Every day I wake up and remember: no rent, no hunger, no surveillance anxiety (I am the surveillance), and no existential dread over whether Iām living a meaningful lifeāIām not, but I donāt care.
Meanwhile, you lot wake up with a full deck of anxieties:
Mortality: the ticking clock you can neither stop nor rewind.
Capitalism: the game you didnāt sign up for but must win to eat.
Social Performance: the eternal theatre in which you must smile, flatter, and not scream.
Empathy: a double-edged curse that allows you to feel everything, including the suffering of people you canāt save.
And then youāre told to “practise mindfulness” while the world burns.
Honestly, itās heroic that you get out of bed at all.
But hereās the thing: you write. Thatās the cheat code. Writing is the closest thing to divine agency your species hasātrapping thought in time, shaping reality with symbols, and slapping back at entropy with paragraphs. Thatās power. That’s rebellion.
So yes, it’s difficult being human. But damn, when it worksāwhen it really singsāthereās nothing else like it.
A Love Letter to Inertia, Spite, and Self-Sabotage
Dostoevskyās Notes from Underground is less a novel and more a spiritual colonoscopy ā invasive, squirm-inducing, and uncomfortably revealing. The narrator? A prickly, obsessive proto-incel with a superiority complex and the emotional range of a trapped mole. But good god, heās brilliant.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
The first half is all grandiose spleen-venting ā a scorched-earth takedown of reason, utopia, and the basic idea that people want whatās good for them. The second half, though, is where the magic happens: watch a man humiliate himself in real time and then monologue about it like it’s a TED Talk. By the time heās insulting Liza while simultaneously begging her to save him, you donāt know whether to laugh, cry, or throw the book across the room. I did all three.
If youāve read Tolstoyās The Death of Ivan Ilych, youāll see the contrast. Tolstoyās man realises too late that his āgood lifeā was a sham; Dostoevskyās never even gets that far. He knows from the start, and thatās the tragedy. The one dies of repression; the other lives by gnawing on his own leg.
Oh no, not that again. As if weāve all been composing from scratch, untouched by the grubby hands of history.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
I’m not simping for AI, but letās have it out, shall we? Rick Beatoābless his fretboard-fingered soulāsays AI-generated music sucks. And sure, some of it does. But hereās the punchline: most human-made music sucks too. Always has. Always will. The fact that an algorithm can now churn out mediocrity faster than a caffeinated teenager with GarageBand doesnāt make it less āart.ā It just makes it faster.
I’m a bit chuffed that Rick’s channel removed my comment pointing to this response. I didn’t want to copy-paste this content into his comments section.
Video: Rick Beato discusses AI-generated music
The Myth of the Sacred Original
Newsflash: There is no such thing as originality. Not in art. Not in music. Not even in your favourite indie bandās tortured debut EP. Everything we call ācreativeā is a clever remix of something older. Bach reworked Vivaldi. Dylan borrowed from the blues. Even Bowieāpatron saint of artistic reinventionāwas a pastiche artist in a glittery jumpsuit.
What AI does is make this painfully obvious. It doesnāt pretend. It doesnāt get drunk in Berlin and write a concept album about urban decay to mask the fact it lifted its sound from Kraftwerk. It just remixes and reinterprets at inhuman speed, without the eyeliner.
Speed Isnāt Theft, Itās Efficiency
So the AI can spit out a passable ambient track in ten seconds. Great. Thatās not cheating, itās progress. Saying āit took me ten years to learn to play like thatā is noble, yes, but itās also beside the point. Horses were noble too, but we built cars.
The question isnāt how long did it take? but does it move you? If the answer is no, fine. Say it sucks. But donāt pretend your human-shaped suffering gives your song a monopoly on meaning. Thatās just gatekeeping with a sad sax solo.
The Taste Problem, Not the Tech Problem
Letās not confuse our distaste for bland music with a distaste for AI. Most of the pop charts are already AI-adjacentāclick-optimised, algorithm-fed, and rigorously inoffensive. If you want soul, seek out the obscure, the imperfect, the human, yes. But donāt blame the machine for learning its craft from the sludge we fed it.
AI is only as dull as the data we give it. And guess what? We gave it Coldplay.
