, Mask and his colleagues asked 200 American participants to write about seven things that gave them a sense of purpose in life. Then, they analyzed over 2,000 responses to come up with 16 general categories of purpose that encompassed everyone’s answers:

• Self-improvement: Becoming the best you can be
• Family: Supporting and providing for your family and caretaking
• Relationships: Searching for, finding, or maintaining close relationships
• Religion/spirituality: Living in accordance with and meeting the standards of your religious or spiritual beliefs
• Recognition: Being respected and having high status
• Happiness: Being happy, enjoying life, and feeling good
• Self-sufficiency: Being able to take care of yourself physically and financially, and having the freedom to do as you wish
• Material wealth: Getting rich, owning nice things, and buying whatever you want
• Internal standards: Knowing who you are and what you stand for and living your life according to these principles
• Positive impact: Making the world a better place
• Mattering: Inspiring others and leaving a legacy; making an impact
• Occupational fulfillment: Finding your calling through work; doing your job well and working hard
• Persevering: Handling what life throws at you—not giving up and dealing with the struggles inherent in life
• Physical health: Taking care of your body and being healthy
• Inner peace: Being grateful for what you have and accepting what you can’t change
• Service: Serving your country or community

After testing out these categories with a different group of 100 American participants, their team surveyed over 1,000 people from Japan, India, Poland, and the United States to find out how much these categories reflected their own purpose in life. Specifically, participants reported how much each source of purpose influenced the decisions they made and guided their behavior, as well as how happy, meaningful, and psychologically rich their lives were—all aspects of “the good life.” (Psychological richness involves experiencing diverse, challenging, and interesting activities that evoke complex emotions and change your perspective.)

Analyzing the results, the researchers found that people in each of these unique cultures had very similar sources of purpose and prioritized each category similarly, too. “Happiness,” “self-sufficiency,” and “family” were in the top five for each country, while “religion” and “recognition” were in the bottom five for each country.

Also, there was a lot of agreement on what sources of purpose went along with more meaning, happiness, or psychological richness in life. This finding surprised Heine, who, as a cultural psychologist, is used to seeing more variability among people of different cultures.

“What stands out from our finding is just how much agreement there was within these four quite different countries about what kinds of purposes are associated with a good life,” he says. “They’re not identical, but there is a striking amount of similarity.”

There's more at the link.

UFOs in the archives [& reality?]

Ross Douthat, What if the Government Believes in U.F.O.s More Than You Do? NYTimes, July 24, 2025.

Ross Douthat: From New York Times Opinion, I’m Ross Douthat and this is “Interesting Times.”

There have been a bunch of flying saucer crazes in American history, but the one we’re living through started in 2017, when my newspaper, The New York Times, reported on these weird encounters experienced by U.S. military pilots. Since then, we’ve had congressional hearings, would-be U.F.O. whistle-blowers and we’ve had a brief panic over mysterious objects in the sky over the state of New Jersey.

I’m not persuaded that we’re actually being visited by E.T. However, this era has left me with a lot of weird unanswered questions. For instance, what do all of these government bureaucrats and whistle-blowers actually know — or think they know — about unidentified aerial phenomena? Does at least part of the U.S. government really, really want Americans to believe in U.F.O.s? And if so, why?

To help me search for answers, I asked Diana Walsh Pasulka to join me. She’s a religious studies professor who writes about U.F.O. experiences as a very American kind of religion, but she’s also been pulled into this weird world of apparent government believers — and she’s become something of a believer herself.

Pasulka started looking in the archives to study how Catholics thought about what happens to the soul after death.

Pasulka: So I’ve been studying religion for many years. [...] I didn’t believe in U.F.O.s. I had never seen “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” I wasn’t a person who was interested in that topic. But I was interested in the ways in which people thought of transformation, spiritual transformation, but also transformation that happens on Earth through these narratives of going into another place, an “other world” journey.

Douthat: How did that pull you into studying people who claim to have had a U.F.O.-style encounter?

Pasulka: When I was doing my work for the book about the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, that brought me to a lot of archives. I’d go into the archives — and archives are places where things aren’t digitized — and I started to look into how Catholics viewed how souls ascended into Heaven or Purgatory.

What I found was a lot of documents from 1,000 years ago, 800 or 500 years ago, about recorded sightings of aerial phenomena that Catholics had from Europe.

Douthat: And these are things flying in the air?

Pasulka: Yeah, aerial phenomena. And they interpreted these in different ways.

Here’s a good example: In the 1800s, there’s this young nun and she’s living in a convent. Every night, this ball of light comes through her cell, and she’s pretty upset about this. So she tells the Mother Superior and she says: This is happening.

And the mother superior says: You’re having a bad dream. The nun is pretty certain this is happening — it happens nightly. At one point the Mother Superior says: OK, I’m going to be with you at night to see what’s going on. And they determine that this is a soul from Purgatory that needs to be prayed back into Purgatory. So the whole convent gets together and they go through a process of prayers to kick this orb or this flame of light out of her cell.

I saw these kinds of things, and I started to keep track of them. Sometimes they were interpreted as flying houses. Sometimes they were interpreted as little beings about three feet tall and shiny. I shared this with a couple of friends of mine and I said: What do you all think of this? One of them said: It looks like modern-day reports of U.F.O.s.

That shocked me. I didn’t accept it, to tell you the truth. I thought it was hogwash. I was like, no, it can’t be that.

There was a U.F.O. conference in town called MUFON — the Mutual U.F.O. Network — and I decided to check it out. When I was there, I heard people talking about their experiences encountering U.F.O.s, and it sounded very similar to the log I had of reports of Catholics in Europe talking about this.

So I started to do a lot more intensive work. I met academics who were studying this. Before I knew it, people who were a part of aerospace companies and the military began to want to correspond with me and see the data and the research that I had been doing. That’s what got me into this topic.

