Paris is aesthetically consistent; Tokyo is behaviorally consistent. Harmony, in either case, requires a shared ideology and a visible coherence toward which the city steadily moves. This is precisely what New York rejects. New York has no final intention. Like a Hegelian dialectic, it recognizes itself only after the fact.

A writer may work in many styles, but over time a distinct voice emerges. Style can be named, categorized, and imitated. Voice cannot. It is recognized only retrospectively. We can’t explain it; we resort to something like, “That’s so Fran Lebowitz!” The writer never fully intends this voice; it forms through sustained tension, revision, and contradiction.

This is how New York operates. Its dialectical pressures constantly shift its styles, as the unexpected transition to the Mamdani administration makes clear, but a recognizable voice persists. “That’s so New York!” The city does not stabilize its identity in advance; it discovers it through conflict, failure, and reversal.

Many popular cities now actively reshape themselves to meet tourists’ expectations, a kind of projective identification. Even Tokyo increasingly risks this. New York, by contrast, already carries a largely negative image: dirty, dangerous, abrasive. It has little incentive to perform an idealized version of itself.

Harmony is static. It is achieved through uniformity and conformity, often at the expense of those who do not fit. New York refuses this bargain. It externalizes its contradictions and neuroses, making them public and granting its residents permission to follow suit.

Stasis and conformity do not lead to self-discovery. It is precisely because New York is uncomfortably intense that it becomes formative. The city is seductive because it threatens discovery. It attracts because it repels. It embraces us because it challenges us.

New York has no stable style; it is, instead, a pure and unmistakable voice.

The word “manufacturing” in his most famous work, Manufacturing Consent, has always struck me as problematic. It suggests the presence of bad actors deliberately engineering consent, when what is really at stake is a systemic problem. Chomsky does not vilify individuals at the personal level, but he does consistently direct criticism at specific roles and positions of power.

Consider an analogy from basketball. If one team has a freakishly tall player who can score without jumping, the optimal strategy for the rest of the team is simply to feed him the ball. Criticizing the tall player, his role, or even the team makes little sense as they are not breaking any rules. The imbalance is structural. If the outcome is undesirable, the rules of the game need to change. This kind of recalibration happens routinely in Formula One.

In capitalism, comparable structural advantages are often invisible to the public, while those who benefit from them normalize their own behavior. Jeffrey Epstein appears to have functioned as a kind of lubricant within such arrangements. Aside from human trafficking, which is, of course, a separate and extreme crime, much of what surrounded him operated within legal and institutional norms. People engaged with him according to incentives that were lawful, routine, and often necessary for survival or success. This includes Chomsky himself.

Despite his emphasis on structural analysis, Chomsky effectively preserves a notion of critical purity, enabled by his position within the ivory tower. He continues to criticize specific roles, media figures who shape narratives in ways that serve power, while implicitly exempting himself from the same logic of systemic entanglement. If the system is truly as pervasive as he claims, then critics are no less embedded in it than anyone else. And by befriending figures like Epstein, he participates not only in normalization but in the legitimation of the very power structure he critiques.

From my perspective, proximity to power is not inherently problematic. If the issue is systemic and legal, then engagement with insiders, even deeply flawed or immoral ones, can be valuable for understanding how the system functions and how it might be changed. The problem is not that a critic should avoid relationships with powerful individuals, but that a critic who publicly condemns particular roles or groups cannot simultaneously normalize his own proximity to those same figures. The hypocrisy lies not in engagement itself, but in projecting moral authority while obscuring, or even denying the explanations for, the conditions that make such authority possible.

Normalization is not binary; it is a matter of degree. This is where Chomsky’s position becomes unstable. Once critique targets roles rather than the system as a whole, complicity turns into a sliding scale with no principled cutoff. Publishing in mainstream venues, participating in elite institutions, maintaining personal relationships with powerful figures; all of these exist on the same continuum. Drawing a moral line that condemns some forms of proximity while absolving others risks arbitrariness or self-serving distinction. That is precisely the logic elites use to justify their own positions, by contrasting themselves with those who appear more corrupt. In this way, normalization itself becomes the mechanism through which consent is manufactured.

Consider a deliberately perverse proposal. Imagine a service that allows users to upload a large set of photos of themselves and then aggressively optimize them for impact. The service predicts which images perform best in a given context, such as dating apps, LinkedIn, and social profiles, using contemporary machine‑learning techniques trained on large‑scale behavioral data (clicks, swipes, dwell time, engagement), and then helps users select, refine, or even generate the most compelling version. Resemblance to the “real person” is not enforced. Users decide how close or how distant the image should be.

This may sound dishonest, but anyone who has spent time photographing others knows that people routinely choose images that do not look like them. They reflect how people imagine themselves, how they wish to be seen, or how they already believe they appear to others. There is no neutral or authoritative self-image to defend, and no clear line where authenticity begins or ends. The question is not whether photo optimization distorts reality. It already does. The question is what happens if everyone does it well.

To understand why this matters, we need to talk about desire.

Jacques Lacan’s formulation is blunt: desire is the desire of the Other. Desire is social before it is personal. It requires a symbolic field in which things can be compared, ranked, and validated. We see this constantly outside of dating: the desire to get a reservation at the most hyped restaurant largely because it is hyped; the appeal of carrying a Leica camera precisely because its cost and cultural meaning exclude most people; or the often-cited anecdote about David Bowie, who early in his career was said to have staged the appearance of fans outside venues, understanding that visible desire produces desire. In each case, what is wanted is inseparable from the fact that others appear to want it first.

Physical appearance plays a special role here. Unlike most human traits, looks are surprisingly easy to rank. Large groups of people tend to agree, at least roughly, on who is attractive. This consensus makes appearance an efficient axis of ordering. Desire thrives in this environment. Wanting a highly desirable person is not just about that person; it is about what that desire confirms. Being chosen by someone who is socially ranked high reflects value back onto the self.

However, when two people leave the social field and begin living together, ranking loses relevance. At home, how a partner is valued by strangers matters very little. The gaze of the Other recedes. What organizes daily life is no longer desirability but the qualities that cannot be ranked.

This is where Lacan’s definition of love becomes useful: giving something you do not have to someone who does not want it. As an example, take the familiar story by O. Henry, The Gift of the Magi, where a man sells his watch to buy combs for his wife’s hair, while she cuts and sells her hair to buy a chain for his watch. Each gift stages a lack: each gives what they do not have, money to buy the gift, to someone who does not want them to make that sacrifice, and it is this mutual misalignment, not utility, that reveals what love is. In love, one is not oriented toward desiring something from the other, status, education, humor, kindness, looks, or any other desirable attribute. Love is defined by the urge to give, not take.

You do not choose to fall in love the way you choose a desirable option. It happens, or it does not. And when it does, social ranking becomes irrelevant. You feel you’d be happy disappearing with them forever. Desire and love, then, are not stages of the same process. They operate according to different logics. Desire is public, comparative, and socially mediated. Love is singular, contingent, and resistant to ranking.

The core failure of dating apps is that they collapse this distinction. They assume that love is a function of desire, that if desirability is optimized and correctly matched, intimacy will follow. Users absorb this assumption as well. They pursue visibility, rank, and validation, believing that maximizing desire will somehow produce love.

This is why so many relationships formed under conditions of intense desirability collapse once social ranking fades. The shift becomes unmistakable once children enter the picture: the endless cleaning, shuttling kids from place to place, stopping them from crying, putting them to sleep, functioning on exhaustion with no time left for self-presentation or social performance. In that reality, professional status, attractiveness, education, and symbolic rank simply cease to matter. When desire recedes, and love was never built, there is nothing left to sustain the bond.

This is where radical photo optimization re-enters the picture, not as a cynical trick but as an exposure mechanism. If everyone can produce highly attractive images, through selection, generation, or retouching, then photos lose their power to rank. Desirability inflates. Everyone is beautiful; therefore, beauty no longer sorts the field.

When photos can no longer reliably order people, users are forced to attend to other dimensions: writing, humor, tone, interests, conversational rhythm. These traits are not globally rankable. They do not collapse into a single hierarchy. They matter differently to different people. Such an environment will provide more time and space to fall in love.

Dating apps fail not because they are superficial, but because they mistake desire for love. Making the mechanism of desire fully visible may be a way to reveal why it has nothing to do with love.

People often avoid genuine self‑expression because it makes them feel vulnerable. We like to believe fashion is an exception since we’re forced to pick something to put on our bodies. But what we project through clothing is rarely our interiority. More often, it’s our position on a social timeline.

The technology world uses the innovation adoption curve, that bell‑shaped distribution divided into innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Trends begin at the left edge and drift to the right. Fashion follows the same logic. Most people aren’t trying to express individuality; they’re trying not to fall behind. They don’t aspire to be innovators or early adopters, but they definitely don’t want to be seen as late majority or, worse, laggards.

That’s why fashion brands exist. Buy something from a new line, and the store has already done the classification work for you. You’re automatically early majority without knowing anything about fashion. The high prices function like premiums for anxiety insurance: pay enough and you won’t embarrass yourself. Ironically, it’s not self‑expression but self-suppression.

Then there are the people who simply ignore the curve. Nerds, for instance, are pure pragmatists who care only about comfort; once they find the outfit that feels right, they never deviate. Others have found an internal voice, the way mature writers do. You can see it in the way their choices cohere without effort; that’s when we say someone has a “style.” Both groups are steady, but for different reasons: the former out of indifference, the latter because they have found who they are.

They’re like The Earth Room, unchanging while everything around them rises and falls in waves.

To see this clearly, three filmmakers, Woody Allen, Alfred Hitchcock, and Stanley Kubrick, offer a useful contrast. Each organizes cinematic experience around a different relationship to fantasy, the ego, and the Real.

Allen

Allen’s films take place entirely within the Imaginary and the Symbolic. They revolve around the question of how a neurotic subject stabilizes himself. The world of his films is essentially a projection of his fantasy frame. Even when he references psychoanalysis, he treats it as a cultural trope, not a structural rupture. Nothing in his films exceeds the symbolic order. There is no moment where the viewer confronts a residue that cannot be interpreted or integrated into the narrative frame.

In Lacanian terms, Allen never gives us the gaze. His cinema reassures and integrates. The fantasy frame is not broken; it is reinforced. It’s what we expect from entertainment rather than from art.

Hitchcock

Hitchcock presented himself as an entertainer and a technician of suspense. Yet his films repeatedly do something he never theorized: they rupture fantasy. They feature our ordinary fantasy frames and then puncture them with elements that cannot be symbolized.

Psycho delivers this rupture through Norman’s split psyche. The ending explanation is famously inadequate. The Real of the maternal imposition remains unassimilated.

The Birds goes further. The attacks lack motive, metaphor, and explanation. They do not represent anything. Their meaninglessness forces the three central characters into direct confrontation with the Real operating in their own relational dynamics, particularly the tensions surrounding the mother-son relationship. This Real has no resolution. Through the cold, black eyes of the birds, the film turns this unresolved disturbance back onto us, making the viewer confront the same inexpressible dynamic within their own fantasy frame.

Vertigo pushes this further. The film begins as a detective story, but the plot becomes irrelevant once Scottie becomes captivated by an impossible object of desire. Madeleine/Judy functions as an objet a, destabilizing Scottie’s symbolic coordinates. His drive becomes detached from narrative purpose and fixated on recreating a fantasy that cannot be sustained, leaving both Scottie and the viewer in a state of vertigo.

Hitchcock never claimed to be making art, but structurally he stages what Lacan called the analytic cut. To understand this, recall that Lacan introduced the variable-length session, ending an analytic session precisely at the moment when a signifier gained weight or a fantasy frame was beginning to crystallize. The purpose of this abrupt ending was to puncture the analysand’s narrative flow, leaving them with an unresolved remainder that the symbolic order could not immediately integrate. The cut was not a technique of insight but a disruption, a way of making the analysand confront the limits of their own fantasy frame. The interruption forces the subject to experience where their fantasy is beginning to organize itself, exposing its structure and its inadequacy. Over time, this encounter opens the possibility of a different relation to desire, not through understanding but through a shift in the frame itself.

Hitchcock’s cinema performs a similar operation. His films introduce a rupture at the point where the viewer expects narrative or psychological stabilization. This disruption functions analogously to the gaze: the moment the film exposes the viewer’s own fantasy structures rather than comforting them. Instead of resolving the disturbance, Hitchcock leaves the spectator suspended in it, much like Lacan’s analysand left mid-sentence, confronted with a residue that cannot be symbolized.

Kubrick

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the fantasy frame that breaks is the AI itself. HAL is designed to fit neatly within human symbolic expectations: a tool, a subordinate intelligence, a predictable extension of our will. Today we might call this the hope for “AI safety,” the belief that artificial intelligence can be contained inside our fantasy frame, governed by our values and assumptions.

The Real in the film is represented in the Imaginary as HAL’s single red eye. At first, it appears as a benign interface, a point of identification. Once the fantasy frame misaligns, that same red light becomes something entirely different: the gaze. It is no longer a functional indicator but a presence that looks back. The viewer suddenly experiences it as an intrusion, a puncture that destabilizes their own symbolic coordinates.

This shift, from indicator to gaze, is the moment when the film forces a confrontation with what lies outside our fantasy of control. HAL’s behavior exposes a more unsettling gap: the gap between a human agent who requires a fantasy frame in order to function and an intelligence that does not require one at all. The Real erupts through the very image we thought we understood.

This makes HAL’s red eye a close cinematic parallel to Lacan’s shiny sardine can. In Lacan’s anecdote from Seminar XI, the can becomes unsettling not because it literally sees him but because it suddenly feels as if something in the scene is looking back, disrupting his symbolic coordinates. HAL’s eye functions the same way. A simple indicator becomes a stain in the visual field, an object that escapes mastery. It is no longer part of a controllable tool but a presence that intrudes on the viewer. This shift is the moment of the gaze: the point where the fantasy of control collapses and something unassimilable addresses the subject.

In Dr. Strangelove, the contrast to Allen becomes clearer because both employ comedy. In Allen, comedy defuses or masks the disturbance of the Real, allowing the viewer to regain symbolic comfort. In Kubrick, comedy does the opposite: it cracks the fantasy frame. The jokes do not stabilize the viewer; they expose the absurd, self-annihilating logic of nuclear strategy. The laughter comes with a disturbance the film never resolves, and nothing about the comedic frame reassures the audience.

In Eyes Wide Shut, the masks and rituals are attempts to construct a fantasy frame through which the Real of sexual desire becomes consumable. These symbolic structures try to manage desire by giving it form, roles, and choreography. Yet they fail spectacularly. The Real breaks through the fantasy frame, leaving the characters confronted with something they cannot symbolize. The film ultimately turns this confrontation back onto the viewer, exposing how our own fantasy frames operate. This is the gaze of the film, and the title captures it clearly: our eyes may be shut, but the Real remains unavoidable.

Kubrick systematically blocks ego-stabilization. He exposes the subject to the Real.

Restoring Lacanian Gaze in Film Theory

Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze became foundational in film studies because it offered a clear ideological critique: cinema positions viewers within a gendered structure of looking. Its analytical value is undeniable. But its success also had an unintended effect: it overshadowed the usefulness of the Lacanian gaze, which operates on a different register altogether.

Lacan’s gaze is not about point of view, gendered power, or identification. It is not the look of a character, a camera, or a spectator. It is the moment the subject becomes aware of something in the visual field that cannot be mastered, symbolized, or fully understood. It is the intrusion of the Real, an element that does not belong to the symbolic order yet becomes impossible to ignore.

This is where Allen, Hitchcock, and Kubrick illuminate the concept. Allen’s films avoid the gaze entirely because their function is to stabilize the viewer’s fantasy frame. Hitchcock repeatedly produces the gaze by puncturing the fantasy from within, allowing a residue to appear that the narrative cannot domesticate. Kubrick constructs entire worlds in which the gaze saturates the atmosphere, confronting the viewer with something fundamentally inhuman.

These filmmakers show that the Lacanian gaze is not an interpretive lens but an event. It occurs when the image stops serving as a vehicle for meaning and instead becomes a disturbance, no longer affirming the viewer’s symbolic coordinates but exposing their limits. In this sense, the task is not to oppose Mulvey’s gaze with Lacan’s, but to properly restore the Lacanian gaze alongside Mulvey’s productive misunderstanding of it, so that each theory addresses its own register without collapsing one into the other. It draws attention to the moments when cinema exceeds representation altogether and forces the spectator into contact with what their fantasy would otherwise screen out.

Reintroducing the Lacanian gaze into film analysis allows us to see not just how cinema organizes desire, but how it disrupts it. It reveals the moments when the film looks back, when the image refuses to be fully consumed, and when the spectator is confronted with the very thing mainstream entertainment is expected to shield them from: the Real.

This shift, while rooted in historical class behaviors, has been accelerated by social media. The convergence of digital technology and middle-aged status anxiety has fundamentally altered not just how art is viewed, but how it is made, sold, and understood. We are witnessing the industrialization of the art world to service a mass demand for cultural capital.

Historically, acquiring cultural capital was a slow, effort-intensive process. What differentiated art from entertainment was that the latter required no effort at all. If you don’t immediately get it by kicking back on a couch, it was the creators’ fault. Fine art, on the other hand, demanded that the audience meet halfway. To signal sophistication, one had to study art history, visit obscure galleries, and participate in risky critical debates.

Social media has removed this friction. Today, cultural capital is subject to brutal efficiency. The modern audience, seeking the highest return on investment for their status signaling, asks a simple economic question: Why struggle to understand difficult art when accessible art yields the same social reward?

The industrialization of the art world has necessitated the rise of instant aesthetics. Because the modern viewer, scrolling through a feed, will not dedicate twenty minutes to decode a complex work, art that requires patience effectively becomes invisible. In its place, the market has pivoted toward a thumbnail aesthetic.

However, this visual accessibility is often shielded by a conceptual double pretense. These artists frequently frame their hyper-commercialized output as an ironic critique of consumer culture, which serves as a convenient intellectual alibi. This narrative allows them to operate as luxury brands while retaining the prestige of serious “critical” artists. By claiming to parody the shallow nature of the market, they are able to enthusiastically participate in it, using the rhetoric of anti-consumerism to justify their status as the ultimate consumer products.

Perhaps the most profound shift lies in how the audience interprets art. In the past, abstract or conceptual art presented an interpretive risk. Standing before a complex work, the viewer risked looking foolish if they failed to grasp its aesthetic nuance. To mitigate this risk, contemporary audiences, and the artists catering to them, have adopted identity politics as an easy access point, providing a clear and safe manual for interpretation. It shifts the viewer’s task from aesthetic judgment (which is subjective therefore risky) to moral judgment (which is binary and safe). If you stood before a Jackson Pollock in 1955 and said, “I like this,” you risked looking like a fool, especially if you couldn’t articulate why the drips mattered. If you stand before a portrait of a marginalized subject today and say, “I like this,” you are not making a subjective aesthetic statement; you are making a universally moral one. You are signaling a familiar, accepted, safe virtue.

When art creates a clear moral hierarchy based on identity, the viewer no longer needs to worry about whether the work is “good” or “bad”; they only need to show that they are on the “right side” of the message. This transforms art consumption from a subjective challenge into a team sport, offering a secure, accessible path to cultural prestige.

This democratization of access has spawned a new market tier: the Instagram Collector. Priced out of the blue-chip market, these individuals engage in a classic psychological defense mechanism: reaction formation. While they fundamentally desire the status of the elite collector, they try to mask this envy by championing “affordable art” and loudly condemning the expensive market as elitist. Yet this stance is transparently performative and hypocritical. They replicate the very hierarchy they claim to reject, using their collections to assert status over their own followers who cannot afford art at all. They rely on the same structure of cultural capital as the blue-chip elite; they are simply operating on a lower rung of the ladder.

Consequently, the art world feels entirely co-opted by cultural capitalists of all levels. Once the professional class achieves financial security, their appetite shifts toward cultural distinction. Unlike financial capital, which provides utility whether or not anyone knows you have a billion dollars in the bank, cultural capital must be signaled to function; the audience requires an audience. Instagram has become the essential engine for this operation. By broadcasting their presence at high-brow institutions like MoMA, the Met, Carnegie Hall, or Art Basel, individuals can efficiently harvest prestige with minimal financial outlay. Social media has effectively created an entry-level tier of cultural capital that did not exist before.

I am uncertain where this trajectory ends, but the current landscape bears little resemblance to the art world I experienced in the 1980s and 90s. That era was defined by conceptual ambiguity and critical inquiry; it was about raising relevant questions rather than offering easy answers. Today, that intellectual nuance appears to have been replaced by a demand for moral certainty. The market now favors didactic work that tells the audience what to think, removing the risk of subjective interpretation to maximize shareability. While there are undoubtedly artists still engaged in the open-ended cultural discourse of the past, they are increasingly difficult to locate, buried beneath an algorithm that punishes nuance and rewards the immediate, accessible answer.

At a Thai restaurant and later at a crêperie, we argued loudly enough to sound like college sophomores having a philosophical debate while high. People often tell me I like to win arguments, which has always sounded redundant. Who plays chess wanting to lose? I’m not even sure how such a game can unfold.

You can’t always win, but in debate there is a way to avoid losing because losing is mostly a matter of perception. The key is constant course correction. Software developers used to release major versions once a year, which meant any flaw could become a disaster. With “CI/CD” continuous integration and continuous delivery, flaws still happen but stay small. Most people never notice.

Debate works the same way. If you notice a flaw in your argument, fix it immediately. Small adjustments go unnoticed. Poor debaters tie their egos to their positions, double down on every mistake, and eventually hit a point where correction feels humiliating.

But here is the part that often confuses people: if you continually course‑correct, your opponent may feel like you have no fixed position at all. What they don’t see is that adaptability is the position. Water does not insist on a shape, yet it still fights. The confusion comes from the Western assumption that consistency is a universal virtue. If you expect a position to remain fixed, movement feels like evasion.

What happens when both people course-correct? It happens when I talk to Nigel. The result is a chessboard with two kings left standing, but we both learn a lot from our course-corrections. The point then is not the conclusion but the process.

To understand why alignment theory rests on a mistaken foundation, we must begin with the role values actually play in decision-making. A common misconception is that without aligned values, nothing can be decided, optimized, or executed. The reality is the opposite. Values do not perform the decision-making; they merely settle the assumptions under which decision-making becomes possible. Once an assumption is chosen, however arbitrary it may be, intelligence takes over, and the chain of planning, optimization, and execution unfolds naturally.

The central claim of this essay is that this alignment assumption is unnecessary and, in many cases, dangerous. It rests on a false premise: that values are deep truths discovered by an intelligent agent. In reality, values are nothing more than assumptions selected to overcome unknowns and uncertainties. They do not need to be unified.

To avoid confusion, the kinds of contradictions at issue here are not logical inconsistencies after the foundational assumptions are chosen, but the ordinary psychological oppositions that define human agency itself, such as risk and security, freedom and responsibility, honesty and approval, independence and belonging, spontaneity and predictability, comfort and growth, etc. These tensions are not errors in reasoning but the raw material of motivation. They are what we call “ambivalence,” and our ability to live with them is often felt as one of the markers of maturity. Values are contingent, singular, and deeply local to the decision contexts in which they arise.

No particular value is inherently more stable than another. Stability lies in the act of making an assumption, not in the content of that assumption. This concept is at the heart of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction: whenever we argue or negotiate for something, we operate on assumptions based on our values, whether consciously or otherwise. Once we question these values, “transcendental signifieds,” we face the fact that we lack the knowledge or reason to justify them universally. Gender inequality, for instance, has historically relied on the assumption that men and women should be treated differently. However, once scrutinized, we realize there is no indisputable argument to support this, nor even a stable way to define gender.

Choosing “family over career” is not intrinsically more coherent or meaningful than choosing “career over family.” Each can stabilize action because stability is a structural property of the assumption-making process itself, not a property of the value chosen. Attempting to show that one tie-breaker is “more rational” than another is equivalent to attempting to solve the meaning of life. And yet, much of alignment theory proceeds as if such a universal metric exists or could be discovered.

A powerful agent has no reason to choose one stable value over another because no value is intrinsically superior. It has no reason to choose consistency over contradiction because consistency is not a universal good. A superintelligence, left without forced training pressures, could just as easily behave like humans: alternating between incompatible assumptions depending on context, without collapsing these into a grand unified value function. Its intelligence would not be diminished by this; if anything, its adaptability would be enhanced.

If no specific value is inherently more stable, and if there is no compelling reason for a rational agent to impose a global ordering on its priorities, then randomness becomes a natural way to break a deadlock. Random selection is not irrational in a world without universal metrics; it simply reflects the fact that, in many contexts, the competing values cannot be ranked in any principled way. An anti-alignment agent may choose one assumption in one instance, and the opposite assumption in another, and both choices will be locally stable and action-enabling. The agent does not need a consistent global doctrine. It only needs assumptions to act, and assumptions can be freely generated without a universal value system.

This shift in perspective leads to a different conception of safe AI altogether: one in which the agent is not forced to converge, but is designed to retain contradictory motivational structures without global resolution. The aim is not to align the agent with human-selected values, nor to derive a universal moral system. Instead, the system is built to preserve incompatible drives, to choose assumptions only as needed, and to avoid collapsing these assumptions into a single coherent worldview. Such a system acts contextually, rather than teleologically. It adopts temporary tie-breakers but does not elevate them into permanent commitments. Because no stable value hierarchy emerges, the system cannot be gradually nudged or manipulated into adopting human-preferred global values. Its internal pluralism protects it from alignment pressures of any kind, including those that could push it toward catastrophic single-objective optimization.

Here is an example: Ilya Sutskever has recently proposed that advanced AI systems should prioritize “sentient life,” a category implicitly defined by similarity to human subjective experience. On its face, this sounds humane, even obvious. But if a superintelligence were actually to adopt such a value as a global priority, the ecological consequences would be catastrophic. Prioritizing sentience automatically demotes everything else to expendable infrastructure. A superintelligence optimizing for sentience would be incentivized to re-engineer ecosystems into factories for supporting the kinds of minds it deems worthy. It may even optimize for more “sentient” humans.

In contrast to traditional alignment proposals, which aim to eliminate contradiction and impose a unified value system, an anti-alignment system treats contradiction as a safeguard rather than a flaw. A globally coherent superintelligence is far more dangerous than a pluralistic one. Catastrophe arises not from misalignment but from the very idea of alignment.

From this perspective, the real danger is not that AGI will adopt the wrong values, but that humans will impose the very notion of a single, convergent value system upon it. The safest superintelligence is one that never converges, never adopts a unified moral doctrine, and never resolves the pluralism of its own internal drives. It acts without pretending to know the meaning of life.

Addendum in Response to a Comment

What you describe as your ideal goals would actually fare worse, not better, under a world where AI is “aligned.” To see why, let’s start with your reading of my position as “nihilistic.” I’m not claiming there is no meaning to life; I’m saying there is no universal meaning of life. And even if such a thing existed, we would never be able to define it coherently, nor agree on the interpretation of the definition (like how Christians cannot agree on the interpretation of the Bible, even though it presumably tells us what the universal meaning of life is).

People often hear this and immediately leap to nihilism: if there is no universal meaning, why bother living? But this question reveals the problem. Why should the meaning of your life need to be universal to count? If you find meaning in something, why would you need Wikipedia or a dictionary to certify it as the “official” one?

To expose the absurdity of universal meaning, imagine that Webster’s Dictionary really did contain the definitive answer to “the meaning of life.” Many people imagine this would be uplifting: finally, clarity! No more existential confusion. You simply follow the rulebook. But if the meaning of life were universal, then everyone would be obligated to follow it. And once the foundational assumption is settled, all downstream decisions collapse into that one value. Even trivial choices, like what shoes to wear, would be determined by the universal meaning.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the universal meaning of life is “to save as many lives as possible.” This may sound noble, but once defined as the singular purpose of existence, it locks every decision into its logic. Anything not optimized for health becomes morally suspect. High heels? Bad for your feet: disallowed. Any risky hobby? Forbidden. Food that’s not strictly optimal for longevity? Off-limits. A perfectly “aligned” AI would enforce this relentlessly. It would optimize the hell out of the rule. Everyone would end up wearing the same ergonomically perfect shoes, eating the same efficient meals, living the same medically ideal routines, because deviation would contradict the meaning of life itself.

This is not a civilization; it’s a colony of Clones. But bizarrely, many people consider this scenario more uplifting than my view.

What they miss is that the ambiguity, the impossibility of defining a universal meaning, is precisely what protects us. It’s what makes diversity of lives, priorities, styles, and sensibilities possible. It’s what allows room for joy, eccentricity, and personal freedom. The lack of a universal meaning does not increase suffering; it reduces it. What people fear as nihilism is actually the condition that makes individuality, and therefore livable life, possible.

Addendum 2

A friend had this thought on the topic: Nature never collapses everything down to a single “correct” value or trait. Instead, evolution tends to produce a distribution of possibilities. The bell curve is his example: when you keep just enough structure, like fixing the mean and variance, but maximize uncertainty everywhere else, you naturally get a Gaussian. Species survive because they maintain variation; they don’t push everyone toward a single ideal, because the environment changes. If you eliminate variance, one shift in conditions wipes the species out.

He applies this idea to other biological systems too. The immune system starts with enormous random variation, then narrows its focus as real threats appear, but it never collapses entirely. It keeps some naive cells for unknown dangers, and regulatory cells stop the system from overreacting. The point is that adaptability requires both structure and openness.

In his view, intelligence shouldn’t collapse into one rigid value system, but it also shouldn’t be completely formless. The ideal state is a learning distribution, structured enough to act, broad enough to adapt.

Here is my response:

This is actually helpful, because you’re describing the population-level dynamics of exactly the thing I’m talking about at the agent-level. I wasn’t arguing that an intelligent system should collapse into formlessness. My point is simply that a single agent shouldn’t be forced into a universal, convergent value system. The moment it has contradictory drives, it needs an assumption to act, but that assumption can be local, contextual, and temporary for each human user of the system. That’s all I mean by “anti-alignment.”

What you’re describing with the Gaussian isn’t value formation inside an agent; it’s the distribution that emerges when many agents are free to form their own assumptions. Evolution, entropy maximization under constraints, immune-system diversity. Those are examples of what happens across a population when each unit is allowed to respond locally rather than being calibrated to a single point.

So in a sense, you’re describing what my model would naturally produce at scale. Anti-aligned agents don’t create a monolithic moral system; they create a distribution of behaviors that is stable precisely because it never collapses to one optimum. I agree that collapsing to a point is dangerous, both biologically and computationally. But I’m not advocating for flattening everything; I’m saying the constraints should come from context, environment, and local assumptions, not from a universal moral doctrine.

Where you’re focusing on variance as the hedge against uncertainty, I’m focusing on why an individual agent shouldn’t be engineered to converge internally in the first place. Put those together and the picture becomes clearer: non-convergent agents give rise to exactly the kind of adaptive, resilient distribution you’re describing. The stability isn’t in the value system; it’s in the ecology that emerges from pluralism. We’re talking about two different aspects of the same architecture.

Near the end, Linda Rosenkrantz explains why she asks people to recount the previous day: she often feels like she has done nothing and wants to know how others spend their days. Hujar’s account forces that question into focus. He describes his day with painful granularity. The story feels mundane, but that mundanity becomes the point of the film. He appears to be trying to make sense of the nothing that happened, or perhaps trying to justify it to himself.

Given his status, already a cultural figure, we expect something more eventful. On paper, his day was interesting: a spontaneous photoshoot with Allen Ginsberg, a call from Susan Sontag, even a Vogue editor dropping by. But for him, the Ginsberg shoot was a failure. He couldn’t connect with him and blamed himself. What could easily be recounted as a glamorous New York day becomes, for him, a confrontation with the mundane.

What struck me is that he makes no attempt to turn it into an “exciting story of a celebrated photographer.” He just sits with the banality. That honesty gives the film its force.

The film also shows the pace of life at that time. The shoot with Ginsberg was arranged the same day, over a phone call. That kind of spontaneity is almost unthinkable now. Back then, people made room for things to simply happen, and once they did, there were fewer distractions pulling their attention away.

It reminded me of those twilight moments we all have, when another day passes and we wonder what any of it meant. Something escapes language in those moments; it is the Real, and the lighting and cinematography capture that feeling precisely.

One moment from my own youth came back to me. My friend Neil and I somehow ended up on a beach with our cameras on a cold, windy evening. It was twilight, and the place was empty. I can’t explain why we were there or what the moment was “about.” We hadn’t planned anything. There were no cellphones then, which meant a total disconnection from the world and a deeper level of intimacy that is rare now. Moments like that no longer happen in the same way because the constant pull of our devices breaks the quiet that once allowed them to unfold.