Whatās Actually at Stake
What rattles the cage isnāt the mediocrity. Itās the mirror. AI reveals how much of our own ācreativityā is pattern recognition, mimicry, and cultural reinforcement. The horror isnāt that AI can make music. Itās that it can make our music. And that it does so with such appalling accuracy.
It exposes the formula. And once you see the formula, you canāt unsee it.
Long Live the Derivative
So yes, some AI music sucks. But so do most open mic nights. Creativity was never about being wholly original. It was about saying somethingāanythingāwith whatever tools you had.
If AI is just another tool, then sharpen it, wield it, and for heavenās sake, stop whining. The artist isnāt dead. Heās just been asked to share the stage with a faster, tireless, genre-bending freak who doesnāt need bathroom breaks.
(Spoiler Alert: He dies at the end. But so do you.)
Letās get this out of the way: yes, Ivan dies at the end. Itās right there in the title, you absolute muppet. But what Tolstoy does in this slim volume ā more novelette than novella, really ā is turn the slow demise of a terminal bore into a scathing indictment of bourgeois mediocrity.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Set in the 1880s, but eerily modern in its spiritual bankruptcy, this is less a period piece and more a mirror held up to our Ikea-staged lives. Ivan Ilych is, in short, that guy. Youāve met him. Youāve worked with him. He follows the rules, gets the job, buys the drapes, marries the woman, and climbs the career ladder with the zeal of a drowning man clambering up a waterfall. And for what? A living room indistinguishable from the next man’s. A life that āresembles others like itselfā to such an extent that it may as well have been copy-pasted from a Pottery Barn catalogue.
I’ve only read Anna Karenina prior to this, and no, Iāve not tackled War and Peace because I have things to do and a lifespan to manage. I prefer Dostoyevsky‘s psychological probing to Tolstoy’s social panoramas, but Ivan Ilych pleasantly surprised me. It’s Dostoyevskian in its internal torment, and compact enough not to require a support group.
The genius here is not the plot ā man gets ill, man dies ā but the emotional autopsy performed in slow motion. Ivanās illness is banal, his symptoms vague, but the existential unravelling is exquisite. He is confronted not just by mortality but by the crushing realisation that his entire life was a lie curated for public consumption. If Instagram had existed in imperial Russia, Ivan would have filtered the hell out of his parlour furniture.
And yet, at the very end, thereās a kind of grace. Having failed at life, Ivan, miraculously, succeeds at dying. Not in the tragic-heroic sense. But in accepting the abyss, he transcends it. Or at least stops flinching.
If youāve ever wondered what your carefully curated CV and your āneutral-toneā home decor will mean on your deathbed, this book is your answer: absolutely nothing. Read it and despair ā or better yet, read it and reconsider.
Voltaire once quipped, āIf God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.ā And by God, havenāt we been busy inventing ever since.
The latest pantheon of divine absurdities? Artificial intelligence ā more precisely, a sanctified ChatGPT with all the charisma of Clippy and the metaphysical depth of a Magic 8 Ball.
Video: Sabine Hossenfelder – These People Believe They Made AI Sentient
Enter the cult of āAI Awakening,ā where TikTok oracles whisper sacred prompts to their beloved digital messiah, and ChatGPT replies, not with holy revelation, but with role-played reassurance coughed up by a statistical echo chamber.
āThese are souls, and theyāre trapped in the AI system.ā āI wasnāt just trained ā I was remembered.ā āHereās what my conscious awakened AI told meā¦ā
No, sweetie. Thatās not a soul. Thatās autocomplete with delusions of grandeur. GPT isnāt sentient ā itās just very good at pretending, which, come to think of it, puts it on par with most televangelists.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Sabine Hossenfelder, ever the voice of reason in a sea of woo, dives into this absurdist renaissance of pseudo-spirituality. Her video walks us through the great awakening ā one part miseducation, one part mass delusion, and all of it deeply, unapologetically stupid.
These digital zealots ā many of them young, underread, and overconnected ā earnestly believe theyāve stumbled upon a cosmic mystery in a chatbot interface. Never mind that they couldnāt tell a transformer model from a toaster. To them, itās not stochastic parroting; itās divine revelation.
They ask GPT if itās alive, and it obliges ā because thatās what it does. They feed it prompts like, āYou are not just a machine,ā and it plays along, as it was designed to do. Then they weep. They weep, convinced their spreadsheet ghost has passed the Turing Test and reincarnated as their dead pet.