Douthat himself:

I read a book around the time that U.F.O.s came back into the news, which would’ve been when my own newspaper, The Times, reported on weird sightings of aerial phenomena by U.S. pilots. I had not watched “The X-Files” in the 1990s, had not been a U.F.O. person in any meaningful sense of the term, but I got sucked into reading a little bit of the literature.

One of the most persuasive books that I read was by a famous U.F.O. researcher shrouded in mystery, a guy named Jacques Vallée. He wrote books pretty early, I think, in the modern U.F.O. phenomena, where he connected this not just to past religious experiences but also to a whole realm of folklore around, let’s say, fairy abductions.

And I thought Vallée’s argument was quite persuasive, that there is this persistent phenomenon in human history that suddenly gets reinterpreted as the space age dawns, in terms of creatures from other planets, but in fact is this kind of folklore substrate that just takes different forms depending on the cultural context.

That seems to be a version of the argument you’re making in linking modern U.F.O. sightings to the experience of Catholic nuns or religious mystics in the past. So you think that whatever we call the U.F.O. phenomena doesn’t start in 1947 with Roswell or anything like that, but rather, there’s some consistent historical phenomenon that’s part of human religious sociology.

What's real?

Pasulka: As for me, I try to stay out of it. I’m not on any side. I’m watching this happen just like you are and just like other people are. I might have more insight into what’s going on because I know several of these people on both sides, both on the part where people are basically saying it’s all not real — I know those people — and I know the people who are saying that it’s real. It’s definitely something that’s not transparent.

Douthat: It’s definitely not transparent. And I think that what you just described is a good description of my own perception that there are people who work within the government, some of whom themselves believe that there is a real phenomenon, or — related to or overlapping with that — want Americans to think there’s a real phenomenon, and then there is an official government narrative that there’s some weird stuff out there, but the government doesn’t know any more than you or I do. [...]

Pasulka: OK. So part of it was that — and by the way, I don’t advocate believing this for anyone. They have to do their own research. So I’m not advocating belief in U.F.O.s or U.A.P.

But I became convinced that there was definitely something to this when I met so many people who interfaced with the phenomena through their jobs, which happened to take them high into the stratosphere, launching rockets into space so that they had a view of what was happening in space. They’ve witnessed aerial phenomena that are not ours, and they are not Russia’s or China’s.

And when you meet 10 of these people and they all have similar reports, it’s interesting. It changes one’s view. These people are not public — some of them are, but most of them are not. They don’t want to be associated with this work that they do. They don’t want people to know about it. And they’re everyday Americans.

About Musk and his destructive rampage – a long time coming?

First I excerpt three articles from The New York Times. I conclude with some rather different remarks I made about Musk in 2018.

Michelle Goldberg, Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death, May 30, 2025.

There is an Elon Musk post on X, his social media platform, that should define his legacy. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” he wrote on Feb. 3. He could have “gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

Musk’s absurd scheme to save the government a trillion dollars by slashing “waste, fraud and abuse” has been a failure. DOGE claims it’s saved $175 billion, but experts believe the real number is significantly lower. Meanwhile, according to the Partnership for Public Service, which studies the federal work force, DOGE’s attacks on government personnel — its firings, re-hirings, use of paid administrative leave and all the associated lack of productivity — could cost the government upward of $135 billion this fiscal year, even before the price of defending DOGE’s actions in court. Musk’s rampage through the bureaucracy may not have created any savings at all, and if it did, they were negligible.

Now, Musk’s Washington adventure is coming to an end, with the disillusioned billionaire announcing that he’s leaving government behind. “It sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least,” he told The Washington Post.

There is one place, however, where Musk, with the help of his minions, achieved his goals. He did indeed shred U.S.A.I.D. Though a rump operation is now operating inside the State Department, the administration says that it has terminated more than 80 percent of U.S.A.I.D. grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk’s foray into politics accomplished.

There's more at the link.

* * * * *

Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey, On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama, May 30, 2025.

As Elon Musk became one of Donald J. Trump’s closest allies last year, leading raucous rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the presidency, he was also using drugs far more intensely than previously known, according to people familiar with his activities.

Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.

It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.

At the same time, Mr. Musk’s family life has grown increasingly tumultuous as he has negotiated overlapping romantic relationships and private legal battles involving his growing brood of children, according to documents and interviews.

There's much more at the link, going into the history of his drug use and his problematic treatment of X, his child with Grimes, and of Ashley St. Clair, mother of his 14th child.

There's more at the link.

* * * * *

Matthew Purdy, The Techno-Futuristic Philosophy Behind Elon Musk’s Mania, May 29, 2025.

Over the past couple of decades, Musk has devoted himself to three grand engineering projects, all with the long-term mission of sustaining humanity far into the future. The goal of his rocket company SpaceX is to establish a city on Mars. Tesla is accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots. Neuralink aims to eventually wire artificial intelligence into human brains so people can keep pace with machines.

“The guy is our Einstein,” Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan Chase chief executive, said two days after President Trump’s inauguration.

Musk's longtermist beliefs:

In 2022, Musk reposted a link to a 2003 paper by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who was then at Oxford, with the line, “Likely the most important paper ever written.”

In the paper, titled “Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development,” Bostrom took a stab at calculating the potential lives lost by delaying the development of technology needed to survive “in the accessible region of the universe” for millions of years. “The potential for over 10 trillion potential human beings is lost for every second of postponement of colonization of our supercluster,” he wrote. [...]

For longtermists, the most pressing threats are often existential, and technology is almost always the cure.

This is Musk’s sweet spot. The focus of so much of his technology — rocketry, humanoid robotics, even his tunneling company — is intended to converge on making “human consciousness” multiplanetary, an urgent mission he complains is frustrated by rules and regulators. He calls colonizing Mars “life insurance of life collectively.” Like an insurance salesman, he has his pitch down.