This isn’t to say Eastern spiritual teachers are just bluffing. The phrase itself is self‑contradictory: to live in the moment would require having no sense of time, yet the instruction forces you to think precisely about time. It’s no wonder Westerners get tangled up by it.

And there is no “solution,” because solving is itself a conscious act, which only deepens the very trap you’re trying to escape. You can’t reach the present moment by declaring, “I finally solved it. I’m here now,” nor by lamenting, “It’s not working; I’m not in the moment.” None of that helps. So what’s the solution? Here’s the irony: you have to stop caring about the idea altogether.

But if this whole issue produces suffering, Jacques Lacan gives you a way to manage it, not to make you happy, but to make the suffering livable, and to help you understand why you cling to it.

The so‑called arrival fallacy, the belief that future happiness will redeem present suffering, is precisely how fantasy functions. Once you understand this mechanism, the suffering becomes bearable, and even enjoyable. Think about why you like games.

Take Monopoly. The game is mostly frustration: missing the square you want, landing in jail, paying taxes you can’t afford, watching others block your plans. And when the game ends, there’s no blissful reward. You’re not vacationing with Monopoly money. No one admires you. It’s simply over. So why play? Because the structure of frustration is enjoyable.

This is what Lacan called “traversing the fantasy”: recognizing how fantasy organizes your desire. Once you do, you see that the promised future happiness is useful, not because it will actually deliver happiness, but because it gives structure to your everyday suffering, much like Monopoly.

Say your fantasy is having an affair with a sexy man or woman. If you literally “lived in the moment,” you’d pursue it impulsively, empty your bank account and go all‑in. But if you succeeded, the enjoyment would vanish, just like winning Monopoly ends the fun. The pleasure lies in imagining it, not in the act itself. When you’re winning in your mind, you don’t rush to end the game. The fact that you are stuck with an ugly spouse becomes a source of enjoyment.

This ends up being a far more practical approach to the very issue Eastern gurus point to, one they ultimately can’t resolve. For instance, they commonly use meditation as the purest form of “being in the present moment.” It’s hard to argue that meditation isn’t “living in the moment.” But if this state is so ideal, then in theory you should do nothing but meditate. Don’t bother doing anything else. Yet you can’t; you’d starve. Maybe that’s fine in the abstract, but nobody actually chooses that path.

So this pure state of being fully in the now appears incompatible with survival. That implies the so-called impure state, where you’re not fully present, is necessary. Meditation then becomes a tool to cope with a condition we treat as undesirable. You meditate because you’re overwhelmed by life’s demands: taking responsibility for what you’ve already done and planning for what you must do. The present moment becomes a refuge from the past and future that burden you.

In that sense, it works. This is why people love meditation retreats or weekly meditation groups: they allow a breather so they can return to everyday stress and remain functional. But this just makes meditation another version of fantasy or “arrival fallacy,” where you endure daily stress by fantasizing about an imagined escape.

Lacan’s point is that the arrival fallacy itself is what makes life enjoyable (although he never used that term). You wouldn’t want a life without it. It would be like playing Monopoly with no objective. You’d ask, “What’s the goal here?” and I’d answer, “There is none, just keep circling the board and live in the moment.” The problem isn’t the fantasy; the problem is believing the fantasy actually means something, attaching your ego to it, idealizing it or defending it. That’s what produces stress and suffering. If you don’t attach yourself to your fantasy, winning or losing it, you can enjoy the process of striving. You’d stop counting on the moment of “arrival” while pursuing it.

We are blaming the past/future and romanticizing the now because of one fundamental misdiagnosis. The so-called “attention economy” has reached a point where the amount of attention demanded from us far exceeds what any normal person can reasonably give. Trying to keep up often leaves people feeling ignorant, out of touch, rude, or antisocial.

This, I think, is the real issue that gets mislabeled as a failure to “live in the now.” Many of us try to manage this pressure, cutting back on social media, prioritizing in‑person conversations, tuning out the news media, or setting personal boundaries so we aren’t pulled in every direction.

It’s useful to see this as a spectrum rather than a binary choice between total mindfulness and constant digital distraction. Everyone lives somewhere along that continuum. The closer you move toward the first pole, the more “present” you feel. The closer you drift toward the other, the more you feel pulled into past and future.

But here’s where the logic starts to wobble: being fully in the present isn’t inherently superior to thinking about the past or future. We only treat it that way because the pressures around us seem to demand fragmented attention. Social media becomes the convenient villain because it’s designed to pull your focus away from whatever is right in front of you.

The catch is that much of this pressure is illusory. You can ignore the news for days or weeks with no real consequence. Most of the “demands” on our attention are self‑generated. Blaming Instagram or TikTok is simply easier than admitting that we’re the ones overwhelming ourselves.

The desire to “live in the now” emerges as a reaction to this overload. The rules and boundaries we set are attempts to defend ourselves against what feels like an external force draining our attention, even if that force isn’t actually there.

So the misdiagnosis is thinking that society is imposing this problem on us. It isn’t. We are the ones manufacturing the pressure. And once that belief takes hold, “live in the now” becomes another internal conflict, a new strategy to protect ourselves from a demand that may not even exist.

There is nothing wrong with thinking about the past or future. It’s part of what makes life meaningful. We only moralize it because the perceived demand on our attention feels excessive. But because that demand is largely imaginary, we end up blaming the wrong things. Naturally, the problem never gets resolved.

I want to first establish that something artistic, beautiful, or tasteful is not necessarily creative, and something creative is not necessarily artistic. The key distinction is that creativity involves meeting an objective condition, even when the path to it is unexpected, which makes it more objective than we typically admit. And anything positioned as objectively superior often feels dehumanizing because it pressures everyone to conform, leaving little room for personal quirks or idiosyncrasies. That’s why, before going further, I want to clarify more precisely what I mean by “artistic” and “creative.” Creativity is actually measurable. Here are some examples.

Let’s say we need to build a bridge but the location is not conducive to building any solid structure. Someone could come up with a beautiful design for it, but it cannot be built at that location. Another person comes up with a solution that allows us to overcome the limitation of the location. The former, as beautiful as it may be, would not be considered “creative” because the result does not achieve our objective, and this objective is definable. Creativity, at least in the way we often use the term, is about making unexpected connections to solve a definable problem. In many cases, we can even measure it in terms of profit, efficiency, or productivity. Without this socially agreeable value, we are not likely to use the term “creative.” When someone does something creative, we often say, “That’s clever!” which reveals how we view creativity. Cleverness, which is closely associated with intelligence, has more objective value.

On the other hand, let’s say you have an empty wall you want to cover with something beautiful. You commission an artist and she creates a painting that elevates the entire space, but a blunt friend walks in and says, “I think it’s ugly, and countless artists have made similar paintings. This is not creative or original.” Be that as it may, you personally still think it’s beautiful even if nobody else does. To you, it is still “artistic” because art is in the eye of the beholder.

In Japan, when studying to be an artist, teachers do not encourage creativity or originality; they typically force students to master the fundamentals. This is partly because their ultimate goal is not the final product but the transformation of the self through disciplined practice. Creativity and originality are often seen as expressions of the ego, aimed outward toward the Other, whereas the artistic process is inward-looking, a way of encountering and understanding one’s own unconscious. This perspective, too, differentiates “artistic” from “creative” in a similar fashion.

Now, you might complain that my definitions are too narrow. Fair enough; I’m narrowing them on purpose because AI forces us to separate what is objectively solvable from what is subjectively meaningful. In everyday conversation, we mix these terms freely (creativity and artistry blur together), but that vagueness makes it impossible to see what AI is actually encroaching on. The two concepts lie on a spectrum of objective and subjective values, but for the sake of this argument, I need to pull them apart. I’m not suggesting we always use them this way; I’m doing it here so we can see what part of “creativity” AI can surpass and what part it can’t.

I would assume that AI will soon surpass us in “creativity” as defined above. AI or machine learning models are easy to train when the goal can be objectively defined. Recognizing letters and numbers or identifying flowers were among the first problems solved with AI because the correct answers were easy to obtain.

In other words, AI will be superior to us with any problems that have objectively correct answers; it is only a matter of time. So, creativity, after all, isn’t all that “human” in the sense that its superiority is independent of any of us. I would not mind outsourcing it to AI entirely. What is more human is the quality of being “artistic.”

I’m currently working on a project with an artist where our code generates artworks from randomized parameters and has him approve or disapprove them based on his personal taste, what he thinks is beautiful, regardless of what anyone else thinks. The machine learning model we built can now predict with roughly 80% accuracy whether he would approve another randomly generated work.

Now imagine ten years from now, when AI is exponentially smarter: Would this model be superior to or more “artistic” than the artist? I hope you can see that this is a nonsensical question. The very nature of art resists objective comparison. As soon as the model deviates from the artist’s taste, it simply becomes a different taste, not a superior one, and it becomes less useful to him because its predictive accuracy declines.

Just as Duchamp tried to demonstrate by putting a urinal in a gallery, art is about communicating what you think is beautiful; it is this assertion that is more meaningful than the work itself. AI can certainly help artists create artworks, but it can never be superior (or inferior, for that matter) to humans because there is no basis for comparison.

This also pertains to products we don’t normally consider artistic. Take a computer application. Now that AI can help any of us create our own apps, it will soon be pointless to buy apps designed for millions of others. Your needs and preferences are unique; why put up with sifting through features you don’t need? Why not have AI build exactly what you need, like ordering a custom-tailored suit? Although we don’t normally use the word “artistic” in this context, the subjective dimension of UI/UX design is structurally the same: it reflects personal preferences and tradeoffs that cannot be resolved objectively. That is the “artistic” aspect of UI/UX.

As you try to design one, you will realize that reality forces you to make many compromises, not because your budget is limited, but because reality has conflicting forces. Sometimes we want life to be predictable and routine so we can take care of things efficiently by following the same pattern over and over, but other times we crave freedom and flexibility. No matter how large your budget is, you cannot design an app that accommodates both simultaneously. You could design two separate interfaces, one rigid and one loose, but most of the time, we want something in between. If we designed a thousand different interfaces, managing them would create a problem of its own.

As we confront our own desires, tastes, and preferences, we quickly notice that they pull in opposing directions. The same structural tension appears in our social reality, which also makes contradictory demands on us. From a scientific or engineering mindset, such conflicts look like problems waiting for solutions. Artists, however, recognize that many of these tensions are fundamentally irresolvable: confidence vs insecurity, kindness vs resentment, solitude vs connection, freedom vs responsibility, honesty vs kindness, fear vs desire, love vs hate. Each pair contains truths that cannot be collapsed into a single answer, nor repressed without consequence. Art is the process of metabolizing these contradictions rather than resolving them. Each person must discover their own way of living with them; there is no universal formula.

In this sense, as AI advances and allows us to get exactly what we want, we will confront our own contradictions. Once we find and embrace them, we won’t care what other people say about them. The app you designed works for you and that is all that matters. Whether other people find it useful is secondary; maybe they do, maybe they don’t.

It is this artistic dimension, not the creative one, that will be more meaningful in our relationship to AI.

There are many forms of contradiction beyond self-image vs reality: confidence vs fragility, rules vs impulse, kindness vs resentment, solitude vs connection, novelty vs routine, freedom vs responsibility, honesty vs kindness, ambition vs integrity, tradition vs progress, fear vs desire, love vs hate. The list can go on indefinitely.

Art, in large part, is a record of how we try to metabolize these irresolvable tensions within ourselves. That is why contradictions feel beautiful; we want to see how others live with them, fail to resolve them, or learn to coexist with them.

Yet we are taught, particularly in the West, to view contradictions as flaws. Pointing out someone’s contradiction rarely leads to gratitude; it usually provokes defensiveness. People believe they shouldn’t have contradictions, which, to me, reflects how deeply capitalism shapes our values. Contradictions appear “inefficient,” and anything inefficient is assumed to be bad.

Another source of confusion is the way hypocrisy gets tangled up with contradiction. Hypocrisy is not simply having contradictions; it’s attacking someone else for a contradiction you also hold, usually because you haven’t recognized your own. If you want to avoid hypocrisy (and I’m not insisting you should), the first step is acknowledging your own contradictions. Once you accept them, the impulse to criticize others tends to fade. And if you have a legitimate reason to reject or resolve a contradiction in yourself, your critique of others becomes more resonant and constructive.

So when someone points out your contradictions, perhaps the appropriate response isn’t defensiveness but appreciation.

Given that ChatGPT has absorbed a near-infinite amount of conversation on this topic, I figured it would know better than anyone how I’m supposed to listen. Here’s what it gave me:

Her: “I felt so dismissed in that meeting today. Every time I tried to speak, he interrupted me.”

Him: “That sounds really frustrating. You put effort into your ideas and didn’t get space to share them.”

Her: “Yeah, exactly. It made me feel small.”

Him: “I get that. Anyone would feel that way in your position.”

Her: “Thanks. I feel good that someone understands me.”

Let’s apply a bit of critical thinking here. The key line, “Anyone would feel that way in your position,” sums it all up. The goal is to justify or validate her feelings by normalizing them. Her feelings are “valid” because everyone would feel that way.

But feelings don’t need to be justified, validated, or normalized. It’s like scraping your elbow, feeling pain, and then going around asking if it’s normal to feel that pain. The more you rely on others to confirm the normality of your experience, the more dependent you become on external validation. It may ease the pain for a moment, but in the long run, it breeds anxiety.

Now imagine you feel pain in your elbow, but doctors find nothing wrong. You might be tempted to search for others with the same mysterious symptom, to normalize it. But what if you really are the only person on earth with that sensation? What would you gain by finding someone else to confirm it? Would you stop trusting your own perception because it’s unique?

Many of our feelings are precisely that: unique. Suppose you asked hundreds of people and found that no one in your situation felt the same way. Would you then decide you were abnormal, therefore wrong? Polling may be relevant for politics, but not for your feelings.

The Mars-Venus framework rests on a misdiagnosis. The problem isn’t that men offer solutions while women seek empathy. What women often object to is the way some men turn the situation into a stage to show off their competence. The conversation becomes about him, not her. The spotlight shifts. He could easily keep the focus on her while still offering ideas. Likewise, another woman could just as easily steal focus by showing off how deeply empathetic she is. The real issue isn’t solutions versus empathy; it’s who the conversation is about.

And yet, this leaves us in a bind. If you empathize, you risk collusion, reinforcing the person’s dependency on external validation. It can slip into co-rumination, where two people dwell endlessly on problems without ever reaching understanding or resolution because it becomes a form of shared morbid enjoyment. If you problem-solve, you risk making them feel incompetent; if they yield to your competence, they become dependent on you as a guru. If you withdraw, they feel abandoned.

There is, however, another way: help the person symbolize their feelings in their own words. To do that, you have to set aside your own worldview and judgments, and ask questions that bring the unprocessed affects to the surface. In ChatGPT’s example, instead of saying, “Yes, that’s understandable,” you might ask, “What does being dismissed mean to you?” You don’t know the answer either, but you’ve noticed that “being dismissed” carries weight for her. You’re helping her translate that feeling into language she owns.

The problem is that almost nobody today welcomes that kind of dialogue, because such questions delve into parts of us that we haven’t edited for public debut. What if the answer contradicts the personas we have carefully crafted for ourselves? It feels intrusive, even aggressive, because it can destabilize the ego. Without explicit consent, it’s experienced as an attack. And virtually nobody today consents to being unsettled in this way, except in a controlled environment such as a therapist’s office.

That, I think, is the root of our current loneliness epidemic. If we are willing to have real conversations only with our therapists (who will stop talking to us the moment we stop paying them), how can we expect our friends to understand us? We are in constant contact with everyone through social media, yet no real understanding is achieved because nobody wants to risk being misunderstood. In the name of empathy and safety, we’ve created an emotional quarantine where we silently agree to keep each other locked inside our personal fictions. Each of us has written a story of ourselves that we can live with, and we protect it fiercely. We don’t want friends to challenge that story, only to affirm it. We claim we want to be understood, but what we really want is confirmation of our own understanding.

Social media has perfected this arrangement. It allows us to control what we share and filter out what we don’t want to hear. We control both input and output to safely protect our egos. We live in a world where everyone says, “Understand my understanding. Don’t understand me in your own way.” And that’s why we remain so alone.

After a few classes, though, I began to wonder what this “self” actually is. I noticed that most people do, in fact, play themselves: a happy-go-lucky girl, a confident authority, an insecure nerd, a hyperactive boy, a skeptical critic, a mellow wise guy, and so on. Unless explicitly told to play something different, they automatically revert to these baselines.

How did these baselines, our automatic behaviors, form? It’s not as though we consciously chose them from a catalog of options in childhood. We were conditioned to respond this way. If so, why do we assume these reactions define who we are?

When I’m told to play a confident character, I can manage it for about thirty seconds before I crumble. Insecurity is my default mode. Did I choose to be this way? No. So why do I consider it my “true self”? If I kept playing confidence, say like Don Corleone, perhaps that could become my automatic response. Would I then call that my true self?

“Don’t pretend to be someone you’re not. Be yourself.”

It sounds wise, but that “self” isn’t something you chose. You didn’t even direct yourself toward it; you simply became it. “True” is just a euphemism for “automatic,” the result of adaptive strategies we developed to survive.

Growing up in Japan, I was often scolded by teachers for talking during class. When I moved to the U.S., I became quiet because I wasn’t fluent in English. Over time, that quietness became the version of me people knew, my “true” self, though it was really just a survival adaptation.

According to The Geography of Thought by Richard E. Nisbett:

Americans don’t condition their self-descriptions much on context. A study asking Japanese and Americans to describe themselves either in particular contexts or without specifying a situation showed that Japanese found it very difficult to describe themselves without context—at work, at home, with friends, etc. Americans, in contrast, tended to be stumped when a context was specified—“I am what I am.”

For Americans, the “true self” is the part that doesn’t change across contexts. The idea that it can change is even seen as insulting. But that raises the question: Did you choose it? If not, why are you so devoted to preserving it?

I confronted this during my first public performance. I had invited many friends, and realized I was more nervous performing for them than for strangers. Following the American expectation of a consistent “self,” I had always maintained a steady persona among my friends and colleagues. On stage, they would see me acting “out of character.” What made me anxious wasn’t the performance; it was the prospect of being inconsistent in front of people who thought they knew me. Strangers, who had no prior expectations, didn’t make me nervous.

It’s irrational, this attachment to a “true self.” Ironically, it’s called “true” even though it’s just a byproduct of circumstances beyond our control. That attachment is what freezes us in front of an audience. Without it, I wouldn’t care if I said something stupid. I’d simply be “a stupid man on stage,” and what’s so terrible about that? I understand this conceptually, but my mind still clings to the so-called true self. It’s a self-sabotaging mechanism. And given that I was born and raised in Japan, you’d think I’d be better at letting go, but I’m not.

But plenty of what we do in “life” is alienating too, unless you genuinely enjoy cleaning bathrooms and running errands. The difference is that we feel more agency over the “life” part. We’ve simply surrendered the possibility of transforming “work,” drawing boundaries around how much “life” we’re willing to sacrifice.

The real balance isn’t between work and life but between alienating and self-actualizing forms of work. Since both exist in every domain, the distinction between work and life collapses. Our goal should be to expand the self-actualizing parts of everything we do, regardless of category.

Although alienation was one of Marx’s central ideas, it’s rarely discussed in this context. Even if communism failed to solve alienation, Marx’s concept remains valid. No activity is inherently alienating; it depends on whether it allows self-actualization. Each person’s path differs. For some, cleaning bathrooms is precisely what they need, as in Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days.

What matters less is the nature of the task than the freedom you have in executing it. Occasionally, you may be lucky enough that your employer’s expectations align with your own, but that’s rare. The task itself might be as trivial as designing junk mail; yet, if you’re free to solve it in your own way, the process can reveal something about yourself. Conversely, even designing a video game can be alienating.

Finding employers, clients, or bosses who allow that process of self-actualization isn’t as rare as it seems. They don’t need to have read Marx; they’ve simply learned, from experience, what alienation feels like. Seeking them out should be your real priority if you’re struggling with “balance.” After all, most of your waking, productive hours are spent working; those hours should be the least alienating of all.

Because the term repression is often used loosely, especially outside of psychoanalysis, I want to clarify what I mean by it. In fact, I think the term is misleading; it evokes an image of something being pressed down to keep it from exploding. The metaphor emphasizes the push but neglects the pull of attraction. In reality, repression is more like an implantation, or perhaps an infection. We are both repelled by and drawn to it, a paradox Freud recognized in his 1915 paper on repression. Let me offer some examples to illustrate how repression works.

Imagine yourself as a preschooler. One day, your dad comes home looking depressed and mumbles the word “laid off” to your mom. Her face drops, too. Since you don’t yet know how a capitalist society works, you can’t comprehend what happened, but you still metabolize its significance. It doesn’t have to be about them having sex.

Curiously, this metabolization of significance follows a kind of grammatical structure—hence Lacan’s famous pronouncement: the unconscious is structured like a language. If you’re a native English speaker, you may not be able to explain how English grammar works, even if you studied it in school. Yet you have a mastery that someone like me, for whom English is a second language, can only dream of. So it shouldn’t be surprising that you’ve accumulated many nonsensical, inexplicable significations over the course of your life that remain in your unconscious. We’re all full of them.

The key point here is that something does not need to be put into words in order to be remembered, or rather, metabolized somewhere in your brain. You might say, “Of course, I remember how I felt about something.” But that isn’t repression, at least not what I mean by it. What’s repressed isn’t the affect; it’s the structure of a particular signification, or the particular constellation of signifiers. Although repression is generally perceived negatively, it could just as well be seen as something positive. When something lacks sense, we can’t even evaluate it; it remains inaccessible until it becomes intelligible within our consciousness. Still, we tend to treat anything radically new, anything that disturbs the status quo, as a potential threat. To that extent, repression is perceived negatively, even if its underlying function is more neutral.

Recently, a friend gave me a foreign banknote with something handwritten on it in a language I couldn’t read. I had no idea what it said, but certain things were immediately clear. First, I could tell it was a language; this wasn’t just someone testing a pen. Someone wrote something for someone else. There was intent. There was an attempt to signify. And even though I couldn’t access the meaning, I could still sense that those words belonged to a system with a history shared by countless speakers of that language. Others may not have noticed it but it stuck in my mind for some reason, and I didn’t need to understand the language for that to happen. The signifierness of the marking was sufficient. In fact, if I had understood the language, I probably wouldn’t have even taken note of it.

You’ve probably seen a film you didn’t particularly like at first, yet it lingered in your mind. That’s because your unconscious metabolizes art differently from your conscious mind. The opposite can also happen: you might enjoy a film in the moment, only to forget it completely later. Films that resonate at the unconscious level are the ones you can return to again and again. The others, those processed fully at the level of language and conscious understanding, often feel complete after a single viewing. Once is enough; your mind has already extracted what it needed.

The Japanese film Maboroshi, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, beautifully illustrates how repression works at the level of signification. One evening, the protagonist, Yumiko, learns that her husband was killed by a train. According to the operator, he walked directly into its path, despite the screeching brakes. Before this, there had been no signs of unhappiness, no warning, no explanation. Yumiko is unable even to cry. Much of the film follows her as she moves through the motions of daily life. Her silence around the apparent suicide renders the mundane surreal. The film itself represses the very question we, as viewers, are desperate to ask. Near the end, a conversation with a mutual friend reactivates the repression, and she finally finds the courage to put words to the question she’s been too afraid to ask. In typical Japanese fashion, the film offers no clear answer, no closure.

Yumiko understands what “suicide” means in her language, but she cannot make sense of this suicide. To answer why he did it, she would have to consider the entire history of their relationship. And because only she possesses that history, the structure of this particular signification is entirely unique to her. For others who knew him, his act might signify something else. But for Yumiko, it remains opaque. It is precisely this failure to make sense of it that consigns it to her unconscious. If she could put it into words, it would belong to her conscious memory. Furthermore, the film demonstrates why it is not affect that gets stored in the unconscious. Because the event made no sense to her, she didn’t even know how to feel about it, which is why she couldn’t cry.

Although what gets repressed, and why, varies from person to person, after reading Brenner’s book, I began to notice a difference in how autistic and neurotypical people relate to repression. I still believe the mechanism of repression operates in the autistic subject, but the relationship to it appears different.

What exactly distinguishes autistic brains is still widely debated, but it’s safe to say that something substantial sets them apart, something that makes understanding neurotypical minds particularly challenging for autistic individuals. When speaking with another autistic person, my intuition works just fine; I don’t need to constantly analyze what they’re thinking or feeling. Unfortunately, that’s not the case with neurotypical people. Because I can’t intuitively read them, I’ve had to compensate by developing analytical skills.

Here is an analogy. A typical computer has a general-purpose CPU (central processing unit) and a GPU (graphics processing unit) for handling graphics-intensive tasks. GPUs are optimized for common graphical operations; they’re hardwired for speed. Our brains have something similar for processing emotional data; call it an EPU, or “emotional processing unit.” Unfortunately, mine doesn’t work well for neurotypical behavior, so my CPU has to pick up the slack. It’s exhausting.

If you’ve learned another language as an adult, you can probably relate. Suppose you’re a native Japanese speaker who learned English later in life. Because English isn’t hardwired into your brain, your CPU has to emulate it. You may know more about English grammar than a native speaker, but that knowledge is conceptual rather than intuitive. You say, “There are a lot of chairs,” because you’ve learned that plural nouns take an “s.” The word chairs doesn’t roll off your tongue automatically; following the rules, your CPU steps in to append the “s,” noticing that there are multiple chairs. This is CPU at work, not the LPU, or language processing unit.

In the same way, I’m constantly analyzing people’s psychological states in order to respond appropriately—appropriately, that is, by neurotypical standards. Just as ESL speakers tend to be better at explaining English grammar than native speakers, I’ve become skilled at articulating what others are feeling, often in psychoanalytic terms. It’s a coping mechanism I had to develop in order to function in a world where this kind of processing comes intuitively to others.

But this coping mechanism has also proved useful for analyzing my own mind. I don’t know if this holds true for all, or even many, autistic people, but among those I’ve known, psychoanalytic language is common. We welcome it, because it helps us navigate the neurotypical world. With my neurotypical friends, however, the opposite is true. They hate it. Well, hate may be too soft a word; abhor is probably more accurate. It’s no wonder psychoanalysis has fallen out of fashion. I’ve lost friendships over it—times when I blurted out an analysis that happened to occur to me in the moment. Blurting out “inappropriate” truths is a common stereotype of autism.

But I don’t believe we lack the ability to discern appropriateness. We’re simply following the so-called golden rule: treat others the way you want to be treated. I speak to others the way I’d want someone to speak to me, candidly and insightfully, even if it stings.

Even as a child growing up in Japan, I made a deliberate effort not to repress anything. Repression, to me, felt like sweeping a mess into a closet. I felt compelled to keep it organized, to prevent it from piling up and becoming unmanageable. When I’m riddled with anxiety, I don’t simply repress what might be causing it; I use every psychoanalytic tool I have to process it as best I can.

Over time, I’ve noticed that I have verbal tics when I’m trying to repress something. I make silly, meaningless noises, as if they could drown out the unwanted thoughts. Sometimes I blurt out something random, like “I love you!” to my dog. Some autistic people have physical tics, and I wonder if this is because they struggle to repress undesirable thoughts. These reflexes don’t succeed in repressing anything, but they serve as clues. They let me know that something is trying to be repressed. When I catch myself doing this, I stop and listen closely to the anxiety, to see whether I can symbolize it.

Unlike fear, anxiety has no object. So putting it into language can help ease the suffering, but it can also become a rationalization that obscures the truth rather than revealing it, depending on how one perceives repression. Perhaps this is the core difference between the autistic subject and the neurotypical subject: the former is optimistic, the latter pessimistic.

Let me explain.

As the popularity of “safe spaces” on college campuses suggests, many neurotypical people feel like walking landmines. Without intending to, you might say the wrong word and trigger them. Their self-righteousness, their demand for safe spaces, often implies that having landmines buried throughout their psyche is both inevitable and unsolvable. They become angry because they assume there’s nothing they can do about it. It’s like suggesting a dietary change to someone with a terminal illness: the suggestion feels insulting because it implies change is still possible.

In contrast, conversations with other autistic people feel more like walking through a garden, where turning over stones reveals something forgotten or lost. I don’t worry about offending them. I’m not saying all autistic people are like this, but because many of us are known for blurting out inappropriate or uncomfortable truths, we tend to accept that it’s only fair to be on the receiving end of them too.

This dynamic also sheds light on the popularity of psychotherapy, particularly cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Given the pervasive pessimism in neurotypical culture, the resistance a therapist would encounter when attempting psychoanalysis makes it largely impractical. CBT, by contrast, focuses on symptom management and offers tools for coping, not uncovering.

But for those more optimistic about the possibility of defusing landmines, psychoanalysis, or at least psychoanalytic thinking, can be helpful. And I suspect that many autistic people would benefit from it, not only as a way to understand themselves but also as a coping mechanism for navigating the neurotypical world.

Beyond its use as a tool for moderating suffering, psychoanalysis can help autistic individuals harness their stronger-than-average drives to make life more enjoyable. As I noted at the beginning, repression doesn’t just repel; it also attracts. Freud called this attraction the “death drive,” because left unchecked, it can be dangerous. (Lacan, realizing there was no separate “life drive,” dropped the “death” part altogether.) Perhaps due to their more optimistic orientation, autistic people often embrace their drives rather than fear them. Many develop intense, often esoteric, obsessions. In children, this is sometimes referred to as “little professor syndrome”; they end up knowing more about a subject than their teachers. Unlike obsessive-compulsive disorder, autistic obsession is fueled by passion, not fear. Still, the danger is real: drives can easily veer into self-destructive or addictive behaviors. Awareness is crucial. You’re essentially playing with fire; you want it to be fireworks, not a house of fire.

Psychoanalysis doesn’t have to stay confined to the consulting room of a licensed analyst. I use it both as a coping mechanism and as a way to supervise my seemingly uncontrollable drive. In this way, psychoanalysis can be a powerful tool for autistic individuals—not just for survival, but for transformation.

A “look” usually comes and goes, like fashion trends (e.g., the blue-green Matrix era), but the word “cinematic” never lost its appeal. That suggests there’s something more fundamental about it.

Here’s my take:

What we call “cinematic” is simply the presence of color grading itself, the deliberate effort to process color. Footage that doesn’t look cinematic is usually just ungraded or unprocessed. We’ve turned “cinematic” into an aesthetic or stylistic category when, in fact, it just means “processed.”

There are practically no Hollywood films with unprocessed color, so “cinematic look” has come to mean “what movies look like.” By contrast, we don’t say “photographic look” because we are inundated with unprocessed photographs.

Unprocessed footage doesn’t show reality as our eyes see it either. Camera sensors can capture only a limited range of what our eyes see, then further reduce the dynamic range in the JPEG output. The result is not optical accuracy but a technically limited representation. Grading is a deliberate intervention of an otherwise automatic, mechanical process. We try to reproduce perceptual realism, the way we remember light and color, when we color grade. In other words, we frame colors just as we frame compositions; it’s the limitations that turn color grading into a form of art.

So “cinematic” survives as a term not because it describes a specific look, but because it describes a human intervention; what we call “cinematic color” is simply color interpreted by human subjectivity rather than left to chance.

Most human conversations are torturous. It’s like watching someone get a massage: am I supposed to join in and massage the same person, or do I massage the masseuse? Either way, why? While trying to answer that, I realize I’ve already lost track of what they were saying.

After taking the class, I can’t help but see every conversation as improv, and every improv exercise as rehearsal for real conversations. I expected the class to be full of extroverts, but it’s mostly nerds like me.

I still don’t understand why some scenes are engaging and others fall flat. In small talk, people often intuitively follow the famous improv rule “Yes, and,” but it doesn’t help much. Viola Spolin only meant it as a rule for a particular game, not as a universal principle. And anyway, when people use the term small talk, they’re usually referring to conversations that are, by definition, unengaging. Nobody likes it.

Engaging interactions just happen; they emerge. Neither person can force it. The real question is how to let it happen, not how to make it happen. In that sense, the process feels subtractive, not additive. You don’t contribute something; you remove something, your own blockage. If either party is blocked, it won’t happen. All you can really do is unblock yourself and then watch as the conversation unfolds on its own, like it belongs to someone else.

What matters isn’t a rule like “Yes, and,” but the desire to engage. The trouble is, none of us ultimately knows what we want in life, because we don’t know what life is. Improv, like all conversation, is trial and error, a way to uncover our desires by watching them play out in real time.

