The title may have given this away, but my parents are in their eighties, an absurdity on the face of it, because some primitive part of my brain still files them under ‘adults’ – people who understand the performance of being alive.
Years ago, against my father’s wishes, my mother took a job as a waitress. His objection came out with that antique domestic authority that probably ought to be preserved in amber: No wife of mine is going to work. There it is. The marital constitution in a single sentence. Not an argument – rather, by decree. Still, she worked.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
It’s been years since she held a paid job, but in retirement, she seems to have lost more than employment. She’s lost a structure of demand. She is bored out of her gourd or tree or whatever. Left alone with an unfilled day, she putters, tidies, wipes, folds, rearranges, and complains – rinse and repeat. Sisyphus would be proud. And the complaint isn’t incidental; it’s part of the ritual. The labour gives the grievance somewhere to reside.
There’s a peculiar mercy in not being too useful.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
This creates an odd etiquette for everyone around her. One has to be careful not to interfere too much. Don’t clean everything; efficiently eliminate tasks; show up flushed with modern virtue and liberate her from the very thing that’s keeping the day from opening its jaws. Offer help, accept the refusal, move on without guilt. There’s a peculiar mercy in not being too useful.
Once the housework is done – or once it reaches the temporary truce by pause – the restlessness comes back. The ourobouros resumes its self-consumption. Then she needs to walk, drive, shop, bake, browse, fiddle, inspect, rearrange, and escape – more infinite loop, though only seemingly so. Anything to distract her from the long flat fact of being alive without a timetable. Employment used to do that. Marriage did that. Children did that. The household still does that. Now the old structures only remain as gestures, but gestures can still hold a person upright, as they had before, but with more salience.
A different version of this appeared with my mother-in-law, who had dementia. To occupy her, we’d give her silver to polish, or napkins to fold. There wasn’t a real need for the silver to shine, and the napkins, once folded, could be unfolded and dropped back on the pile to repeat the process. Like Keynes’s worker digging holes to fill them in again, the point wasn’t production. The point was occupation. The task didn’t need to move the world forward, as if it did in any case. It only needed to hold the day in place.
That sounds cruel when you describe it abstractly, as if we were tricking her into labour, but you’d be confusing this with Capitalism. The real cruelty would have been leaving her unmoored – nothing for the hands to do whilst the mind searched for a room it could still recognise. Folding napkins wasn’t housework in any economic sense. It was a small architecture of reassurance. A way of letting purpose survive after purpose had lost its object. even if the sense of purpose had long left the building.
There’s a distinction here, though it isn’t clean. My mum’s rituals are self-maintaining. They belong to a life trained by domestic obligation, by marriage, by an older settlement between gender and labour, by all the small cruelties that once got to call themselves normal. My mother-in-law’s rituals were externally staged – not expressions of domestic identity so much as acts of care arranged by other people. Whilst all purpose is fictional, one woman kept her purpose through the fiction of inherited duty; the other was offered purpose as a merciful fiction. The border between the two is porous, naturally, because reality has never agreed to respect our categories.
I’m not recommending any of this to anyone. I’m just noticing it, which is what we writers call ‘thinking’ when we want to dodge responsibility.
Abstract freedom isn’t the same thing as a life you can actually inhabit.
I’m a feminist the way I’m a humanist: sincerely, but with reservations about the slogans. I don’t think this is how a woman should live. I don’t believe domestic labour is some mystical feminine vocation – as if dusting were an ontological destiny and the Hoover a sacrament. But I also can’t bring myself to take it away from her. Abstract freedom isn’t the same thing as a life you can actually inhabit. Sometimes emancipation arrives too late to provide new habits. Sometimes the cage has become furniture.
This doesn’t justify the cage. It only complicates the fantasy that removing it leaves behind a clean liberated self, glowing like a freshly unboxed appliance. People aren’t appliances, although civilisation has made several brave attempts.
The mistake is assuming purpose has to be justified by productivity. That’s the capitalist infection, of course: if nothing’s produced, nothing happened. But most of ordinary life isn’t productive in that sense. It’s regulatory. Consolatory. Rhythmic. A person folds the napkin, wipes the counter, polishes the spoon, walks round the block, checks the same cupboard twice, tells the same story, asks the same question, rearranges the same shelf, writes the same sentence again with one adjective changed and calls it progress – like an LLM but with less personality. These acts don’t redeem existence. They just stop it arriving all at once.
As for me, I don’t have a purpose either, so I write. Ostensibly, this is my own form of puttering. My desk is her kitchen counter. My paragraphs are folded towels. I arrange sentences, complain about them, rearrange them, and call the whole performance ‘vocation’ because compulsive symbolic housekeeping looks poor on a business card.
There’s a shabby tenderness in this, though one shouldn’t make too much of it. The old trick isn’t really meaning; it’s occupation, rhythm – having something to do with one’s hands whilst the mind declines to look directly at the wall. Some people clean. Some people shop. Some shoot fentanyl. Some become serial killers, CEOs, presidents, consultants, motivational speakers, or other recognised hazards. Some of us write essays about our mothers and pretend it counts as insight. We all find our own ways to bide the time until we die.