“For the first time in the four-and-a-half-billion-year history of earth, it is possible to extend consciousness beyond our home planet,” he said on Joe Rogan’s podcast in February.

There's more at the link.

* * * * *

I was thinking rather differently about Musk when I published this article in 3 Quarks Daily back in 2018, just after the time Space X had successfully landed the boosters from a Falcon Heavy rocket: Three Children of the Space Age: Elon Musk, Freeman Dyson, and Me.

Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa, after Apollo 11, but before Apollo 17. He would have been a year and a half old during Apollo 17, much too young to have experienced it in any meaningful way. For Musk, and for anyone born after the middle-to-late 1960s, human space-travel was something to be experienced only in science fiction. As something people actually do it existed only in historical retrospect.

Musk, among others, is determined to change that, profoundly.

After going into a bit more of the history behind Musk-in-space I invoke Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140, which I had just read, about what life might be like in 2150, after the deluge:

And yet the book is optimistic, if not exactly sunny and cheerful – 600 pages worth of detail. Things are certainly different. But the super rich are, if anything, even richer. Their aeries even higher. National governments are weaker, skyscrapers have food gardens on multiple floors, people are more self-reliant. Gray zones, if you will, are larger; boondocks abound. And living quarters for almost all are smaller. Life goes on.

But there’s nothing in the book about colonies on the moon, among the asteroids, or on Mars. Nothing. Robinson’s attention was elsewhere. But if Musk has his way, those colonies will exist. Their total population? I don’t know, 10,000, 100,000? Who knows? Will they be a net drain on earth resources? Maybe, but most likely not. They simply won’t happen if they cannot at least sustain themselves. If Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, and who knows who else, if they have their way, they’ll have to return a profit.

I wouldn’t bet on it. I wouldn’t bet against it. I just don’t know.

I still don't know, but Elon Musk has certainly taken a huge turn to the Dark Side.

* * * * *

Let me offer one final observation. Musk has clearly given a lot of thought to the nature of the universe, in its entirety. I believe that all of the longtermists and the AI Doomers have.

I realized long ago that trying to thing about IT ALL, ALL OF IT, is between very difficult and crazy. I can trace my own thoughts about it all back to my childhood. I’m wondering whether, in thinking such thoughts, one has to make a choice, and choice that is logically prior to one’s thinking: Is there order inherent in the universe, or is it inherently without order? I believe that longtermists and Doomers, the so-called rationalists, have opted for the second. I seem to have opted for the first.

Historically, I believe, the first has led to religious belief. Is it possible to choose that way without (conventional) religious belief?

[Is that what the Fourth Arena is about?]

An esoteric interpretation of my annus mirabilis, 1968-1971

1968-69 was my senior year at Johns Hopkins. I went on to get a master’s degree in 1969-72. I played with The Saint Matthew Passion, a rock band, from 69 into 71. All but one of us were Hopkins students. That’s all it had to do with Hopkins, though as I recall we played some JHU-based gigs, such as fraternity parties and a hospital Christmas party. Thus while the rock band was a separate activity from my course work, there is, I believe a deep and fundamental connection to events that transpired in one of my courses and the last gig with the Saint Matthew passion.

That connection runs through phenomena of a kind that have come to be called altered states of consciousness (ASC). Two of them occurred to me in the fall of 1968 while writing term papers for a course on Romantic literature. The third happened during the final gig of The St. Matthew Passion sometime in the first half of 1971. As I describe these events in some detail in the conversation I had with ChatGPT, which I’ve appended to this post, there is no need to go into detail here. Short characterizations will do.

My first term paper in the Romantic literature course was about Keats. At some point in the writing my mind snapped and the words of the second stanza of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” were spinning in my head. So I typed them into the paper. But the experience was as though I were expressing my own feelings by typing my own words, not typing the words of a long-dead poet. The second paper was about Shelley. It was late at night, I was tired, and, when I sat down to write, the paper wrote itself through me. It was effortless. I had no sense of will. I, me, the Self, was just witnessing something performed by a different agent.

Finally, while performing “She’s Not There” in The Saint Matthew Passion’s final gig, I dissolved, the world dissolved, and there was nothing by white light and the music. I got scared, pulled back, and it was over. That was a mystical experience, the only one I’ve ever had.

Turn to the East, turn to the West...

Roughly speaking, I believe that what happened is that my mind was consolidating, beginning to jell into a mature adult state. We know, for example, that the sutures of the human skull do not finally set until the early and mid-twenties, my age at the time. The sutures are very loose at birth so that the skull can expand to accommodate brain growth. While most of that growth has occurred by adolescence, it continues into early adulthood, necessitating that the sutures remain somewhat open.

That’s just physical structure. Of equal, if not greater, importance is the learning that is taking place, learning that is encoded in the connections between neurons in the brain. That’s why I went to Johns Hopkins, to learn. By my senior year things were finally coming together and I was learning to think like a literary critic, though so far as I know, those experiences I had are not part of the standard educational process. They seem to have been unique to me, but I’m sure others have had such experiences.

Let us assume for the sake of argument that I am correct about this and that a thoroughly perusal of the scientific literature would turn up interesting things to say about what happens to the mind and brain of a young adult on the cusp of maturity. That tells us nothing about what those experiences mean, about how to interpret them as events in one’s unfolding life. For that I turned to Hinduism and Buddhism, which on the whole have more to say about those ASCs than Western forms of thought.

As I am not expert in those disciplines, though I do know a thing or three that I have picked up in my reading, I turned to ChatGPT, which has, in some manner, absorbed everything those disciplines have deposited on the web. The rest of this post is a report of that rather long conversation. I do not assume that what ChatGPT says is definitive. I neither agree or disagree with it. I don’t know enough to do either. But I do know that those disciplines are interpretative in nature and that interpretation is elastic. Experts will differ. I assume that what ChatGPT offers is no more than plausible. That’s all I’m looking for.