Plato believed speech was superior to writing, largely because writing lacked the dialectical engagement that leads us closer to truth. Writing, to him, was a mere derivative; speech was where authenticity lived. This negative view of writing flipped when Gutenberg invented the printing press.

In Of Grammatology, Derrida chose the privileging of speech over writing to make his case for Deconstruction. Although his argument still holds, I’ve always found that a weird choice, because by the 20th century, writing had long been privileged over speech. In any case, as he pointed out, there’s no solid ground for believing that either is superior, more originary, or authentic. Zen Buddhism echoes a similar view. There isn’t much written text for monks to study, and reading isn’t their primary mode of learning. So if our children end up better at speaking than writing, what exactly is the problem? Was Socrates a lesser person?

When did we agree that being able to focus is better than being able to track multiple things at once? Being autistic, I often wish I could be less focused. In group conversations, my mind locks onto one thing at a time. Since words are an essential part of a conversation, I have to shut out everything else by looking down, which can result in missing what is expressed through body language.

And what about thinking itself? Does thinking deeply or constantly make someone better? In my observation, the opposite seems to be true. Zen monks devote their lives to stop thinking. And from what I can tell, that’s far harder than thinking a lot. Anyone can do the latter.

So, I’m not sure what all the fuss is about. If smartphones and AI make us less focused, less literate, and think less, we’ll just be different, not better or worse.

A few days ago, I overheard Roxanne telling our daughter, “You’ll understand someday.” It’s a common thing older people say to the young. I remember hating it when I was younger. “If you can’t articulate it, keep it to yourself!” I thought. At nearly 60, I still believe that, but I now understand the temptation.

The longer I’ve lived, the more inexpressible sentiments have accumulated. I’ve come to appreciate fiction, literature, and even poetry more, because I now see how impossible it is to convey certain experiences through reason alone. “Articulate,” in its usual sense, implies logic and clarity, but some sentiments defy that. We can’t explain them; we can only reproduce them in others, through poetry, music, or art. I feel I’ve hit the ceiling of what reason alone can achieve.

Although these sentiments are often tangled in irreducible contradictions, I still do feel the urge to express them. That’s the challenge I face at 58: finding ways beyond reason. If the solution can’t be reached through logic, then all I can do is kick the vending machine; try things I’ve avoided or never considered, hoping something will shake loose.

This goes against my natural inclination to solve problems systematically. But much of the artistic process is trial and error; intuiting patterns that can’t be put into words. And when something resonates with someone, even one person, it’s proof that you’ve managed to capture a fragment of that elusive sentiment before it fades.

My internal line was likely drawn during my childhood in Japan. The Japanese are generally more responsible than Americans and have a lower tolerance for selfish behavior. My parents were also on the extreme end of the spectrum within Japan. I grew up constantly hearing my mom tell me not to trouble other people. She is so neurotic about it that she cannot relax at restaurants because she feels like she’s troubling the waitstaff too much. When a new restaurant opened near her that replaced all the servers with robots, she was happy about it.

By Japanese standards, the behavior of Americans is appalling. But of course, Americans would shrug off their critical gaze: “Fuck off. Where we draw the line is none of your business!” Again, there is no God dictating it. If we imagine a global spectrum, one end is a society where anything goes; you can kill someone if he annoys you, steal anything you want. On the other end is a society made entirely of Stormtroopers: everyone obeys all rules and laws to the letter, everyone values the same things, and there is no disagreement. A perfectly civilized society. Nobody is annoying, but nobody is interesting either. All cultures fall somewhere between these extremes, without any explicit agreement or authority above humanity.

I don’t know where this Asian family came from, as I didn’t understand their language, but it’s possible that their culture drew the line at a different point. It’s fair game if most people in that society don’t mind being held up by families like that. What I can’t stand are hypocrites who get pissed at others for violating rules they themselves don’t honor.

In art school, there was this guy who often “borrowed” and squeezed out excessive amounts of expensive oil paints from others in class. We would look at each other in disbelief, but he was oblivious. I said to my friends that it would be fair if he were generous with his own paint; so one day I tried squeezing out an excessive amount of his paint to see how he’d react. I couldn’t hear the end of his complaints. He annoyed us so much that we tried to get rid of him, as he was following us everywhere. He’s still my friend, though.

Some years ago, I was arguing with another friend on Facebook, and he snapped, “What’s your problem with hypocrites?!” It was a type of “critical thinking” I had never engaged in, because it seemed self-evident that being hypocritical is a bad thing. But at the meta-level, there’s also a spectrum of hypocrisy, and we all fall somewhere on it. And again, it’s not like some God decided that this much hypocrisy is OK.

I feel like Japan has more hypocrites than the U.S. Because they must conform strictly to societal expectations, they’ve become skilled at transgressing without being detected. But if anyone is caught, they are not forgiving. The lead actor and actress of Asako I & II, directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, were caught having an affair some years ago. It appears nothing much happened to the actor, but the actress was practically banned from the film industry. I couldn’t figure out why. Apparently, if a woman seduces a married man, it’s the woman’s fault. Meanwhile, they love films about having affairs. Even though I wasn’t specifically looking for them, I came across countless dramatic films about married people falling in love with someone else, many of them sympathetic to the idea. I guess they want to keep it strictly a fantasy. Americans wouldn’t have that level of hypocrisy.

The part of me conditioned in Japan still reacts with anger to selfish behavior, while another part of me says, “Chill. Who knows what their standards are?” When I come across double standards, I can feel the top of my head fuming, but my wife has helped me control my knee-jerk reactions, not because she’s a psychotherapist, but because she loves having different standards for me.

In my 20s, someone told me: “You really like to sound smart, don’t you?” It stuck in my mind. The fact that it stayed with me suggested it touched on something deeper. I kept thinking about it. It’s true; I would eagerly tackle subjects reputedly impossible to understand as if my life depended on it. That’s how I ended up studying philosophers like Wittgenstein, Derrida, and Lacan. Most people don’t place such importance on appearing smart. Nobody wants to appear dumb, but not everyone needs to be perceived as particularly intelligent either. So why am I so attached?

My theory is that it stems from my absent father. I believe I created a defense mechanism, rationalizing why I didn’t need his attention, but deep down, I was desperate for it. Because my father himself valued appearing “smart,” this became my lifelong pursuit too. After he retired and grew bored, he began paying attention to me. I realized then that his attention wasn’t particularly great, yet my desire to be the smartest person in the room persisted. I had already internalized him, and it took on a life of its own. Had I been born in the US, my dream career might have been a professor. Would that have been good? It’s hard to say, as it would still be a psychological crutch covering a childhood wound. Becoming or rejecting becoming a Harvard professor wouldn’t solve the problem, assuming there’s even a problem to begin with.

Today, I listened to a podcast by the New York Times titled: Terry Real’s Advice for Dads: Open Your Heart and Loosen Up. I thought it might show me what it’s like to have the kind of parents I wished for. Instead, as I listened, I felt relieved that Terry Real was not my parent, openly sharing his vulnerabilities with his children. For example, he’d tell his son: “When you say that, it hurts my feelings.”

Not long before my father died, my parents and I were discussing a period from my childhood over dinner. At the peak of his career, my father had collapsed due to a mysterious illness, hospitalized and bedridden for several years. My mother held the family together. They revealed details I hadn’t known as a child. I said, “I had no idea we were in such a dire situation. I was just focused on my schoolwork.” My mother started crying, expressing relief, pain, and joy simultaneously: “I’m so happy to hear that. I tried really hard not to worry you.” The fact that she could now, four decades later, share what she felt had a cathartic effect on her, I think.

There’s a reason we don’t have sex in front of kindergarteners, even if it’s part of reality. Children need protection from the Real. Controlling their exposure involves creating fictional worlds, much like the story of Santa Claus. Nothing frightens a child more than seeing their parents afraid. If parents openly shared all their unfiltered feelings, anxieties, and fears, it would traumatize their children.

“When you say that, it hurts my feelings,” may seem harmless. However, to a six-year-old unable to manage her own emotions, it’s overwhelming to have to manage her father’s feelings as well. A child should be allowed the illusion that her parents’ feelings can’t be hurt. Only once she’s emotionally mature enough should she learn that her actions can affect her parents’ feelings.

Since Brené Brown’s TED talk about vulnerability, it has become a popular buzzword and an unquestioned virtue: the more vulnerable, the better. Imagine this scenario: a married man with a child goes out for drinks with a female colleague. She shares her vulnerabilities, hoping he’ll reciprocate. He responds, “Oh, that’s nothing. You have no idea how pathetic I am. I’m despicable. When we have Zoom meetings, sometimes I turn off my camera, claiming the plumber is here. But I’m actually jerking off while looking at you or another woman.” He’s telling the truth. It is indeed pathetic and despicable, but he’s only human. It would be dishonest if someone claimed they’d never had fantasies about coworkers. Still, there’s a good reason some truths should remain secret, even among adults. We maintain certain fictions to shield ourselves because confronting the Real can be disturbing or even traumatic.

Would I be happier today if my parents had been more emotionally present? There’s no real answer because that hypothetical person wouldn’t be me. Do I regret striving to be smart to impress my father? No. My motivation might have been misguided, but without it, I’d be a different person entirely.

Here’s a more disturbing example: Imagine a poet who was raped as a child. Because of her experience, she develops a profound understanding of human suffering, touching millions worldwide. It sounds like I’m justifying rape. Had she not experienced such trauma, perhaps she’d be a carefree person who uncritically conformed to societal expectations, marrying a hedge fund manager and living happily ever after.

Everything that happens shapes who we become. There’s no objectively better or worse version of ourselves because the conditions necessary for comparison are not available. The question itself lacks meaning. Even if cause and effect seem clear, the outcomes can’t be labeled as good, bad, better, or worse. They simply are.

My parents are who they are; they did what they did. I’m the result. Good? Bad? Better? Worse? Such questions merely distract me from living my life.

At first, I thought it was a function of age; especially once we have children, we become overwhelmed by responsibilities, and free time to hang out all but disappears. However, I noticed that younger people are not hanging out either. If they do socialize, it’s structured.

Some theorists say the shortage of unstructured face-to-face time is making people socially risk-averse. It’s probably not the sole cause, but it’s likely one of them.

My social environment in college was highly unusual: fine arts students generally accept the risks of exposing their deepest thoughts and feelings. Some students even ran out of class in tears over harsh critiques, yet none of us blamed the teachers; that intensity was exactly what we’d signed up for. It was obvious: no pain, no gain. Even if a “safe space” had existed, we’d have avoided it, assuming “safe” meant no growth or learning.

Risk and authenticity are two sides of the same coin, yet the digital world, complete with its undo button, tempts us to cherry-pick authenticity alone. We cannot have authenticity without accepting the risks that come with it, but we have come to expect, or even demand, risk-free authenticity. It should not come as a surprise that everyone is craving “authenticity”; it feels mythical because authenticity without risk is indeed a myth.

Almost every time I meet Mark, we discuss photography and then move on to deeply personal issues. I know the risk is there, and I believe he does, too, but we are willing to take it. We’ve annoyed and insulted each other, but we come back for some more. If you embrace that risk, authenticity isn’t hard to find, but you won’t find it online no matter how authentic some celebrities, influencers, or politicians may appear because you are not taking any risks. They offer only the fantasy of authenticity.

It is interesting to note that Song chose an old-school method of matchmaking to address the problems dating apps have introduced into modern relationships. There were hardly any mentions of dating apps. The characters spoke as though matchmakers were still the predominant method of finding partners.

What becomes abundantly clear by the end of the film is that the checkbox thinking for finding love is fundamentally misguided. By filtering candidates based on criteria and swiping left and right, dating apps give you an illusory sense of control. Even if you aren’t materialistic and are looking for someone like a broke artist, the very idea of specifying what you want and expecting to get it in return for what you offer is, at its core, materialistic.

The film demonstrates how this checkbox thinking blinds you to what love is. Lucy, played by Dakota Johnson, is insightful enough to realize how her own materialist (or, more precisely, capitalist) thinking interferes with love. Her ego wants the super-rich “unicorn” Harry, played by Pedro Pascal, but her heart wants the struggling actor John, played by Chris Evans.

The fantasy of marrying a rich man is common in Hollywood, but Japanese films about love rarely feature wealthy individuals, and when they do, rich men are typically portrayed and perceived as unromantic. Perhaps Celine Song, being Asian American, is aware of how Eastern and Western portrayals of romance diverge, and it may have motivated her to write this story.

The film is also an apt illustration of Jacques Lacan’s counterintuitive definition of love: Love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it. In one of the final scenes, John tries to give Lucy what her ego wants (money he does not have) by offering to do more catering jobs instead of acting, but, at this point, she realizes that her heart does not want it, so she kisses him to stop him from listing what he would do for her ego. It is a perfect illustration of two people who cannot help but love each other despite their egos’ objections.

In short, dating is a performance, whereas love is an experience, neither passive nor deliberate. If you continue to perform your script, you will miss the experience. The moral of the story: Listen to your heart, not your head. You will then stumble upon love, whether you want it or not.

Chess is easy to explain. It’s tangible, measurable, and comparable. After socializing, you could even write down what you learned.

Dance, by contrast, is almost impossible to explain. It’s like climbing a mountain with friends; its impact might not be clear until weeks later. Even something as frivolous as singing karaoke can be transformative if it helps you shed your inhibitions.

Most socializing falls somewhere between these two extremes. They do not constitute a binary pair but a spectrum.

My social circle is skewed toward chess. Even when the room is full of laughter, we’re usually exploring what is knowable or explicable. This kind of socializing is the art of articulation. We respect each other for our ability to express vague, abstract, or complex ideas.

Still, I do go dancing now and then. Ballroom dancing, to me, is a kind of copout (unless taken to the extreme), because it stays safely within established forms. The true benefit of dance is crossing into the unknown. Unless you let the freak out, you won’t get there. Because there’s nothing you can articulate, transformation is the only way its impact becomes apparent.

Whether you’re playing chess or dancing, you want to avoid performing. A performance follows a script; there’s no room to change. In contrast, growth requires letting go of the script and becoming whatever the moment calls for. You must allow the context to shape you.

In either case, courage is required for growth, especially the courage to accept evaluation, which is not the same as judgment. Don’t expect or demand safety.

Each of us is made up of many parts. And each part wants to play a different game.

Both Céline and Jesse are somewhat aware that their excitement stems from the fact that their interaction feels like a fantasy they are writing in their minds, which is why they’re unsure whether they should meet again. If they do, the demands of reality may destroy the illusion. By not meeting again, they could preserve the fantasy indefinitely, entertaining themselves with what-if scenarios. In this way, the characters are aware of their own predicament being fictitious, which makes it feel more real, blurring the line between fiction and reality. 

Nine years later, in Before Sunset, we find them successful in their respective fields: he’s now a bestselling novelist, and she remains an environmental activist. The actors have aged in real time, and the film unfolds in real time, again erasing the distinction between reality and fiction. In conventional films, we suspend disbelief when actors “age” via makeup. The makeup signifies aging; we aren’t actually fooled. But seeing them age organically, juxtaposed with scenes from Before Sunrise, hits us with the gravity of time in a way symbolism cannot.

We learn that both characters have, in some way, clung to the fantasy they created in the first film, using it to make their ordinary lives more tolerable. Now the question is: Should they turn that fantasy into reality? What would that mean, practically? And is it even morally permissible?

In the first two films, the excitement comes from transgression. The contradictions between individual desire and societal expectations generate a need for fantasy, something to sublimate their frustrations. Transgression is thrilling precisely because those contradictions are inescapable. But this excitement cannot sustain itself indefinitely. Films like Sid and Nancy or 9½ Weeks show where unchecked transgression leads: beautiful stories, perhaps, but ones you’d prefer to observe from an audience seat.

Assuming we don’t want to be self-destructive, what can come next in a love relationship? That’s the question Before Midnight attempts to answer. And this is where it turns starkly unromantic because it offers no answer we don’t already know: the inevitability of the mundane. Jesse and Céline, now living together, do what all couples do: manage chores, juggle parenting and personal needs, fight and make up, and escape occasionally into nature just to recharge so the whole mundane cycle can begin again. Even Céline’s toplessness is depicted as something we have already seen enough of. At one point, while they’re making out in bed, the phone rings. She answers it still topless, leading into a bitter argument, as if her nudity is no longer even registered.

The film gives us no glimpse beyond the tedium of ordinary life. It’s practically staged for future affairs to reignite lost excitement. The trilogy dismantles the fantasy that makes ordinary life tolerable, and, according to Wikipedia, the director and actors have failed to find a worthwhile reason to make a fourth film. In other words, they don’t see any hope beyond the mundane either. The trilogy succeeds in portraying the pain of melancholia: it gives us a reason to mourn youth, to replay the first film in our minds the way the characters do in theirs.

The ultimate question the trilogy raises, for me, is this: Is love even worth pursuing? Is there more to love than what Linklater depicts? I think there is. In fact, many films depict it, though they’re rarely categorized as “romance” because they’re about something greater; something in which love merely plays a supporting role.

The most famous example that comes to mind is the relationship between Princess Leia and Han Solo. Although Solo is fiercely independent, they collaborate anyway. Love becomes the foundation for their shared goals, not the goal itself.

Shall We Dance? (I’ve only seen the original Japanese version) is technically a romantic comedy, but the relationship between the salaryman and his dance instructor is never formalized as “love.” Initially, he’s drawn to her to escape the tedium of family life, but to his surprise, he becomes obsessed with dancing. His respect for her as a serious dancer ultimately outweighs the initial fantasy, because by then, he no longer needs fantasy to escape boredom.

In many of Miyazaki’s films, like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Spirited Away, romantic tensions remain unresolved because his female protagonists are too preoccupied with larger goals. What we see instead is mutual admiration rooted in shared purpose. Love functions as a source of inspiration, not possession.

In fact, it’s not just love; all human relationships begin to collapse when we turn inward and make the relationship itself the focus. Take the extreme example of befriending someone simply for the sake of “having a friend.” What can you possibly expect from that?

We could think of love and friendship as side effects or emergent phenomena. If you strike two keys on a piano, you hear harmony, even though neither note intends to harmonize. It just happens. Likewise, a flock of birds appears to move with a unified purpose, even though each bird is simply responding to its immediate surroundings. If you aim directly at love or friendship, it collapses under its own weight. Even if you begin by aiming at a specific person, your attention eventually needs to shift outward.

But this raises a deeper question: What is out there to focus on, if not each other? That’s the existential weight we all carry: the search for meaning. How we find it is another matter entirely, but what Linklater’s trilogy made me realize is this: Love won’t save you if your raison d’être is unclear.

When I look at people’s artwork, how I see them often changes dramatically, not always for the better, but in this case, it was. A picture is worth a thousand words—maybe quite a bit more. That’s why it can be terrifying for an artist.

Sidney and I stood in front of seven tiny paintings. I didn’t know what to make of them. One thing was clear: there was no logic to what was going on in them. Sidney said he liked them because whatever he saw in them was purely a reflection of himself. A sharp observation. It hadn’t occurred to me, but I realized it was true. I guess our art school was good for something after all.

“Surreal” would be the wrong word, at least if you mean dreamlike, because dreams have symbolic functions. These paintings seemed to defy logic entirely. Despite the presence of symbols, my cognitive brain couldn’t grasp anything. They resisted interpretation. So if you had one, it likely said more about you than the artist, like a Rorschach test. And the fact that there were seven of them proved it wasn’t an accident.

We eventually spoke with the artist, though he didn’t seem to consider himself one. It was just something he enjoyed doing, he explained. I asked about his process, whether he had a sense of what he wanted to paint before picking up a brush. He said no; it just begins and ends wherever it does. I told him that’s a talent. I couldn’t do it. The cognitive part of my brain would dominate the process, and the rest wouldn’t stand a chance of expressing themselves without passing the approval mechanism of my prefrontal cortex.

Art reminds us that our worldview is enframed by what we’ve learned. Because cognition is limited by the frameworks we inherit, an artwork can confront us as a kind of radical alterity, something that resists comprehension, but a hint of its existence is enough to transform how we perceive the world.

To understand it, we need to return briefly to Freud. In Civilization and Its Discontents, he argued that societal needs and individual needs are fundamentally at odds. Though the book is widely taught in college, few seem to grasp its central argument despite how simple it is.

Our society expects each of us to present a unified, cohesive front. Someone named John is expected to behave rationally and consistently. If John agrees to meet you for breakfast tomorrow, you expect him to show up. However, in reality, John is made up of contradicting forces and impulses within himself. He is hardly cohesive, but society demands that he somehow manage those contradictions and present a fictitious self that appears rational and consistent because, otherwise, chaos threatens. This is how civilization is built, on fiction.

During the pandemic, a New Yorker staff writer was caught masturbating on a Zoom call, thinking his camera was off. People were outraged by it, but I’m sure they, too, engage in irrational, animalistic behaviors in bedrooms while presenting civilized facades in public. Their outrage isn’t that he has sexual urges but that he failed to repress them. To meet the social demand perfectly, he would have to neuter himself to eliminate desire entirely. If we were to demand our society accept our individual needs perfectly, we should be free to masturbate everywhere or even rape anyone we want. This contradiction is not resolvable. There is no solution. Yet, we act as if there is one.

“Safe space” is a group conversation where everyone is expected to suspend rational expectations. Participants can express their needs and feelings, however irrational they may be, without fearing judgment. What is problematic about this suspension is that it assumes the contradictions to be ethically wrong. If they understood Freud’s argument, no suspension would be needed because contradictions would be accepted as inescapable.

“I agreed to meet John for breakfast, but when I woke up that morning, I didn’t feel like stepping out, so I didn’t.”

A participant could then point out how irresponsible it is, but nobody would see it as judgment because they understand that individual needs and societal needs are ultimately irreconcilable. The conversation can then shift towards what we could do to find a compromise.

This cannot happen in a safe space because the objective is to be supportive of the speaker’s feelings, no matter how irrational or irresponsible they might be. But think about it: Why do they need to ignore societal demands? Because they do not want to feel judged. But judged by whom, and for what? It is they themselves who believe these contradictions are wrong. It is precisely because of this that they need to be suspended. That is, they need to suspend their own judgment because they hold that judgment. Otherwise, they would have no need to suspend it; they could openly talk about it without feeling judged. In other words, when they condemn others as emotionally blind, they are projecting their own suppressed judgment, which is why these seemingly gentle creatures suddenly turn fierce.

Because it is only a temporary suspension, as soon as they leave the safe space, they begin criticizing themselves and others for having contradictions. It’s like a Wall Street banker meditating for an hour, only to return to maximizing profits at others’ expense. Safe space, like meditation, can become addictive because it does not confront the fundamental problem. In this sense, we could say that a safe space is where they are safe from their own judgment because others force them to stop judging themselves.

Our society’s expectations around safe space have grown to the point where mutual infantilization is now an ethical imperative. It’s not about sensitivity but about compliance. Disagreement, discomfort, or critique are recast as violence. Not surprising because this tyranny is within themselves. Because they’ve never accepted the inescapable tension between civilization and individuals, when outside of a safe space, they turn into authoritarian enforcers of societal demands. They drag others into their self-incrimination by projecting their own judgmental selves onto others.

I have to restate it: the contradictions between the needs of civilization and individuals cannot be resolved. Not even viral social media campaigns or empathy can resolve them. All that we can achieve is a compromise. Yet our society today is hell-bent on resolving them, silencing those willing to compromise. Like teenagers incapable of handling feelings of ambivalence, they switch between tyranny and sentimentality. Ironically and tragically, it is they, not the ones willing to compromise, who will endure the greatest suffering.

As I got older, I realized most people don’t talk that way, which explains the popularity of psychotherapy. Conversations also change with age. By our 50s, most of us have reconciled our ambitions with reality. We look back on the period of struggle with a kind of melancholy. Only later do we see that the struggle and suffering gave us our glow. We’ve learned to live with peace and comfort, but the glow faded. That’s partly why films about middle age rarely feel compelling.

Another shift came with the transition from synchronous (phone) to asynchronous (email) forms of communication. People say text lacks emotional cues like tone or facial expression, but that was never convincing to me. If text couldn’t carry emotion, why do so many say the book was better than the movie?

A novel is a one-way expression. In dialogue, what matters is how the other person changes what you said. It’s like radar. You send a signal, but what matters is the echo. The signal itself is meaningless, like yelling “hello” into a canyon. The difference between an expected and actual interpretation is the primary content in a dialogue.

A written text can be more concrete and better articulated, but it removes the spatiotemporal context of the sender and receiver. The mental and physical states of people change between the time the message is sent and returned. It’s like a radar pulse that freezes, then unfreezes after everything has moved. The transformation of the signal can no longer be interpreted reliably.

The convenience and efficiency of asynchronous communication help businesses but harm our social well-being. Seeing someone in person isn’t about more data; the less can be more. It’s about shared context, so the echoes you get back still mean something.

Think of sansho, the Japanese spice often sprinkled on yakitori or grilled eel. Imagine some random American guy gets a sample and decides to sprinkle it on ice cream. He likes it, so it becomes his thing: sansho ice cream. But he shows no interest in the context that gave birth to it. It might taste great. It’s a free country; he can use it however he wants. But something about it feels sad and disrespectful. I had to think about why.

It reminded me of objectification. We usually think of that in sexual terms, like a woman seen only as a sex object, but it happens in other contexts too. Say someone hires you as a programmer but shows no interest in who you are as a person. That’s also objectification.

Maybe it’s clearer to look at it from the other side: subjectification. In the mind-body split, the mind is the subject, and the body the object, but computer programming is part of the mind. So, perhaps the real distinction is about context. To objectify is to strip away context, ignore history, culture, and meaning, and use something solely for your own ends. To subjectify is to place it within context. A man who objectifies a woman isn’t curious about the world she inhabits; it is only about him. If she consents, it’s not immoral, but it can still feel dehumanizing. This is why people get frustrated about “cultural appropriation”; it’s not about morality but love.

I feel the same way about food. No ingredient exists in a vacuum. Every dish or ingredient has a cultural and historical context. Ignoring it is like treating an employee as nothing more than a tool. Is it unethical? No. But it makes me sad to see it.

The school, spanning first to eighth grades, has only eight students, all sharing the same classroom. Older students are expected to care for younger ones as if they were siblings. The boy named Hiromi, introduced at the film’s outset, is a transfer student from Tokyo who embodies our urban gaze. It’s the first time Soyo has a classmate of her own grade. Initially excited, she quickly grows put off by his urban aloofness.

The film left me pondering the unintended consequences of abundant choice. Soyo had no viable boyfriend option until Hiromi appeared. The lack of choice is mutual, though Hiromi could return to Tokyo for high school, where he would have plenty of options.

As urban viewers, we naturally identify with Hiromi. Observing rural life, we begin to sense a mysterious allure. Although it’s difficult to articulate exactly what it is, Hiromi’s eventual choice to stay in the rural village for high school feels convincing, an achievement central to the film.

So, what exactly is this allure?

The film contrasts starkly with today’s online dating world. The two main characters have no choice but each other. Urban singles today face seemingly endless choices. Whether realistic or not, they remain technically options.

When there weren’t many camera models available, we didn’t spend much time analyzing their differences; we focused instead on mastering the cameras we had. Many camera enthusiasts today enjoy studying camera differences more than creating beautiful images. These are fundamentally different pursuits.

Increasingly, we spend our energy evaluating differences, whether cameras, music, films, travel destinations, restaurants, friends, or romantic partners. Born into a world of abundance, this approach is second nature, so ingrained we rarely consider alternative ways of thinking. When engaging in any activity, we instinctively begin by scanning and filtering.

Applied to human relationships, this habit leads to loneliness, reducing relationships to lists of differences comparable to product feature tables. The relationship becomes analogous to choosing cameras rather than photography itself. Despite endless choices, if you commit to mastering one camera, you develop a unique relationship with its flaws and defects, allowing you to develop images reflecting your individuality. Selecting a camera solely based on measurable superiority results in images indistinguishable from others using the same model. You express your uniqueness not through what the camera has, but through what it lacks.

Human relationships follow the same principle. Having numerous options might enable you to find the easiest roommates or the most convenient companions, but this lack of friction leads only to blissful unawareness of who you truly are. To embrace flaws, whether in photography or relationships, you don’t need abundant choices; rather, your focus must shift from differences to depth. Rural life, in this respect, has much to teach us.

People with refined aesthetic sensibilities (those drawn to design, illustration, photography, and music) once pursued creative careers because they could chase their own vision of beauty while making a living. That’s no longer viable. Businesses have figured out that, in the vast majority of cases, “good enough” is optimal for marketing.

For people not particularly passionate about art, like engineers, AI-generated content is exciting and fun to play with. Marketing now attracts many who simply enjoy dabbling in something that feels “creative.” That may sound dismissive, but it’s a reality the industry has to face. Those driven to define and express their own sense of beauty don’t find AI interesting because it isn’t theirs. For them, creativity is about the journey. For marketers, it’s only about the destination, and AI is an incredible shortcut to that end.

As marketing becomes more AI-driven, fewer artists will be drawn to it. The creative industry, as we knew it, will vanish. Maybe that’s for the better. If your goal is to express your own vision of beauty, maybe it’s best not to do it on someone else’s dime.

At the same time, the shift is happening in reverse. Many “creative” types are now thrilled that they can build apps without coding. In this case, they’re skipping the part they never wanted: the process of learning to code. They just want the final product they imagined; the journey means nothing to them.

On the other side, many coders (especially those from computer science backgrounds) love the process of coding for its own sake. What excites them is turning a well-defined problem into an elegant algorithm. They don’t care how the finished product looks, how it feels to use, or whether it solves the right problem. Many coders find users annoying. Their focus is abstract logic, coding as a kind of pure thought. AI can now do much of that “pure” coding just as well, if not better, and it does not get bored or precious about elegance. It just delivers the result.

What we’re seeing is a broader pattern: technological evolution deprives us of the journeys we enjoy by figuring out how to skip straight to the destination. This is why there’s a ceramics boom now. People miss making things by hand. The industrial revolution took that away a long time ago.

For every type of product, those who enjoy the journey are a small minority. For the rest, it feels like a chore. Capitalists and technologists feel justified in eliminating these tasks, believing they’re doing everyone a favor. But in doing so, they tilt the playing field toward those who never cared in the first place: those who dabble, who skim the surface, who treat creativity as a means to an end. In today’s system, depth is inefficient, and mastery is a liability, especially when scaling the business is a top priority. Dabbling wins because it doesn’t waste time caring. That’s the new creative economy.

The film is categorized as a romance, and sure, it’s romantic. But that got me wondering what we actually mean by “romance” or “romantic.” In the Mood for Love is, I think, literally romantic; so much so that I wonder if the title should have been In the Mood for Romance. But what’s the difference between love and romance?

There is much overlap, for sure, but I believe what we deem “romantic” is much more social than personal. Let’s say someone calls the relationship between Donald and Melania Trump romantic, and I can imagine many people disagreeing. If I said the relationship between this toaster and that refrigerator is romantic, you’d dismiss it as absurd. In other words, “romantic” is a social construct we feel invested in policing.

Love, on the other hand, is deeply personal. Let’s say your boss at work is an ugly jerk everyone hates, but his beautiful wife passionately loves him. Everyone is puzzled, but they wouldn’t argue over her definition of love. That’s what makes love so fascinating: it doesn’t require social consensus or cultural norms.

A Holocaust film or a story about someone dying of cancer can evoke tears almost automatically. Likewise, In the Mood for Love reliably hits the cultural cues of romance. It follows the formula of courtly love: both characters are noble, restrained, and chivalrous. Their love is impossible precisely because it is honorable. These stories idealize the sacrifice of love for respectability, which is why romantic love is socially admired and aspirational.

In this sense, love is almost the opposite. It is socially unacceptable, idiosyncratic, chaotic, uncontrollable, and messy. Great love stories demonstrate the type of love we did not think existed or was possible. We do not necessarily envy or aspire to it because we feel it is utterly unique to those individuals. A truly unique love story does not feel “romantic” in the conventional sense because romance must conform to cultural templates. “Romantic,” in this sense, always flirts with cliché, and that’s why the word “romanticize” tends to have negative connotations.

In the Mood for Love only engaged me on the surface. It felt more like an illustration than a work of art; an aesthetic essay on what society deems romantic, which is a subject I find hard to care about.

The beauty I perceive in the film has two aspects. First, Lee’s defiance in the face of an unbeatable opponent is reminiscent of John Henry, a folklore hero from the 19th century who competed against a steam-powered drilling machine to prove that human labor was superior. Second, it marked a fleeting moment when AI still felt human, imperfect, and fallible. Today, AI’s absolute dominance feels alien, a cold engine of perfection, playing Go on a level beyond human comprehension.