In the end, nobody gets out alive. The least we can do is not steal from each other the shabby little rituals that make the waiting bearable.
Video: On a related note. Jonny talks about Setiya and atelic activities.
Self-help, pop psychology, LinkedIn, and the metaphysics smuggled into advice
Self-improvement books rarely begin by telling you what it believes a person is. That would be too honest, and honesty is bad for conversion funnels. Instead, it begins with verbs.
Choose. Decide. Commit. Heal. Optimise. Manifest. Reframe. Own. Level up. Set boundaries. Do the work. Become intentional. Stop self-sabotaging. Unlock your potential. Be your authentic self. Take radical responsibility.
The vocabulary shifts depending on the tradition. One speaks of healing, one of discipline, one of nervous systems, one of leadership, one of purpose, one of abundance. What they share is not a doctrine but a grammar: a way of arranging the person before the advice begins. The subject is always inward, sovereign, and temporarily malfunctioning. The problem is always locatable. The solution is always available, often for $29.99 or in a free webinar that becomes a masterclass for $299.
But here is where the easy cynicism runs out of road, because the people writing this stuff — by and large — believe it.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
That is the part of the critique that tends to get skipped, because it is less satisfying than imagining a cynical operator deliberately strip-mining the anxious for recurring revenue. Most self-help authors arrived at their framework the same way their readers are about to: they were struggling, they encountered a grammar that organised their experience, they felt the specific relief of suddenly being intelligible to themselves, and they mistook that relief for discovery. Then they wrote a book about it. The author is not the shark. The author is a previous customer who graduated to the front of the room.
The framework they found — and are now evangelising — is what I call, in The Architecture of Encounter, an ontological grammar: a set of prior commitments about what kind of thing a person is, which arrives upstream of any specific advice and quietly determines what advice is even thinkable. You cannot recommend reframing without first presuming a self transparent enough to observe its own cognitions and sovereign enough to revise them. You cannot prescribe boundaries without presuming a self whose territory is violable and whose autonomy is the relevant moral unit. You cannot offer alignment without presuming a self that has a true direction, temporarily obscured, patiently awaiting discovery through either a values exercise on page forty-seven or a retreat in somewhere with good lighting and worse plumbing.
The grammar arrives first. The advice follows from it. And the person reading it is not being shown a mirror. They are being issued a lens.
The lens finds its wearer. “Take ownership” resonates with people already invested in the idea of themselves as agents who have been insufficiently deliberate — it confirms the worldview while appearing to challenge the behaviour. “Your nervous system is dysregulated” resonates with people for whom the moralised language of laziness and discipline has become intolerable; here is a vocabulary that removes the accusation while retaining the explanation, which is a genuinely useful service even if the mechanism on offer is borrowed loosely from neuroscience and the rest is borrowed from hope. “Mindset is your prison” resonates with people who need their suffering to remain individually tractable — solvable, that is, without anyone having to redistribute anything expensive or inconvenient. “Manifest your abundance” resonates with people who find both structural analysis and self-blame equally unappealing and would like a third option involving the universe.
Each grammar finds its congregation. Which is precisely the problem.
A grammar propagates not because it has been tested against alternatives or evaluated for efficacy, but because it maps onto a prior self-conception cleanly enough to produce the sensation of being understood. The entrepreneur already believes in agency-language: execution, discipline, ownership, leverage. The book that tells them their discipline is the differentiator is not offering new information; it is offering comfortable confirmation in a more expensive format. The therapeutic reader already suspects their relational difficulties involve something called attachment. The book that tells them so is not illuminating; it is flattering them with their own vocabulary. The LinkedIn professional already believes their career is a project of self-authorship. The thought leader who tells them to communicate their value and build authentic leadership is not giving them a strategy; they are giving them a liturgy.
The community that forms around a grammar is a church, not a seminar. It has converts, not students. And like most churches, it is considerably better at solidarity than at falsifiability.
This matters because the mechanism by which self-help content spreads — resonance, recognition, testimonial, referral — is entirely decoupled from the mechanism by which we would establish that it works. A sentence resonates because it fits a grammar the reader has already adopted. That tells you something real: about the anxieties structuring a cohort’s self-understanding, the stories they are trying to make liveable, the descriptions of themselves they find tolerable or intolerable. It does not tell you whether the intervention produces the claimed effect, in whom, under what conditions, and compared with what alternative. Those are duller questions. Less shareable. They do not fit on a carousel post with a soft gradient and a mountain.
Horoscopes also resonate. So do conspiracy theories, national myths, and the first chapter of any book you buy during a difficult stretch of your life.
The point is not that the advice is necessarily wrong. Sometimes “set boundaries” is exactly right. Sometimes “take ownership” is precisely what someone has been avoiding hearing. Sometimes a new frame genuinely reorganises attention in ways that produce durable change, and the person is measurably better off for having found it. None of that is in question. The question is whether a framework that produced one useful instance has any reliable claim to truth beyond that instance — and whether the person reaching for it during a difficult period is in any position to make that evaluation carefully.