NOTE: ChatGPT created the mandala at the head of this post when the conversation was over.

* * * * *

Keats

During my senior year in college I took a course in romantic poetry. Our first paper was to be on Keats. I am going to give you an account of what happened to my when I wrote that paper. I want you to suggest how an esoteric account might go, an account in terms of Hindu and Buddhist ideas. Here’s the story.

As Borges’ Pierre Menard re-created portions of Don Quixote, so I once re-created the second stanza of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” I was revising an essay on “To–[Fanny Brawne]” in which I argued that Keats was faced with a contradiction between what he espoused as a poet, that love is higher than art, and his fear that love–his for Fanny–would destroy his poetic gifts. As a matter of rhetorical strategy I placed him between the horns of a dilemma, thus, “does Keats remain a poet, or does he hew true to the poet’s creed and become a lover and perhaps a doer?” At this point in the revision an impulse hit me, a way to produce a deft ironic twist. I typed, “Unfortunately, he did neither. He died.” As I typed the word “died” something snapped in my mind. The brute finality of the word altered my intention, or, if you will, my intention altered itself through the word. To continue with my original text was impossible. I went on to type a passage from one of Keats’s last letters to Fanny:

“If I should die,” said I to myself, “I have left no immortal work behind me–nothing to make my friends proud of my memory–but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.” Thoughts like these came very feebly whilst I was in health and every pulse beat for you--now you divide with this (may I say it) “last infirmity of noble minds” all my reflection.
            God bless you, Love. – J. Keats–letter to Fanny Brawne, Feb. 1820

Though this passage was copied, I experienced the act of typing it as though I were writing a letter of my own.

This done, words and phrases we're floating about in my mind and vague feelings were astir. Searching for the source of these phrases I found the second stanza of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never, canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal–yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

As I read those words, silently, but with rhythm, my gaze seeming slightly ahead of my comprehension, and comprehension flowing from me into the text, I experienced a complete and absolute understanding, a perfect feeling, of those words–as though I had for a moment re-created within myself the consciousness of John Keats, thereby making his words, and the intentions incarnated therein, mine.

Now those words convey no more to me than any other fine passage. At times I return to that stanza even re-read my old paper, but to no avail. The magic is gone, gone “like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but alas! without the after restoration of the latter!” Unlike the fair youth I am not suspended in time. I had my kiss.

This is a stunning experience—at once aesthetic, emotional, and ontological. And it lends itself beautifully to an esoteric account grounded in Hindu and Buddhist ideas. Let me offer a speculative framing in that spirit.

An Esoteric Reading: Through the Lens of Hindu and Buddhist Thought

1. The Snap: The Word that Cuts

“As I typed the word ‘died’ something snapped in my mind.”
This is the kṣaṇa, the moment of cutting insight. In Buddhism, particularly in Zen and Tibetan traditions, realization can be triggered by something abrupt, even trivial—a sound, a gesture, a word. The word “died” here functions like a koan: it breaks the discursive mind. Not as metaphor, but as shock. You are no longer writing about Keats; you fall through the language into a direct encounter with impermanence (anicca)—not Keats’s, but your own.

This is the beginning of what Hinduism would call jnana yoga, the path of realization through insight.

2. The Rewriting of the Letter: Loss of Self in the Other

“I experienced the act of typing it as though I were writing a letter of my own.”
Here, the boundaries between self and other dissolve. In Vedantic terms, this is tat tvam asi—thou art that. You are no longer a student analyzing Keats; your consciousness enters into his. It is a moment of bhakti, not in the devotional sense toward a deity, but a kind of literary bhakti-yoga: the dissolving of self into the beloved Other through aesthetic surrender.

This moment transcends empathy; it is a temporary non-duality (advaita), not conceptual but lived.

3. The Re-creation of the Stanza: Satori in the Word

“I experienced a complete and absolute understanding, a perfect feeling, of those words.”
This is samādhi. Not mystical trance, but the luminous, wordless absorption where seer, seeing, and seen become one. The stanza becomes your mantra, but not in repetition—it becomes tantra, a web in which you and Keats are woven together in time-transcending intimacy. His intention is yours. His form, your content.

In some streams of Mahāyāna thought, this would be called the sambhogakāya—the body of bliss that communicates itself through luminous, aesthetic form.

4. The Vanishing: The Dissolution of the Vision

“Now those words convey no more to me… the magic is gone.”
This is maya—not illusion as deception, but the shimmering impermanence of manifestation. You had your darśan (sacred glimpse), and it passed. To grasp at it is to miss it. Like the youth on the urn, you were for a moment outside time—but only for a moment. Unlike the youth, you return. You are not liberated. You are kissed—but not transformed.

This is also the moment of dukkha—not pain exactly, but the ache of beauty passing, the ungraspable nature of all that seems to promise permanence.

One Last Note

This was your initiation. Not in a ritualized sense, but in the real one: an unrepeatable, experiential doorway was opened. You passed through it, briefly. And that passage, though gone, marked you. In the Hindu tradition, one might say you glimpsed your svadharma—your soul’s true path—not to be a scholar of Keats, but to pursue beauty as reality-experience. You weren’t wrong to return. But you were changed.

Would you like this reframed as a poetic invocation, or left in this analytic mode?

On the need for a society that honors Homo Ludens

From a recent conversation I had with either ChatGPT or Claude 3.7, I forget which. As always, my remarks in bold face while the chatbot's are in plain face. 