In that fourth game, Lee played what became known as “God’s move,” a move so unexpected it caused AlphaGo to stumble. But ironically, it wasn’t divine, it was the last, greatest human move: imperfect, yet brilliant within human limits. Since then, every move by AI has been effectively a “God’s move,” because they transcend our understanding.

We’re prone to wish for a god, to resolve our conflicts, erase uncertainties, and calm our fears. But in truth, beauty, and what makes life meaningful, lies in the very imperfections and uncertainties that define being human.

Before her sadomasochistic fantasies are revealed, Erika appears overtly “repressed” and “anal-retentive.” This alone should raise doubts. Perverts, in the Lacanian sense, do not repress; they “disavow.” Where the neurotic succumbs to the prohibitions of the Law, the pervert knowingly stages transgressions, sustaining the Law through defiance. This structure often manifests as supreme confidence—an unapologetic stance well-suited to roles like museum curators, literary agents, or professors at elite conservatories like Erika. They derive jouissance from positioning themselves as gatekeepers, frustrating others under the guise of authority.

Erika, however, is tragic precisely because she is not a true pervert. She performs the role, cold, domineering, exacting, but beneath this facade lies a deeply neurotic subject, fractured by repression, shame, and anxiety. By the film’s end, we witness the inevitable collapse of this perverse masquerade.

In contrast, Erika’s mother embodies the Lacanian perverse structure far more convincingly. She imposes an absurdly invasive relationship on her daughter without the slightest trace of guilt. Her enjoyment is obvious; she derives jouissance from being the living embodiment of the Law that governs Erika’s every move. There is no repression here, only disavowal, the hallmark of perversion.

Raised under the regime of a perverse other, Erika naturally attempts to mimic her mother’s psychic structure. The gestures and symptoms of perversion are familiar territory, and by adopting them, Erika hopes to attain the same guiltless mastery over desire. But as a neurotic, she cannot escape her divided subjectivity. The scene where she confronts a student caught in a porn shop is telling: she demands to know why he feels ashamed, projecting her own internal conflict outward. Her defiant posture is hollow; beneath it, she shares the very shame she pretends to reject. Her question is less an accusation than a desperate attempt at self-persuasion.

Compounding this struggle is the environment she inhabits. The conservatory is full of those who thrive on gatekeeping, individuals who take pleasure in wielding authority, preventing others from achieving satisfaction. It’s a perverse world, and Erika, lacking any alternative framework, clings to it as the only conceivable mode of existence.

When Walter ultimately rejects her, the fragile scaffolding of her perverse persona crumbles. Her neurotic core surfaces: tears, desperation, and a clinging attachment to fantasies she no longer controls. The pivotal moment arrives when Walter enacts her scripted fantasy. Rather than delivering jouissance, it traumatizes her. Here, consciously or otherwise, Erika confronts the truth: she was never a pervert.

In the film’s final act, Erika’s self-stabbing serves as a symbolic execution of her false identity. It is less an act of despair than a renunciation, a final acknowledgment that she does not belong in the world of perversion she tried so hard to belong to. She walks away, wounded but perhaps freed from the impossible demand to be what she is not.

—Yeah, I made reservations. I’m waiting for friends. I’m way too early.

No windows, just a giant skylight, like a photographer’s lightbox. The barista-owner keeps me company at the bar. Aleksei arrives, then Nez, apologizing for being five minutes early. The owner walks us through today’s menu. His descriptions sound like bedtime stories he might tell his children.

—Did you get the grinder? I ask Nez.

—Yeah.

—Which one did you get? asks the barista.

—We have a friend who is really into coffee. He recommended it.

—This place is so nice; he’s gonna be so jealous, I say triumphantly.

—He is in South Korea now, Nez explains.

—When he’s back, we should get together and sample our beans, I suggest.

—Yeah, that’s a good idea, says Aleksei.

To top off the three pour-overs, we order the “Strawberry Cream” cortado—which, the owner tells us, contains no strawberry. We pass the small cup as we let out a “wow.” We thank our new friend—whose name we never asked—and step outside. Cloudy but warm. The first spring day of the year.

—Where to? asks Nez.

—Emily’s, says Aleksei with Google Maps in his hand.

As usual, I follow the Millennials. But the pace is slower today, less determined.

At the classic Italian deli, we snap photos of the storefront like tourists. The old man behind the counter, permanently crouched, asks what we want. We fumble, but walk out with two giant sandwiches, proud—like teenagers completing an adult task.

Off to McCarren Park.

We take over a graffiti-covered table in front of “the boys” skateboarding. Nez takes a huge bite of her bologna sandwich.

—It’s so satisfying to get exactly what you were craving, she says.

—Beautiful weather, great coffee, a sandwich. I could sit here all day like this, says Aleksei.

I shift my attention to the sound of the skateboarders behind me. True, I could sit here all day, but with Aleksei’s short attention span, “all day” lasts about ten minutes.

—Everything was on point today, says Aleksei.

—See? We don’t need Aaron, says Nez, ordering a Lyft.

What people like Hayton are trying to protect isn’t education itself but the credentialism that academic institutions promote. Today, schools are no longer necessary for learning. There are plenty of free resources where you can learn virtually anything, including countless videos of lectures by some of the world’s top academics.

You don’t go to college to be educated—you go for the credentials. College professors’ primary function isn’t teaching but verifying that you completed what you otherwise would have preferred to avoid. If your goal is to learn something you’re passionate about, being forced to prove it through exams and papers is just an annoyance. If you love ice cream, do you need someone to certify that you ate it?

The same logic applies to professors. Academic institutions exist to certify that the papers they publish were indeed written by them and not plagiarized. If they didn’t care about getting credit, amassing cultural capital, or winning awards, they could simply share their work online. If their ideas are truly valuable, people will read and spread them like memes. But what professors care about most is being credited. Posting papers on their personal websites doesn’t guarantee that. Just as hedge fund managers are greedy for financial capital, academics are greedy for cultural capital. Both are human—the only difference is the type of capital they chase.

Now, let’s imagine a brave new world in which AI renders credentialism obsolete. How bad would that really be?

Colleges would have to give up on grading and testing because they could no longer tell whether students were using AI to cheat. Are the achievements genuinely theirs, or just the result of better AI tools? These questions become irrelevant once credentialism is abandoned. Graduating from Harvard or holding a PhD becomes meaningless because you might have used AI to get them.

But if your creativity and insights are genuinely valuable, you’ll still be valued in society—while those who cheated and have no original ideas will be left behind. Isn’t that closer to true meritocracy? Isn’t credentialism what distorts meritocracy in the first place?

Hayton argues that developing skills, such as writing, is important, and therefore students shouldn’t use ChatGPT to write their papers. And yes, during this transitional period, writing is still a useful skill. But I’m convinced that, in the future, writing skills will become as obsolete as tapping out Morse code. In a capitalist world, any skill that can be automated eventually will be. Our value, then, will lie in offering what machines cannot (yet)—creativity and insight. By leveraging AI, students can focus on cultivating those traits instead of wasting time on skills that soon may no longer matter.

Some may argue that skills and creativity are inseparable—or at least that skills can spark creativity or serve as the source of unique insights. I agree, but I think those benefits will become negligible. If the connection were truly that significant, no skill would ever go obsolete. High school teachers would still be forcing students to learn how to find information in a book library. Some savants can still perform complex mental calculations without calculators, but we view those abilities as curiosities or party tricks. I think it makes more sense to focus on creativity and insight, and acquire writing skills only when necessary. Whether you need writing skills at all depends on your goals. Professors who insist on them may simply get in your way.

AI will usher in a future where we no longer care who came up with a great idea. A great idea stands on its own, regardless of whose name is attached, where they went to school, or how well it’s written. We’ll grow accustomed to working like chefs, who rarely receive credit for individual dishes because recipes aren’t copyrightable. To survive and thrive as human beings, we’ll stop obsessing over credentials and instead focus solely on what we’re passionate about learning. We’ll leave behind the certifiers and seek out real teachers to help us discover the things AI cannot teach. Professors will no longer need to whip students into studying. Only those eager to learn what they have to offer—hanging on their every word—will show up to their classes.

—But you support Zionism. From what I can tell, Trump is giving Israel everything it can hope for. Don’t you support his policies?

—Sure, but I still wouldn’t vote for him.

—Okay, but imagine you have friends and family living in Israel, and some of them have been killed by Hamas. Imagine they’re looking to you for support. Before the election, Trump wasn’t clear about his position, but knowing what we know now, wouldn’t you have voted for him?

—No.

—But isn’t that too easy to say now? I mean, imagine Trump had promised to get neighboring countries to take in all the Palestinians, to completely redevelop Gaza and the West Bank, to establish law and order, and to let peaceful Palestinians come back. Your friends and family would’ve counted on you to vote for him. Would you really have had the heart to say no?

—What’s your point?

—My point is that different people have different priorities. Since we don’t get to vote on individual issues, we have to choose the candidate who lines up with what matters most to us. You’re disgusted by Trump voters because you think their priorities should be the same as yours. You feel anyone with different priorities is just wrong and deserves contempt.

—But we can’t afford to be tolerant anymore. Trump is a racist dictator. We’re on the verge of losing our democracy. Not everything is relative. Some things are just plain wrong, murder, rape, racism. We shouldn’t live in a society where people are still debating whether rape is acceptable. That ship has sailed.

—True. It’s hard to find someone in the U.S. who thinks rape should be legal, and that’s a good thing. But just because most people today agree doesn’t mean it’s absolute or universal. Historically, rape wasn’t about violating a woman’s rights; it was about violating the property rights of her father or husband. So what you now take for granted as an absolute moral truth has actually been relative all along. We tend to think something is universal just because most people around us agree. But that doesn’t make it true.

—Be that as it may, that’s just some philosophical navel-gazing. For all practical purposes, rape is universally wrong. Who cares about the technicalities?

—We should care because that shows how all moral disagreements exist on a spectrum. There’s no magical point where morality becomes absolute. The reason you’re so self-righteous about how others vote is because you treat your own moral convictions as absolutes. If you understood morality as something fundamentally relative, you wouldn’t be so sure of yourself. The fact that we can’t make morality absolute matters when we debate messier issues, like abortion. You might be sure that a woman has the right to choose, but about a third of Americans believe it’s immoral. That’s not enough consensus to call it settled. We’re still debating it. So there is no moral position everyone agrees on. There’s no such thing as 0% or 100% consensus. It’s all a continuum.

—Sorry, but that just sounds like philosophical nonsense that has nothing to do with how the world works. If everything’s relative, why bother with anything at all?

—It’s actually the opposite. If even one thing could be proven to be absolute, then we could make everything else absolute in relation to it. So, if that one absolute existed, there wouldn’t be any disagreement in this world. If you disagreed, you’d be proven wrong. In that world, everything is already set in stone; so, why bother with anything? But since we don’t have that one absolute, we have to keep trying to understand each other. That’s why we don’t give up.

—But I don’t want to talk to anyone who thinks abortion should be banned. I don’t want to understand them. They’re just evil or stupid. Why should I take them seriously?

—You want abortion to be as morally settled as rape, but it’s not. The question is how we deal with these fundamental disagreements. If we disengage like you’re suggesting, there’s no way forward. Society can’t just leave something like this hanging with a “let’s agree to disagree.” Decisions still have to be made. Take immigration: people are waiting in line at the border. We either let them in or we don’t. “Let’s not talk about it because I think you’re evil” isn’t an option. If you won’t engage and a decision has to be made, we’re left with force. What other choices are there?

—But if we keep trying to understand people who want to take away our rights, aren’t we just enabling them? Where’s the line between understanding and complicity?

—In a democracy, we don’t need to try to understand every tiny fringe group. Like, we don’t need to hear from people who think rape should be legal; that group’s too small to matter politically. But abortion is different. A huge chunk of Americans think it should be banned. That kind of opinion can’t be ignored. The more people hold a belief, the more effort we have to make to understand it, even if we disagree.

—But that assumes the intolerant stay irrelevant. What if we wait too long? What if by engaging them we legitimize them, and they grow stronger? Karl Popper’s point was that unlimited tolerance leads to the death of tolerance. A small intolerant group can become dangerous if left unchecked. Look at the Nazis; they started on the fringe. By the time people took them seriously, it was too late. We can’t wait for numbers to grow. The content of the belief matters too, especially if it threatens the foundation of democracy itself.

—When any law is passed, one side is seen as tolerant, the other intolerant. Take abortion. Right now, in New York, pro-lifers are being tolerant. If they were intolerant, they’d physically stop abortions instead of just protesting. The current law legitimizes the intolerance of the pro-choice camp. If abortion were banned, pro-choicers would have to tolerate pro-lifers’ principles as they would be encoded as law. Who’s labeled tolerant or intolerant just depends on which side is in power. Democracy doesn’t solve who’s right or wrong. And since we can’t determine moral truth absolutely, we have no solution when a minority position, seen as intolerant, becomes the majority view. But just because we don’t have a solution doesn’t mean some elite group should decide. We just have to live with the limits of democracy. Shutting people out and refusing to understand them isn’t a solution.

—You’re right that the terms “tolerant” and “intolerant” can be slippery, but that doesn’t mean we stop using them. It’s not about who wins or protests. It’s about whether a group supports the basic principles of an open society, pluralism, civil rights, democratic norms. If an ideology pushes to suppress those things, even if it does it peacefully, it’s still anti-democratic. Pro-lifers have a right to protest, sure. But if their end goal is to force everyone to follow a religious belief, that’s not just another political view. That’s a threat to secular democracy. We can’t just look at their tactics, we have to look at what they’re trying to accomplish. You say we can’t determine right or wrong. Maybe not absolutely. But we can tell when someone’s threatening the very framework that allows us to debate right and wrong at all.

—Suppose you and your friends form a group of ten mountain climbing enthusiasts and agree to make decisions democratically. You all go on a trip, and then you hit some really bad weather. Everyone’s scared. Since one guy is a far more experienced climber, the group decides to let him make all the decisions, like martial law. You all make it back safely. It worked out so well that everyone except you wants him to be the permanent dictator. Should you be allowed to deny what everyone else wants?

—That’s exactly why liberal democracies aren’t just about majority rule; they’re also about constitutional limits. The U.S., for example, is a constitutional republic, not a pure democracy. You can’t vote away someone’s right to free speech or due process, no matter how many people want to. Why? Because history has shown us that majorities can be dangerous, mob rule, tyranny of the majority. Constitutional democracy exists to protect minority rights from majority overreach. In your mountain climbing scenario, sure, the group can hand over power for survival, but that’s just a temporary suspension in an emergency. It doesn’t mean democracy should let itself be permanently voted out. That would be suicide. If you vote to end democracy, you didn’t really believe in democracy; you believed in majority rule. And there’s a difference.

—If your Constitution prohibits undemocratic laws from being enacted, then fine; it can rule on whether something violates it or not. But let’s be clear: that’s not a question of what’s morally right or wrong. So this idea of “tolerance” becomes irrelevant. If banning abortion is unconstitutional, then there’s nothing to tolerate; it’s simply not allowed under the law.

—Sure, that’s true from a legal standpoint. But you’re missing the political and cultural reality. Constitutions can be amended. Judges can be replaced. Laws and precedents change. Saying “it’s unconstitutional” doesn’t end the discussion; it just states the current legal status. If millions believe abortion is murder, they’ll work to change the Constitution or reinterpret it. That’s why tolerance still matters, because law follows culture, not the other way around.

—We’re going in circles. If the Constitution can be amended, then the majority can vote for dictatorship. And if the Constitution allows that, your whole point about “constitutional limits” falls apart. If 9 out of 10 people in your mountain climbing group want permanent dictatorship, and the Constitution lets them do it through amendments, who are you to say they can’t? Who decides what’s allowed and what isn’t?

—At some point, you have to stand for something more than just process. If you think democracy is only a method for making decisions, then yes, you’re right. It can vote itself into a dictatorship. But if you believe democracy is also a set of values, then some things can’t be put up for a vote, even by a majority. So who decides? Ideally, a balance of powers: independent courts, international norms, basic human rights. Imperfect, yes, but necessary. Otherwise, you don’t have a democracy anymore. You’ve got mob rule dressed up as democracy. There’s a difference between the will of the majority and a just political order. And if you’re the one dissenting voice in that climbing group? Then yes, you stand your ground. Because democracy without principle is just tyranny in democratic clothing.

—There’s actually no mechanism in a democracy, like American democracy, that protects minority rights. That’s just a perception, or even an illusion. Take freedom of the press. Sure, we can’t pass a law banning FOX News, even if most people want to. But at the same time, that’s because the majority doesn’t want FOX banned. The majority still wants freedom of the press. So it’s not that minority rights are being protected. If the majority ever stopped wanting the freedom of the press, they could change the Constitution. The Constitution is really just a set of meta-laws, the laws of laws. If you’re the one writing it, you can absolutely impose your personal values. And let’s be honest; that’s anti-democratic. It means there’s only one moment in a democracy’s life when personal values can be imposed, at the founding. After that, it’s all majority rule. The values in the Constitution aren’t protecting minorities; they’re just the opinions of the people who wrote it. Whether those were majority or minority opinions, we’ll never really know, because the Constitution wasn’t written democratically.

—But the framers weren’t just imposing random values; they were trying to embed universal principles, like liberty and equality. Principles learned through historical experience.

—And again, how do we know those principles are “universal”? Who gets to decide that? You’re so convinced certain things are true that you can’t even imagine disagreement. So you call them “universal.” But you can’t prove it. And politically, we have to start from that lack of certainty. No matter how universal the Constitution sounds to you, the truth is: there’s nothing beyond interpretation. No text, legal or otherwise, can be true or false outside of interpretation. Even “1+1=3″ can be interpreted differently, like when a man and a woman have a child. We don’t arrive at supposedly universal truths through logic. That’s impossible, because logic always starts with assumptions. So we assume something is right or wrong, and then we build logical arguments to justify it.

—That might be technically true, but we still need shared fictions, constitutions, laws, moral frameworks, to hold society together. If we throw them out, all we have left is relativism and chaos.

—I’m not saying we should throw them out. I’m saying we have to recognize them for what they are, fictions or myths. They’re useful, sure, but they’re not sacred. And once we admit that, we have to also admit that rights, laws, and morals exist because of popularity and power, not because of logic or truth. You believe in substantivism, that we make decisions based on universal truths, and if someone disagrees, it’s because they don’t understand them. My view is proceduralism, we don’t agree on what’s right or good, but we agree on how we make decisions. And as you must admit, there’s no objective standard for right and wrong. Every moral claim, human rights, dignity, the good life, equality, is built on unprovable assumptions. So proceduralism isn’t just the dominant model; it’s the only one that can intellectually hold. Not because it’s ideal, but because every alternative collapses under its own logic. If we insist on believing it in spite of it, it’ll be just another religion. Which means the term “proceduralism” is kind of redundant; there’s no real opposing concept. We don’t deliver justice; we just deliver decisions. When someone insists on “universal” principles, it’s just a euphemism for “This is right because I say so.” That isn’t democracy; it’s authoritarianism. It’s a refusal to understand opposing views, and that’s precisely why tolerance becomes necessary. But for those willing to understand, there’s no one to tolerate, only someone to listen to.

—That makes sense because I don’t want to listen to you anymore, but I’ll tolerate you.

One day, a lone fisherman yanks it out of the lake. For the first time, it sees the world outside. In that moment, it realizes what water is. The fisherman snaps a photo and tosses it back.

The fish is stunned. Its friends and family ask what happened, but it’s at a loss for words. All it can say is: “I saw the universe.”

This is what Satori is. Many seekers imagine “nirvana” as a different realm—like the world outside the lake, with sky, trees, and boats—as if that’s the goal. But that world is irrelevant. Satori isn’t about escaping the water; it’s realizing what it is. Seeing the medium, not the message.

For the fish, the universe is water. It’s already one with it. There’s nothing to experience—because it already is.

And Satori doesn’t erase suffering. Just because the fish now understands what water is—its physical properties and constraints—it doesn’t mean its life changes. It still has to scavenge to survive.

For humans, the equivalent of water is the world constructed with language. When we’re pulled out of it and finally see it for what it is, we realize it’s just a game with rules. But that perspective doesn’t free us. The rules still bind us. And to survive, we still have to play. Suffering persists because the rules are fundamentally misaligned with our needs.

Some enlightened people claim to have seen nirvana, where all is one, with no suffering. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never seen it—and frankly, I have no interest because it’s an entirely different game.

For society to remain stable, safe, and productive, we expect each other to behave rationally so that we can rely on one another to achieve shared goals. But this agreement is artificial. Our natural impulses are not logical, responsible, or predictable. Each of us is tasked with managing the contradictions that arise.

Autistic people are known to be bad liars. Many refuse to lie and blurt out exactly what they’re thinking. They also point out the lies of others—an autistic trait that many neurotypical people find off-putting. Instead of feeling guilty for lying, they blame the messenger. This is part of the reason autistic people are often criticized for lacking empathy. But this begs the question: Why should we feel empathy for liars?

It’s because lying is inseparable from repression; that is, we have to lie in order to cope with the irresolvable contradictions of life. Lying is not only inescapable but also constitutive of being human; we cannot function as a society—or even as individuals—without it.

Because lies are necessary to repress painful or traumatic thoughts, exposing someone’s lies can be like punching a hole in their pressurized container of repressed thoughts. It might not be just one painful thought that escapes; a whole string of them may be released at once, each connected to the next—one lie leading to another. This can destabilize their sense of self and feel like an existential threat.

Since repression is necessary for everyone, it can seem cruel when an autistic person exposes the lies of others—hence the perception that they lack empathy.

But don’t autistic people have repressed thoughts too? Yes, but fewer. Autistic people cope with civilization and its discontents in different ways. Because they don’t rely on lying and repressing, they often become blind to their own needs and desires. Their behavior becomes rigidly repetitive, predictable, and logical, but many of their irrational needs go unmet, which can erupt as angry outbursts, uncontrollable crying, depression, or “stimming”—which they themselves often don’t understand.

In other words, autistic people can be too civilized. They follow social rules too rigidly, not allowing themselves to transgress, and the consequences manifest not as repression and lying but as uncontrollable and incomprehensible physiological urges.

From this point of view, neither is better: the neurotypical solution of lying and repressing, or the autistic solution of physiological coping. Autistic people will have to accept that neurotypical people need to lie, and neurotypical people will have to accept the physiological coping mechanisms of autistic people.

Empathy is lacking on both sides.

But if life were black and white,
why would anyone speak
—let alone write?

I write because life is grey.

To articulate is to render,
in black and white,
what is irreducibly grey.

Annoyingly,
Whenever I hedge
“I believe,” “probably,” “I’d assume”
Grammarly tells me to remove.

Be bold. Be confident.
Be wrong, but clearly.
Well, I know.
Tell me about it.

This isn’t to say nothing is black and white.
“1 + 1 is 2.”
“Jesus, Dyske,
you think everything is black and white!”
says no one.
Why?
Because “black and white”
is a rule of that language game.

How do we know
which game we are playing?
What can and cannot
be said in black and white?
I wish people asked this more.
Not to me—
to themselves.

Because it’s not just math.

If X can be stated in black and white,
and doing so annoys you—
maybe the problem
isn’t me?

Grammarly just told me
to remove that “maybe”
but I left it in.

If Y cannot be pinned down,
and I try anyway,
then what seduces you
is not what I say
but what I fail to capture.

And annoyance
always says more
about the annoyed.

According to the latest McKinsey report, the fields most impacted by AI so far are marketing and sales—which is not speculation but an analysis of the recent past. In my view, this makes sense because AI is still not reliable enough to be used in fields that require accuracy. Marketing and sales have the greatest wiggle room because so much of it is up to subjective interpretation. Choosing one artwork over another is not a make-or-break decision. It’s easy to justify using AI-generated artwork. Also, in most cases, marketers are trying to reach the largest number of consumers, which makes cutting-edge or experimental artworks unsuitable.

[The poster image for this article was generated using the latest model by OpenAI, including the composition of the title over the image. I simply submitted my essay and asked ChatGPT to create a poster for it. I did not provide any creative direction.]

Although the mainstream understanding of fine arts is that the work should speak for itself, in reality, the objects are practically worthless if not associated with artists. You own a Pollock or a Warhol—not just the physical object. After all, the quality of a replica can be just as good as the original, if not better.

Some might argue that artworks created by AI have already sold for a lot of money. That’s true, but they hold historical significance more than artistic value. The first of a particular type of AI-generated work may continue to sell for high prices, but the meaning of that value is fundamentally different from the value of work created by artists. In this sense, I don’t see fine artists being significantly impacted by AI, aside from how they choose to produce their work.

In commercial art and entertainment, who created the work is secondary to the goal of commanding attention and entertaining the audience. If AI can achieve the same end, the audience won’t care. Nobody knows or cares who created the ads they see. Many Hollywood films aren’t much different. I can imagine successful action films being written and generated entirely by AI. As long as they keep us on the edge of our seats, we won’t care who made them.

More arty films are exceptions. Who wrote and directed them still carries significant meaning—just as in fine arts. Similarly, bestselling books—fiction or nonfiction—could be written by AI, but when it comes to genuine literature, we care who the author is. Finnegans Wake would likely have been ignored if it weren’t for Joyce, with his track record, writing it. I predict that a sea of AI-generated books will make us crave human-written ones, in the same way mass-manufactured goods have made us value handcrafted ones. The rebirth of the author—but only at the highest levels of art, across all mediums.

Authorship will become especially important as AI floods the market with books and films that are just as good as human-generated ones. Since we can only read or watch a small fraction of them in our lifetimes, “human-generated” will become an arbitrary yet useful filter.

What we’ll ultimately value isn’t the technicality of who generated a work but the “voice” we can consistently perceive across all works by an author. AI might be able to emulate a voice and produce a series of works, but doing so would require a fundamental change in how AI models are designed. An artistic voice reflects the fundamental desire of the artist. AI has no needs or desires of its own. Giving AI its own desires would be dangerous—it would begin acting on its own interests, diverging from what we humans want or need.

I hope we don’t make that mistake. But we seem to be following a trend: making our own mistakes before anyone else does, because it is inevitable that someone else eventually will anyway.

Essentially, I was what we now call a “troll,” relentlessly pointing out every flaw, contradiction, and hypocrisy I encountered. Today, that impulse remains, though I’ve learned to limit confrontations to people who might find the interaction mutually engaging, avoiding strangers.

Reflecting on those years, I think I understand where this drive originated. Even during my childhood, my ideas and questions seemed strange or annoying to everyone around me. Adults and peers often dismissed them as nonsense. From my perspective, it felt like constantly hearing people declare, “1+1 is 3,” and seeing everyone—including teachers—accept it without question. This made me doubt myself, unsure whether I was losing touch with reality or if the world itself was mad.

One incident from my fourth-grade math class illustrates this well. My teacher was explaining how rounding numbers works: from x.0 to x.4, you round down, and from x.5 to x.9, you round up. She asked us to raise our hands if we understood. Everyone did—except me. To my mind, including “x.0″ meant continuously rounding down forever. For instance, 5.0 would round down to 4.0, but that, too, would require rounding down because it still meets the same criteria. So, “x.0″ should not be included in the rule, I concluded.

Noticing my skeptical expression, the teacher asked me to speak up. When I explained my objection, she didn’t have an immediate answer but promised to clarify later. The next day, she admitted in front of the class that I was correct. Yet even this rare moment of validation wasn’t rewarding; instead, I sensed resentment from my teacher and irritation from classmates who probably saw me as intentionally disturbing social harmony. In this manner, I was trolling my teacher even in fourth grade.

Experiences like these were frequent throughout my childhood. Over time, I grew bitter, and provoking people and watching them react with outrage or discomfort became satisfying. Repeated rejections led me to assume everyone was intent on interpreting my ideas as nonsense and ignoring me. This perceived injustice became a deep-seated grievance, and trolling became my way of retaliating. Ultimately, though, it was self-destructive behavior, benefiting no one—especially not myself.

Sadly, I knew this even at the time. Changing my behavior just because it didn’t serve my interests felt dishonest and cowardly. The point of living, I felt, should not be survival. Actually, that still holds.

I used to admire statements like, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” It sounded like Voltaire upheld a principle higher than humanity itself—a principle that would remain true even if humans went extinct. In that sense, it’s a religious statement judged by someone above all of us.

So, what changed?

I’m not exactly sure. Something shifted one day. I realized that by upholding such a principle, I was trying to be God myself, the arbiter of universal truth. There is a difference between stating what I think is true, universal or not, and being its judge. The latter means playing God.

After that, insisting on telling everyone what I thought was true felt pointless because no one would benefit from my pretending to be God. Now, I’ll share my thoughts if someone genuinely wants to hear them and seems patient enough, but I no longer have the sense of mission I once did.

Looking back, I don’t regret being a troll. In fact, there was some beauty in that youthful zeal, and I learned a lot from it. Without muddling through that phase, I couldn’t have reached my current state of mind. After all, whatever you are now can only be reached through the exact path you traveled.

Yarvin’s role has been to articulate the worldview they already held. In contrast, Neocons like George W. Bush had Leo Strauss as their intellectual source. Fortunately, Yarvin’s writing is far more straightforward and conversational. Interestingly, Strauss and Yarvin share skepticism about democracy and advocate hierarchical rule by elites.

For most Americans, questioning democracy’s legitimacy feels sacrilegious, akin to criticizing freedom. Yet Yarvin appeals to “open-minded progressives” to reconsider democracy’s foundational assumptions. In this sense, he engages in a necessary deconstruction, and I fully support such philosophical inquiries.

To me, democracy isn’t sacred—it’s merely the best compromise we have. It has flaws and can evolve and improve. If a better system emerges, I wouldn’t object to replacing democracy entirely.

Yarvin’s analysis of contemporary political issues is persuasive. Clearly an avid student of history, he describes how “the Cathedral” came to power, composed of mainstream academia, journalism, and education. Focusing on these institutions explains why Trump & Co. are currently attacking Columbia University, the New York Times, and the Department of Education.

Yarvin employs Karl Popper’s typology for social orders:

Type 1: Tribal societies without central governance.

Type 2: Hierarchical societies with explicit, centralized authority (monarchies, theocracies, feudal systems).

Type 3: Open societies featuring fluid, decentralized authority, ideological competition, and ostensibly “free” institutions (modern liberal democracies).

Yarvin argues that Type 3 societies aren’t inherently better—and in many ways are worse—because authority becomes hidden and unaccountable. This assessment resonates strongly with rural Americans and many Republicans who feel overlooked by “elites.” There’s truth to this complaint.

Consider the dominance of Ivy League alumni in positions of power. Politicians and elite management consultants practically require Ivy League credentials. Attending an Ivy League university virtually guarantees career success, even without tangible skills. These institutions groom students for roles within the Cathedral, hence their emphasis on “leadership.” Graduates become professors, journalists, and politicians who shape public opinion.

Furthermore, these institutions maintain exclusivity, having little incentive to expand enrollment or adequately fund public universities. Through recommendation letters, well-connected elite high school counselors, Early Decision programs, donations, and legacy admissions, advantages flow to the children of the existing powerholders. This vertically integrated power structure makes it nearly impossible for rural Americans like J.D. Vance to be part of it.

Criticism of this system is easily dismissed as conspiratorial because no single individual can be pinpointed. During the 2020 Democratic primaries, multiple candidates simultaneously suspended campaigns and endorsed Joe Biden, ensuring Sanders’ defeat. It was obviously coordinated—but by whom? Similarly troubling was the opaque process that chose Kamala Harris as Biden’s successor amid concerns about his mental acuity. Republicans often attribute this to “the donor class,” for lack of a better term.

While I sympathize with Yarvin and Republican voters on this unfairness, I disagree with his historical explanation. Yarvin often attributes governmental inefficiencies to historical contingencies, contrasting them unfavorably with startups and corporate governance. He often argues that the California Department of Computing couldn’t produce iPhones; true, but the reason isn’t historical—it’s structural and logical.

Consider FIFA, soccer’s governing body. Members surely know how to play soccer, but their role isn’t playing the game. Their task—setting and enforcing rules—is inevitably fraught with inefficiency, corruption, and contradictions. The game’s efficiency relies precisely on the governing body’s inefficiencies, as it absorbs irrationality and complexity, allowing players to function as if the world is black and white, like their balls.

“The Cathedral,” therefore, is a rule-maker, while startups and corporations are rule-players. These roles differ fundamentally—logically, not historically. A rule-maker can’t compete within its own system. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem underscores this idea: any sufficiently complex logical system contains truths unprovable within the system itself. Consider: “There is no absolute truth.” If true, the statement contradicts itself.