They usually are not. That is not stupidity. That is the condition of being in difficulty: you reach for intelligibility, and whoever offers it collects a great deal of credit. The problem is not the reaching. The problem is that the self-help ecosystem — including the parts of it operated by entirely sincere people who believe every word they publish — has no reliable mechanism for distinguishing frameworks that help from frameworks that merely feel like help while the underlying situation continues undisturbed. The true believer and the true seeker share the same vulnerability. Both reached for a grammar. One of them got to write the book.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
It is also worth noting that commerce is the easy villain here, and an overrated one. The same dynamic runs through pop psychology, where the grammar of individual cognitive mechanisms tends to dominate because it produces legible interventions in a way that structural analysis never quite does; blaming cognition is tractable, blaming the organisation of society is dispiriting and hard to monetise, even when it is accurate. It runs through LinkedIn, where the grammar is not therapeutic but managerial — the self reimagined as an optimisable professional asset — and where burnout becomes a boundary failure, precarity becomes an invitation to upskill, and alienation becomes a purpose deficit. Nobody on LinkedIn is necessarily trying to extract money from anyone. Many of them are trying to be useful, or to be visible, or both, which is human enough. But the grammar they are deploying disappears material conditions into interior architecture with the same efficiency as the most cynically produced wellness content. The mechanism does not require a profit motive. It requires only a grammar and an audience that already shares it.
The useful response to all of this is not wholesale dismissal, which would be too easy and almost certainly wrong. Some people need clearer habits. Some need better descriptions of their own conduct. Some need permission to stop tolerating what they have been tolerating. Some need a vocabulary that makes their own patterns visible, and a framework — however approximate — is better than none. These are real services. The fact that they are sometimes delivered inside a dubious metaphysics of the person does not automatically negate them.
But there is a question worth developing the habit of asking, before the grammar installs itself: what kind of person does this advice presume? Is the self it describes sovereign, where I am actually constrained? Wounded where I am actually responsible? Deficient where I am actually being exploited? Misaligned where I am actually just bored? In need of self-belief, where I am in need of rent?
These questions are less fun than a morning routine designed by someone who has never had a difficult commute. They do not come with a community or a badge or an accountability partner who sends encouraging voice notes. But they do something the grammar on its own cannot: they ask whether the patient described in the diagnosis is the one actually in the room.
Most self-help skips that step. So, not infrequently, does the person who wrote it. They found a grammar that made their experience legible, felt the relief that comes from that, and never quite got around to distinguishing legibility from truth. Which is understandable. It is also, for everyone downstream of that decision, a problem.
I don’t occupy this shared space of ontological grammar, so I call bollox.
Full Disclosure: This article was drafted by ChatGPT 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 upon a discussion of my perspective on self-help, pop psychology, and LinkedIn. I am busy with other projects, but I wanted to share my position. Apologies to those who don’t prefer LLM-authored or assisted articles.
My goal is to articulate the connexion between ontological grammar commitments, the noted disciplines, and more. As should be evident, I am not a fan of self-help or some adjacent modalities.
I’ve selected the cover colour for Architecture of Willing. It’s monograph number 3 in a series. I chose a dark aubergine-violet colour (#4b256b) because I like the contrast, and it is different to the other 2.
I discussed Chapter 1 of The Architecture of Willing in a recent post, as well as a piece on my review process. I’ll be sharing more presently. I expect it to be completed by the end of May, but time will tell. Even though I’ve gone through seven revision passes, errors and fixes continue to crop up all the way to production – in fact, even afterwards.
Why Dating Is Not Shopping, No Matter How Many Apps Insist Otherwise
Firstly, be nice, and remember that I’m a recovering economist, so I can’t fully abandon this lens. There’s a concept in economics called the double coincidence of wants. For barter to work, I must have what you want, and you must have what I want, simultaneously, in the right quantities. The implausibility of this – that two strangers would arrive at the same moment, each holding exactly what the other needs – is traditionally the justification for money. Money decouples giving from receiving. It lets me sell my grain today and buy your lumber next month. Problem solved. It is tempting, and initially illuminating, to notice that dating is a double coincidence of wants with no money.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Two people must simultaneously possess what the other desires. There’s no abstract medium of exchange. Listen, I don’t make up the rules, but you can’t deposit romantic capital in a bank and draw on it later with a different partner. Every transaction must clear bilaterally, in real time, between specific parties. The reason dating is difficult, on this account, is the same reason barter is difficult: the coordination problem is enormous.
This is a genuinely useful analogy – for about sixty-nine seconds. After that, it begins to collapse. And the way it collapses turns out to be more interesting than the analogy itself.
NB: I swear I started this post before I saw Louisa’s. Damns algorithms.
Wants can’t be enumerated
In an economy, wants are at least notionally specifiable. You want grain, I want lumber. We can write a contract. In attraction, nobody can write the contract, because nobody knows the terms. You can list proxies – symmetry, wit, income, dentition – but the list never cashes out the phenomenon. There’s always a residue. Someone ticks every box and provokes nothing. Someone ticks none of them and provokes everything. The attributes aren’t the attraction. They’re at best rough correlates of something that resists decomposition.
Evolutionary psychology claims to have the list – fertility signals, resource indicators, and bilateral symmetry – but this is just dressing up economic grammar. It takes the lived phenomenology of attraction, which is irreducibly aesthetic, and rewrites it as a covert optimisation problem. The evo-psych account is the friend who explains why you should find someone attractive and then looks puzzled when you don’t.