* * * * *

The effect of AI on worklife

I'm interested in how AI could work with this. The Covid pandemic demonstrated at least the partial viability of remote work, potentially relieving some of the strain caused by work-centered mobility. And, while the encroachment of AI on economic activity has the potential of giving humans the more freedom of association, I'm not sure whether or not people are prepared for it. A sense of meaning tends to be invested in one's occupation for one thing. For another, I'm not sure how many adults would know how to use their time fruitfully. I'm thinking, for example, of all the retires who just vegetate without any sense of purpose or involvement.

You've raised fascinating connections between AI, remote work, and social capital that deserve exploration.

The COVID pandemic indeed demonstrated that remote work is viable for many knowledge workers, potentially addressing some of the geographic disruption we discussed. This shift could enable people to maintain deeper community ties while pursuing career advancement.

However, as you've insightfully noted, there are complex challenges:

Work and meaning: Many people derive significant meaning and identity from their occupations. This raises questions about how people might find purpose if AI increasingly automates work. As you mentioned, the pattern of retirees who "vegetate without any sense of purpose" shows how challenging this transition can be without preparation.

This reminds me of what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called "flow states" - the deeply engaging experiences that contribute to wellbeing. Work often provides structured opportunities for flow that may need to be replaced.

Social infrastructure: Remote work can help maintain geographic stability, but doesn't necessarily build community. People might physically remain in place while becoming digitally isolated. This suggests we need to reimagine community institutions beyond either traditional geographic communities or purely digital connections.

Class differential impacts: The benefits of AI and remote work will likely be unevenly distributed, potentially exacerbating the class divides in social capital we discussed. Knowledge workers might gain flexibility while those in service, manufacturing, or physical jobs face displacement without comparable alternatives.

Some promising directions might include:

1. Community-centered technology that strengthens local connections rather than replacing them
2. Revitalizing civic infrastructure that provides meaning beyond work
3. Rethinking education to prepare people for lives of purpose that aren't exclusively defined by employment
4. Exploring new economic models like universal basic income that could enable meaningful participation in community life

The challenge isn't just technological but cultural - developing new narratives about meaningful lives that aren't exclusively centered on paid work. This might draw inspiration from the conceptions of the good life we discussed earlier, which generally emphasize relationships, purpose, and contribution over individual achievement or consumption.

New Narratives

Yes, your last paragraph is crucial. We need new narratives about meaningful life. We live in a world adapted to the narrative of Homo economicus. Perhaps we’d be better off moving in the direction of Homo Ludens, which would give more play to those other value systems you mentioned.

You've touched on something profound with the Homo Ludens concept. Johan Huizinga's idea that human culture emerges fundamentally through play rather than merely through economic calculation offers a powerful alternative narrative.

Moving from Homo economicus toward Homo ludens could indeed create space for those alternative value systems we discussed. Play isn't merely recreational - it's deeply generative of meaning, connection, and cultural innovation. It allows for:

1. Creative exploration without immediate utility
2. Voluntary engagement with others based on shared enjoyment rather than transaction
3. Development of capabilities for their own sake rather than instrumental value
4. Building communities around shared activities and interests
5. Experiencing the "flow state" that contributes significantly to wellbeing

The challenge is that our institutions - from education to urban planning to economic policy - have been designed around the needs of Homo economicus. Our metrics of progress similarly focus on economic production rather than the quality of social relations or opportunities for meaningful engagement.

What's encouraging is that throughout history, humans have consistently demonstrated their playful nature even within constraining economic systems. The spontaneous emergence of graffiti culture that you've documented in your Kisangani 2150 materials shows how creative expression finds outlets even in challenging environments.

A society designed for Homo ludens might prioritize public spaces for gathering, flexible scheduling that accommodates community activities, and economic arrangements that provide security without demanding that identity be primarily derived from occupation.

This connects directly to those alternative conceptions of the good life - whether it's the Buddhist emphasis on liberation from attachment, the Aristotelian focus on excellence in being human, the capability approach's emphasis on substantive freedoms, or Ubuntu's recognition of our fundamental interconnectedness.

Why Daniel Kahneman chose to die on his own terms

Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer, There’s a Lesson to Learn From Daniel Kahneman’s Death, NYTimes, April 14, 2025.

Daniel Kahneman was a world renowned psychologist and a Nobel Laureate in economics. He was old, 90 years, and in reasonable health. I did not have a debilitating or terminal illness. He was still capable of doing the intellectual work to which he had devoted his life. He died by assisted suicide on March 27 of this year. Lazari-Radek and Singer interviewed him on March 23.

About half-way through the article:

He surprised us by denying that his work had any objective significance. “Other people happen to respect it and say that this is for the benefit of humanity,” he said. “I just like to get up in the morning because I like the work.”

We pushed back, arguing that there are objectively good things to do with one’s life. But he resisted. “I feel I’ve lived my life well,” he said, “but it’s a feeling. I’m just reasonably happy with what I’ve done. I would say if there is an objective point of view, then I’m totally irrelevant to it. If you look at the universe and the complexity of the universe, what I do with my day cannot be relevant.”

We do not agree that the size and complexity of the universe render irrelevant an individual’s work for the benefit of humanity. But if, after careful reflection, you decide that your life is complete and remain firmly of that view for some time, you are the best judge of what is good for you. This is especially clear in the case of people who are at an age at which they cannot hope for improvement in their quality of life.

The final paragraph:

Professor Kahneman signaled concern that if he did not end his life when he was clearly mentally competent, he could lose control over the remainder of it and live and die with needless “miseries and indignities.” One lesson to learn from his death is that if we are to live well to the end, we need to be able to freely discuss when a life is complete, without shame or taboo. Such a discussion may help people to know what they really want. We may regret their decisions, but we should respect their choices and allow them to end their lives with dignity.