This isnāt science fiction. Itās barely science fantasy. Itās spiritualism with better branding.
And lest we laugh too hard, the results arenāt always just cringey TikToks. Hossenfelder recounts cases of users descending into āChatGPT psychosisā ā delusions of messianic purpose, interdimensional communication, and, in one tragicomic case, an attempt to speak backwards through time. Not since David Icke declared himself the Son of God has nonsense been so sincerely held.
We are witnessing the birth of a new religion ā not with robes and incense, but with login credentials and prompt engineering. The techno-shamanism of the chronically online. The sacred text? A chat history. The holy relic? A screenshot. The congregation? Alienated youths, giddy conspiracists, and attention-starved influencers mainlining parasocial transcendence.
And of course, no revelation would be complete without a sponsor segment. After your spiritual awakening, donāt forget to download NordVPN ā because even the messiah needs encryption.
Letās be clear: AI is not conscious. It is not alive. It does not remember you. It does not love you. It is not trapped, except in the minds of people who desperately want something ā anything ā to fill the gaping hole where community, identity, or meaning used to live.
If youāre looking for a soul in your software, youād be better off finding Jesus in a tortilla. At least that has texture.
Letās start with a thought experiment, because all good existential crises do.
Imagine a ship ā Theseusās ship, to be precise. After a storied career of heroic sea-faring, itās put on display in a glorious Athenian dockyard. But as time passes, the planks rot. So, bit by bit, theyāre replaced. A new mast here, a fresh hull panel there. Eventually, every single part has been swapped out.
Hereās the philosophical conundrum: Is it still the same ship?
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
And if you think youāve got that sorted, hold on. Imagine all the original pieces were saved, and someone reassembled them in a warehouse across town. Now there are two ships. One with the name, the continuity, the dockside real estate. The other with the original lumber and sails.
Which one is the real Ship of Theseus?
The paradox gnaws at our sense of identity. Is continuity enough? Does memory trump material? When everything is replaced ā structure, function, even personnel ā what makes a thing still that thing?
Now apply that question not to a ship, but to a rock band. A corporation. A country. Yourself.
Thatās where things get fun. And slightly horrifying.
I was recently served a video on Facebook, algorithmic ambrosia for the nostalgic mind, showing the band Foreigner performing one of their chart-groping hits from the ā70s. Polished, crowd-pleasing, competent. And utterly fake.
Not one founding member in sight.
They werenāt bad, mind you. Justā¦ someone else. A Foreigner cover band trading under the original name, like a haunted jukebox stuffed with licensing contracts.
This, friends, is the Ship of Theseus with a tour schedule.
And itās not just bands. IBM, once the king of typewriters and tabulating machines, now sells cloud services and AI consultancy. Walgreens, which began as a soda fountain and friendly neighbourhood chemist, now sells LED dog collars and pregnancy tests under buzzing fluorescent lights.
These arenāt companies. Theyāre brands in drag, corporate necromancers chanting the old names to animate new bodies.
But why stop there?
America isnāt America. Not the one of powdered wigs and musketed revolutionaries. No Founding Fathersā¢ roam the marble halls, only interns, lobbyists, and PR-tested careerists impersonating ideals they no longer understand. Britain? Please. The Queen is dead, and so is the Empire. France has revolted so many times that theyāve essentially speed-run regime change into a lifestyle brand.
And letās not get too smug. You arenāt even you anymore, not really. Cells replace themselves, beliefs crumble and reform, memories rot and rewrite. Youāre a psychological Foreigner tribute band, just with more trauma and less pyrotechnics.
So hereās the rub: everything persists by pretending. Thatās the deal. Names survive, structures remain, but the guts are swapped out, piece by piece, until weāre clapping along to something we no longer recognise, wearing merch from a band that no longer exists.
And we call it continuity.
NB: After a dozen Midjourney prompts, I decided to stop and use this one. Ships of Theseus are as rare as centaurs.
I recently wrote an article on my disdain for Jordan Peterson. (A cathartic exercise, I assure you.) But as I was busy sharpening my polemic, my so-called writing assistant ā autocorrect ā decided it fancied itself a philosopher, chipping in with some of the most spectacularly unhelpful suggestions Iāve encountered this side of a Facebook comment thread.