Tolerances are fuzzy, interactive, and opaque
Even granting an approximate list of attributes, each one functions not as a threshold but as a band of acceptability. And the bands interact. A deficit in punctuality can be compensated by a surplus in making-you-laugh-until-you-cry. But the exchange rate between these dimensions isn’t fixed, it’s not linear, and almost certainly not conscious. Nobody’s running this calculation. If you ask them to formalise it, they’d produce a confabulation, not a report.
The evaluator is noisy
Kahneman’s Noise documents a finding that should alarm anyone who believes in stable preferences: the same agent, evaluating the same inputs, will produce different outputs on different occasions – not because of bias (which is at least systematic and therefore correctable) but because of irreducible stochastic variability. The judge sentences harshly before lunch and leniently after. Same person, same case, different output.
Applied to attraction, means that the person you’d swipe right on at nine in the morning, you might pass over at eleven at night – or vice versa, as the case might be <winkie>– not because you’ve learnt anything new, but because you aren’t a stable instrument of measurement. The evaluation function drifts across a single day. Across months and years, it’s rebuilt entirely.
The evaluator is path-dependent
Every prior relationship recalibrates the apparatus. Someone who’s been betrayed doesn’t simply move ‘trustworthiness’ higher on their list. Their entire perceptual system for detecting trustworthiness has been restructured. The sensor’s been rebuilt by its prior readings. In no market economy do my preferences over apples change because I once had a bad experience buying oranges from a particular vendor. In relationships, this is the norm.
Returns are asymmetric
Standard preference theory assumes diminishing marginal returns, and this holds for attraction in the obvious direction: the tenth bunch of flowers yields less delight than the first. But the inverse does not hold symmetrically. The absence of a previously supplied attribute often produces increasing marginal disutility. You habituate to presence but sensitise to withdrawal. The utility of gaining X and the disutility of losing X are not mirror images. The preference function is path-dependent in a way that wrecks any static equilibrium model.
Search space is radically local
And all of this assumes the candidates are available for evaluation. They mostly aren’t. Your evaluation function, however sophisticated or broken, only gets applied to whatever washes up in your vicinity – no offence to Ariel. Your so-called soulmate might reside in Istanbul, but you live in London, and you don’t share a language, and you’ll never meet. This isn’t a logistical barrier. It’s a legibility barrier. You could stand next to this person in an airport and the aesthetic response function would not even fire, because the medium through which half of attraction is constituted – conversation, the texture of someone’s verbal mind – is simply unavailable. The instrument requires an input format that the candidate can’t provide. Consider you spy this person across an expanse, gain enough courage to introduce yourself, and they don’t speak your language. Body language will only compensate so far.
Local maxima
The cumulative force of all this is simple and devastating: we are stuck on local maxima. The search space is computationally intractable. The evaluation function is noisy and path-dependent. The attributes resist enumeration. The tolerance bands are fuzzy and interactive. The returns are asymmetric. The search is geographically and linguistically truncated. And so agents do what any rational agent would do under these conditions: they satisfice. They adopt a threshold of ‘good enough’ – a threshold which is itself endogenous to all the noise and path-dependence described above – and they stop searching when they cross it.
This is not a failure of nerve. It is the only coherent strategy available to an agent who can’t identify, or even in principle define, the global optimum. Committing to a local maximum is the rational play, precisely because optimising is impossible 0150 at least legible in the sense of James C. Scott.
Which makes the cultural mythology of ‘the one’ a rather cruel grammatical artefact. It presupposes a global search that no one has conducted or could conduct. It borrows its intelligibility from the economic grammar of optimal allocation – there is a best match, you just have to find it – and projects it onto a domain where ‘best’ has no operational definition, the search is radically local, and the searcher is a different instrument on different days.
Los Angeles, and why it matters
I lived in Los Angeles from twenty-one to twenty-seven, in the early to mid-1980s. I loved it. It was my favourite place on earth. I returned to LA from thirty-five to forty-five, and it was just another place.
It may have turned out that way even had I never left. The point is not that Los Angeles changed – though of course it did. The point is that I changed. Different profession, different situation, different appetites, different saliences… The evaluation function that produced ‘favourite place on earth’ at twenty-three was a fundamentally different instrument from the one that produced ‘just another place’ at forty. No longer a club rat on the prowl, I walked the same streets and saw a different city, because the perceptual apparatus that constructed the city as an experienced object had been rebuilt by fifteen years of living.
‘Favourite place on earth’ and ‘just another place’ aren’t two judgements issued by one stable subject upon one stable object. They’re two outcomes produced by two historically different configurations of salience, appetite, profession, circumstance, and age.
Los Angeles is useful here precisely because it’s not a person – RHCP, not withstanding. It lets you see the structure before sentiment starts mucking about with it.
We don’t even evaluate cities consistently across a lifetime. The same is true, more painfully, of persons.
The partner one adored at twenty-five may not have become deficient in any simple sense. The evaluative field changed. New dimensions became salient, old ones lost force, tolerances narrowed or widened, and costs are reweighted. The same partner now appears under a different aspect, because the apparatus of appraisal has been rebuilt in the interim.
