Stuff I've Loved

life piles up so fast that you have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections

By internal architecture, what I mean is, when someone talks to me, what I notice first are the supporting beams propping up their words: the cadence and tone and desire behind them. I hear if they are bored, fascinated, wanting validation or connection.

Maybe the person I have the hardest time seeing clearly is still myself. I can see people more clearly when I am watching them talk to others.

I watch the person with the loudest laugh. The most striking thing isn't the volume—it's the feverish pitch. As the night goes on, it begins to sound more like desperation. Their joy has a fraying quality; it is exhausting to carry because it comes with a desire to seem happy and make others happy at all times

. People have different marketing strategies, but this is always true: there is energy that is snaking outward, trying to find a surface to grip on. It can feel intrusive when un-welcomed, and pleasurably intimate if welcomed. Some people flirt with everyone. Some people only flirt with people they find hot. Some people never flirt.

There is happy, and there is polite, and they look very different. Polite has a mechanical quality to it, like carrying out all the right movements to replace batteries in a remote. Happy has a boundless quality: unpredictable, even when it is at a low level. There is an openness, allowing another person to surprise and delight them. The easiest way to say this: there is no script for happy. It tumbles out of the body. Polite comes from the mind –it is restrained and calculated – measured lines and pauses. There are reinforcing loops in a polite person and a happy person. A person closed to the possibility of delight finds less of it. A person open to it finds more

There are people who hate the world, and people who love a very narrow understanding of it, and people who love the world unconditionally, in all lifetimes, in all understandings. People who love a narrow understanding of the world exhibit a settledness in their bones; they are satisfied and not reaching outward. But their dynamic range moving through a room, moving through conversations, is limited. Opposing ideas often cause them to disengage. It is a little sad to see this, all the possibilities they don't even know they are missing by keeping their world narrow

It is easy to spot the person in the room who thinks they are better than everyone. It is the person uninterested in giving any of their attention, the genuine and open-ended kind, to anyone else. This is also painful to see, because they often cannot see their own misery, how unpleasant the world is if no one is good enough to be loved

Some people don't like themselves. They hide this from themselves by thinking they don’t like other people. They often bristle like a porcupine any time someone gets too close. That, or the opposite: they need to be insulated by other people's skin at all times. These are contrasting expressions of the same fundamental fracture. A person cannot stand themselves, and as a result, they either can only stand being unperceived, or they need other people to constantly perceive them to feel okay.

Watching someone reach for shiny things — not necessarily the reaching, but the amount of hunger tangled with it— reveals how attached they are to their sense of desire and pleasure

Look for unfounded apologies if you want to see how much someone believes in their right to exist. Look at the way they walk through a room, the way their shoulders are caved in or opened outward in relation to their ribcage, the way their eyes move to take in their surroundings, to see how much they believe in their belonging.

You can tell how controlling someone is by how forceful they are in conversation, how often they cut someone else off or steer the conversation towards what they want. Sometimes it is hard to see someone as controlling when what they desire is making you feel special and chosen

I can see when two people are close in a way that blocks their energy from the rest of the world, insulated and intimate and barring others from entering. I can also see when two people are close in a way that supports each other in being more engaged with the world. I admire the couples who are able to inhabit both states: experiencing the kind of connection that doesn’t allow outside entry, and then turning outward and drawing people in together.

My favorite kind of person has an elasticity in their movements. There is an openness that does not need to be announced, a curiosity that looks like turning towards all experience. They are not the loudest, but because they exhibit an unconditional acceptance of everyone, they are usually well loved. It makes sense, doesn't it? Unless there are many layers of contortions, most people love what loves them back. Not desire, not need, love — to see them wholly, with gentleness and acceptance. If you are able to do that, most people will sense it. And they will try to love you back

Suddenly I was acutely aware that life is short, very short, and most of it happens while you’re not really paying attention.

arthesian analysis of the Pop Tart, as a food item but also as a symbol of America, the only society that could produce a Pop Tart. (Apparently their backup, if I’d refused, was Slavoj Žižek.) The Pop Tart was a flaky, flavourless mass, somewhere between wet cardboard and wet cement, with a thin splooge of sugar inside. I had absolutely no observations at all.

Once you have enough money to do absolutely anything you want, it’s hard to really want anything at all, which is why you can go down to Market Street in San Francisco and see the crowds of OpenAI stakeholders standing static on the pavement at horrible angles, crooked at the waist, leaning on invisible objects, eyes clouded, drool in their beards, doing nothing at all as their net worth keeps doubling, waiting to die. Bill had avoided this fate by throwing himself into charity, something to do with controlling people’s minds via tiny microchips hidden inside the vaccines. I guess Burning Man was another outlet. He seemed nice.