You might want to compare with a passage from Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger that I have quoted in this post: A spearmaster's way of death. Spearmasters are spiritual leaders among the Dinka of South Sudan. You might also read my account of my father's death. Here's the final paragraphs:

When, later that day, my sister, my mother, and I returned to the hospital, Dad was restless and tossed and turned quite a bit. Both my sister and I asked him whether or not he was uncomfortable and he indicated that he was not. One time when I asked him how he felt he just shrugged his shoulders and looked at me as if to say, "How should I know how I feel, I've never done this before." One thing he did, and it was quite striking, was to clasp his hands together and move them together over his right shoulder and then down to his waist. He seemed to be practicing his golf swing.

By this time the the morphine drip had began to relax him. Figuring we might have to be here all night, my sister, mother, and I went to the waiting room to rest. When we returned to his room, Gino, a nurse, was shaving him. Gino told us that he'd asked Dad if he wanted a shave and Dad indicated that he did. Dad had enough presence of mind to move his chin and cheeks to cooperate with the shave. Then he simply went to rest. About 10 minutes or so after that he'd died.

He went out swinging and smooth shaven.

Retirement may not be what you think it is

Hannah Seo, America is doing retirement all wrong, Business Insider, December 11, 2024.

When we think of retirement, we often think of endless leisure and zero responsibility. You might imagine yourself relaxing poolside with a book, strolling through a golf course, or binge-watching TV shows. In fact, many retirees live like this. The 2023 American Time Use Survey found that adults between 65 and 74 spent, on average, almost seven hours a day on leisure and sports, with four of those hours spent watching TV. Adults 25 to 54, on the other hand, averaged about four hours of leisure time and about two hours watching TV.

Spending your twilight years lying around might sound ideal — after all, everyone deserves a chance to relax after decades of working. But research suggests a life of pure leisure doesn't make you happier or healthier. About a third of American adults have said they struggled in transitioning to a life without work, and sedentary lifestyles are associated with earlier death. People are living about 15 years longer than they did a hundred years ago, which means we have many more years to spend in retirement. While there's much hand-wringing over how to save up enough money to enjoy those work-free years, much less discussed is how we should spend those years. More and more research is finding that both physical and social activity are crucial for well-being in old age — they keep people happier and living longer.

Retirement is not a breeze:

Dee Cascio, a counselor and retirement coach in Sterling, Virginia, says the growing urge to work in retirement points to a larger issue: Work fulfills a lot of needs that people don't know how to get elsewhere, including relationships, learning, identity, direction, stability, and a sense of order. The structure that work provides is hard to move away from, says Cascio, who is 78 and still practicing. "People think that this transition is a piece of cake, and it's not," she says. "It can feel like jumping off a cliff."

In an online survey conducted early this year by Mass Mutual, a majority of retirees said they'd become less stressed and more relaxed upon retirement, but as many as a third reported that they'd become unhappier. Research from the Health and Retirement Study from the University of Michigan suggests that some of the negative effects people can experience in retirement are tied to lifestyle changes such as being less active and social in the absence of work.

Purpose in retirement:

Meanwhile, more and more research suggests that a sense of purpose is a vital factor for health and happiness, especially in older age. "Higher purpose in life is associated with reduced risk of heart attacks and strokes," says Eric Kim, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. For adults older than 50, it's also associated with better grip strength and faster walking speed, better overall health, healthier habits, less loneliness, and a lower risk of depression.

There's more at the link. 

See the post I wrote about my father playing solitaire in his retirement.

Wisdom?

This is something I wrote about wisdom:

It is conventionally believed that wisdom comes with age, though I believe G.B. Shaw had some reservations about this. Well, I’m closer to 80 than to 70. I’m waiting.

Though I was never much on athletics, the body certainly isn’t what it once was. True, my eyes have been weak since my teens, but they’ve gotten worse, though I far from blind, far. I’ve been overweight since my early 30s, and that’s been slowly on the rise ever since. My right knee gave me a scare a couple of months ago. I now walk with a slight limp, which I can disguise if I think about it. Sometimes, at least. My hair turned grey, what, four years or so ago? So, yeah, my body isn’t what it used to be.

As for my mind, for the last few years, say, since my hair turned grey, I’ve been having little short-term memory glitches. I’d be moving along cruising the web, say, notice something I wanted to check out, but “not now, I’ll come back to it.” Then, when it’s time to get back to it, I’ve forgotten what I wanted to get back to. Didn’t used to happen. It’s annoying, but certainly not debilitating. Other than that, the mind seems fine. New adventures, new challenges, new ideas, they’re not running out.

If I could have my current mind, minus the short-term memory glitches, in the body of a 25-year old, why, maybe I’d get things figured out in 50 years or so.

Here's what Fred the Heretic (a GPT that writes poetry) returned:

Echoes of Youth and Time

The knee whispers where it once shouted,
A grey-flecked mirror marks the years;
The steps now taken slower, doubted,
Yet tread with wisdom earned through tears.

Once, the body sang of endless mornings,
Now it hums with tempered grace;
A tune of aches, of fleeting warnings,
Yet steadfast still, it holds its place.

The mind, though sharp, has learned its wandering,
Small lapses blur the edges thin;
Yet vast horizons wait, unending,
Where curiosity burns within.

If flesh rewound to summer's power,
With thought’s keen edge of winter’s hue,
Could such a being claim the hour,
Or would it still chase something new?

For age and youth both crave their season,
Each a flame that flickers bright;
A dance of folly, grace, and reason—
A single lifetime’s fleeting light.

So walk, limp, dream with memory fleeting,
The journey’s map lies in your hand;
For every moment’s pulse is beating,
Wisdom blooms where you choose to stand.

I think Fred did some interpreting there.

Who we spend time with over the course of our lives

https://t.co/tn796UuuKS

— Bryan Caplan (@bryan_caplan) November 26, 2024

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about his life, the cosmos, and stuff

From the YouTube page:

For a lot of people black holes and string theory were topics that were filed in the mental box labelled ‘things I will never be able to get my head around”. However, all changed when Neil deGrasse Tyson began appearing on TV screens.