And here, three claims should remain separate: the object may change; the evaluator may change; and the relation between them may change even if neither has altered dramatically. This third one prevents this from collapsing into a banal ‘people grow’ sermon. Sometimes the drift isn’t a defect in either party. It’s a change in fit.
Many:many
It would also be a mistake to think any of this operates as a 1:1 match. The dimensional space isn’t shared. Any two people will overlap on some dimensions, diverge on others, and be mutually illegible on others still – dimensions where one party’s response function is active, and the other’s doesn’t even register the input. He cares intensely about how she loads the dishwasher. She doesn’t experience dishwasher-loading as a dimension at all. It’s not disagreement. It is incommensurability.
A long relationship isn’t a transaction. It’s two non-congruent evaluative systems attempting to maintain a shared narrative of congruence as the terrain shifts beneath them. The miracle isn’t finding someone who matches. The miracle is sustaining a workable fiction that two-dimensional spaces are more commensurable than they are.
Consider the statistically perfect match – bilateral alignment across every operationalised dimension. Even if you could construct such a thing, it would be a snapshot: a cross-section of two moving systems that happened to align at time t. By t+1, the dimensional spaces have already drifted. The statistical portrait is a death mask of a living process.
And here is a green-eyed test. Suppose the perfect match has green eyes. It doesn’t follow that a blue-eyed twin – identical in every other respect – would or wouldn’t provoke the same response. Because whatever was operative in the encounter was not an attribute, or a bundle of attributes, but something that emerged from the specific interaction and can’t be decomposed back into the components that produced it. The entire enterprise of algorithmic matching is cataloguing attributes on the assumption that the attributes are the attraction. It is like analysing a joke by listing its phonemes.
The spot market and the long game
Let’s consider one-night stands as an example to clarify the taxonomy. A one-night stand really is the nearest thing romance has to a spot transaction. The time horizon is short, the narrative load is low, path-dependence is weak, and local salience dominates. The calculus is narrow and immediate. The economic grammar almost applies. Whatever gets you through the night.
A long relationship isn’t a transaction at all, but an evolving coordination problem between changing evaluators. The longer the time horizon, the more layers of critique come into play, and the more absurd the matching grammar becomes. Over time, relationships are not discrete exchanges but moving equilibria between non-stationary systems. That’s why long partnerships are so fragile and so impressive when they endure.
Post hoc rationalisation, or: the story we agree to tell
Having arrived at their local maximum, both parties then construct a narrative in which the outcome was the product of discernment rather than constraint.
‘I knew she was the one when…’ isn’t a report. It’s a reconstruction – a story imposed on a stochastic process to make it legible in the grammar of rational choice. The same person, encountered on a different Tuesday or in a different postcode, might never have registered at all. But the narrative requires necessity, so necessity is confabulated.
And it runs in both directions. She thinks it was his quiet confidence. He thinks it was the argument about Godard. Both are post hoc pattern-matching on noise – selecting from the welter of early interactions the moments that fit the ‘recognition’ narrative, and discarding the rest. It’s survivorship bias applied to one’s own love life.
This also explains the peculiar ferocity of heartbreak after the narrative has been constructed. What collapses is not merely the relationship but the explanatory framework. The story that made the local maximum feel like a global one disintegrates, and the agent is returned to the raw landscape: noisy, path-dependent, locally constrained, and aesthetically illegible. The grief is partly about the person. It’s also about the loss of the rationalisation that made the search feel concluded – losing the construct of the person rather than the person, per se.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
Enfin
The dating app asks you what you want as though you’re ordering from a menu, when what is actually happening is that the menu is rewriting itself based on what you had for lunch yesterday, how much sleep you got, and that thing your ex said in 2019 that you think you are over.
We don’t find ‘the one’ – sorry, Neo. We become different readers of the same world, and occasionally manage to remain legible to one another for a while. Which is, if you stop demanding it be a fairy tale, quite a lot.
I’ve been experimenting with different cover designs most of the day. I’m leaning toward this one.
It’s intentionally minimalist, uses a story element – the red button – and avoids a box, which had been in some earlier design candidates.
I’ve always published fiction as Ridley Park, as I shall continue, but I usually get into a mindset of that persona. For The Box, I didn’t, and it doesn’t feel like that, so I opted to use my own name when I release this.
Yet again, I solicited designers, but they inevitably ask what I am looking for. Honestly, if I knew, I’d do it myself. I am not opposed to design assistance or even execution, but it needs to be upstream and not down.
I’ll not dawdle here because I need to save details for the release. I just wanted to share where I am at the end of the day.
I find myself interesting, not in a narcissistic way, but in examination.
I wrote an academic blog post (and then a couple others, 1, 2) to clarify a nonfiction book that commenced as an academic essay. The blog post spawned a novella (pending, in revision), which in turn spawned both a short story (pending novella) and another academic essay (pending novella). With the short story, I plan to release meta commentary and background around the novella.
This seems like an unusual ecosystem, but it’s how my brain operates – on inputs and synthesis. Having completed The Architecture of Encounter, itself a follow-up to A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis and the second of a planned series of three, but hard-pressed to call it a trilogy.