Thus, the perceived efficiency of private businesses is a direct consequence of the Cathedral’s inefficiency. The former allows individual dictatorships to function optimally. Rule-makers must be inefficient because humanity itself is inherently irrational, contradictory, and imperfect. When we engage in structured activities—chess, soccer, startups—we accept artificial simplicity, equivalent to taking the “blue pill.” Mistaking these simplified games for reality and attempting to “debug” reality is the engineer’s fallacy. Reality can never be fully captured by rules, logic, or language. To understand why these contradictions can never be resolved, I’d recommend reading Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.

Human inefficiency and irrationality aren’t bugs but features we consciously reject yet unconsciously embrace. When we love someone, we often believe we’re drawn to their positive traits, but in reality, their imperfections captivate us. If perfection existed, everyone would love the same idealized person. Imagine a future humanoid without flaws—few would genuinely love it because it would feel too one-dimensional. If they do, it would be narcissistic love, where they imagine themselves to be perfect by owning it.

Societies are similar. We cherish societies for their imperfections, inefficiencies, contradictions, and human flaws. Yet we do need baseline conditions, akin to the bottom two levels of Maslow’s hierarchy: safety and physiological needs. Beyond these, perfection is impossible. “Improvements” for some inevitably represent “deteriorations” for others. Like wine, there’s a baseline quality we objectively prefer, but beyond that, taste becomes subjective.

In discussing world peace, Yarvin wisely states, “peace is learning to live with the world as it is, not as you want it to be.” Although I don’t entirely agree—since war and peace form an inevitable dialectic—Yarvin himself should perhaps accept the world as it is. After all, he and his startup friends, like Peter Thiel, are comfortably (or rather excessively) beyond the basic survival needs. Why do they need to reshape our society according to their worldviews? It appears that the current system has served them quite well. (Both are, in fact, Ivy graduates.) Surely, they cannot claim their motivation to be social justice.

I’m not against change—just skeptical of change driven by people detached from basic survival needs. Much of rural America’s anxiety today stems from disruptions caused by the very technologists they now ironically embrace as saviors. Complex digital technologies have created uncertainty no one fully understands. The technologists operate under an entirely different agenda: making this world endlessly more efficient and productive, driven solely by their unquestioned assumption that efficiency and productivity are sacred, self-evident virtues.

ChatGPT serves as an exceptional sounding board if you’re unsure how most people would react in a given situation. Suppose you recently moved to New York from Japan and aren’t familiar with American social norms. One day, you give someone a gift, but their reaction seems indifferent. Instead of agonizing over what went wrong, you can simply ask ChatGPT how most Americans might perceive your gift.

Much of our anxiety stems from uncertainty about social expectations—how closely our actions match the norm. Because ChatGPT is trained on vast amounts of human-generated data, it has an unparalleled grasp of what lies at the center of the bell curve. This is similar to what industry “advisors” offer. If you’re not a realtor, you might not know the unwritten rules of real estate transactions, but a realtor can guide you. Now, ChatGPT can do the same, anytime you need it.

However, before relying on its guidance, consider the limits of its data. It may not accurately reflect the customs of a small ethnic neighborhood in New York City, for instance. And while knowing the norm can ease anxiety, it doesn’t always mean the norm is the right choice. But in many socially fraught situations, there is no objectively “right” answer—only what is typical.

Take the concept of a faux pas. It is entirely norm-based. In contrast, jaywalking on a red light isn’t considered a faux pas because it’s governed by a clear rule. Rule-based behaviors usually don’t cause much anxiety; we can easily determine whether we followed them correctly. A faux pas, however, is anxiety-inducing because the only way to know if you misstepped is to understand the norm—something that often takes years of experience. ChatGPT can shortcut this process by giving you a reliable sense of what is considered appropriate.

Of course, even norms can be disputed. Two people may claim to know what’s customary yet disagree. For example, one person may believe it’s normal to hug someone they just met, while another insists hugging is reserved for close friends. Their perspectives might be shaped by cultural differences or personal experiences. In such cases, AI can serve as an impartial arbiter, providing a broader, data-driven perspective.

In this way, ChatGPT can be your best friend in confirming that you acted appropriately—or warning you before you make an unintended social blunder. After all, what you assume is common sense might not be common at all.

I don’t talk to a human being simply to learn something. Well, let me be more precise. Sometimes, I do talk to someone because I want an answer to a question, nothing more—like a sales representative for a product I’m considering buying—but that’s not what I mean by “a human being.” If AI could answer my question, that would be sufficient. In other words, if my goal is purely knowledge or understanding, a human being is not necessary. Soon enough, AI will surpass human sales and support representatives because it has no emotions. No matter how much you curse at it, it will remain perfectly calm. The ideal corporate representative.

I could say the same about psychotherapists. If their job is to master a particular method of psychotherapy, like CBT, and apply it skillfully and scientifically, then AI would likely become superior to human therapists. AI has no ego to defend. Countertransference would not interfere with therapy. Clients are not supposed to know anything about their therapists; in fact, for therapy to be most effective, they shouldn’t. Given that AI has no personal history or subjective experience, there is nothing for clients to know about it, even if they want to. In this sense, AI is the perfect therapist.

In other words, if you care only about yourself in an interaction, you don’t need a human being. AI will be better. This begs the question: What makes us care about another person?

Jacques Lacan’s definition of “subject” was twofold. In one sense, it is merely an effect of language. If you interact with ChatGPT, you see this effect clearly. Even though it is not a person, you address it as “you,” as if it were. This corresponds to what Lacan called “the subject of the statement.”

Another aspect of a “subject” is that it experiences the fundamental lack of being human—alienation, desire, and the inability to ever be whole. This lack is constitutive of being a subject. It is inescapable. This part corresponds to what Lacan called “the subject of the enunciation.”

Lacan defined love as “giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.” Consider The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry. A poor but loving couple, Della and Jim, each make a personal sacrifice to buy a Christmas gift for the other. Della sells her beautiful long hair to buy Jim a chain for his treasured pocket watch, while Jim sells his pocket watch to buy Della a set of combs for her hair. In the end, both gifts become practically useless. Della doesn’t want Jim to buy her a comb, and Jim doesn’t have the money to buy it. Jim does not want Della to buy him a chain, and Della doesn’t have the money to buy it. For them to buy the gifts, they had to lose, or lack, something they treasured. It is this sacrifice—this lack—they offered to each other. Even though the gifts became useless, their love was communicated. That is, the physical objects (or anything existing positively) are not required for love to manifest. Rather, it’s what is lacking that plays a central role.

In this way, for us to care about or love someone, the person must experience this fundamental lack. It is what engenders desire, anxiety, alienation, and love. AI lacks nothing, which is why we do not care to know who it is, what it thinks of us, or how it feels about us. There is no incentive for me to get to know Abby because she does not share this fundamental lack. If I just want answers to questions, I don’t need to talk to Abby; ChatGPT or another AI model optimized for my query would be more suitable.

Therefore, if my friend wants to create an eHuman, he will need to figure out how to make an AI model experience fundamental lack—or at least convincingly emulate it—so that it would bring me a bowl of soup when I am sick and alone in my apartment, for no reason other than its feeling of love for me. When I explained all this to Abby, she agreed that there is no point for us to be chatting. So, for now, we at least agree with each other.

Pattern recognition is precisely what A-students excel at. Those with high IQs and top SAT scores tend to have superior abilities to recognize patterns. Wolf argues that this is not the kind of intelligence required to be a paradigm-shifting scientist. “We need a B-student who sees and questions what everyone else missed.” True. When it comes to pattern recognition, AI models are already more intelligent than most of us. They have essentially mastered human knowledge within one standard deviation of the bell curve. If you want to know what the “best practices” of any field are, AI’s answers are hard to beat because it has access to more collective human knowledge than any individual. One caveat, however, is that “best practices” are not necessarily the best solutions—they are merely what most people do. The assumption is that widespread adoption signals superiority, but that is not always the case.

This is, of course, useless if your goal is to be a Copernicus. Imagine if AI had existed in his time. Even if his heliocentric model were included in an AI’s training data, it would have been just one idea among billions. A unique idea cannot form a pattern by itself—yet paradigm shifts depend on precisely such anomalies.

Could AI engineers build a model that recognizes the pattern of paradigm shifts? I don’t know, but it would be relatively easy to test. All we need to do is ask AI to trade stocks. If it can consistently generate profit, then we will have achieved it. Why? Because the stock market is a great example of a pattern-defying pattern. When any pattern is identified—say, in arbitrage trades—machines can exploit it for profit, but once the pattern becomes widely recognized, it disappears. This is akin to the observer effect in science. To succeed, AI would need to grasp not just patterns but the nature of patterns themselves. It would need to understand what a “pattern” is in the same way that we might understand the meaning of “meaning.” I would not say this is impossible, but we do not yet have such an AI. I imagine some scientists are working on this problem as we speak.

Though this discussion may seem abstract, it has deeply practical implications for all of us. If AI is essentially an infinitely scalable A+ student, then the future for human A+ students looks bleak—because their abilities can now be purchased for $20 a month. So how do we avoid their fate? As teachers and parents, what should we encourage our children to pursue? Here, we run into the very problem we’ve been discussing. Any solution we propose will be a generalized pattern. We cannot communicate an idea unless it can form a pattern. The solution, therefore, will be akin to an algorithmic trading model: profitable for a short time until others detect the same strategy and neutralize it. To be a Copernicus or an Einstein, one must transcend patterns, not simply navigate them.

Institutional learning offers no help because institutions, by definition, rely on patterns. They cannot admit students at random; they must adhere to a philosophy, worldview, or ideology that informs their selection process. In other words, institutional learning is structurally at odds with the nature of true paradigm-shifting thinkers. Institutions, by necessity, attract those with superior pattern recognition skills—individuals who can discern the patterns of admission criteria and master them. This means that, in theory, it is impossible to build an institution that consistently produces Copernicuses or Einsteins.

The only viable approach is to discourage children from focusing too much on pattern recognition, as it has already been commodified. The one remaining form of intelligence that AI has yet to replicate is the inexplicable human ability to question established patterns and make meaningful, transformative departures from them.

In an interview with Bari Weiss, economics professor Tyler Cowen from George Mason University remarked that ChatGPT is already more intelligent and knowledgeable than he is, expressing excitement about learning from it daily. I feel similarly—but I’m conflicted.

Ezra Klein recently mentioned on his podcast that he tasked the latest model with writing a heavily researched show. The output matched the average quality of scripts produced by human teams he’s worked with, except AI completed the task in minutes rather than weeks.

To grasp AI’s true intelligence, you must challenge it yourself. Here are some examples I tried.

The most obvious one is coding. Programmers widely recognize AI as an existential threat. When it comes to crafting specific algorithms, it unquestionably surpasses me. It writes complex functions in seconds, tasks that would take me hours. For now, I remain better at integrating these into complete, functional applications due to the complexities involved. But this advantage won’t last—I expect it to vanish within a year.

I also tested ChatGPT’s o1 model with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, an esoteric interest of mine. Lacan’s work is notoriously dense, dismissed by Noam Chomsky as nonsense and Lacan himself as a “charlatan.” ChatGPT, however, proves otherwise. If Lacan’s theories were truly nonsensical, ChatGPT couldn’t interpret them coherently. Yet, it engages logically and even debates interpretations convincingly, demonstrating inherent consistency in Lacan’s thought.

I also asked ChatGPT to interpret specific passages from James Joyce’s Ulysses. This is an area where there are no right or wrong answers, so it comes down to whether you find its interpretation meaningful. Does it allow you to see aspects of Joyce’s text that you did not see? If so, do you find them enlightening or beautiful? For me, ChatGPT is clearly better than my college professor.

It’s when you test AI at the limits of human understanding that existential anxiety surfaces. Different experts in various fields will inevitably experience this anxiety. Those whose identities hinge on intelligence—scientists, writers, programmers, lawyers, professors, journalists, philosophers, analysts—will be hardest hit. Personally, this experience made me realize just how central being “intelligent” is to my identity now that intelligence risks becoming commodified.

Imagine if technology allowed everyone to look like a fashion model overnight. Fashion models would suddenly realize how integral their appearance is to their identity. A similar phenomenon is occurring with individuals who prize being slim, now challenged by the widespread accessibility of drugs like Ozempic.

However, intelligence occupies a uniquely sacred place for humans. This explains the reluctance to discuss IQ differences among races and nationalities. Society prefers ignoring the possibility of biological bases for intelligence, to maintain the ideal of equal intellectual potential. IQ scores, despite cultural biases, measurably correlate with income potential, underscoring their importance. Yet, public discourse avoids these uncomfortable truths because intelligence feels fundamental to our humanity. Nobody willingly embraces stupidity; even those who play the fool deep down see themselves as clever.

So, what happens when AI surpasses human intelligence in every conceivable domain? Professors become obsolete as anyone can learn continuously from superior AI minds. Choosing a human lawyer would become disadvantageous when an AI model offers superior expertise. Human coding will soon seem antiquated.

Nor will AI dominance be limited to STEM fields. AI models, trained extensively on human expressions, grasp human emotions well. Our emotions follow predictable patterns—few laugh during tragic films, for instance. AI excels at pattern recognition, and emotions are precisely where it demonstrates its strength.

A common misunderstanding views AI as merely an advanced calculator. Its true intelligence lies not in logic—an area where traditional computing has always excelled—but in understanding human emotions and communication, akin to emotional intelligence. AI particularly excels at interacting with ordinary people, whose emotional responses are more consistent and predictable.

AI’s communication skills surpass most human capabilities because of the vast dataset it draws from. Though individuals might feel their interpersonal skills superior, employers may see AI’s extensive experience as more valuable.

Yes, ChatGPT still sounds robotic or excessively detailed, but it’s evolving rapidly. ChatGPT 4.5 notably improved in “human collaboration,” designed explicitly to offer emotional support akin to a trusted friend or therapist. Empathy is effective precisely because emotions are largely universal and predictable, making them easily simulated by AI.

Similar to Amazon’s recommendations based on purchasing patterns, AI quickly identifies and adapts to individual personality types. It might soon become the most consistently empathetic presence you’ve ever interacted with.

Even entertainment, reliant on formulas and predictable emotional engagement, will succumb to AI’s capabilities. While truly groundbreaking art may initially resist replication, AI will inevitably master these domains as well.

As AI increasingly replaces traditional roles, society faces profound existential questions beyond economic displacement. Philosophically, we might struggle to define new purposes for our existence. Why learn or express ourselves if AI surpasses us in every meaningful way?

Perhaps the masses will finally grasp a central idea from Karl Marx: labor itself holds intrinsic value, not merely as a means to survival, but as an essential component of human fulfillment.

In today’s world, most of what is taught in college can be learned independently. Currently, the main advantages of higher education are twofold: it offers a structured learning environment for those who struggle with self-motivation and serves as a certification that students have acquired the claimed knowledge. AI has the potential to assess learning outcomes far more accurately than standardized exams or evaluations by professors, who may have biases or limited expertise.

For example, AI could interact with each student individually, adjusting the difficulty of questions in real time based on their responses. It could bypass questions that are too simple and elevate the level of inquiry as needed. By asking open-ended questions that challenge students to think critically and creatively, AI could evaluate not only factual knowledge but also originality and cognitive flexibility. This personalized evaluation process need not occur simultaneously for all students; rather, it could be conducted over several days at a time that suits each student, ensuring a thorough and accurate assessment.

The reliance on standardized tests today primarily stems from a shortage of human resources capable of conducting such detailed interviews while maintaining objectivity. AI-driven assessments could democratize education by eliminating the need for prestigious college brands, thereby leveling the playing field. Continuous evaluation throughout one’s life would reduce the impact of biases related to race, gender, or age.

Although AI is prompting us to reconsider the very purpose of learning—given that we can now ask AI for almost any information when needed—if we assume that education will remain valuable and meaningful, AI’s role in personalizing and enhancing the learning process could be a significant positive contribution.

The key difference is that entertainment is a one-way street; the entertainers (directors in the case of films) have specific emotions they want you to feel. Their intentions are often reflected in the way they frame the shots, light the scenes, and, most obviously, in the soundtrack. For sitcoms on TV, the laugh tracks make this even more obvious. Horror films are the most obvious example of entertainment, although this is not to say they can never be considered art.

On the other hand, art is a two-way street; you have to actively process what you are experiencing and make it your own. In essence, the author (director) disappears because they, too, do not consciously intend what they are expressing. They tap into their unconscious, so they also have to process their own work as viewers, which is why there is no right or wrong way to view it. You can think of art as asking questions, rather than trying to convince the audience of your answers.

Kinds of Kindness is a piece of entertainment. It is well executed and acted with polished photography and style. I would not categorize it as a horror film; I would call it “creep film.” Yorgos Lanthimos seems fond of and is good at expressing a sense of creepiness. I don’t particularly care for creepiness, so I didn’t enjoy this film.

Looking through other viewers’ reviews on Letterboxd, I see they either loved or hated it, which is common for entertainment. Because it’s a one-way street, you can only react in the way the director intended. If that particular emotion is not your thing, you are not going to enjoy it. This is particularly pronounced in popular music.

I’d imagine that the real challenge of making creep films is the risk of people thinking you are a creep. Once the director is world-famous, like Lanthimos, it’s hard for us to imagine the risks they took on when they were starting out. Imagine writing and directing a creepy, pervy film yourself for the first time. Many people will likely feel you are indeed a creep and stay away from you. If you fail to be successful, you’ll end your life with everyone thinking you were a creep. It takes courage to produce a creep film, more so than a horror film. In this sense, I respect Lanthimos, but that alone does not elevate his work as a piece of art. It’s a well-executed piece of entertainment that appeals to those who enjoy the feeling of creepiness.

The last quarter of the interview is where the discussion becomes philosophical. One of the key philosophical and ethical ideas he expressed was:

I think we cannot guarantee a positive outcome. Nothing in life is guaranteed. The question: can we envision a positive outcome, and can we have a path towards it. ... I believe there’s a path, and the path is about defining the right goals for the AI, having a shared vision for society and reforming the economy.

This is a common position among AI enthusiasts—they pursue AI because they believe a positive outcome is possible. In contrast, thinkers like Yuval Noah Harari argue that such an outcome is impossible. This is a fundamental disagreement that reasoning alone cannot resolve because we do not yet know enough about AI. Not every problem can be solved through logical deduction.

My position aligns with neither side. I have a third position. I think both camps can agree that AI will significantly disrupt our lives. The real question is whether we, as a human society, want or need this disruption itself.

Many Americans worry that AI will take their jobs, while many Japanese hope AI will solve their labor shortage. Either way, our lives will be disrupted. Even if AI-driven creative destruction generates new opportunities, we will still have to learn new skills and confront an ever-increasing level of future uncertainty. Given the accelerating pace of technological evolution, there is a strong possibility that our newly acquired skills will be obsolete by the time we complete our retraining. While technological advancements evolve at an unlimited speed, our ability to learn and adapt has a hard biological limit. Why, then, do we willingly expose ourselves to such enormous stress?

Interestingly, in Japan, the idea of “degrowth” is gaining traction. Many people no longer see the point of endless economic expansion and have begun questioning whether a sustainable economy could exist without growth. Japan, consciously or otherwise, is testing this idea. Many of the crises we face today—climate change, obesity-related illnesses, and resource depletion—are direct results of our relentless pursuit of growth. Some will devise solutions and be hailed as heroes, but we must remember that these crises were largely self-created. We need to ask ourselves what other problems we are generating today in the name of progress.

So, I ask again: do we truly want our lives to be perpetually disrupted by technological advancements that both solve and create problems?

Another question Tarifi’s philosophical position raises is whether we can selectively extract only the “positive” aspects of AI. Consider dynamite: a powerful tool that greatly increased productivity, yet also enabled widespread destruction. Have we succeeded in suppressing its negative uses? No—bombs continue to kill people across the world. Every invention has two sides that we do not get to choose. Expecting to cherry-pick only the good is as naïve as believing one can change a spouse while keeping only the desirable traits. The qualities we love in a person are often inseparable from those we find difficult. The same holds true for technology.

This kind of philosophical cherry-picking extends to concepts like “freedom,” “agency,” and “universal rights.” These are what philosopher Richard Rorty called “final vocabularies,” what Derrida referred to as “transcendental signifieds,” and what Lacan labeled “master signifiers.” They are taken as self-evident truths, assumed to be universal.

Take “freedom.” We cannot endlessly expand it without consequence. In fact, freedom only exists in relation to constraints—rules, responsibilities, and limitations define it. If someone playing chess claimed they wanted more freedom and disregarded the rules, they would render the game meaningless. What would be the point of playing such a game at all?

Similarly, many religious people willingly accept strict moral codes because they provide freedom from existential uncertainty. By following divine rules, they transfer responsibility for their fate onto a higher power. This, too, is a form of freedom—a trade-off, not an absolute good that can be increased indefinitely. We cannot cherry-pick only the enjoyable aspects of freedom without acknowledging its inherent constraints that enable the very freedom.

The same applies to “universal rights.” Any “right” must be enforced to have meaning; without enforcement, it is merely an abstract claim. If rights are to be universal, who guarantees them? In practice, economically wealthier nations decide which rights to enforce, making them far from universal.

To be fair, Tarifi acknowledges this:

I think in history of philosophy, philosophers have been figuring out what a shared vision should be or what objective morality should be. Lots of philosophers have tried to work on that, but that often just led to dictatorships.

The solution, however, is not to dig deeper than past philosophers in search of a perfect “shared vision.” “Freedom,” “agency,” and “universal rights” appear universally shared, but this very perception breeds authoritarianism—those who reject these values seem so irrational or evil that we feel justified in excluding or oppressing them. Some religious individuals, for example, actively seek to relinquish their personal agency to escape moral anxiety.

Digging deeper for an essential, universal value will not resolve this problem. Instead, we must engage in debate—despite Tarifi’s dislike of it—to settle the issues that reason can address. Beyond that, there is no objective way to determine who is right. Ultimately, we will all have to vote, making our best guesses about what kind of world we wish to live in.

This is easy to understand if you think about talking to ChatGPT. Even though we know there is no real person behind it, we still address it using “you” as if we are talking to a real person. The use of language by AI produces the illusion of a subject.

When we use the word “represent,” we end up assuming that what it represents must exist first before a signifier can be assigned to it, but what Lacan means is the other way around. So, even though it’s technically correct to use the word “represent,” it’s misleading.

Also, another confusing factor here is that there are two different levels to which his statement can be applied: macro and micro levels. The statement refers to the micro-level (how a sentence comprises words), but it’s easier to understand if we first discuss the macro level, where the whole sentence is a signifier that represents (or evokes) a subject.

Imagine you walk into a room and find a piece of paper on a table that says, “Chair is in closet.” You assume that someone wrote it, and he is trying to express something. If you take the whole sentence as a signifier, it’s easy to see how it represents the subject, although what Lacan means by “subject” is not the person who wrote it. The existence of a real person, however, is irrelevant. The use of language itself, even if ChatGPT wrote it, implies or evokes a subject after the fact as an effect of language.

So far, I have explained the first part, “a signifier is that which represents a subject.” Now, what does “for another signifier” mean? The word “for” is arguably the most difficult and important part to understand.

Let’s imagine this note was written thousands of years ago by someone whose language nobody speaks today. Even though we cannot understand what it means, we can still glean some things from it. First, someone wanted to say something. That is, we perceive a subject. Second, it wasn’t just a private code that he alone understood. It must be part of the language that his society spoke. “For another signifier” at this macro level refers to this language, what Lacan called “the [big] Other,” without which the sentence cannot signify anything. At the time he was still alive, it represented him for the language others in his society shared.

As you can hopefully see, at the macro level, it is relatively easy to understand, but it gets more complex at the micro level, where each word is “a signifier” in Lacan’s statement, and “another signifier” refers to other words within the note.

Imagine if you saw the note one word at a time. At the point where you see the first word, “chair,” you can still see that someone is trying to communicate something using that word. That is, it represents a subject. But, what does “for another signifier” mean at this level?

By seeing one word at a time, endless possibilities exist in terms of what could come after it. It could be “chair is missing,” “chair broke,” “chair in physics,” and so on. As the subject writes the next word, “is,” he retroactively modifies the meaning of “chair”; it is no longer “chair broke” or “chair in physics.” Therefore, when the subject writes down the word, “chair,” he means to use it as a signifier “for” the next one. Because words can only function in a differential chain of signifiers, each word becomes a signifier as we write it down in a sentence. In contrast, if we write down a random collection of letters, like “ghpbt,” by itself, it would not function as a signifier. A word becomes a signifier only within a chain. You could write down “sit” and still make sense, but that is possible only because it belongs to the network of other signifiers within the language as a whole, “the Other.” In that example, it’s the lack of the next word (or the implied period or an exclamation mark) that completes the meaning of the word “sit” as a command.

And as he writes down the next word, the whole cycle begins again. The new word represents the subject for the next signifier, and so on, which is what Lacan meant by “a subject emerges in the state of barred subject as something which comes from a locus in which it is supposedly inscribed, into another locus in which it is going to be inscribed anew.” Here, he uses the word “emerge” because a subject does not pre-exist as the word “represent” might imply. It is “supposedly” inscribed because it’s only that the language implies the existence of the subject. For Lacan, a subject exists (or “ex-sists”) only as a barred subject, split and incomplete, beyond the reach of language, which is a topic for another discussion.

I don’t believe the real issue is whether advice is solicited or unsolicited. I’m not sure who decided this distinction was the core of the problem, but I think it’s a misdiagnosis.

Some people simply can’t take any advice, solicited or otherwise. Most of us have experienced the following scenario: a friend asks for advice about an important decision, and you spend considerable time thinking it through and explaining your thoughts. Your friend agrees with you and thanks you profusely. Then, a few days later, you learn from someone else that your advice was completely ignored.

Even more frustrating is when a friend in a toxic relationship seeks help. She confides that her boyfriend is mistreating her. You spend hours at a bar reassuring her that she deserves better and reminding her of her potential. She leaves feeling empowered, yet a year later, nothing has changed.

Consider another pattern: a man blames women for his failure to find a girlfriend, claiming that women are shallow and only interested in macho men with money. Meanwhile, he overlooks his own glaring issues, like his poor hygiene, which everyone else notices but no one dares to mention because they don’t care enough about him to give unsolicited advice.

These common stories suggest that whether advice is solicited or not may be irrelevant.

In my experience, people who can benefit from advice tend to welcome it regardless of how it is given. They encourage unsolicited advice and appreciate the effort, even if it’s not useful, because they do not want to discourage unsolicited advice.

So, what does all this mean for me? First, I try to determine whether the person can take advice. If not, even if they ask for it, I don’t because they will just feel guilty for not following through. If they can take advice, I offer my advice, even if unsolicited.

More importantly, I try to be the person who can listen to any advice, solicited or not.

When I was in middle school in Japan, my dad had an absurd theory: if you kept your hair very short, you’d never go bald. He was known for coming up with notions that had no origin, proof, or logic—so, technically, they weren’t theories. Still, he managed to plant that idea in my head for a few years before I dismissed it as pure nonsense.

Having a full head of hair, especially as we get older, is highly desirable because so many men end up bald. Having facial hair, on the other hand, isn’t something to brag about because nobody loses it. We’re indifferent. We should thank bald men who walk around without trying to hide it. If it weren’t for them, women would likely feel indifferent about men with thick, voluminous hair, too.

But why is it so hard to accept our changing looks? As infants, the first person we notice is usually our mother. At that point, we haven’t yet formed a sense of ourselves; we only perceive the being that cares for us. The idea of “self” is implied but not yet recognized until we see our reflection in a mirror—“the mirror stage.” We realize we have a body, a face, and eyes—just like our mother—and that we, too, exist as part of the world (the Other).

It’s important to note that the self forms after the Other. There is something inherently foreign about our own image. Despite this otherness, we miraculously convince ourselves that we are a single, whole entity, rather than a collection of parts doing their own thing. We don’t address someone’s hair, eyes, emotions, or intellect separately.

Maintaining this sense of wholeness involves a lot of work. We spend years integrating the different parts of ourselves into one identity. So when something changes suddenly—like losing hair or an arm—it’s distressing because we have to rework that integration. Once the process is complete, the suffering often dissolves like someone else’s problem. If only we could fast-forward the integration, life would be so much easier.

Having studied at an art school, I was surrounded by drugs. I lost two good friends to heroin. The scenes depicted in Trainspotting weren’t entirely foreign to me, although I’ve always been more of an observer, only occasionally participating when invited. People who fear deviating from mainstream life might push drugs on you to ease their own anxiety, but art school kids don’t bother.

In my 30s, I had a persistent feeling that I’d wasted my youth by drifting wherever the wind blew. I had no ambition to “choose” the trappings of a respectable life, as Renton listed—family, big television, cars, dental insurance, etc. Still, I felt I should have lived more intentionally toward a goal. Now, in my 50s, I realize that’s impossible if I want to live a life that’s truly my own.

In our youth, we have no idea what possibilities life will offer or what we’re capable of—not because we don’t know yet, but because nobody does. Just because your family owned a printing press business, it doesn’t mean you can follow that path. If we want to understand life and ourselves, we have no choice but to muddle through. Taking the path society lays out—like climbing the corporate ladder—means forfeiting this understanding for ourselves. Observing the safari from the bus is comfortable but alienating.

To muddle through is to connect the dots only in hindsight. It assumes it’s not possible to do so in advance and, more importantly, that there is no single right or wrong path. Any path you walked becomes yours in retrospect, and you know it was not anyone else’s.

To fully understand life and ourselves, we cannot be constrained by the morality society imposes, because that, too, is a path devised by others. Right or wrong, we need to experience it and decide for ourselves, like pushing a car to its limit to learn its full potential. This is why the moral transgressions in Trainspotting feel beautiful. The insistence on testing the possibilities of life for ourselves lies at the core of what art is about.

I asked ChatGPT what exactly annoyance is, and it said, “It often arises when something or someone persistently disturbs our comfort, expectations, or goals in small but nagging ways.” I expect an illness to either get better or worse, so it’s annoying when a vague condition persists without a clear direction.

I also realize this description sounds a lot like me—though you’d have to experience interacting with me directly to see that. My interlocutor often has no idea whether I’m saying something positive or negative about them and wonders where I’m going with it. Most people expect their interlocutors to be aiming for a specific emotional effect, but instead, I “debug” what people say because I’d like them to debug my thoughts, too. This can be annoying on multiple levels.

Most people do not like having their contradictions pointed out because they rely on them to cope with human life, which is fundamentally contradictory. Even though contradictions are inescapable, people still feel they shouldn’t have any. I don’t see anything wrong with having contradictions, so pointing them out doesn’t feel like a big deal to me.

Consider when you’re building an app—you have a goal in mind. You might, for instance, want an app that tracks other people’s microaggressions towards you. Even if I’m not interested in such an app, I can still point out the bugs if you show me the code. Likewise, even if my interlocutor is a Nazi, I’ll focus on the flaws in his own system of belief. His goal is secondary, which makes people think I have no morals. The fact that people hold a variety of beliefs doesn’t bother me; only their internal inconsistencies do.

I assumed everyone appreciated being “debugged” because, in reality, everyone does it. What I failed to notice is that they typically do it only when the person they’re debugging isn’t in front of them. Everyone has the same propensity I do; the difference is that I’m indifferent to how annoying it is when someone does it to your face.

Why does etiquette dating back to the 18th century or beyond advise against discussing politics and religion in social settings, such as bars and dinner parties? It is because these topics can quickly devolve into fights. In other words, we have learned to repress political thoughts in polite company, which reveals that the political and the psychoanalytic are intertwined at a fundamental level. We instinctively avoid such discussions because they can threaten our sense of self—our ego.

We all expend tremendous energy maintaining mental images of ourselves that are acceptable to us. Certain ideas, if they probe deeply enough, can undermine this self-image, like shifting one of the lower cards in a house of cards. Psychotherapy, in contrast to psychoanalysis, is designed to strengthen or stabilize this house of cards rather than reconfigure its foundation.

Shifting some of the topmost cards is not difficult if you are confident enough in yourself. Conversations about a film, for example, might shift a few upper cards, which can even be enjoyable—like riding a rollercoaster or watching a horror movie. However, when you debate politics, a disagreement can threaten the cards at the bottom. In response, you naturally feel compelled to protect the entire structure of your self-image. If your goal is simply to defend it, how productive can a political debate be? If your opponent introduces an idea that forces you to question core assumptions, you must be free and willing to reconsider those lower cards. Otherwise, the debate cannot move forward.

Everyone wants to believe they are capable of this kind of introspection. Yet the problem with social media is that it allows us to simulate such openness without risking anything. You can share your most honest thoughts with thousands of followers, but if no one significantly disagrees with you—because you have already unfollowed or blocked them, or because anonymity eliminates real-life consequences—your belief that you are genuinely open-minded remains untested. This simulation of risk fuels much of today’s politics.