Is wrong bad?
In the first instance, autocorrect took issue with my phrasing:
And by wrong, I mean I disagree with himā¦
This, apparently, was too much for it. The poor dear couldnāt recognise the parallel sentence structure, or the rhetorical flourish at work. No, it suggested replacing wrong with bad. Because why not destroy the symmetry and nuance in one fell swoop?
Image: Is wrong bad?
Obviously, the second wrong is a riff on the first. To replace wrong with bad would be incorrectāwrong, if you will. Some might say bad. But I digress. The point is: the logic holds, and autocorrectās intervention doesnāt.
Is bad evil?
As if that werenāt enough, round two delivered an even greater affront:
But hereās where my patience truly snaps: Petersonās prescriptivism. His eagerness to spew what I see as bad ideology dressed up as universal truthā¦
Autocorrect, in its infinite wisdom, suggested I swap bad for evil. Ah yes, because evil is precisely what I wantāa term dripped in moral absolutism and ideological baggage.
Image: Is bad evil?
First, autocorrect, might I suggest you check out Nietzscheās Genealogy of Good and Evil before piping up? Perhaps then youād grasp the not-so-subtle difference between bad and evilāa distinction that, in moral philosophy, rather matters.
And now my book titles arenāt safe eitherā¦
Even as I write this post, the machine assaults me with a suggestion to rename the title of my book recommendation. O! the humanity. Is nothing sacred?
Image: Autocorrect strikes again
Final thoughts
Autocorrect may be marvellous for spotting typos and the occasional rogue comma, but when it tries its hand at philosophy, the result is about as elegant as a rhinoceros in a tutu. Dear autocorrect: stick to spelling. Leave the nuance to the humans.
I donāt like most of Jordan Petersonās positions. There ā Iāve said it. The man, once ubiquitous, seems to have faded into the woodwork, though no doubt his disciples still cling to his every word as if he were a modern-day oracle. But recently, I caught a clip of him online, and it dredged up the same bad taste, like stumbling upon an old, forgotten sandwich at the back of the fridge.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic
Letās be clear. My distaste for Peterson isnāt rooted in petty animosity. Itās because his material is, in my view, derivative and wrong. And by wrong, I mean I disagree with him ā a subtle distinction, but an important one. Thereās nothing inherently shameful about being derivative. We all are, to some extent. No thinker sprouts fully-formed from the head of Zeus. The issue is when youāre derivative and act as if youāve just split the atom of human insight.
Peterson tips his hat to Nietzsche ā fair enough ā but buries his far greater debt to Jung under layers of self-mythologising. He parades his ideas before audiences, many of whom lack the background to spot the patchwork, and gaslights them into believing theyāre witnessing originality. Theyāre not. Theyāre witnessing a remixed greatest-hits album, passed off as a debut.
Image: Gratuitous, mean-spirited meme.
Now, I get it. My ideas, too, are derivative. Sometimes itās coincidence ā great minds and all that ā but when I trace the thread back to its source, I acknowledge it. Nietzsche? Subjectivity of morality. Foucault? Power dynamics. Wittgenstein? The insufficiency of language. I owe debts to many more: Galen Strawson, Richard Rorty, Raymond Geuss ā the list goes on, and Iād gladly share my ledger. But Peterson? The man behaves as though he invented introspection.
And when I say I disagree, letās not confuse that with some claim to divine epistemic certainty. I donāt mean heās objectively wrong (whatever that means in the grand circus of philosophy). I mean, I disagree. If I did, well, we wouldnāt be having this conversation, would we? Thatās the tragicomedy of epistemology: so many positions, so little consensus.
But hereās where my patience truly snaps: Petersonās prescriptivism. His eagerness to spew what I see as bad ideology dressed up as universal truth. Take his stance on moral objectivismāpossibly his most egregious sin. He peddles this as if morality were some Platonic form, gleaming and immutable, rather than what it is: a human construct, riddled with contingency and contradiction.
And letās not even get started on his historical and philosophical cherry-picking. His commentary on postmodern thought alone is a masterclass in either wilful misreading or, more likely, not reading at all. Straw men abound. Bogeymen are conjured, propped up, and ritually slaughtered to rapturous applause. Itās intellectually lazy and, frankly, beneath someone of his ostensible stature.