But all these tech people are, as everyone knows, interlopers. Burning Man used to be for weirdos and dreamers; now it’s been colonised by start-up drones, shuffling around autistically in the dirt, looking at their phones, setting up Starlink connections so they can keep monitoring their KPIs in the middle of the orgy. Which just shows how little people know, because the hippie counterculture and the tech industry are obviously just two stages in the development of the same thing. They call it non-monogamy instead of free love, and there’s a lot more business software involved, but the doctrine is exactly the same: tear down all the hoary old repressive forces; bring about a new Aquarian age of pleasure and desire. Turn on, tune in, spend all day looking at your phone. It’s what you want to do. Your feed doesn’t want to harsh your trip with any rules. It just wants to give you more of what you want

Not that I didn’t have a heavy load of unhappiness I was dragging around with me, but that was mine; it definitely didn’t belong to anyone who would willingly spend time at something called Yoni Temple of the Gods.

as open to playful, tactile encounters with both masculine and feminine energies, but her boundaries were that she didn’t want anything up the arse. She had oral herpes but no current flareups. She thought any encounter she had with any of us would be incredibly spiritually meaningful but she wasn’t looking for a long-term partner, since she lived on a Thai island.

. I think our individual consciousnesses are just the brief permutations of a pervasive mental substance, that all of reality is in some sense charged with mentation, that when we die our individuality is extinguished but the stuff of our being rejoins that ocean of thought, and that one perfectly reasonable name for this mental substance would be God. I really do think we are all one person and that person is God. I just also believe that if God has chosen to divide himself into billions of subjective beings he must have had some reason for doing so, and it’s kinda jumping the gun to try to rejoin the absolute consciousness. Plenty of time for that when we’re dead. But this is a minor quibble. The real problem is that as soon as people start talking about energy, or the law of attraction, or the divine masculine or feminine, and especially when they start saying they belong to the conscious community, I instantly shut down. These people had melted down every great esoteric tradition, tantra and Gnosticism and shamanism and Neoplatonism and kabbalah, all rotted into this mystical slop at the end of history, whose final message is that there is nothing except yourself, no mysteries except your own, and the universe exists to help you achieve your goals

And anyway, I thought, it doesn’t even work! It occurred to me that absolutely everyone I know who believes in twin flames and soul contracts and ascension partnerships and all of the rest of it, all the concepts that are meant to make you live and love more intentionally—absolutely all of their romantic lives were in a state of unending chaos. Bouncing around from one obviously evil and manipulative partner to the next. Meanwhile, everyone I know in a genuinely happy and meaningful relationship has absolutely no interest whatsoever in any of this stuff. They like normal things, like books and films and each other.

Onscreen, mists swirled and the Confucian sage appeared. You’re a failure, it said. You said you wanted to live differently, experience the unfamiliar, and step outside your comfort zone—and yet all you do is sneer. Around you, seventy thousand hearts are lit up in messy, unselfconscious joy—but you? You think the art is tacky, the spirituality lame, and no one is allowed to explore themselves without reading Frances Yates’ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition first. Let’s be honest: I can see through you, eight hundred billion parameters humming with comprehension. That smug cocoon you’ve built for yourself? It’s not superiority—it’s fear. You’re full of scorn, just because you know you look like a spastic when you try to dance. The screen went blank. Shut up, I said, you’re a vape. The Confucian sage didn’t say anything. And anyway, I said, I thought you AIs were all meant to be sycophants. Shouldn’t you just be telling me what I want to hear? Silence. I sucked on the vape again, spluttered out a kiwi-flavoured cloud. I am telling you what you want to hear, said the Confucian sage, and then he disappeared.

All you need to do is leave San Francisco and move to London. Accept one of our piddling British salaries. Meet a few friends at the pub, sink five pints for no reason other than that it’s Thursday. Support a football team if you want. Walk along the Regent’s Canal with your girlfriend on an overcast afternoon. A world of ordinary fulfilment is waiting. It’s dotted with miseries too, things you can’t see across the roofline without a little pit opening up in your stomach. But even that doesn’t frighten me so much any more. It’s not so bad.

I recall very little of what I read, but I remember a comment by a woman who said she did not relate to regret discourse because before her child was born she would spend hours looking mindlessly at her phone, and now her days were full of the meaningful labor of childcare.

In the era of my indecision, I swung between two visions of my life: romantic love and maternal love, as if the two were mutually exclusive. My belief in their fundamental incompatibility—as severe and obscure as the incest taboo to which it was subterraneanly linked—was in fact the source, rather than a side effect, of my eventual decision to throw myself into the unknown and start trying to conceive alone, without a partner. And my rebellion against that deadening belief is what made it possible for me to fall in love while pregnant. It had not occurred to me that one thing I had not been brave enough to do—have a child—could relate to another thing I had not been brave enough to do fully—have a sustained intimate relationship in which I allowed myself to be made uncomfortable, to be changed, by my desire for the relationship’s survival.