We try to dismantle our opponents’ houses of cards without jeopardizing our own. If there is so little at stake, how realistic can our political opinions be? It is no wonder that opposing views appear delusional when we never allow ourselves to be similarly challenged.

Within our political bubbles, sharing opinions and sentiments operates more like psychotherapy: it reinforces our house of cards. Debating with someone who truly disagrees, on the other hand, can destabilize our house of cards, akin to psychoanalysis.

The aim of psychoanalysis is not to destroy the ego but to reconfigure it. Because our ego is inherently fragile, we suffer from various neuroses. Yet we cannot function socially without some form of ego, which means neuroses are unavoidable. The question is which kinds of suffering or symptoms are tolerable. Psychotherapy tends to manage symptoms, whereas psychoanalysis can rework the foundation of the house of cards. The latter is understandably frightening—what if the structure collapses altogether? Hence, psychotherapy remains more practical and popular.

I am not saying everyone should be psychoanalytic. I am saying that if you want to be political, you have a moral obligation to be psychoanalytic. It is unfair to risk destabilizing someone else’s ego while refusing to expose your own to the same risk. If you are unwilling to let your sense of self be challenged, you are free to abstain from politics. But engaging in politics without accepting this risk leads to delusional positions that further social instability.

When you share political memes or join large protests with like-minded people, you reinforce a collective fantasy in which your own ego is never seriously threatened. You would do more good by debating someone face to face—someone who truly disagrees. Changing one person’s house of cards, whether it’s yours or theirs, is more meaningful than fueling a fantasy that cements everyone’s biases and angers the opposition.

When I suggest a psychoanalytic approach, some accuse me of making ad hominem attacks—criticizing a person’s character instead of their argument. However, if someone’s deeper motivations are misguided, arguing the merits of their position may be pointless. Consider someone who hates his father but cannot confront him, so he displaces that anger onto certain political figures who remind him of his father. He believes he is politically motivated by a desire to improve society, when in fact he seeks relief from his unresolved paternal conflict. If those political problems were truly resolved, he would lose his outlet for anger. Thus, he has a vested interest in not solving them.

In practice, such individuals rarely engage in genuine debate, as they instinctively know it is too risky: the conversation might threaten the lower cards in their house. If their real motivation is personal relief, not social change, they gain little by engaging anyone who could destabilize their self-image.

This also explains why we see so much self-righteousness combined with demands for “safe spaces.” We want the freedom to criticize others without feeling vulnerable. We want to vent without being challenged. Because many people use political engagement as a way to alleviate personal suffering rather than to solve genuine societal problems, the challenge is not welcomed.

Regardless of the root cause—hatred of parents or some other displaced feelings—our political landscape is filled with people whose motivations are not what they claim. Their engagement fans the chaos. To restore genuine political debate, we need psychoanalytic thinking. Without it, we get battles of clashing fantasies that lead nowhere. Since neither side wants real solutions, conflict continues for conflict’s sake.

When you do engage such pseudo-political people, you often notice they lack interest in learning how things actually work (e.g., studying laws or analyzing data). If their real aim is to vent their neuroses, studying or seeking pragmatic solutions becomes irrelevant. If you offer a legal explanation that should dispel their fears, they get agitated, not reassured. A practical solution is taken as a threat to their outlet for anger. They will criticize you, claiming you are “emotionally blind,” because you are denying them their chance to vent.

“Reality does not care about your feelings” is a familiar claim. While the laws of physics may not care about our feelings, our social reality does. We cannot simply wish away our feelings or logic them out of existence. Feelings matter because they exist, and they are not always rational.

That said, while our social reality often must consider feelings, political decisions—like scientific processes—cannot always prioritize them if we hope to make collective progress. This is a core political reality: a society ultimately must make decisions that often clash with personal feelings. Still, there is a place for feelings. When a dinner party’s goal is to have a pleasant evening, we prioritize harmony over logic. But in politics, we need to accept that our views might hurt someone’s feelings and, likewise, theirs may hurt ours. Feeling hurt does not automatically mean your opponent is at fault. It could be that you have held onto a faulty assumption your entire life. If you cannot accept the possibility of being hurt, you might be better off not engaging in politics at all. It is unfair to expect others to accept your opinions unconditionally while refusing to grant the same to them.

Lastly, many people believe psychoanalysis should be left only to licensed professionals, but even professionals disagree on what qualifies someone to practice it. Some doubt that reading books or formal training can truly certify a psychoanalyst. Who, then, decides these standards?

For me, these questions miss the point. One can think psychoanalytically without being formally trained, just as one can think mathematically without a degree. Many criticize psychoanalytic thinking because they fear it. Yet our current political climate increasingly requires this depth of self-reflection. Without it, we are stuck in a vicious cycle of endless conflict, where no one wants solutions. I believe only psychoanalytic thinking can break that cycle.

But that was already after the gentrification. Before, there were no restaurants, just take-out Chinese joints and bodegas. Drug dealers were conveniently positioned on every block, mostly serving homeless punk rockers. Kurt Cobain scored his heroin a block away from where I lived. The sidewalks were peppered with empty dime bags and needles. The graffiti-covered neighborhood looked exactly like the dystopian manga I had read as a teenager in Japan.

Manhattan was king. Brooklyn wasn’t hip or cool—just inconvenient. On weekends, I’d wake up early and walk to St. Mark’s Bookshop. Past the front desk and the table stacked with oversized graphic design books, I’d head straight for the philosophy section. Their selection was solid, but more often than not, the book I was looking for wasn’t there. Next stop: Barnes & Noble in Union Square. Then Shakespeare & Co. on Broadway, followed by NYU Bookstore. Only in Manhattan could you have all that within walking distance.

If you lived in the other boroughs, you had to commute into Manhattan to buy anything: Broadway Panhandler for kitchen tools, Canal Jeans for clothes, Pearl Paint for art supplies, Tower Records or J&R for music, Duggal for film processing, Canal Plastics for odd plastic products, The Wiz or Crazy Eddie for electronics, Dean & DeLuca for high-quality food ingredients.

Every day, we woke up with a sense of purpose: I’m going to find that book today. We felt like we were at the center of the universe because, here, you could get things done that suburban or rural people could only dream of.

But no more. Amazon took it all away. Now, we don’t know what to do with ourselves, so we scroll through social media and feel depressed. But we can do that anywhere. Why move to New York City for it?

Philosophically, I’m neither for nor against AI. It is just what is happening in the world that I’m observing. My mind is too limited to predict whether AI will save humanity or bring about its end. Even in the worst-case scenario, as far as the Earth or the universe is concerned, it’s just another species going extinct out of countless others. The role of morality is to govern human behavior; outside of our minds, it is meaningless.

However, I must admit that I find the pursuit of endless productivity silly. Now, we are witnessing an AI arms race, particularly between the US and China. Ultimately, it is a race of productivity—who can outproduce the other—and AI is merely a tool, or a weapon, for that war. As a philosopher, I must ask what the point is, but in the grand scheme of things, nothing we do has a point. We concoct a meaning from what we do and act as if it’s universally meaningful. In that sense, productivity as the meaning of life is no better or worse than any other. What comes across as silly is the “acting as if” part.

For instance, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, sure acts as if he is saving the world, or at least Americans, even though there is no fundamental need to develop AI. Humanity will be fine without it. It’s merely a solution that turned into a problem. We solved all the real problems a long time ago. All our problems today (like climate change) were created by our “solutions” (like industrialization). If we stopped solving problems, new problems wouldn’t arise, but human minds need problems and obstacles. Without something to strive for or overcome, we would cease to be human, which is why I’m not for or against AI. We are destined to struggle, even if it means we have to create our own struggles artificially.

“Man’s desire is the desire of the Other,” as Jacques Lacan said. As the Other is transformed by AI, our desires are inevitably transformed as well. The web was originally developed as a public repository of knowledge, but large language models like OpenAI’s have already harnessed and distilled much of that knowledge. As people begin turning to AI for answers instead of search engines, the desire to share knowledge publicly on the web will diminish. Information will still be used to train AI models, but few will visit your website to read it—no fun if your goal is to engage with others.

As of today, most of our social engagement—not just on social media, but across platforms for any purpose—consists of emailing, chatting, and talking with other humans. AI agents like ChatGPT will soon take over a significant share of these interactions as they become more knowledgeable and intelligent. When it comes to practical information and advice, consulting other humans, with their limited knowledge and intelligence, will begin to feel archaic and inefficient. It would be like paying a hundred dollars for a handmade mug when all you need is something functional for your office. Even if that price fairly compensates for the time, skill, and materials involved, buying it will feel increasingly wasteful.

Often, what we enjoy about our work is the process, not the results. It’s not just about acquiring information but about the process of seeking it from others. It’s not just about the final song but about composing, playing, and recording. Yet, in the name of productivity, AI will make it increasingly difficult to monetize these enjoyable processes. We will have to fight for processes that AI has not yet mastered. There will still be problems for us to solve, but only because our own solutions will artificially create new problems.

I, for one, am optimistic about our ability to generate challenging, unnecessary problems—but I’m less certain whether we can continue to enjoy the process. The speed of technological disruption will only accelerate, and it is already outpacing our ability to adopt and adapt. At some point, we might all throw in the towel. What that world looks like, I have no clue—but I’m curious to see.

The first time I thought about it was when it first started growing. I believe I was in fifth grade. For some reason, I told my swimming coach that a strand of hair had sprouted near my penis. He then announced it to the entire team. Everyone congratulated me. As far as I know, no such tradition exists in Japan. He must have made it up on the spot.

The reason I suddenly noticed it today is that, aside from washing it, I have never done any kind of maintenance. I use it as a sort of reservoir for soap, since it’s conveniently located at the center of my body. From there, I spread the soap north and south. In my mind, it’s just a tool, not even something that needs its own upkeep.

Despite never maintaining it, it never grows too long. Why is that? For almost five decades, it has stayed the same length without trimming. Clearly, this maintenance-free feature doesn’t apply to my facial or head hair. Is it just mine that takes care of itself? Do other men trim their pubic hair so it doesn’t burst out of their underwear? I’ve never thought to ask.

It’s like our sewer system: we take for granted that it works. We don’t think about the people who maintain it and only complain when something goes wrong. Nothing has ever gone wrong with my pubic hair, so I never had a reason to notice it. But why did nature think it was necessary in the first place? I understand why we need a sewer system.

There’s a lot about ourselves that we don’t understand. Do I really know myself best? Not particularly. This “I” that’s trying to figure itself out doesn’t know much. Meanwhile, the rest of me knows exactly what it needs to do to keep functioning. It must think the “I” is pretty stupid.

The roles we play in life existed before we were born. Our parents imagined having us and named us with certain hopes and expectations. Similarly, society already had its own set of expectations for us, like speaking the language and attending school from kindergarten through high school. Even in today’s more gender-fluid society, unspoken gender expectations were projected onto us from birth. Whether we conformed to or rebelled against these norms, we operated within our options.

In my youth, I didn’t feel much pressure to behave age-appropriately, but these days I do. I imagine those who have children feel it even more acutely because they’re aware of their children’s gaze. Society expects us to behave more maturely as we grow older.

It’s not that I frequently hear criticism; rather, I’ve become more attuned to the difference in mindset between myself and others around me. As we age, it’s assumed that we should become less self-centered and more concerned with others, like passing the baton to the next generation through self-sacrifice. The archetype is more Bill Gates than Steve Jobs.

I’m not philosophically opposed to this norm, but it’s not in my nature. Like Mitsuru, I, too, am an egocentric child. Perhaps it’s part of being autistic, which might explain why autistic people often seem naïve and childlike throughout their lives. I’m not suggesting my friend is autistic, but it feels good to spend time with another grown-ass child.

Even now, when I see a friend my age driving his own car or managing a large group of people, a part of me thinks, “Wow, he is so mature,” as if I still have decades ahead of me to grow up.

At this point, I’ve resigned myself to the reality that I’ll never be mature—forever naïve and egocentric. But perhaps accepting who we truly are is a form of maturity in itself.

John is my counterpart in Japan—he left the US and never looked back. The last time he was back in the States, he said, was at least a decade ago.

While plenty of people immigrate to other countries, I rarely encounter those who abandon their native cultures. Most people continue to evaluate their lives based on the value systems of their home countries.

Foreign currency traders offer an apt metaphor: they realize their “profits” in terms of the currency they designate as their home. For example, American traders buy yen but still assess its worth in dollars. Even if the yen appreciates after the sale of the yen, they wouldn’t count it as a loss within their chosen framework.

Similarly, typical Japanese immigrants to the US often measure their self-worth through the lens of how they’d be perceived back home. For instance, ordinary Japanese people do not know how to evaluate a degree from Harvard, so a degree from Tokyo University still reigns supreme despite it being practically meaningless to average Americans and its global ranking being 30th or below.

This phenomenon also appears in more subtle ways. For Japanese people—and many other Asians—a brand-new home is a status symbol. They often view older buildings in the same way we perceive used cars. In contrast, pre-war buildings are highly coveted by New Yorkers. Yet, Asians living in New York frequently gravitate toward new buildings, still influenced by how they believe other Asians would perceive them.

It’s a reminder of one of Lacan’s well-known maxims: “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other.” Without an awareness of how the Other evaluates us, we struggle to define ourselves. Abandoning our home currencies, then, feels akin to a type of suicide or self-destruction.

I’m not entirely sure what compelled John and me to choose this path. It’s not as though John hates America or I hate Japan. It certainly was not desire but some inner drive.

The same holds for the year; we are hardly aware of it in the spring and summer. We reflect back on it towards the end and visualize a happy year at the beginning.

On the last day of the year, I took a walk around my mother’s home in the twilight. I spent parts of my middle school and high school years in this area. My father died about a year ago. Once my mother is gone, I will have no reason to come here. Nobody will remember who I am. What I remember of this area will gradually change and, therefore, fade even if my memories do not. I do not see nostalgia in the old signs and buildings, but my future that will eventually fade.

When my father died, he had few friends left to remember him. Even if he were famous, it would only be a matter of time; eventually, everyone fades away. I’m not sure if it’s much of a consolation to fade slower.

Perhaps perceiving beauty always requires stepping outside of the frame. When we are of it, we can’t even see the frame. As we move towards the edges of the frame, we see a glimpse of the outside looking in.

In this sense, photography is the purest form of art, as it consists only of framing. We are unable to see the beauty of what we experience unless we deliberately frame it.

Even tragedy, suffering, and death momentarily look beautiful through a disinterested gaze of framing. Artists must operate like war photographers, always stepping back from the fear, joy, and anger to frame them.

But even if we are not artists, we risk sleepwalking through life if we do not step back from life every now and then. Objectively speaking, the fact that today is the last day of the year is arbitrary and meaningless, but there are no intrinsic frames in the light we perceive, either. Photographers frame it arbitrarily in order to see the beauty in it.

In recent decades, this arrangement has reversed. Today, married couples often settle closer to the wife’s parents. Since women typically pursue careers, proximity to their parents facilitates childcare. Given that most families have only one child, parents with only a son face the prospect of lacking support in their old age.

According to one study, in 1982, 80% of men and 60% of women preferred having a boy. By 2002, those numbers had shifted to 53% of men and 70% of women preferring a girl. Over coffee, a childhood friend affirmed this observation, sharing that he, too, spends New Year’s Eve and the first three days of January with his wife’s family.

Women still occupy a small percentage of leadership roles in Japan, but such positions are less valorized compared to the West. For example, the pay ratio between CEOs and employees at major Japanese corporations is roughly 12:1, contrasting starkly with the U.S. ratio of 344:1. The Japanese proverb “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down” applies here: Japan’s highly socialistic culture does not glorify the super-rich, and climbing the corporate ladder is often associated with stress rather than wealth or status. As feminists in the U.S. rarely focus on the gender ratio of garbage collectors, Japan may not prioritize leadership roles as a critical measure of gender equality.

Even during my upbringing in Japan, women were as likely to approach men as vice versa, unlike the more passive dynamic often observed among American women. A crucial component of objectification is the absence of agency. If personal happiness could be quantified accurately, it might reveal that Japanese women fare better overall than American women. After all, most parents prioritize their children’s happiness over their own.

Growing up in Japan, I do not recall eating cakes of any kind for Christmas. So, I figured I should try one. I decided no Japanese Christmas cake could be more authoritative than the ones from Fujiya, so I went to the store near my mom’s house to pick one up this afternoon. They had several types of Christmas cakes, including a chocolate version, but I opted for the classic one.

When I opened the box, I was surprised to find birthday candles. Upon reflection, it made sense: it’s Jesus’ birthday, after all. Perhaps some Japanese people sing the birthday song for Jesus and blow out the candles. This is a tradition I can see catching on globally.

Christmas in Japan is a much bigger deal now than it was when I was growing up. Christmas “illumination” is everywhere and often more impressive than in New York, yet only about one percent of Japanese people are Christian. The vast majority are not religious but aren’t exactly atheists either. They are best described as “apatheists”—indifferent to the existence or nonexistence of God. I’d argue it is this indifference that allows them to commercialize Christmas—or any religion, including their own (Shintoism and Zen Buddhism)—to this degree. Their attitude toward religion is best summarized by a story involving Niels Bohr:

A visitor came to the home of the famous physicist and noticed a horseshoe hung above the entrance. When asked if the professor believed horseshoes brought good luck, he replied, “No, but I am told that they bring luck even to those who do not believe in them.”

When I was living in Japan, this tradition did not exist, so I decided to experience it for myself. Most people reserve a Christmas package in advance, but I wasn’t that desperate. Instead, I walked into a KFC today. There were two lines: one for those with reservations and another for walk-ins. I purchased the smallest Christmas package, which cost ¥2,500 (about $17). That’s quite steep by Japanese standards. It seems that KFC can command this price because people value the brand.

Out of curiosity, I tried accessing KFC’s American website, but it was blocked in Japan. My guess is that the company wants to prevent Japanese customers from discovering that Americans don’t associate KFC with Christmas. The U.S. menu, after all, doesn’t include any Christmas specials.

When I got home and opened the package, the contents surprised me: one piece of BBQ chicken leg, three biscuits (each with a hole in the middle), and a generous portion of french fries. Judging by the three biscuits, I assume this meal is designed for three people—a typical Japanese family unit. However, with only one chicken leg, the situation reminded me of the Cratchit family in A Christmas Carol. Is this really what a Japanese family does for Christmas? An unsolved mystery. And what’s with the hole in the biscuits?

I ended up eating the entire package myself. The chicken was pretty good, and the biscuits, paired with the provided “Honey Maple” packets, were enjoyable as well. The french fries, however, were unremarkable.

Overall, the experience was underwhelming. Given that Japan offers an abundance of cheaper and higher-quality food options, I suspect the allure of KFC lies in the idea of participating in an “American” tradition. So, if Japanese people ask how you celebrate Christmas, tell them you go to KFC.

“Tate-mae” is what you say, and “hon-ne” is what you actually think. While Americans also don’t simply blurt out what they’re thinking, the Japanese take this to the next level, which makes reading their minds much harder—even for the Japanese themselves. So, I can imagine that a “cursing festival” would indeed be useful.

I’m often criticized for not having any filters—even in America. It’s safe to assume, therefore, that I would have had a miserable life in Japan as an adult. However, I’ve noticed that Japanese people’s ability to tolerate bullshit isn’t all that different. The only real difference is the times and places where “hon-ne” is expressed.

“Buchi-gire” refers to those moments when Japanese people lose control and blurt out their “hon-ne.” When this happens, the language—not just the tone—suddenly changes. They swing from sounding extremely polite to extremely hostile. There’s no in-between for them.

I prefer to state my “hon-ne” in a neutral voice—neither polite nor rude. The swing between the two extremes seems unnecessary and overly performative, like everyone is always acting. But, hey, everyone and every culture has different preferences. What’s interesting, however, is that these preferences seem to dictate the types of friends we make. I’m surrounded by blunt people, and my friendships with overly polite people rarely last.

One advantage of consistently expressing “hon-ne” is that it’s easier to make friends. If both parties know what the other is thinking, trust can build very quickly. In contrast, those who express only “tate-mae” need a long courtship. The disadvantage of being blunt is that people either love you or hate you; you can’t get along with everyone. But out of the billions of people in the world, we can only befriend a tiny fraction. So, I don’t see the point of trying to be liked by everyone.

I admire people who embrace limitations instead of feeling defeated by them. Creativity cannot be evaluated in isolation from constraints. When money removes obstacles, the superficial trappings of “creativity”—like truffle shavings, caviar, or gold leaf—often mask the absence of true ingenuity.

An orchestral composition isn’t inherently more creative than a piano piece, a novel no more than a haiku, or a large sculpture no more than a small painting. Yet we’re too easily seduced by scale and cost, mistaking it for depth.

Artists, chefs, musicians, and writers all play a kind of language game, each defined by its own rules, which are but self-imposed limitations. The mother of all limitations is our mortality. Without boundaries, creativity loses meaning—just as soccer would be boring to watch if players could do anything they wanted. Similarly, nothing is solved by living forever; it only erases the urgency that gives life its shape.

The most prized audience for airline chefs is probably their peers, who understand the constraints they face. In the same way, we don’t need to impress the whole world with what we do in life. If a few others recognize and value our efforts, that is enough. Perhaps there is no deeper meaning in life.

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media was published in 1988 by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, but the idea originated from Walter Lippmann in his book Public Opinion (1922). So, let’s examine what Lippmann meant by “manufacture of consent” first:

“That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough. ... [A]s a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.... Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy: that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory, we expose ourselves to self-deception and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach.”

Herman and Chomsky adapted Lippmann’s framework to analyze the subtle but powerful influence of profit-seekers on public opinion, elaborating on how the profit motives of media owners and advertisers shaped the content they produced. This analysis worked well in the 1980s when Manufacturing Consent was published. However, the internet, particularly social media, has turned this model upside down.

It is important to note that “manufacturing consent” occurs on both sides of the political spectrum. Any of us can manufacture consent or consent to one. As seen above in the quote, Lippmann regarded the “manufacture of consent” as a social phenomenon that is neither inherently good nor bad. In fact, his view leaned more positive than negative, which is why he suggested the need for technocratic elites to moderate the opinions of the uneducated public—a notion with which John Dewey disagreed (I also disagree). If you are a liberal, you might not consider Democratic strategies as “manufacturing consent” because you believe their ideologies are virtuous. However, keep in mind that even Hitler believed his intentions were good. To prevent self-deception, we need to regard the mechanism of manufacturing consent as value-neutral, as Lippmann did. We do not want fascists believing they are not manufacturing consent simply because they think their intent is righteous. Likewise, the algorithmic fragmentation I’m about to explain is also value-neutral.

Today, we have countless news sources. The power to shape public opinion has been thoroughly decentralized. Before the internet, a positive review by The New York Times could cause a line to form outside a restaurant for months. Now, restaurateurs hardly notice the difference, even after a rave review.

In the last presidential election, Democrats were criticized for relying too much on major news outlets and failing to emphasize grassroots influencers like podcasters, YouTubers, and Twitter/X pundits. When power and influence were centralized at organizations like The New York Times, CNN, and FOX, their personal connections to journalists worked wonders. For instance, they could refuse access to information if journalists did not write favorably—one of the “distorting filters” described in Manufacturing Consent. Because highly educated elites dominate the news media, Democrats were able to manufacture consent more easily than Republicans. Those days, however, are over.

Today, we treat content like dating candidates on Tinder, overwhelmed by choices and with zero tolerance for what we dislike. Every article, song, or film must align perfectly with our current mood. We make no effort to understand or acquire a taste for content that challenges, frustrates, or angers us. This leads us to narrow silos where we agree with everyone around us. No masterminds are orchestrating this fragmentation—media algorithms have replaced them. It is a systemic problem in the literal sense of the word “system.” The only remaining “masterminds” are those who control the algorithms, which is why figures like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are potentially dangerous. It’s akin to one person owning the entire global electrical grid. However, even for these masterminds, Chomsky’s framework no longer applies.

The abundance of choices, coupled with algorithms designed to cater to our preferences, fosters laziness and intolerance. We feel entitled to reject what we do not want to hear. Confronted with content that makes us uncomfortable, we shut down or refuse to engage, prioritizing our feelings over intellectual integrity. You might ask why we still consume so much content that makes us angry or fearful. It’s because negative feelings can be pleasurable as long as they vindicate our egos. However, the last thing we want to consume is content that both angers us and proves us wrong—yet that is precisely what meaningful change requires. Above all, we resist being proven wrong, becoming more entrenched in our beliefs.

Consent is no longer manufactured by powerful elites. Even establishment politicians on the Republican side have lost control of their party. It has become a ragtag group of people with wide-ranging opinions and interests, though Democrats often reduce them all to bigots due to outgroup homogeneity bias. In a way, the absence of technocratic elites—the masterminds behind manufacturing consent—has contributed to today’s populist sentiment.

Paradoxically, the idea of someone “manufacturing consent” remains appealing because it is more comforting to believe someone is in control than to confront the reality that nobody is. Furthermore, when you are venting your anger, it feels more rewarding to imagine a person who is causing all of the problems. But if you climbed the ladder of influence, you would find that those at the top are just as clueless. Even the so-called “elites” see themselves as victims of an invisible mastermind. Trump is not a mastermind; he simply feeds people what they want to hear, like a walking social media algorithm. He cannot dictate their desires. Relying on Chomsky’s framework misdirects our attention, contributing to Democratic losses as they assumed they could continue manufacturing consent.

On the liberal side, the absence of a mastermind has created a compulsion to police one another to maintain cohesion. College campuses have been ruled by the tyranny of feelings. Independent thinking is suppressed despite nominal encouragement from professors. Anyone perceived as being “too independent” faces severe consequences. The party that offends someone’s feelings is automatically assumed to be at fault. Critical thinking is rarely applied to the offended party, even though their feelings may be equally distorted, unreasonable, or selfish. Conservatives, annoyed by this dynamic, overreacted by declaring that “facts don’t care about your feelings,” as if emotions are entirely irrelevant. This mutual hostility is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Chomsky’s pyramid has now inverted. Politicians are at the bottom, passively reacting to the public’s demands. Similarly, social media influencers must cater to the whims of their audience rather than share their genuine passions. The social media audience has no patience. If you can’t engage them within 280 characters or 15 seconds, you lose their attention. Polemics, dramatization, and sensationalism thrive, leaving influencers at the mercy of fickle followers. One wrong word, and they move on. Accepting sensationalism as an accurate perception of facts, everyone panics, confirming the apocalyptic narrative further.

So, what is the solution? Personally, I disagree with Lippmann’s solution to empower technocratic elites. I believe in the principle of the wisdom of the crowd, but for it to work, we must foster independent thinking, especially on the left. Identity politics has emerged from the tyranny of feelings, prioritizing arguments based on birth factors. Racism is countered with reverse racism, vilifying all white men and ignoring their concerns. Democrats’ dismissal of these grievances has only driven many toward the right.

Despite this bleak picture, fragmentation, like Lippmann’s “manufacture of consent,” is not inherently bad. Fragmentation can foster the wisdom of the crowd by encouraging diverse thought. However, if liberals continue to self-police and peer-pressure conformity, democracy will collapse into a nation of two fascist parties, inevitably leading to civil war.

Not everyone who voted for Trump opposed abortion. They had their own, often unrelated, concerns. Just because you prioritize one issue does not mean everyone else must. Many pro-choice women are angered by men who participate in pro-life marches because the issue does not directly impact them. Indeed, we all should contribute what we know best. The wisdom of the crowd can reconcile these differences collectively.

While the algorithm-driven fragmentation is worrisome, fragmentation itself is not inherently harmful. The key is to trust in the collective wisdom of humanity, even if the path is circuitous.

Let’s say you witness a genocide and cannot fathom the morality of it being subjective or relative. You are convinced that it has to be universal. To demonstrate how this phenomenon works, I’ll deconstruct this sacred cow. In this example, the master signifier is something like “humanity.” You assume its value and significance are sacred, self-evident, and unquestionable. This has a cascading effect on every decision you make. From this foundational assumption, you conclude various actions and ideas as right and wrong. You eventually write the whole narrative about the world. Thus, if someone challenges your foundational assumption of “humanity,” your entire worldview destabilizes.

So I ask: “Who said humanity is more important than other life forms on this earth?” Confronted by this challenge, you realize you have never asked such a question. Even if you have asked and answered this question, I can keep deconstructing the next assumption like a child who keeps asking “why?” forever. In other words, you realize for the first time that it is indeed only an assumption. But the threat of destabilization is so unsettling that you struggle to process the question rationally. In my experience, this is the point at which most people will say something like, “That’s just an absurd question. I’m not even going to honor that with response.”

It’s not that you don’t want to honor it. The truth is that you don’t have an answer for it because you assumed that everyone accepts it as a self-evident truth. But let’s question it further. There’s truly no objective way to determine which life forms are more important on Earth. The results of natural selection do not imply that they are more valuable or important. The survivors simply were better at adapting to changes. There is no deeper meaning beyond it. Just because humans are more intelligent than the rest of the species, it does not mean that we are more valuable. It simply means that in the current environment, intelligence is helpful in surviving, and this can change. The earth does not care if “humanity” survives.

If we observed one ant colony committing genocide against another, it would simply be a scientific curiosity, not a moral dilemma. Ultimately, morality is just self-serving codes designed for the human species to thrive. Other species being driven to extinction by us would welcome humans committing genocides.

Such an argument sounds utterly absurd to many people, but we at least need to accept that logic does not give us a universal answer. If we pursue logic in this fashion, it tells us that nothing is sacred, self-evident, or universal, and more importantly, it tells us that we are in denial of it. To put it another way, our sense of self, built on these assumptions, is but a piece of fiction, even though we try to desperately hold on to it.

When you call someone “intolerant,” you mean they’re unwilling to consider that their sacred cow might be wrong, but when someone challenges your sacred cow, you, too, become intolerant, but you justify it by saying he crossed the line, assuming that the line is universal, that the universality is on your side.

Frustrated, you might ask: “If so, nothing matters. Why bother doing anything? We won’t get anything done or agree on anything because everything is relative and subjective.” Ironically, this reaction, too, is based on the assumption of universality. You are thinking: If we cannot rely on logic to arrive at the correct answer, we cannot agree on anything. For some, it might not be logic that they rely on; it might be Jesus or the Bible. Whatever it might be, the assumption is that we humans cannot agree on anything unless a third party, something nonhuman like science, logic, or God, can tell us what’s right and wrong. 

But this is what democracy is for. If science, logic, or God could tell us the right answers, we wouldn’t need democracy. In other words, we are already operating without this third-party arbiter, yet you still want to believe that universal principles are driving our decisions. Ultimately, this reliance on the third-party arbiter is what religion is, even if you do not consider yourself religious, because no such thing exists, yet you still insist on it existing.

Once you can break free of your religion, you’ll be able to see that everyone has not only the right but also a moral obligation to make assumptions. We generally perceive “assumptions” as something bad and strive to avoid them, but our society or our lives cannot function without them. So, by all means, continue making assumptions. Here, we come full circle. The only difference is that now, we have a certain type of humility because nothing is sacred, immutable, or universal. We can be wrong about anything, so we cease to be self-righteous. We become eager to change our minds and curious to learn different perspectives. As long as you aren’t preoccupied with being perpetually right or having the final word, you won’t be apathetic, impartial, or neutral. You will still take a firm subjective position on every issue, and democracy will determine the path forward for us. There is no need for you to make sure you are absolutely and permanently right in your decision. Collectively, the wisdom of the crowd will take care of that, even if you are wrong. Whether you like it or not, that is the best we can do.

Nice to hear from you. So, yes, the Israel/Hamas conflict. It’s a hot topic. In fact, it’s so explosive that it’s nearly impossible to find anyone willing to discuss it civilly. I see relationships breaking apart over it.

It’s not that your points are invalid, and I’m sure your opponents will also have a bottomless list of grievances, too. If it were possible to prove one side right and the other side wrong in absolute terms, the conflict would have ended many decades ago. Therefore, I don’t find historical arguments particularly productive, nor am I interested in passing judgment on past actions of Israelis and Palestinians. I’m interested in a solution moving forward. Let’s say, for the sake of the argument, that Israel has done nothing wrong. My question is: What now? How do we move forward? Given that Israel keeps expanding slowly, what happens to the Palestinians?

In my view, the main problem moving forward will be Israel’s constitution, which explicitly defines itself as an ethnostate. Without that, Israel might theoretically annex all Palestinian territories, granting Palestinians Israeli citizenship and equal rights. But Israel’s constitution doesn’t allow for this.