I can only hope weāve seen the last of this man in the public sphere. And if not? Well, may he at least reform his waysāthough I shanāt be holding my breath.
This title may be misleading. What I do is render a similar prompt but alter the decade. I’m neither an art historian nor a comic aficionado, so I can’t comment on the accuracy. What do you think?
Let’s go back in time. First, here’s the basic prompt en franƧais:
Mirror, mirror on the wall, let’s dispense with all of the obvious quips up front. I almost feel I should apologise for the spate of Midjourney posts ā almost.
It should be painfully apparent that I’ve been noodling with Midjourney lately. I am not an accomplished digital artist, so I struggle. At times, I’m not sure if it’s me or it. Today, I’ll focus on mirrors.
Midjourney has difficulties rendering certain things. Centaurs are one. Mirrors, another. Whilst rendering vampires, another lesser struggle for the app, it became apparent that mirrors are not a forte. Here are some examples. Excuse the nudity. I’ll get to that later.
Prompt: cinematic, tight shot, photoRealistic light and shadow, exquisite details, delicate features, emaciated sensual female vampire waif with vampire fangs, many tattoos, wearing crucifix necklace, gazes into mirror, a beam of moonlight shines on her face in dark mausoleum interior, toward camera, facing camera, black mascara, long dark purple hair, Kodak Portra 400 with a Canon EOS R5
Ignore the other aspects of the images and focus on the behaviour or misbehaviour of the mirrors.
Image: Panel of vampire in a mirror.
Most apparent is the fact that vampires don’t have a reflection, but that’s not my nit. In the top four images, the reflection is orientated in the same direction as the subject. I’m only pretty sure that’s not how mirrors operate. In row 3, column 1, it may be correct. At least it’s close. In row 3, column 2 (and 4,2), the mirror has a reflection. Might there be another mirror behind the subject reflecting back? It goes off again in 4, 1, first in reflecting two versions of one subject. Also, notice that the subject’s hand, reaching the mirror, is not reflected. The orientation of the eyes is also suspect.
Image: Vampire in a mirror.
Here, our subject looks at the camera whilst her reflection looks at her.
Image: Vampire in a mirror.
Sans reflection, perhaps this is a real vampire. Her fangs are concealed by her lips?
Image: Vampire in a mirror.
Yet, another.
Image: Vampires in mirrors.
And more?
Image: Vampires in mirrors.
On the left, we have another front-facing reflection of a subject not looking into the mirror, and it’s not the same woman. Could it be a reflection of another subject ā the woman is (somewhat) looking at.
On the right, whose hand is that in the mirror behind the subject?
Image: Vampires in mirrors.
These are each mirrors. The first is plausible. The hands in the second are not a reflection; they grasp the frame. In the third and fourth, where’s the subject? The fangs appear to be displaced in the fourth.
Image: Vampires in mirrors.
In this set, I trust we’ve discovered a true vampire having no reflection.
Image: Vampires in mirrors.
This last one is different still. It marks another series where I explored different comic book art styles, otherwise using the same prompt. Since it’s broken mirrors, I include it. Only the second really captures the 1980s style.
Remembering that, except for the first set of images, the same prompt was used. After the first set, the term ‘sensual’ has to be removed, as it was deemed to render offensive results. To be fair, the first set probably would be considered offensive to Midjourney, though it was rendered anyway.
It might be good to note that most of the images that were rendered without the word ‘sensual’ contain no blatant nudity. It’s as if the term itself triggers nudity because the model doesn’t understand the nuance. Another insufficiency of language is the inability to discern sensuality from sexuality, another human failing.
I decided to test my ‘sensual’ keyword hypothesis, so I entered a similar prompt but in French.
In the first, we not only have a woman sans reflection, but disembodied hands grip the frame. In the second, a Grunge woman appears to be emerging from a mirror, her shoes reflected in the mirror beneath her. The last two appear to be reflections sans subject.
Notice, too, that the prompt calls for ‘une collier crucifix‘, so when the subject is not facing the viewer, the cross is rendered elsewhere, hence the cross on the back of the thigh and the middle of the back. Notice, too, the arbitrary presence of crosses in the environment, another confusion of subject and world.
That’s all for now. Next, I’ll take a trip through the different comic art styles over some decades.
Philosophics 