This post might make more sense when the unfinished projects are complete, but until then, consider it a status update.
A bit more…
The reason for the short story is that the novella ends intentionally ambiguous, and the short story is a disconnected possible resolution. But I want the novella to remain open to interpretation, as is my modus operandi in many cases. I had considered including it as an epilogue – and I may do this in a future edition – but for now, I don’t want to prematurely close the discussion.
If I can get someone to publish the short story in a collection, that would be great, but I’ll otherwise publish it with the notes I mentioned above.
To quote The Critical Drinker, ‘Anyway, that’s all I’ve got today. Go away, now‘.
NB: I reviewed the credentials of the hosts and revised my critique at the end of this piece.
I joined a scheduled close reading of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil recently and came away less refreshed than exasperated. I will spare the platform and the hosts, not out of charity exactly, but because the problem is broader than two particular men fumbling through a canonical text in public. What disappointed me wasn’t that they disagreed with Nietzsche, nor even that they may have misunderstood him in places. Misreading is inevitable. The problem was that they seemed not to have brought much of a reading to begin with.
I had read Beyond Good and Evil years ago and thought a return to it might do me some good, or at least less evil than the usual intellectual content mill. The format sounded promising enough: two interested hosts working through the introduction live, sentence by sentence, in a supposedly close reading. Both had apparently read the book before. One therefore assumed they might arrive with at least a provisional grasp of its architecture, key provocations, and habitual traps. That assumption, in the event, turned out to be embarrassingly optimistic.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
As one host read line by line, the discussion lurched forward by way of hesitant paraphrase, speculative gloss, and the occasional verbal shrug. He offered the more substantive guesses, such as they were, while the other contributed mostly vague assent, half-memory, and the sort of foggy commentary one gives when one dimly recalls having once encountered a difficult book in a previous phase of life. It was less a close reading than a public rehearsal of not quite knowing what one was doing.
Now, I am not demanding exegetical perfection. Nietzsche is not a writer one simply ‘gets’ and files away like a user manual. Nor am I naïve enough to think authorial intention settles everything. Barthes is right enough to remind us that the text exceeds the author’s sovereign control. But the death of the author is not a licence for the death of preparation. If one is going to host a close reading of a notoriously elliptical and performative philosopher, the least one might do is arrive having done some prior work. Read the introduction carefully beforehand. Refresh the major themes. Check the loaded terms. Develop an argument, or at least a point of view.
That point of view may be wrong. Fine. Better that than the contemporary preference for the curated shrug, where one mistakes visible uncertainty for intellectual seriousness. There is a difference between interpretive openness and simple lack of preparation. One is a virtue. The other is an aesthetic.
I find this especially grating because I cannot imagine teaching a class that way. When I taught, I’d spend hours preparing before entering the room. Not because I imagined myself infallible, but because students deserve more than watching a lecturer discover the material in real time. A formed point of view is not a dogma. It is a starting position. It gives the discussion shape, stakes, and resistance. Without it, one is not leading inquiry but merely simulating it.
The second host did little to improve matters. Rather than complicating or sharpening the reading, he mostly echoed the first. There was very little friction, and thus very little illumination. One of the virtues of reading Nietzsche in company is that he invites productive disagreement. He is slippery, aphoristic, ironic, and often strategic in his provocations. A good discussion can tease out the tensions in his prose, test competing emphases, and ask whether a claim is literal, tactical, genealogical, or satirical. None of that really happened. Instead, one host fumbled, and the other nodded. The result was a kind of interpretive ventriloquism in which agreement substituted for insight.
The accompanying chat made things worse, or perhaps simply made the missed opportunity more obvious. Viewers were offering questions and interpretations, yet the hosts largely ignored them. Aside from one participant, who seemed likely to have some prior relationship with them, the chat was treated as background furniture. This was especially irritating because the event was live. If one is going to perform reading in public, the public should not be reduced to silent witnesses of one’s uncertainty. Otherwise, the ‘community’ aspect is just branding, another little liturgy of digital participation in which the audience is invited to attend but not to matter.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic. To be honest, I am including this because I find it to be humorous.
To be fair, even when they did read from the chat, they handled those comments much as they handled Nietzsche: superficially, without much analytical pressure, as though any sentence placed before them deserved the same tone of vague consideration. This flattening effect was revealing. It suggested not generosity but a lack of discrimination. A close reading requires hierarchy, emphasis, and judgement. One must be able to say: this is a crucial phrase; this term matters; this apparent aside is actually structural; this comment in the chat opens something worth pursuing; that one does not. Without such judgement, everything becomes equally interesting, which is another way of saying that nothing really is.
What emerged, then, was not close reading but the theatre of close reading. The ritual gestures were all in place: slow pace, sentence-by-sentence attention, occasional lexical speculation, the performance of thoughtfulness. But the substance was strangely absent. One had the form of seriousness without much seriousness of form. It was analysis as ambience.
This points to a broader problem in online intellectual culture. Much of it now confuses exposure with engagement. To read a difficult text aloud is not yet to wrestle with it. To host a discussion is not yet to lead one. To hesitate publicly is not yet to think. Somewhere along the line, people began mistaking the visible performance of inquiry for inquiry itself. The result is a style of pseudo-seriousness in which the host need not know very much, so long as he can sound tentative in the correct register.