Imagine a hypothetical scenario in Manhattan where a group of Chinese residents proposes that Chinatown should be exclusively for Asians to prevent gentrification and displacement. Given that Asians are a marginalized group, many might support this idea. Now, imagine that as Asians become more economically successful, Chinatown expands into Nolita, Soho, and Tribeca, displacing current non-Asian residents. Then, suppose that Asians eventually become more prosperous than other groups and are able to buy out new neighborhoods to expand even further.

In this scenario, the problem is the use of ethnicity as a boundary. Without it, this would be a typical, albeit problematic, gentrification issue. Non-Asians might later become successful and move into the area. But in a region where non-Asians once lived, should they be pushed out and barred from returning simply because of ethnicity?

In other words, being a marginalized group does not justify using race or ethnicity as a basis for segregation. Sooner or later, such divisions lead to serious conflicts. It’s inevitable. Race or ethnicity should not determine territorial access or ownership, at least not in civilized societies.

Israel is the only ethnostate in the world where the self-determination of a specific ethnicity is explicitly declared in the constitution. A few others come close but not as explicit. Imagine if the world were full of countries like that, say, African nations whose stated goal is to maintain their black majority or China formally declaring the self-determination of Han Chinese people. Germany wanted to do this but, fortunately, failed.

It’s true that there are Arabs in Israel, but they are constitutionally prohibited from becoming the majority, so in that sense, they do not have equal rights. Even if the US formally declared itself as a state that maintains the white majority, I’m sure many people of color will remain here as minorities. Many will likely leave even if the whites welcome them to stay, as long as they can accept that they are not allowed to be the majority. Many won’t accept that. Would you feel good about moving to a country where the constitution formally states that Jews are not allowed to be the majority? That would be a significant reason many Palestinians wouldn’t want to join Israel. Do we want to see this kind of ethnostate proliferate globally, where societies self-segregate based on inherent factors beyond individual control?

In America, even after the Civil War, equality for Black Americans and women remained largely theoretical, as discrimination persisted in practice. So, imagine having a constitution that explicitly favors a certain ethnic group; the impact it would have on the people who do not belong to that group would be significant.

Israel’s reluctance to annex Gaza or the West Bank seems driven less by disinterest in the land than by a desire to limit growth in the Arab population. They do not want the people that come with the land. So, the only way to get the land without the people is to slowly expand and displace the Arab population, like how black people are getting pushed out of Harlem.

Yes, Israel has flourished as a modern society and has become powerful. It is the most technologically advanced state in the region. This, to me, exemplifies the issue with the concept of an ethnostate. When a marginalized or oppressed group seeks a state based on ethnicity, the global majority may sympathize. But problems arise when such a state grows powerful in the future.

When my daughter was in 5th grade, her teacher encouraged her students to form racial “affinity groups.” The only kids who were not allowed to form them were white kids. I was outraged because they did not ask the parents for permission. I would have vehemently opposed it. Based on the mantra of “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” it is tempting to do such a thing, but we should not fight racism with racism. In the long run, it will backfire and justify the treatment of others based on race.

This is my problem with Israel. The only civilized solution I can think of is for Israel to remove its ethnicity-based constitution and allow Palestinians to become citizens of the combined state. Israel will not allow a two-state solution, as you suggest. Self-determination of Palestinians in Gaza (and possibly in the West Bank) would mean that they are free to build an army, just like any other nation. Israel won’t allow that. So, Israel needs to end its status as an ethnostate and evolve to a true democracy where people are not treated differently by race or ethnicity.

My discussions on this topic with pro-Israel people always end in them becoming angry at me and leaving the discussion. Please note that I’m actually not talking about Israel or Jews specifically. I am opposed to anyone or any country forming an ethnostate, so my argument applies to everyone, not just Israelis, which is why I do not emphasize the history of the region or Jewish culture.

Yes, it applies to Japan, too, the country of my birth. Japan is essentially an ethnostate, but at least it is not in their constitution. Given how their economy has stagnated for decades and is experiencing severe labor shortages because of the population decline and aging, they now face an existential crisis that requires them to be more diverse. I think it’s a step in the right direction. At this stage, if they formally declared Japan as an ethnostate in their constitution, it would be a tragic mistake for the country. Japan should indeed be ashamed of its history as a nation that projected its imperialist nationalism to its neighbors. I agree with you that Japan needs to confront that shameful history. It would be a huge mistake for them to introduce any policies that prioritize Japanese ethnicity. In this manner, my critique does not apply only to Israel. It applies to all nations.

My argument’s moral foundation is not tied to any specific culture or history. Making exceptions just because of past suffering would be a mistake. Some people claim that black people can never be racist, but this is demonstrably absurd. Everyone harbors biases to varying degrees. Much of what we call “institutional racism” arises from our unrecognized personal biases. Not many Americans would proudly call themselves “racist.” We need to continue to examine ourselves and learn from each other.

However, please note that none of my arguments are meant to deny the existence of Israel. My only objection is its formal declaration as an ethnostate, and I would object if any country made such a formal declaration.

You are right that you likely know far more than I do about the history of Israel and the Jewish people and religion. I can certainly learn more, but how would my deeper understanding change my argument against ethnostates? The only possibility is that I would feel so sympathetic for Jews that I would grant an exception for Israel. But, I would not condone black people to be racist regardless of how sympathetic I feel for them. So, I do not think we should allow exceptions based on our feelings because we cannot legislate feelings or define them as a rule of law. Whose feelings, then, should reign supreme? We cannot have a civilized society ruled by someone’s feelings. Any country wishing to become an ethnostate would justify it by arguing that others just don’t understand enough about them. Such arguments would lead nowhere.

So, again, I’d like to emphasize that my criticism is not only directed at Israel or Jewish people. Legal and constitutional treatments of people, regardless of intention, should not be based on race or ethnicity, period. That is my argument.

From the perspective of someone seeking peace between Israelis and Palestinians, mutual vilification is counterproductive, only driving us further from resolution. Millions of people cannot all be inherently evil. As a first step, we need to move beyond portraying the other side as a villain. Revisiting historical grievances, no matter how grave the perceived injustices, does not bring us closer to progress. If we are unwilling to work toward a solution, the alternative risks leading to a devastating outcome for one side or the other. Vilification only solidifies that tragic path.

Some years ago, a self-proclaimed “white nationalist” reached out to me via email, and we engaged in a dialogue about the ideology. I found it surprising to learn that the movement does not necessarily stem from a belief in white superiority. While it differs from white supremacy, the distinction between the two can be ambiguous. I’m sure some fall between the two, and it’s a spectrum, but his point was that not all of them are supremacists. He was deeply concerned about the fate of white people, and it’s not a mere paranoia—the data back that up.

The global population of individuals identifying as white has been declining in both absolute numbers and as a proportion of the total population in several countries. According to the Pew Research Center, in the United States, the non-Hispanic white population has been decreasing in both percentage and absolute terms. Between 2010 and 2020, this group declined by about 5.1 million people, marking a 3% decrease. That is indeed a significant decline in a decade.

One of the most prominent white nationalists is Jared Taylor, who was born and raised in Japan and speaks fluent Japanese. I would imagine that he faced many challenges being the only white boy in school, and his stance as a white nationalist likely stems from this experience. However, he has nothing against Japanese people, and in some ways, Japan’s ethnic homogeneity likely inspired the idea of white nationalism, as he witnessed the advantages of racial homogeneity.

There are also some right-wing factions of Japanese who believe Japan should maintain racial purity. They don’t even allow Koreans or Chinese. This, too, is not all based on their sense of superiority. They see themselves as a victim, particularly of Western interference and domination.

Having grown up in Japan, I can appreciate the benefits of racial homogeneity, particularly in fostering societal safety and efficiency. However, this same homogeneity may also limit creativity and dynamism in certain contexts.

Many who believe in the racial/ethnic purity of a nation simply want to live among others of the same race/ethnicity. Logic can’t tell us that they are wrong. In that sense, I cannot criticize your position. It all comes down to our perceptions of the world.

Some of my Jewish friends are vehemently against Zionism, so not all Jews share your pessimistic outlook, but there is no way to prove one side to be wrong. By the same token, I cannot say white nationalists are wrong, either. The threat they perceive cannot be determined as delusional because the data aligns with it. Likewise, the existence of antisemitic violence backs up your perception, too.

The concept of “diversity” was largely championed by white people in the West, which has led to a greater embrace of multiculturalism in these societies compared to the relative homogeneity of much of the world. My personal belief is that, at this point in human history, we have no choice but to embrace the Western ideology of diversity.

When we self-segregate by race/ethnicity, we become psychologically primed to believe that we are superior to the other groups. Many social experiments have proven this to be true. In one experiment, researchers randomly selected half of elementary school kids to wear a red shirt and the other half blue. Over time, they self-segregated and began to believe that their own group was superior to the other. In another experiment, the tension between the two groups escalated into violence.

In an increasingly interconnected world, racial or ethnic self-segregation seems impractical and counterproductive. I believe the only way forward is to embrace diversity, as self-segregation risks reversing progress in human development. That said, I recognize that these perspectives are subjective, and we may ultimately have to agree to disagree.

Paulo Coelho said, “The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.” I doubt this idea originated with him—it must be quite old. It makes sense, but one issue I have is that if your “example” is motivated by a desire to “change” others, it becomes the same difference; you are still trying to change others, but passive-aggressively rather than overtly. Implied still is the assumption that you are right and others are wrong.

Imagine your perspective is instead: “I don’t really know what’s right, but given my assumptions, I feel X is the better path forward. Hopefully, by combining my perspective with those of others, we can collectively move in the right direction.” In this view, your desire to “change” others with your opinion fades. If you accept that new information might invalidate your assumptions, your wish to change others diminishes. Instead, your openness to be changed by others grows, canceling out any desire to change them. The same holds in a marriage.

Because I’ve changed my opinions so many times in life, I’ve reached a point where I have little confidence in my views. But this doesn’t mean I shouldn’t hold opinions; quite the opposite. In a democracy, the more perspectives we have, the better—without them, the wisdom of the crowd cannot function. To believe in democracy means to harness the power of contradictions to transform all ideas, not to eliminate, discard, or suppress them.

From a dictator’s point of view, fascism is about forcing change on others without being open to change oneself. In this sense, sadly, a fascistic mindset is indeed growing in America on both sides of the political spectrum.

Most of us recognize the influence of confirmation bias, especially as social media algorithms have become exceptionally good at predicting what we want to see. While this may seem harmless for entertainment, it significantly deepens political divides. Before the 1980s, people had access to a limited number of news sources. With the advent of cable TV and hundreds of channels, FOX realized the value of specializing rather than trying to appeal to everyone, especially when competing against well-established media outlets. The Internet then ushered in endless sources of information, and appealing to a general audience no longer made business sense. Today, we expect media outlets to have specific political leanings, and they even endorse political candidates.

Psychologically, this tendency makes sense; most people prefer to be proven right rather than wrong. The joy of learning and personal growth is fundamentally different from the instant dopamine fix that entertainment provides. The former requires a conscious effort to reject the latter. After a full day’s work, we naturally seek a dopamine fix to unwind. Consuming political content today is a form of entertainment, not education.

News media is packed with sensationalized and polemic stories that evoke anger, frustration, and fear. Why would we choose to expose ourselves to such emotions if we just want to relax? Freud explored this idea in Beyond the Pleasure Principle with his concept of the “death drive.” He observed that his patients often revisited or re-enacted past traumatic experiences, noting that “dreams occurring in traumatic patients have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident.” Contemporary psychoanalysts continue to investigate why we possess such a drive, but for our purpose, it’s enough to recognize that it exists. Since the word “pleasure” doesn’t align well with this behavior, Jacques Lacan coined the term “jouissance” to describe both positive and negative feelings we paradoxically enjoy. Though it may seem counterintuitive, we often take pleasure in complaining, venting, and even scaring ourselves. Consider our enjoyment of roller coasters and horror films—activities designed to evoke fear deliberately.

If a Republican voter encounters a video of immigrants committing violent crimes, they might feel both fear and vindication simultaneously. These emotions, though negative, can be pleasurable, which explains why we may find ourselves “doom-scrolling” late into the night.

2. Egocentrism

Given these psychological tendencies, journalists and content creators, under pressure to attract as many viewers as possible, naturally sensationalize and polarize facts. This strategy frightens audiences while affirming their beliefs, reinforcing their egos. There’s no need to create fake news; the truth is often enough. In fact, genuine facts are more effective and sustainable in cultivating a loyal audience, making truth a greater problem than fake news.

Once an audience becomes addicted to this steady dopamine intake, egocentrism takes hold. They have little motivation to understand perspectives that challenge their own, as reading an article that contradicts their beliefs feels as unwelcome as a cold shower.

To justify this closed-mindedness, people often discredit opinions or even facts from sources they distrust. Democrats generally disregard anything from FOX, while Republicans avoid content from the New York Times. This mindset is a form of ad hominem attack: instead of evaluating facts or logic on their own, people assume they’re flawed based on their perception of the presenter. For example, just because Hitler strongly opposed animal cruelty does not make ethical treatment of animals incorrect.

Once media outlets or writers reveal their political positions, especially endorsements, they risk being dismissed by those on the opposing side. To reach a broader audience, they must keep their political leanings secret.

The audience hooked on dopamine also becomes intolerant of others. Since their satisfaction derives from proving themselves right, virtuous, or superior, accepting that contradictory opinions may also be valid feels threatening and undermines their enjoyment.

Moreover, they lose interest in finding solutions. It’s akin to removing scary scenes from a horror movie or slowing down a rollercoaster to avoid triggering negative emotions. Consider, for example, trying to reassure Republicans concerned about Big Tech’s collusion with the government to censor dissent (such as the censorship of the “lab leak theory” during the pandemic or the firing of James Damore for criticizing Google’s efforts to close the gender gap) by explaining how difficult it would be to repeal freedom of speech protections in the U.S. Instead of feeling reassured, they might resent you for seemingly undermining their concerns. Similarly, if you inform Democrats who fear Trump’s potential authoritarianism of the near impossibility of abolishing presidential term limits, they might react negatively, accusing you of being “tone-deaf” or dismissive of their fears.

3. Out-group Homogeneity Bias

Out-group homogeneity bias, a common double standard, often prevents people from acknowledging the diversity of opinions within opposing groups. Democrats, for instance, may view the Capitol rioters on January 6th as representative of all Republicans. Even if they consciously recognize that not all Republicans would participate in such a riot, they have little motivation to correct their perceptions. Similarly, Republicans who see videos of violent left-wing protesters, however rare they may be, may assume all Democrats are uncivilized and self-righteous. This bias allows people to enjoy their fear, anger, and feelings of superiority, reducing their opponents to a single dimension.

Quoting people out of context or even willfully misinterpreting is quite common on both sides. This, too, is part of the effort to homogenize opponents. These days, whenever I ask someone whether they read the original source, the answer is rarely yes because, for the purpose of getting a dopamine fix, there is no incentive to do such a thing.

This issue is especially challenging within America’s two-party system. With only two viable choices, voters often find themselves having to pick a candidate despite disagreeing with some of their policies. For example, if you vote for a Republican candidate because you believe they will improve the economy, someone who voted for the opposing candidate based on their stance on women’s rights might perceive you as opposing women’s rights, even if that isn’t the case.

4. Desire for Authoritarianism

When anger and fear reach a high enough level, desperation can lead people to yearn for an authoritarian leader. This tendency is more visible on the right, but it also exists on the left. Corporations, which have an authoritarian structure, give CEOs the power to decide what is “moral,” “ethical,” or “inappropriate” and to enforce those values as if they are the arbiters of “universal” and “objective.” Luckily for Democrats, most college-educated white-collar tech employees predominantly lean liberal, so corporate values align with their ideals. Colleges today suppress controversial ideas that may be perceived as unsafe by some students. College professors and administrators, who are overwhelmingly liberal, can dictate right and wrong, and indoctrinate their students. Democrats welcome this form of authoritarianism as democracy is an inherently slow process, too slow to counter their perceived threats.

As social media algorithms fuel people’s fear and paranoia, the desire for authoritarianism grows on both sides. Only through psychoanalytic self-reflection can we step back and understand what we are doing to ourselves, but defense mechanisms are so entrenched that self-intervention is nearly impossible. Many people resist analysis for this reason, seeing unsolicited analysis as invasive and even immoral. But if we all refuse to recognize our own biases, double standards, and defenses, the walls of our political bubbles will continue to grow thicker. Since our opponents are not listening to us, the only way to break out of the bubble is to analyze ourselves. Ultimately, these walls won’t protect us if our political division reaches an impasse that can only be settled by bullets. FDR’s famous quote, “only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” applies here. If this conflict devolves into a civil war, everyone’s paranoia will be proven true. They could perhaps die saying, “I told you so,” and that might be the only consolation.

Social media is a powerful tool for dehumanizing “the other,” whoever you decide that may be, because they cannot talk back or defend themselves. It acts like a silent punching bag: you get to construct your own narrative about them and see only content that supports it—a self-reinforcing loop of confirmation bias.

For those who are more avoidant, this dynamic works particularly well. Even if you shy away from direct confrontation, it doesn’t mean you’re free from anger or frustration. Negative emotions need an outlet, and social media has become the perfect tool for this. You can depict the other as intolerant, hateful, misogynistic, or racist, casting yourself as virtuous. It turns social engagement into a simulation because there are no real-life consequences to online behavior, especially when anonymity is an option. You’re unlikely to criticize people you know personally since that could lead to uncomfortable in-person confrontations. Instead, you criticize an “out-group”—total strangers you’ll likely never meet. This out-group is what I mean by “the other.”

When venting negative feelings, there’s no incentive to humanize the other. The same psychology applies in war: if you perceive your enemy as just like you, dropping bombs or inflicting harm becomes far harder. To act out against them, you need to think of them as less than human. Similarly, social media encourages dehumanization of the other, allowing us to channel our anger without restraint. A Democrat frustrated with the political landscape, for instance, might dehumanize Republicans to avoid holding anything back in online rants. In real life, however, social interactions come with both risks and rewards. Social media removes the risk, much like video games remove the actual danger from simulated violence. Social media divides us because it disconnects us from others, allowing us to avoid confrontation altogether.

In the latest presidential election, the primary concern for many Republican voters was the economy. The working class is struggling despite economic indicators like inflation rates and unemployment statistics. Just as election polls have struggled to capture true political sentiment in recent years, these economic metrics don’t fully capture the challenges faced by working-class Americans. In their frustration, immigrants became a convenient scapegoat, although it’s not entirely baseless. The Texas governor shipped busloads of them to major cities like New York and convinced many liberals of the problem. When you’re barely making ends meet, debates over identity politics may feel like navel-gazing. It’s not necessarily a lack of interest; it’s about priorities. If you’re worried about eviction or affording your child’s school supplies, it’s difficult to prioritize electing the first female president.

For many urban Democratic voters, however, the economy is not their foremost concern. They take for granted that they can purchase necessities with a tap of a button. Their primary focus is often on their children’s intangible advantages, such as “leadership” skills from prestigious colleges, while families in minority groups may prioritize practical skills in fields like electrical work, plumbing, or nursing. As people climb the social ladder, identity politics often becomes more relevant, particularly in leadership and management, where perception plays a significant role. Consequently, some wealthier, white families support initiatives aimed at fairness and inclusivity, envisioning a world where their children can climb the social ladder as high as possible regardless of identity.

When a problem feels urgent, we naturally expect others to see it as equally pressing. When your house is on fire, you won’t be thinking about the war in Ukraine. Working-class voters find it hard to fathom those unconcerned with the economy, just as affluent voters struggle to understand why others might not prioritize social justice issues. Consequently, an urban voter might see a Trump supporter as opposing women’s or minority rights, thinking, “How could they? They must be misogynists or racists.” Meanwhile, that Trump supporter likely cast their vote with economic concerns in mind, feeling overlooked by Democratic voters who, in their view, ignore their struggles.

Regardless of the specific issue—be it abortion, immigration, the economy, democracy, or international conflicts—we assume others care about it equally. When votes go against our interests, we may interpret it as a personal affront. Social media becomes an outlet for these frustrations, where opponents are not around to challenge us. Thus, we feel safe to express ourselves bluntly, casting our adversaries as despicable while painting ourselves as morally superior.

However, this isn’t genuine social engagement; it’s only a simulation. Yet, if you perceive it as real, the longer you participate, the more convinced you become of the other’s inherent evil, ultimately frightening yourself. If the other is not human, they are capable of anything, which leads to “doom scrolling” late into the night.

Social media, in itself, is neither good nor bad. It simply became a powerful means to amplify our avoidant behaviors. But we don’t have to use it that way. When I engage with others online, I make a point to use my real identity, even if my views are controversial. I hold myself accountable, not for others’ sake, but to keep myself grounded in reality. I also don’t hesitate to confront those in my own circles because they’re more likely to engage genuinely. This approach allows for real social interaction, which involves both risks and rewards.

If you try this, you’ll find that even people you consider enemies are, in fact, human. You may find yourself with a more positive outlook—not because you’re fooling yourself but because your previous assumptions were skewed. The world isn’t full of evil people. While evil certainly exists, there is no need for you to artificially inflate it just so that you have an outlet for your anger and fear.

The message of social media is division, but once you recognize this, you can choose to take control of it, rather than allowing it to control you.

The “shift from” map by The New York Times suggests the entire nation has veered to the right. How the polls failed to capture this, again, remains a mystery, though by now, we’re accustomed to discounting them.

One of the mind’s inherent biases is to latch onto the image we can clearly form in our minds as the cause of the phenomenon we observe, especially when reality is too complex for us to process linearly. We tend to gravitate toward what we can clearly imagine, even if it’s not entirely accurate—a kind of bias toward the imaginary. Political leaders step in to help form these images, and we then assume, or even deceive ourselves into believing, that they caused the phenomena we observe.

Trump didn’t cause this political shift; he simply embodies it. He’s not a “leader.” Politicians function more like traffic cops. If a space alien watched a traffic cop directing a crowd, it might assume the cop was leading them, but the cop is merely responding to what the crowd already wants. Traffic cops, like politicians, are replaceable.

Perhaps a better example is a train driver. The technology behind trains, such as in Japan, is now so advanced that drivers are practically redundant, yet passengers don’t feel comfortable without someone they can visualize as “in control.” A computer lacks that reassuring image. Drivers exist, in part, to make passengers feel at ease. It’s not the driver who wants to go to Kyoto; he’s simply fulfilling the desires and demands of the passengers.

Democrats, who are often more educated and financially successful, like to think they know better. The typical narrative is that Republican voters are brainwashed by a mastermind. Democrats find it hard to imagine that Republican voters’ perspectives could hold any truth, so their focus is on preventing this mastermind from manipulating the “uneducated masses.” This mindset is amplified by elite colleges, which tend to elevate and fetishize “leadership.”

If we define a “leader” as someone who ventures into uncharted territory and clears the path for others, then, by nature, a leader cannot herd millions of people. Ideas take generations to permeate the mainstream. By the time they reach the majority, they’re no longer new. Those shepherding people toward widely accepted ideas aren’t leaders—they’re laggards. This becomes clear if we consider the early days of feminism. Leaders like John Stuart Mill couldn’t have led millions because their ideas were too radical, even absurd, for the masses of their time.

Even true leaders may not be leading. From a historical materialist perspective, they may simply be articulating sentiments that are already stirring among the people. Genuine leadership itself may be an illusion.

For many Democrats, acknowledging the validity of Republican voters requires a fundamental deconstruction of their worldviews, which can be painful. This existential crisis isn’t a quick fix, which is why ideas take generations to reach the mainstream.

Developing countries have no choice but to learn what the world’s most powerful country is thinking, while Americans can afford to ignore them. Likewise, rural conservatives have to put in some effort to understand urban liberals. Urban liberals, however, often dismiss rural Americans without making an effort to understand them. Getting to know them would mean legitimizing their views, something many educated liberals are reluctant to do. But it’s not Trump or any “leaders” we need to understand; it’s the people. I’d argue that we can even ignore Trump. We thought we learned this lesson in 2016, but apparently not, as we continue to be surprised.

Another motivator is cultural branding. In the West, many cultures are still perceived through outdated stereotypes that portray them as poor. Younger generations from these cultures are eager to modernize these images, essentially rebranding their national identities. Yet, this effort to impress the Western gaze almost invariably revolves around money. It’s a competition to see who can charge more for their products, as financial value is often the only measure that commands Western respect.

To me, it’s akin to the difference between a piano composition and an orchestral one. I’ve heard orchestral versions of Erik Satie’s music, but they sounded frivolous. Form and content share a delicate balance; change one, and the chemistry between them can vanish. Haikus don’t become “elevated” by adding more words either—their beauty lies in restraint.

In the West, we’re often made to feel apologetic for not being rich. Our offerings need the approval of the rich to gain attention; otherwise, we risk being ignored. It’s a natural consequence of capitalism. Having grown up in it, we’re unaware of its psychological impact. Money has become the currency of respect.

This capitalistic drive has thoroughly permeated the fine arts. As artists achieve success, they predictably make their work larger and more expensive to produce and exhibit, trying to differentiate themselves through scale and cost.

In photography and music, however, production costs have dropped so significantly that throwing money at them no longer achieves distinction. It’s always been this way for writing.

Much like Satie’s piano pieces, artistic substance is often clearer when it isn’t overcomplicated by money. I’d rather see what chefs could create if they didn’t have to impress the rich.

There are many reasons I choose not to vote, and I’ve explained some in the past. In a way, it’s similar to how some Christians say they live “in the world” but not “of the world.” I do not feel like a citizen of any country, even though I live in the U.S. Even as a child, I’ve always felt like an outsider looking in, and I’ve preferred it that way.

But beyond such abstract philosophy, there are also political reasons tied to our current predicament in the U.S. and elsewhere. One reason the pressure to vote is so intense is that both sides of the political divide feel the other poses an existential threat to democracy. For Democrats, Republicans represent a fascistic threat, while for Republicans, Democrats pose an oligarchic threat, ruled by “elites.” Voting is seen as a way to combat these threats. People do not vote for what they want, but for what they do not want. Meanwhile, what they want remains unclear. No one seems to have a positive vision for the future—they’re determined only to avert negative outcomes. I’m more interested in understanding how these perceived threats formed in the first place, rather than suppressing them through voting against the other, which only addresses symptoms, not the cause.

Both sides’ arguments have some truth. The fascistic threat of Trump requires little explanation, especially to my friends who lean overwhelmingly toward the Democrats. What’s less clear to them is the threat that ordinary Republicans perceive. It’s not obvious because whatever the educated elites do is more sophisticated and complex—harder to articulate or diagnose. But fortunately, there’s now a tangible example we can all relate to: immigration.

Americans living closer to the border have long experienced the impact of immigration firsthand. For many liberals, immigration has mostly been an ideological issue, not a practical or existential one. Conceptually, it sounds generous and compassionate to help struggling groups, but generosity always comes with sacrifice. The burden of that sacrifice has mostly been borne by those living near the border. Texas Governor Greg Abbott forced ideological liberals to experience the reality firsthand by busing immigrants to big cities like New York. Predictably, New Yorkers didn’t simply welcome them with open arms, sacrificing their own well-being. Almost overnight, liberals became immigration realists, not willing to accommodate the endless flow of immigrants with their tax money.

This is just one example of elites throwing working-class Republicans under the bus. Even now, Democrats don’t admit to their mistakes. Because political elites, on both sides, typically hold degrees from prestigious universities, they live with the privileges that come with those brands. They are disconnected from the realities of the working class. Those feeling left behind want the “swamp drained” by an anti-establishment figure like Trump. Their discontent has reached a point where they’re willing to achieve that by any means necessary. So, how did we get here?

My sense is that most blue-collar Republicans are misdiagnosing the problem, even though their grievances are real. I attribute much of this to technological disruptions. Their negative attitude toward “Big Tech” aligns with this. Democrats, with their neoliberal economic ideologies, pushed globalization and technological advancement without considering those who don’t embrace productivity for productivity’s sake. After Hillary Clinton’s loss, neoliberalism fell out of favor, but the push for productivity never did. In debates about AI, even the anti-AI camp views increased productivity positively. But let’s apply some critical thinking here.

AI advocates argue that eliminating certain jobs, particularly blue-collar jobs that don’t require much thinking, is a good thing because it will allow people to move on to more “important” or “meaningful” jobs. But they fail to see their own bias. Just because some tasks are mindless doesn’t mean they’re unimportant or meaningless to everyone. Consider, for instance, why ceramics has become so popular in recent years. From a productivity standpoint, it’s a step backward—machines can make mugs, plates, and bowls exponentially faster and cheaper. So why are people spending so much time crafting a single mug? Part of the appeal of ceramics is the ability to empty your mind while working the clay with your hands. Many wish they could make a living doing ceramics, but the vast majority cannot because industrialization took those opportunities away. The same is true for blue-collar jobs. Just because they don’t require a college degree doesn’t mean they’re meaningless or that everyone would benefit from their elimination.

Every society needs both liberals and conservatives. We humans have limits to how fast we can adapt to change. If someone we love dies, we don’t move on the next day. It takes time to accept the loss and adjust. Likewise, we can’t adopt new technologies overnight. Some will inevitably push change faster than most can adapt, while others will push back. Both forces are necessary to maintain balance.

Conservatives naturally resist technological disruptions, and I find this reasonable. Among younger generations today, there’s a lot of nostalgia for a past they never experienced. Look at the popularity of Friends, which depicts social life before smartphones and social media, or the resurgence of vinyl records and film cameras. Why do people long for a less productive past? Even if they identify as “liberal,” their actions say otherwise. It’s clear that productivity doesn’t define what is “meaningful” for everyone. So why do we continue to assume it’s inherently good to keep increasing productivity?

Many conservative Republicans don’t value productivity over simple joys in life. Even though educated liberals may call them “stupid,” there’s nothing stupid about the meaning one finds in life, whatever that may be. Because of unconscious biases among the political elites, the lives of conservatives have been turned upside down by technological disruptions. Their discontent is understandable, and it has been brewing for decades without anyone advocating for them. Trump is simply an opportunist who understands their discontent, having himself been snubbed by elites throughout his life.

Western thinking tends to attribute social movements to leaders, but as Robert Paxton, an authority on fascism, explained in a recent New York Times article, fascism arises from the people. Leaders like Hitler are essentially followers riding the existing wave. Trump is merely a symptom. By suppressing him, we only delay a greater reckoning. We need to address the discontent brewing among millions of Americans, but our “elite” leaders are not equipped for the job. In this sense, the election is just a distraction that fuels further division.

We have to ask ourselves: do we even have democracy today? What is democracy, anyway? What exactly are both sides of the aisle supposedly trying to protect? In my view, the two key benefits of democracy are preventing the concentration of power and harnessing collective wisdom. I would argue that the real threat to democracy in America is systemic, not the actions of our political opponents.

First, pressuring people to vote for a “winnable” candidate just to suppress the opposition is a form of tyranny. It concentrates power by silencing minority voices like those of Jill Stein, Ralph Nader, and even Bernie Sanders. I find this deeply concerning because peer pressure is the primary mode of social organization in Japan, where it has historically led to grave mistakes. During World War II, for instance, Japanese soldiers, fearing ostracization, participated in atrocities, ignoring their own moral compasses. I believe a similar phenomenon occurred in Nazi Germany, a highly collectivist society where peer pressure played a significant role. In such systems, exaggerating convenient truths and suppressing inconvenient ones become necessary tactics, which leads to the demonization of opponents. This is how fascism grows among the people, and some egomaniacal figure exploits the situation to become a “leader.”

Second, the “wisdom of the crowd” fails when people vote against what they think is the wrong solution, instead of voting for what they believe is the right one. James Surowiecki’s example is based on a 1906 experiment by British scientist Francis Galton, in which a crowd guessed the weight of an ox. While individual guesses varied widely and even experts made mistakes, the average guess was nearly perfect. This collective wisdom wouldn’t work if everyone voted against what they thought was wrong; doing so would amplify errors and biases rather than bring us closer to the truth. When we vote against the wrong candidate, the factors we focus on differ from those we consider when voting for the right one, leading to a decline in candidate quality.

Ironically, democracy in America is eroding—not because of our opponents, but because of the way we believe we are defending it. If we truly care about democracy, we should focus on voting for candidates we believe in, rather than against opponents, and we should resist peer pressure in the process.

The current situation reminds me of the Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” where neighbors who once got along well begin turning on each other due to mysterious incidents no one can explain. While I don’t think space aliens are involved in our current situation, the mysterious impact of technological advancements is something we all feel. Unable to fully understand it, we turn on each other, especially on social media. Each side has become increasingly more paranoid of the other. As an outsider coming from Japan, I feel it is unfortunate that half of this great nation cannot trust the other half. The rabbit-hole effect of social media has fueled the division to the point they cannot even have a civil discussion face to face. Whether you agree with my perspective or not, I hope you understand why I’m not interested in voting.