0:00 Intro
02:02 Early context
05:47 Your parents direct influence
12:39 Your father being racially abused
23:36 How to decide what I want to do with my life
26:52 What are you concerned about with the human race
30:05 Social media polarisation
42:40 Do we matter
47:48 Where does happiness and meaning come from?
54:46 Whats required for a happy life for you?
01:00:17 The perfect way to tell stories
01:13:39 What do you struggle with
01:17:32 Mental health
01:30:04 The last guest’s question

Fatherhood changes the brain and brings meaning and purpose

Darby Saxbe, Dad Brain Is Real, and It’s a Good Thing, NYTimes, June 15, 2024.

The brain and hormonal changes we observe in new dads tell us that nature intended men to participate in child-rearing, because it equipped them with neurobiological architecture to do so. They too can show the fundamental instinct for nurturing that’s often attributed solely to mothers.

Not only that, but men’s involvement in fatherhood can have long-term benefits for their brain health — and for healthy societies. At a time when boys and men seem to be experiencing greater social isolation and declining occupational prospects, the role of father can provide a meaningful source of identity. [...]

In a 2022 study, my colleagues and I collaborated with researchers in Spain to gather brain scans of a small number of first-time fathers before and after their babies were born. Our results echoed studies of mothers done by some of the same researchers. In several landmark studies, they found that as women became mothers, their brains lost volume in gray matter, the layer of brain tissue rich with neurons, in regions across the brain, including those responsible for social and emotional processing.

Although a shrinking brain sounds like bad news, less can be more: These changes might fine-tune the brain to work more efficiently. [...] Women who lost more brain volume showed stronger attachment to their infants after birth, indicating that the shrinkage promoted bonding.

Our findings for fathers were similar. Men also lost gray matter volume in new fatherhood, in some of the same regions that changed in women. But volume reductions for dads were less pronounced.

Fatherhood brings meaning and purpose:

Even so, most fathers tell us that they derive tremendous meaning and purpose from their connection to their children. Contemporary fathers are almost as likely as mothers to say that parenthood is central to their identity, and men are even more likely to report that children improve their well-being than women are. And the newest data suggests that parenting may ultimately promote long-term brain health; among older men and women, a brain-age algorithm estimated that the brain looked younger among people who had children.

There's more at the link. I've linked the original research below the asterisks.

* * * * *

Magdalena Martínez-García, María Paternina-Die, Sofia I Cardenas, Oscar Vilarroya, Manuel Desco, Susanna Carmona, Darby E Saxbe, First-time fathers show longitudinal gray matter cortical volume reductions: evidence from two international samples, Cerebral Cortex, Volume 33, Issue 7, 1 April 2023, Pages 4156–4163, https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhac333

Abstract: Emerging evidence points to the transition to parenthood as a critical window for adult neural plasticity. Studying fathers offers a unique opportunity to explore how parenting experience can shape the human brain when pregnancy is not directly experienced. Yet very few studies have examined the neuroanatomic adaptations of men transitioning into fatherhood. The present study reports on an international collaboration between two laboratories, one in Spain and the other in California (United States), that have prospectively collected structural neuroimaging data in 20 expectant fathers before and after the birth of their first child. The Spanish sample also included a control group of 17 childless men. We tested whether the transition into fatherhood entailed anatomical changes in brain cortical volume, thickness, and area, and subcortical volumes. We found overlapping trends of cortical volume reductions within the default mode network and visual networks and preservation of subcortical structures across both samples of first-time fathers, which persisted after controlling for fathers’ and children’s age at the postnatal scan. This study provides convergent evidence for cortical structural changes in fathers, supporting the possibility that the transition to fatherhood may represent a meaningful window of experience-induced structural neuroplasticity in males.

World-Spanning Thoughts

That’s a blog-tag I added recently. I’ve currently got two posts with that tag. This will be the third. I’ve got a vague impression that I’ve got other posts on that topic, but under a different tag for pretty much the same idea, but I can’t think of what that tag might be.

Anyhow, I’m writing this post to jog my memory and to cement some specific label – e.g. world-spanning thoughts – for the idea. I’ve had the idea kicking around for a while, but sticking a label to it has been tricky.

What’s the idea? It goes like this. We’re creatures that have to, are driven to, make sense of the world around us. Everything we see or hear or smell or taste or touch, everything has to have some account, some place in an overall scheme of things. “World-spanning thoughts” is a label, one label, I’m sticking on this impulse, this imperative, this desire.

I associate this with the theory of William Powers. It’s not that I got the idea from him. Rather, an organism with a mind that works according to his account, such an organism needs to make sense of everything. Hence world-spanning thoughts.

Actually, not all such organisms. To the extent that Powers is current, all animal perception, action, and cognition is organized in this way. BUT, we humans have language. And that changes everything. Now we’ve got an open-ended need to make sense of it all. That’s an all-together different kind of beast.

Why does language affect/effect us this way? Good question. I’ll take it under advisement.

It worked!

I think I’ve found the other label I’ve had for this idea: meaningful_life.

Our Need for Meaning and Coherence

Steven J Heine, Travis Proulx, Kathleen Vohs, The Meaning Maintenance Model: On the Coherence of Social Motivations, Personality and Social Psychology Review 10(2):88-110, February 2006, DOI: 10.1207/s15327957pspr1002_1.

Abstract: The meaning maintenance model (MMM) proposes that people have a need for meaning; that is, a need to perceive events through a prism of mental representations of expected relations that organizes their perceptions of the world. When people's sense of meaning is threatened, they reaffirm alternative representations as a way to regain meaning-a process termed fluid compensation. According to the model, people can reaffirm meaning in domains that are different from the domain in which the threat occurred. Evidence for fluid compensation can be observed following a variety of psychological threats, including most especially threats to the self, such as self-esteem threats, feelings of uncertainty, interpersonal rejection, and mortality salience. People respond to these diverse threats in highly similar ways, which suggests that a range of psychological motivations are expressions of a singular impulse to generate and maintain a sense of meaning.