Nietzsche, of all people, deserves better than that. He is not an author who yields his force to the merely dutiful or the casually adjacent. He requires energy, suspicion, historical feel, and the willingness to risk a reading. One need not become a priest of correctness. But one should at least bring a sharpened knife to the table, rather than two butter spoons and a podcast voice.
What disappointed me, then, was not simply that these hosts stumbled. Everyone stumbles with Nietzsche. It was that the stumbling seemed to be the content. No deep framework, no clear prior preparation, little tension between the readers, and scant engagement with the audience. The whole affair felt less like a serious encounter with Beyond Good and Evil than a performance of cultural literacy: a way of being seen near an important book.
And perhaps that is the real irritation. One expects difficulty. One can even forgive error. What is harder to forgive is the peculiar modern tendency to make a spectacle of one’s underpreparedness and call it interpretation.
To be fair, I later learned that the co-host was not a philosopher by training but came from Literature. That in itself is no objection. Indeed, a pairing like that could have worked very well. Nietzsche is precisely the sort of writer who benefits from both conceptual and stylistic scrutiny. A philosopher can situate the argument, trace its targets, and identify the intellectual inheritance under pressure. A literary reader can pick up tone, irony, rhetorical staging, and the peculiar way Nietzsche so often performs thought rather than merely stating it.
The problem, then, was not the pairing but the execution. The session might have worked if both hosts had prepared properly and if each had leaned into his own strength. Instead, what emerged was a flatter sort of exchange, with the philosopher soliciting the literary co-host’s ‘opinion’ on semantic content as though interpretive adequacy were simply a matter of free-floating textual impressions. What was missing was any real division of labour, any methodological self-awareness, or any sense that different competences might illuminate different aspects of the text.
So glad I took time out to watch a short exchange between Rick Beato and Justin Hawkins on whether music is becoming content rather than art. The question is framed in musical terms, but it hardly stops there. The same corrosion is visible in writing, visual art, criticism, and now, with grim inevitability, in AI-mediated production more broadly. The disease is not confined to music. Music merely makes the symptoms easier to hear.
For music, my aversion to pop music goes back to my youth. I was a kid when the Beatles practically invented pop music, but they left it to grow and continued exploring. Sadly, as solo artists, they mainly – not always – failed and rested on their laurels in pop. It’s not that their version or any pop music is inherently unlistenable. Surely, it’s not, if only by the aspiration of the pop moniker, but it has no depth, no soul, as it were. Some make this argument for Organic food. In essence, it involves an appeal to nature fallacy.
Audio: Slightly off, but not bad, NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
My own aversion to much pop music begins there. It is not that pop is necessarily bad, nor even that it is always shallow. That would be too crude and too easy. The problem is that pop often presents itself less as an artistic act than as a consumption object engineered for immediate uptake: catchy, frictionless, emotionally legible, and just disposable enough to make room for the next one. It is built to circulate.
That, for me, is the difference between content and art. Art may be accessible, even popular, but it retains some residue that exceeds its delivery mechanism. It resists total reduction to utility. Content, by contrast, is made to be processed. It is optimised not for depth but for throughput. Its highest ambition is not transformation, but engagement.
This is why the question matters beyond music. Writing, too, now lives under the same pressure. One is increasingly expected to produce not essays, arguments, or works, but units of output: posts, threads, reactions, takes, summaries, explainers, and other forms of polished verbal debris. The point is no longer to say something worth dwelling on, but to remain visible within the churn.
The issue, then, is not simply whether one should consume AI-generated material. That framing is too pious and too easy. The more interesting question is what the consumer thinks they are consuming. If a reader, listener, or viewer wants only speed, familiarity, and surface competence, then AI content is not a scandal at all. It is the logical endpoint of a culture that has already demoted art into a deliverable.
This is where the fuss over labelling enters. Is it a principled demand for honesty, or merely a theatrical gesture by people who still want the aura of art whilst consuming content on industrial terms? Some of it is clearly protectionism. Some of it is virtue signalling. But not all of it is empty. The insistence on labelling betrays an intuition, however muddled, that authorship still matters, and that not all artefacts are equivalent merely because they occupy the same screen-space.
The deeper question is whether we still want art at all, or whether we merely want the aesthetic styling of art attached to things optimised for convenience. Once a culture learns to prefer seamless output over resistance, recognisability over risk, and quantity over form, it should not act surprised when machines begin to serve it perfectly. They are only completing a trajectory already chosen.
So no, the issue is not AI alone. AI is only the latest mirror held up to a public that has spent years confusing availability with value and polish with depth. The real question is not whether machines can make content. Plainly, they can. The question is whether we still possess the appetite, patience, and seriousness required for art.
Image: Full image because the cover version is truncated. Generated by Gemini Nano Banana.
I published the first version of this essay in February, arguing that the Frege–Geach problem, that three-score-year-old albatross around expressivism’s neck rests on a category error. Analytic philosophers were polite about it in the way that analytic philosophers are polite about things they intend to ignore. I don’t often revise my manuscripts, opting instead to publish a new and improved version, but the meat of this one remained strong and not worth revisiting as much as fortifying.