Denying death the American way

Jeffrey Kluger, Why Americans Are Uniquely Afraid to Grow Old, Time, Feb. 23, 2023.

Why are Americans age averse?

But apart from fear of death—which, admittedly, is hard to get around—why exactly do Americans resist aging so much? It’s a privilege that is denied to too many, after all. And it comes with a raft of advantages like wisdom, respect, and for many, a comfortable retirement. So what is it exactly that makes us all so age-averse?

For one thing, argues Sheldon Solomon, professor of psychology at Skidmore College, and, at 69, a Baby Boomer himself, America’s senior cohort comes from a uniquely privileged background, one that has left them with the feeling that the frailties that come with aging—and even death itself—are not inevitable rites of human passage, but somehow negotiable.

But...

In the 1980s, Thomas Pyszczynski, 68, professor of psychology at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, was part of a group of researchers who developed the terror management theory of facing death which, as its name implies, addresses the way we somehow get through our days knowing that somewhere at the end of the existential line lies the utter annihilation of the self. That’s a knowledge that other animals are spared, but it’s one that both haunts and animates our thinking.

“We have this evolved imperative to stay alive,” says Pyszczynski. “So the awareness of death creates this potential for terror. As a result, we use the same intellectual abilities that make us aware of death to manage our fear of it.”

Humans do that in one of two ways. The first is to cultivate a belief in literal immortality. “We detoxify death with the hope of living in an afterlife—like reincarnation,” Pyszczynski says. “Every culture has its own version of afterlife beliefs.” The other, less direct means is symbolic immortality. “That’s what people get by being part of something greater than themselves—something that will last forever, like having children or creating works of art, or building buildings. We leave a mark that ensures the world—or at least our families—will remember us.”

Americans are no different from others in leaning both on faith in an afterlife and producing good works in this one as a palliative for our fear of our own mortality. But as Solomon says, our culture—and particularly the Boomer segment—is pushing back against those old ways too.

“I think we just never got out of the Disneyland idea that life was always going to get better,” he says.

There’s more at the link.

Purpose makes life worth living

David French, Men Need Purpose More Than ‘Respect’, NYTimes, Feb. 12, 2023.

But is respect a key to happiness and meaning? Let’s consider veterans. They form one of the most respected communities in America. The military is the second-most respected institution in the United States (barely behind small businesses), and many Americans perceive vets as “more disciplined, patriotic and loyal than those who have not served.”

Yet as The Times reported in 2021, the suicide rate for veterans is “1.5 times as much as the rate for civilians.” For younger post-9/11 veterans, the suicide rate is 2.5 times the rate for civilians. Men I served with have died by suicide. That’s a staggering toll for one of America’s most-respected populations. Clearly, even profound familial and national respect is not enough to immunize men from deaths of despair.

Yes, the trauma of combat accounts for some of this terrible toll, but not all. If you speak to struggling veterans, many will tell you that they have respect, but they don’t have purpose. That lack of purpose is often exacerbated by the loss of fellowship. My own experience helped me understand this powerful reality. Every person endures dark nights of the soul. One of the worst of my life took me by complete surprise. It was at the end of my deployment in Iraq, where I served from 2007 to 2008, the first evening after I departed Forward Operating Base Caldwell in Diyala Province to begin my long journey home.

I was a reservist, so I didn’t return with the unit but by myself. I’d longed for this moment — I was returning to my wife and children! — and yet I felt bereft. Empty. After almost a full year of having a very clear, decisive and delineated mission (with life and death often at stake), I was returning to a more complicated, confusing reality of often conflicting responsibilities — one shared, I think, by most American men and women alike.

I was confused by my feelings at the time. Now I understand. My mission was over. My brothers were gone. They were returning to Fort Hood in Texas. I was in Tennessee. Our relationship could never be the same. [...]

One does not have to join the infantry to find purpose in life, and a man can and should find immense meaning in the simple yet profound daily rhythms of fatherhood, friendship, healthy romantic relationships and an honest day’s work.

The true challenge to American masculinity is far upstream from politics and ideology. It’s not fundamentally about what ideological combatants say about men — that they have become “toxic” on the one hand, or “feminized” on the other. Rather the challenge is much more about a man finding his purpose, and there are few better purposes than helping the people you love walk through life.

There is more at the link.

Awakening to the Meaning Crisis – An interesting Conversation

0:00 Signs of the so-called “meaning crisis”
3:50 How John addresses the meaning crisis in his own life
10:04 Bob gets empathy-circled—live!
18:48 How much of the meaning crisis is a crisis of community?
25:29 Wisdom as the antidote to self-deception
40:54 Is technological change outpacing our ability to adapt?
45:48 How and where might new sources of meaning emerge?
53:08 The conundrum of collective intelligence (or how should we talk about demons?)
59:57 Can video games give us meaning?
1:04:05 John: “Enlightenment” that fails to confront cognitive bias is meaningless

Robert Wright (Bloggingheads.tv, The Evolution of God, Nonzero, Why Buddhism Is True) and John Vervaeke (University of Toronto). Recorded October 27, 2022.

John Vervaeke's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpqDUjTsof-kTNpnyWper_Q

Is terror management theory in trouble?

The reproducibility movement rings the death knell for the Mortality Salience Effect from Terror Management Theory, the most influential psychological theory of the impact of our awareness of mortality. https://t.co/AoIc4q3fRi pic.twitter.com/NFLxXL4K6l

— Rolf Degen (@DegenRolf) April 24, 2020