The trouble was that I’d dissolved the problem without resolving it. Good enough for me. Others were less convinced. Telling people they’ve been asking the wrong question is satisfying but insufficient without a better one. Version 1.1 tidied the prose. Version 1.2 does the actual work.
The new section (§4, if you’ve already read previous versions) introduces recruitable expressions – a broader class of expressions (moral predicates, thick evaluative terms, epistemic and institutional vocabulary) whose full functional load is attenuated under embedding whilst a thinner inferential profile remains available for reasoning. The standard of practical inferential adequacy replaces the demand for semantic identity: what ordinary reasoning requires is not invariance but inferential sufficiency. And the pattern isn’t peculiar to moral language – a noted goal –, which means Frege–Geach stops looking like a special embarrassment for expressivism and starts looking like one symptom of a general feature of how natural language handles multi-functional expressions under logical stress.
The essay is dissolved as a demand for unrestricted semantic invariance. It is resolved insofar as the behaviour it identifies is explained, predicted, and shown to be general.
The revised paper is available here, near the rest of my manuscripts:
I published an essay on the Frege–Geach problem in February. I published an update yesterday. I still wasn’t satisfied, so I engaged with several LLMs. This was my approach.
The involved LLMs were:
Claude
Grok
ChatGPT
Gemini
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic. (This summary misses the mark in some ways, but it brings up some interesting observations along the way.)
First, I fed them some documents in no particular order, my goal being to share my own knowledge and position on the purported problem.
I am interested in resolving the Frege–Geach problem, but it seems I can only dissolve it. This doesn’t appear to be adequate for some analytical philosophers. How might I get closer to resolving it? My main argument is that they are assuming that language is stronger than it is, and they don’t agree with my argument.
As the prompt notes and by design, many analytical philosophers are reluctant to grant the degree of insufficiency I take to be constitutive of natural language, especially where logical embedding is concerned. Evidently, that counts as my not wanting to play their game. From my perspective, they are committed to a different ontological grammar. What this means practically is that I need to present my solution proposal in their terms. This doesn’t mean their terms are right; problems are only relevant in their dialect, even though my argument is that all dialects are lossy – mine included.
Part of the challenge is that formal logic was invented precisely because ordinary language is imprecise, yet its standards are often retrofitted back onto natural language as though they revealed what language must have been doing all along.
Without sharing the entire play-by-play of the transcripts, I established my course of action. I’d dissolved the problem, but I hadn’t yet resolved it.
My initial intuition of several years ago was to argue that they were expecting too much from grammar. I’ll use a well-worn example. Follow these statements:
IF ‘Murder is wrong.’
THEN ‘If murder is wrong, then getting your brother to murder is wrong.’
SO ‘Getting your brother to murder is wrong.’
According to them, the embedded ‘murder is wrong‘ doesn’t make sense. Here’s their logic:
According to Ayer, moral statements are simply emotive. When one utters, ‘murder is wrong‘, they are really saying ‘Boo, murder‘ – ‘I don’t like murder‘.
If ‘murder‘ is defined as ‘killing disallowed by the state‘, then murder is wrong might be translated into ‘killing disallowed by the state is wrong’ or ‘what the state declares is wrong is wrong’, but we also know that the state makes many pronouncements, many of which carry no moral weight and others which are counter to expected moral positions – law does not equal moral, and vice versa. Let’s move on and revisit our statements:
IF ‘Boo to Murder is wrong.’
THEN ‘If boo to murder is wrong, then boo to getting your brother to murder is wrong.’
SO ‘Getting your brother to murder is wrong.’
My intuition was that the embedded clause does not perform the same linguistic act as the standalone assertion, even if the lexical material is repeated. We’re committing a category error. More crucially, the category it belongs to doesn’t exist, so it’s unspecified. It needs to be invented.
Although I struggled to find apt nomenclature, I settled on performance-sensitive expressions.
A parallel challenge is that the solution can’t be a simple carve-out for moral language. Whilst I feel that moral language does use its own grammar and semantics, I don’t expect analytical philosophers to accept this assertion, so the solution should be more generalisable. I’d need to demonstrate where else this conditional logic fails in the same manner.
ChatGPT had this to say in response to a draft:
The comparative-cost section is good, but one sentence should be added to pre-empt the “your account also uses theory-laden notions” objection. A critic may reply: your own terms, like “coherence zone” and “synchronisation protocol,” are also theoretical machinery. True enough. The difference is that your machinery is independently motivated and not introduced solely to patch Frege-Geach. You imply this already, but it would help to say so directly.
It offers clearer language:
Embedded moral predicates are not semantically identical to their unembedded counterparts, but neither are they inert; they are performance-sensitive expressions whose full evaluative load is attenuated under embedding while a thinner inferential profile remains available for reasoning.
In any case, I am still polishing the essay, dotting Is and crossing Ts. I think I’ve got the main argument and some examples. One of my weaknesses may be that I rely heavily on my own theories, but these are published and debatable on their own merits.
A real challenge of some problems and paradoxes is that they are self-inflicted. Faith that language is truth apt and lossless leads down many blind alleys.
Philosophics 