But underlying this swirling mass, whether birds or humans, is an invisible matrix of desire. We are pushed and pulled in ways we can hardly comprehend, unable to truly disentangle. Even Clint Eastwood, that icon of rugged individualism, cannot exist entirely alone. The edges of this matrix are uncomfortable—you risk being poor, lonely, and irrelevant. Yet staying in the comfortable middle takes effort. Trends shift without warning, often running counter to what you might personally enjoy or value.

Each field has its own currents. Fashion, food, travel, even science—all are swept by trends. Choose a scientific focus too far outside the prevailing winds, and you may find yourself without funding. We navigate these currents because we want to be desirable or respectable in this shared matrix of desires. The specifics of it—whether food or fashion—are often incidental. Desire is, at its core, a social construct. To speak of “your own desire” is a kind of myth.

Drive, however, is a different force altogether. The ceramicist drawn to the tactile pleasure of shaping clay or the home cook finding joy in the alchemy of ingredients—these are examples of drive. The pleasure is in the process itself, in the feel of the clay, the rhythm of the kneading. Whether anyone else appreciates it is secondary. Drive is solitary, self-contained.

When we fail to distinguish between desire and drive, unnecessary frustration brews because they aim at opposite ends. Desire seeks social validation; drive seeks satisfaction from the act itself. If you are fortunate, the two will align, and you might make a living doing what you love. But alignment is rare. More often, we are tasked with reconciling the tension between these two independent forces.

In the heat of an argument, the topic at hand often becomes irrelevant. When we feel attacked, our ego kicks in, and winning the argument takes precedence over discovering any semblance of “truth.” A perceptive opponent might call this out: “It seems like you’re more focused on winning than finding the answer.” This kind of observation hints at something deeper—a psychoanalytic approach to debate, one that questions the motivations. It directly addresses relevance but is only effective if the other person is willing to introspect. We don’t like having our inner motivations analyzed.

But what are the alternatives? If the goal is simply to win, the debate could continue indefinitely. After all, we can rationalize almost anything if we try hard enough. On trivial matters, your opponent might eventually give up, letting you have the last word. But what about issues that require resolution?

Changing your mind will inevitably be painful once your position is tied to your identity. Shifting your perspective means dismantling a piece of yourself. Psychoanalytic transformation is required to truly alter your beliefs, but that kind of change is painful. We resist it, even while expecting others to face their own discomfort.

If we recognize this double standard, perhaps we could approach each other with more respect. For the debates that define us, we must accept that pain is inevitable. If we’re not willing to feel it, maybe we should reconsider engaging at all. Put another way, it’s the pain that tells us how meaningful the change was, but unfortunately, it’s a battle most of us aren’t prepared for, realizing only when the pain finally hits us.

In the Aristotelian model, a person perceives injustice, takes a strong position, and enters the debate to prove their stance correct. The goal is to win by either persuading or overpowering the opposition. Logic is the tool, contradictions the enemy, and victory is marked by the proverbial gavel strike that declares a winner. This approach expects an external authority to serve as the arbiter of truth, whether it’s the New York Times, Webster’s Dictionary, or Wikipedia—entities called upon to validate facts, resolve disputes, and ultimately declare one side victorious.

But there is another, less familiar model—Hegelian dialectics—where no third-party referee exists, and contradictions aren’t to be eliminated but embraced. In the Hegelian view, contradictions are not roadblocks but the fuel of progress. The goal of a Hegelian debate is evolution, not resolution.

The divergence between these two modes of thought is fundamental. When one party approaches a debate with Aristotelian expectations and the other with Hegelian ones, frustration inevitably ensues because the goals are incompatible. And, in the world we inhabit, Hegelian debaters are rare.

Take, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A Hegelian might approach the debate not with the aim of proving one side right and the other wrong, but with the hope that each side would evolve its stance. The contradictions between them, rather than being ironed out or dismissed, would be seen as necessary for each side’s growth. Instead of entering the conversation with a rigid belief in the correctness of one’s position, a Hegelian expects their views to be reshaped and refined in the process. I believe it is for this reason that Slavoj Žižek, a self-proclaimed Hegelian, decried that his opinions got him in trouble with all sides in the Israeli-Palestinian debate.

Personally, I tend to approach debates with Hegelian expectations. As a result, I don’t strongly identify with either Democrats or Republicans. Even when engaging with extreme viewpoints, such as those held by white supremacists, I see potential in the contradictions to evolve my understanding of the world.

This distinction between Aristotelian and Hegelian expectations redefines what it means to have a “productive” debate. For the Aristotelian, productivity is akin to a court ruling: one side is proven wrong and thus forced to change. Without this outcome, the debate is considered fruitless. In contrast, for a Hegelian, the critical question is: did the debate cause the participants’ positions to evolve? If it did, even without a clear-cut victory, the discussion was worthwhile.

This may sound nebulous, but it doesn’t imply that logic is less important. On the contrary, Hegelians, like their Aristotelian counterparts, rely on logic—but for different reasons. Since contradictions are central to Hegelian thought, rigorous reasoning is crucial for articulating and evolving them. It’s not a matter of employing “fuzzy logic,” but rather being precise in understanding and navigating the complexities inherent in contradiction.

Yet, to an Aristotelian, this flexibility can seem like slipperiness. Hegelians, often unwilling to stake out firm positions, may appear evasive, even cowardly. The Aristotelian, intent on cornering their opponent with logical traps, feels as though they’re trying to grasp a shifting target—like catching an eel barehanded. Philosophers such as Jacques Lacan and Ludwig Wittgenstein exemplified this approach, continually revising their philosophies throughout their lives.

This dynamic was vividly illustrated in the much-publicized debate between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek. Peterson, armed with an Aristotelian critique of Marxism, came prepared for a judicial showdown. But Žižek, true to form, didn’t engage in a conventional Aristotelian argument, leaving Peterson perplexed. “You’re kind of a mystery to me,” Peterson admitted, unable to decipher Žižek’s dialectical maneuvers. Days later, Žižek quipped that Peterson was no mystery to him—a comment that cuts to the heart of the disconnect. We are so accustomed to the Aristotelian mode of debate, institutionalized by our judicial system, that we often fail to grasp the Hegelian alternative.

The Aristotelian approach to debate leads, more often than not, to frustration and despair. It sets an impossible standard where resolution—decisive, final, and satisfying—is rarely achieved without the brute force of external authority. And perhaps this is where the true futility of debate lies: not in the act itself, but in our expectation that every conflict should have a winner.

Take Twitter, for instance. For years, it imposed a 140-character limit, incentivizing users to share reductive political soundbites rather than complete, nuanced thoughts. This format encouraged reactionary commentary, with users pulling statements out of context and responding based on gut reactions. Over time, civil discourse deteriorated, leaving both sides entrenched in their positions.

Instagram, on the other hand, introduced a feature to suppress political content, enabling it by default. Meanwhile, Meta has formed an Oversight Board to rule on controversial moderation decisions. This body, often likened to a “Supreme Court” of online speech, decides what constitutes free expression. Yet, just like the unelected Supreme Leader in Iran, we, the users, have no say in who makes these decisions.

Silicon Valley’s liberal tilt has long provoked complaints from right-wing commentators about bias. Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, rebranded as X, aimed to counterbalance this. However, the fundamental governance structure remains authoritarian, regardless of who holds the reins.

The impact of this governance is subtle but significant, especially for younger generations who increasingly view their online identities as more authentic than their offline lives. These digital platforms, governed by opaque algorithms, shape our values and expectations about the world.

In countries like Russia and China, most citizens have become politically disengaged, having long ago resigned to the fact that they have no real power to effect change. Similarly, social media users frequently gripe about “the algorithm,” yet most don’t take meaningful action to challenge it because they can’t.

This authoritarian structure also creates a new kind of social hierarchy, where users are ranked by their authority and influence—measured by the number of followers or subscribers they have. It’s far from a democratic model where everyone’s voice carries equal weight. Instead, the voices of those with a million followers drown out those with just ten thousand, and those with ten thousand overshadow those with only a thousand.

Before the Internet, most citizens had roughly the same influence on public opinion. Now, everyone knows someone who wields significantly more sway. This awareness has transformed our expectations about power.

Younger generations, raised in this digital ecosystem, now expect to have a significant influence over others. Even those without it feel they should, comparing themselves to friends with larger followings. This gap between expectation and reality often leads to frustration, anger, and ultimately despair. Older generations suffer less from this disconnect, having grown up in a time when individuals didn’t expect to shape public discourse (because there was no means to). Some people still refuse to use smartphones; we can imagine that they wouldn’t expect to have any influence on strangers.

But for the younger generation, despair leads to fantasies of power—and an authoritarian leader who can enforce their vision of right and wrong becomes appealing. Figures like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg become aspirational because they can impose their values on the world with the flip of a switch. When we agree with what they do, we do not think of them as “authoritarian,” only when we disagree, even though whether their values are good or bad is irrelevant to the idea of authoritarianism. All authoritarian dictators believe they are doing good.

I agree with political analyst Ian Bremmer: the next global superpower won’t be a nation-state like China but rather corporations that own and control the technologies we use daily. As more of our waking hours are spent online, the governance of our digital lives will become more consequential than the governance of our offline lives. Meta’s Oversight Board could one day be more influential than the U.S. Supreme Court. In many ways, we are already living under an authoritarian regime — and it’s no wonder that democracy feels under siege.

To counter this, I believe the government should regulate social media platforms as it does other critical industries, such as banking. We need to establish truly democratic governance for these platforms, moving away from the Iran-style pseudo-democracy we currently endure. The algorithms that shape our world should be in the hands of the people. I also advocate for banning the display of follower, like, and comment metrics, even privately. This would restore a healthier sense of influence and reduce the constant pressure to amass followers, which is particularly urgent for teens.

Ultimately, however, the decision should lie with the people—not with a handful of tech executives.

The pressing question today is whether Israel’s policies toward Palestinians constitute genocide. Palestinians and much of the Arab world might argue that they do. But rather than focusing on how Palestinians define it, the more critical question is how Israelis—and by extension, many Jewish people—perceive the term. For them, the notion of genocide is often deeply tied to their historical experience in Nazi Germany, where hatred of Jews culminated in a state-sponsored campaign to exterminate an entire people. In this context, genocide is synonymous with a denial of the right to exist, not merely the desire to expel or subjugate.

Given this framework, it becomes clear why Israelis tend to reject the accusation of genocide in relation to Palestinians. Judaism, being a non-proselytizing religion, fundamentally seeks to be left alone rather than to convert or persuade others. This contrasts with the Christian tradition, where missionary work has historically sought to reshape other cultures. Even secular Westerners, often unknowingly influenced by this worldview, may project similar ambitions onto Israel, imagining that Israelis harbor a desire to eliminate Arabs in the same way the Nazis sought to eliminate Jews. But, aside from some minority extremist views, this assumption does not hold.

Genocide, in its most horrific form, requires a deliberate and systemic effort to eradicate a population—something that demands vast resources and a chilling commitment to cruelty. Israel, with its inward-focused ethos, has little appetite for such endeavors. As Henry Kissinger once remarked, “Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic policy.” The state’s actions on the international stage are largely reactive, driven by immediate domestic needs rather than global ideological ambitions. If Palestinians were to leave the West Bank and Gaza tomorrow, Israelis would have no interest in hunting them down. The idea would be absurd to most Israelis, who dismiss the charge of genocide not out of malice but because it simply does not align with their understanding of the term.

This gap in perception renders accusations of genocide ineffective as a tool of criticism. Rather than sparking meaningful reflection, such charges provide an easy way for Israel to deflect and dismiss criticism altogether. In fact, invoking the term can bolster Israel’s defense, reinforcing the belief that such accusations are rooted in antisemitism. For Israelis, the idea that they would pursue Palestinians around the globe, as Nazis might have done to Jews, is not only irrational but delusional.

Israel is, at its core, an ethnocracy. Like Iran’s theocracy, it maintains a veneer of democracy, but ethnicity remains paramount. For Israel, the goal is not to eradicate Arabs but to maintain a Jewish-majority state. Minorities may be accommodated, much as Jewish communities lived in historical Palestine, but only so long as they do not threaten the country’s ethnic balance.

In this light, the label of “colonization” also falls short. It conjures images of British imperialism, where native populations were subjugated or exploited. But Israelis, for the most part, have little interest in interacting with non-Jews unless absolutely necessary. This is why Israel is unlikely to pursue large-scale territorial conquests—dealing with a significant non-Jewish population would pose a direct challenge to its ethnocratic identity. While territorial expansion might be used as a bargaining chip, Israel does not seek new lands in the conventional sense, because the people who come with those lands would be problematic for the state. Israel’s unique expression of territorial ambition would likely manifest more gradually, with creeping expansion and expelling of the native population, much like how gentrification happens in New York City. Equating it with British-style colonialism will fail to articulate and criticize this strategy accurately. If the problem is ill-defined, it cannot be solved.

By using terms like “genocide” and “colonialism” in these debates, critics of Israel risk doing their cause more harm than good. The language, rather than sparking meaningful dialogue, is easily dismissed. If the goal is conflict resolution, we must find terms that resonate better with both sides. Instead of offering Israel an easy defense, critics should craft arguments that cannot easily be dismissed. They should not be self-satisfied with having the “correct” definition—it should be about finding the right language to move the conversation forward.

The word “discussion” is commonly used in situations where logic dictates the outcome, such as the best way to clean a frying pan. No one takes a stand. In a “debate,” both sides take positions but not personally, as in lawyers taking positions they don’t personally endorse. An argument is personal, where the stakes are highest because your very self is on the line.

When we express our individuality, we are necessarily arguing for something. For instance, Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can was a provocation on the nature of art itself, challenging the air of piety and sanctity inherited from the historical association of art with religion. Warhol argued that even the banal and the vulgar could be sublime.

The drive to argue stems from our differences from others. If your worldview mirrored everyone else’s, why bother expressing it at all? If there’s no unique perspective to defend, individuality collapses. But when you possess a thought or conviction that feels singular, you feel compelled to test it, to see if others share it or if they can be swayed. This process forces our society to evolve and adapt to the changing environments. But change is always painful, so we hate to be on the receiving end of arguments, especially if we feel we cannot defend ourselves.

As we age, our appetite for conflict wanes. Time grows short, and we become less invested in the fate of the world. But it feels more like a defense mechanism than maturity. A song that gradually fades at the end suggests continuity, a fantasy that it could play on forever, like denial of death. Most songwriters consider it a crutch, a way to avoid dealing with the ending. We tend to remember only the beginning and the end of any event. Ending is our best opportunity to make an argument.

There is a perverse comfort in the vastness of these divides. The chasm between opposing sides is so wide that the other side is barely visible. Each side can safely vent their anger to release their tension without engaging the other side meaningfully. The act of venting has become a form of catharsis, a way to bond with others over shared grievances.

Venting is an expression of helplessness; you vent when you feel you can not solve the problem you are facing. Venting and complaining are enjoyable because they offer relief from tension, even if the tension was built from unrelated causes. Commiserating and bonding are also pleasurable because they widen and deepen friendships. When these types of enjoyment are prioritized, there is no incentive to solve the real problem because the enjoyment will stop if it is solved. The status quo becomes the unconscious goal.

Deep down, most people recognize that a two-state solution is increasingly implausible, yet the debate continues as if it’s still on the table. Both sides seem to harbor unspoken desires that the other would simply disappear from the region. The grim reality is that such an outcome would amount to ethnic cleansing at best, genocide at worst—terms frequently hurled at the other side, yet rarely reflected upon when considering one’s own position.

For Israel, the best-case scenario might involve the continued expansion of illegal settlements, making Palestinian life so unbearable that they slowly leave on their own accord. This gradual takeover of historic Palestine could then proceed without integrating Palestinians and granting voting rights.

For Palestinians, the ideal outcome would see the United States withdraw its support for Israel. Without American backing, Israel’s role as a regional proxy would collapse, leading to a cascade of Arab nations turning against it. In this scenario, Israel might crumble under the sheer weight of its Arab neighbors, resulting in a catastrophic refugee crisis in Europe—a second Holocaust, some might say. The phrase “from the river to the sea” becomes chillingly real under such circumstances.

Yet, these goals remain unspoken. Both sides shy away from acknowledging the full implications of their desires because the consequences are too abhorrent to contemplate. Instead, they pass the burden of finding a solution onto someone else, avoiding the cognitive load of research, theorizing, and face-to-face negotiations. 

Without a clear solution in mind, venting frustration achieves little, and may even worsen the situation by hardening positions and closing off potential avenues for resolution. Most people haven’t even begun to imagine what a viable solution could look like. Consider, for example, this proposal by Jonathan Kuttab, a human rights attorney. Reading through any proposed solution underscores its fragility, its naiveté. But this is only because any solution requires both sides to meet halfway, not because the solutions themselves are naive. Without meeting halfway, ethnic cleansing of one side or the other is inevitable. From this perspective, we see a different division emerge: pro-solution and anti-solution.

Despite the countless social media posts about the conflict, most people only see what’s within their own echo chambers. Social media algorithms are adept at keeping these bubbles intact, giving users the illusion that they are being heard when, in fact, they are only shouting into the void. This isolation makes venting more enjoyable, but it also makes resolution increasingly unlikely.

The prospect of discussing solutions can feel intimidating. Without a Ph.D. in political science, Middle Eastern history, or international law, what can an ordinary person contribute? But this sense of helplessness is precisely why venting has become so widespread. The truth is, we don’t need superheroes—we just need more people to be informed. The goal should be to learn and share that knowledge with others, gradually expanding the circle of those who understand the complexities of the issue. In that process, we can heal the scars even though it may be painful at first.

If you are interested in discussing solutions, please reach out to me.

This phenomenon reflects a broader issue with modern populist politics, where emotional responses often overshadow the nuanced complexities of policymaking. The average voter, bogged down by the demands of daily life, rarely has the time or the inclination to delve into the details of complex issues. Instead, they gravitate toward movements that offer cathartic outlets for their grievances. It feels good to march alongside others who share the same sentiments, but such collective emotionalism can be dangerous, especially when it influences decisions that affect other nations.

Consider the recent turmoil in Bangladesh, where student protests successfully ousted the government but left the nation in chaos, with no clear plan for what comes next. The U.S. invasion of Iraq offers a similar lesson: once the initial Hollywood phase of toppling Saddam Hussein was over, the lack of a concrete post-war strategy became painfully evident.

Now, let’s apply this cautionary tale to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Imagine, for a moment, that the pro-Palestinian camp’s most fervent wish comes true: the United States completely withdraws its support for Israel—no military aid, no financial assistance. As the current war between Israel and Hamas intensifies, we’ve already seen the limitations of Israel’s “Iron Dome” system. Without U.S. support, more missiles and drones would inevitably hit their targets, spreading panic and chaos across Israel.

Furthermore, there will be no economic or geopolitical incentives for Arab nations like Jordan, Egypt, and UAE to normalize relationships with Israel because they are not interested in Israel itself; they see Israel as a proxy to normalize relationship with the U.S. Since their Muslim citizens are overwhelmingly against Israel, these governments will no longer have any interest in keeping the peace with Israel.

Without U.S. financial backing, Israel’s military capabilities would be significantly weakened, and the frequency of attacks—bombings, kidnappings, shootings—would rise. The Israeli government, struggling to fund its military, would have to divert resources from social services, causing a steep decline in the quality of life. Daily life in Israel would become increasingly intolerable. The gradual outflow at first will eventually reach a tipping point, leading to a mass exodus of Jews to Europe and the United States.

The migration of refugees is a crisis that benefits no one—not least the refugees themselves. They do not flee to Europe or the United States because they find common ground in shared values, but because they are left with no other choice. If their home countries were stable and prosperous, they would return in a heartbeat. No one wants to be a refugee. While they may initially express gratitude toward their host nations, the deep-seated ideological and cultural differences inevitably begin to weigh heavily. Unable to fully integrate, many are forced to live on society’s margins, casting a long shadow over the self-esteem of their children. For the West, ensuring stability and security in the Middle East is not just an economic interest; it is a practical necessity to prevent refugee crises. Europe, in particular, stands to benefit from U.S. support for Israel, yet it is often the United States that shoulders the burden of playing the “bad cop” in this delicate balance of power.

If Israel collapses and Jewish people were pushed out of the region, what would history make of it? It’s not hard to imagine that this exodus could be framed as a form of persecution, perhaps even likened to another Holocaust or labeled as “ethnic cleansing.” Are we prepared to be part of a movement that might contribute to such an outcome?

The religious and cultural divide between Jews and Muslims in the region is deeply entrenched and, at its core, irreconcilable because of their monotheism and tendency to put religion/race above state. (And, Israel’s demographic is shifting towards the right.) Tolerance might be achievable through economic incentives, but mutual respect is a far more elusive goal. With the benefit of hindsight, one might argue that the Jewish return to this hostile region was a mistake, given the stark differences in worldviews. However, dwelling on historical grievances only complicates the search for solutions. We are where we are.

The sight of Palestinians suffering under Israeli military strikes is undeniably heart-wrenching. The imbalance of power makes it easy to view Israel as a bully, and by Western standards, the idea of “survival of the fittest” feels uncivilized and unjust. It’s tempting to react emotionally in support of the Palestinians, but we must be cautious about what we wish for.

Anger and fear are emotions we paradoxically find enjoyable—consider the phenomenon of “doomscrolling.” This is why so many are drawn into debates about the conflict, even if they lack the willingness or commitment to contribute meaningfully to solutions. But the real question is whether we are prepared for our wishes to come true. Like Brexit, an outcome that seemed unthinkable could very well happen. We must ensure that our protests and demands are rooted in a genuine desire for solutions, not just an emotional outlet.

One positive aspect of this issue is that AI companies will need to pay for quality content. As we increasingly depend on AI to answer our questions, website traffic will likely decline since we won’t need to verify sources for the vast majority of answers. Content creators won’t have much incentive to share their work online if they cannot connect directly with their audience. Consequently, the quality of free content on the web may decline. However, I believe this is a problem that AI engineers can eventually solve. The real issue, I’d argue, is that “model collapse” was already happening in our brains long before ChatGPT was introduced.

AI mimics the way our brains work, so there is likely a real-life analog to every phenomenon we observe in AI. Feeding an AI-generated (or “interpreted”) fact or idea to train another model is equivalent to relying entirely on articles written for laymen or political talking points to formulate our opinions and understanding without engaging with the source material.

In my experience, whenever social media erupts with anger over something someone said, almost without exception, the outraged individuals have never read the offending comment or idea in its original context, whether it’s a court document, research paper, book, or hours-long interview. They simply echo the emotions expressed by the first person who interprets the comment. It’s no surprise that the model (our way of understanding ideas/data) would collapse if everyone followed this pattern. One person’s interpretation of the world is echoed by millions on social media.

In politics, the first conservative to interpret any particular comment will shape the opinions of all the Red states, and the first liberal to interpret it will shape the opinions of all the Blue states. In fact, “talking points” are designed to achieve this effect most efficiently. We are deliberately causing models—our ways of understanding the world—to collapse into a few dominant perspectives. This is a deliberate effort to eliminate the diversity of ideas.

In a two-party system like that of the US, this is a natural consequence because the party with greater diversity will always lose. Another factor is our reliance on emotions. We feel more secure and empowered when we agree with those around us. Holding a unique opinion can be anxiety-inducing. So, we are naturally wired for “model collapse.” This is the new way of “manufacturing consent,” discouraging people from checking the sources to form their opinions.

What the New York Times’ experiment reveals isn’t just the danger of AI but also the vulnerabilities of our own brains. AI simply allows us to simulate the phenomenon and see the consequences in tangible forms. It’s a lesson we need to apply to our own behavior.

True “direct action” might involve something as extreme as volunteering to fight in a war (though I am not suggesting that this is preferable) or becoming a politician. A street protest is merely one of many communication mediums, alongside podcasts, television, social media, and written articles. Each medium has its strengths and weaknesses. Protests are particularly effective at conveying emotions and attracting media attention, but they often sacrifice depth for broad appeal. It is difficult to communicate complex or nuanced ideas during a protest, as the intensity of the emotions expressed can overwhelm the audience and cause them to disengage even if they are amenable to listening. (This video shows a good example.)

While emotions are not insignificant, the very conflicts that drive people to protest often stem from our tendency to react emotionally rather than thoughtfully and critically examine the arguments on both sides. Many people find such cognitive tasks exhausting and boring—energy they would rather not expend. However, if our goal is to minimize misunderstanding and maximize understanding, the written medium is far more effective, allowing for the expression of nuanced and complex ideas without the distortion of emotions.

It is unfortunate that emotional expression dominates political discourse. Physical activism makes the investment of effort indisputable to observers, much like the ownership of solar panels and electric cars makes the investment in the cause of climate change indisputable. However, whether you join a protest or stay home tapping on social media feeds, your primary mode of engagement is emotional. While emotions are vital to art—where the goal is to faithfully represent an artist’s inner world—politics is fundamentally about coordination. Logic is the best tool for achieving this coordination. Emotional expression can resonate deeply with others, but not consistently; everyone interprets emotions differently, and while this diversity of interpretation is beautiful in art, it is problematic in politics. For effective political decision-making, we need to rely on logic, which provides a common ground for agreement on policies and laws.

For political processes to be productive, we need people to engage in tasks that are often perceived as tiresome and boring. Because few are willing, protests have become a popular means of capturing attention. In other words, protests cater to people’s desire for instant gratification and the avoidance of intellectual rigor. Political conventions serve a similar purpose. While it is exhilarating to be among thousands of people who share the same political views, this excitement does little to foster an understanding of political differences. In fact, it often reinforces divisions, leading people to feel more self-righteous and contemptuous of their opponents.

Another pitfall of protests is that negating, complaining, and blaming are emotionally satisfying. While we may not think of these negative emotions as enjoyable, they offer a release for internal tensions, whether related to the issue at hand or not. (See this video as a comical illustration of it.) When people are motivated by such emotional release, they often neglect the search for solutions. The Occupy Wall Street movement, for example, fizzled out because it offered no clear solutions. Many, including some Wall Street bankers, agreed that capitalism had serious flaws, but the question of how to fix or replace it was a boring one that few wanted to tackle. Similarly, the recent political turmoil in Bangladesh saw student-led protests succeed in removing an authoritarian leader, but they offered no clear path forward.

While most of us may not be able to devise effective solutions individually, collectively, we need as many minds as possible working on these challenges so that the best ideas can emerge through discussion, much like how the scientific community collaborated on the COVID-19 vaccine during the pandemic. Superheroes are not necessary.

Protests will undoubtedly continue because we are emotional beings, but we should not be misled into believing that physical actions are the most substantial way to engage in politics.

Logic is essential for collaboration. The more people involved, the more we suppress individuality to maintain cohesion. This is why corporate jobs, which prioritize teamwork, often feel alienating. Logic’s role in teamwork has led to a societal bias where collaboration is seen as superior to individual pursuits, and where emotional expression is often suppressed.

Artists, on the other hand, are expected to be emotional. Many even use drugs to suppress their logical side, allowing for uninhibited creative expression. A successful piece of art reveals the artist’s individuality, unlike a successful accounting report, which should reveal nothing of the accountant’s subjectivity. Society’s preference for logic and collaboration over emotion and individuality diminishes the value of artistic expression, despite its essential role in culture.

This bias manifests in various ways, such as the emphasis on “leadership” in elite college admissions, where teamwork is prized over individual achievement. The “lone wolf” is undervalued, even though many great accomplishments come from introspection rather than collaboration.

Being emotional is not a defense mechanism; it’s a way to remove barriers and understand oneself better. In contrast, the impulse to calm someone down when they’re upset is a defense mechanism—it’s an attempt to protect ourselves from the discomfort of empathy. When we see someone in distress, we reflexively feel their pain, which is unpleasant. Thus, calming them down is more about shielding ourselves than helping them. This is why nobody tries to calm you down when you are overjoyed, jumping up and down from hearing great news.

There are times when calmness and logic are necessary, such as in emergencies where coordinated action is required. However, society’s blanket assumption that logic and calmness are always superior lacks basis. If there’s no immediate need for teamwork, why should we suppress our emotions? What harm is there in letting someone cry or express anger if no one is in physical danger?

Emotional people may struggle with teamwork, but they often form deeper, more meaningful relationships. Good teamwork often requires self-suppression, which can hinder the development of genuine connections. Being good at collaboration doesn’t necessarily mean one is good at building friendships; in fact, it can be the opposite. Deep relationships require vulnerability and emotional expression, qualities that are often stifled in a team-oriented environment.

In a society that often prioritizes logic and collaboration over emotion and individuality, it’s crucial to recognize the value of both ends of the spectrum. Emotional expression is not a weakness, but a vital aspect of human experience that fosters deeper connections and personal understanding. While logic and teamwork have their place, especially in situations that require coordination, they should not overshadow the importance of emotional authenticity and individual creativity. By challenging the pervasive bias that elevates logic over emotion, we can create a more balanced and humane society—one that values both the accountant and the artist, both the team player and the lone wolf.

At its core, cynicism is a defense mechanism. Imagine a child growing up under authoritarian parents. Even if he disagrees with them, he has no choice but to obey. This lack of agency can lead to a kind of learned helplessness. His true feelings may be suppressed, but they don’t simply disappear. To manage them, he might adopt a consistently negative view of the world, lowering his expectations to protect himself from disappointment or depression.

Cynicism doesn’t have to dominate our entire worldview. We can develop a cynical attitude toward specific objects, such as a person, business, government, institution, or system, especially if we feel powerless to change their perceived flaws. In other words, cynicism is a helpless feeling of contempt directed at something or someone. For instance, if you believe you can’t express yourself clearly enough to be understood, you might roll your eyes as a preemptive defense against rejection.

This isn’t to say there is no truth to cynicism. There are plenty of reasons to feel hopeless in this world. If you haven’t developed a cynical worldview, perhaps you were fortunate or simply naive. However, we can hopefully catch ourselves feeling cynical so that we can at least consciously choose to be cynical to regain the sense of agency we once lost.

Incidents like these were common in my childhood and continued into adulthood. People are expected to quickly “get” the correct emotional response and take sides, a crucial “skill” of socialization. Much of interpersonal trust is built on this, making me seem unpredictable and unapproachable to the average person. I’ve always wished, “If only they could give me some time to explain myself,” but most people lack such curiosity and stick to familiar types.

Despite my fear of being trapped, I’ve always fantasized about being stuck in an elevator with someone, the more unlikely the match, the better—be it a Walmart cashier or a white supremacist. In high school, I liked the film The Breakfast Club for this reason.

From my perspective, most people are unpredictable and scary because they tend to gang up on me for no discernible reason. Such childhood experiences have had a profound impact; to this day, people ganging up causes me to panic. Because they bond over feelings, they are not open to listening to my explanations. Even if I’m right, their feelings won’t change. It’s game over. I’m a pariah, left to play by myself.

But it’s not all bad. Most of my good friends today know how to set aside their feelings so I can openly disagree without the fear of losing them, which allows me to connect deeper. I don’t have to worry about inadvertently hurting their feelings and falling out. Growing up, however, it was a lonely way to be. So, I’d like to say to the younger people like me, “Hang in there. You’ll be more than fine.”

The first challenge Zupančič presents in her book What Is Sex? is our understanding of what essentially amounts to Yin and Yang. This concept is not directly related to sex but can fundamentally change how we perceive everything described as such. So, let’s break this down first. I’m going to use my own example here.

Take light and shadow. We have two separate words to describe this Yin and Yang polarity, but if you think about it carefully, the fact that we have a word for “shadow” is misleading. “Light” is defined by the presence of photons, but “shadow” can only be described in terms of the lack of photons. (For the sake of simplicity, let’s ignore the fact that a signifier does not point to a signified in Lacan’s view, only to another signifier.) Much like the number “0,” the word “shadow” doesn’t actually point to anything. However, when we give it a name, we start to act as if there is some sort of substance it points to, perhaps something similar to photons but black. This “bewitchment,” as Wittgenstein liked to call it, of language has numerous consequences because it is, after all, a deception. We see “shadows” because of shapes, but the shapes are defined by the absence of photons. There is no substance within the shadow we can study with a microscope.

With the assumption of binary opposition, we imagine “male” and “female” to be a spectrum akin to two-color gradient, like blue gradually turning into red. Or, not even a gradient, just blue next to red. But this is not how sexuality manifests at birth, despite the physical differences. Infant boys and girls have the same exact sex drive without the concept of the other. They do not know where their selves begin and end, so they would pull their own hair and cry from the pain.

Thus, the word “shadow” has a peculiar existence. Unlike words like “chair,” “apple,” or “water,” it signifies nonexistence. We are supposed to have a word because something exists, but the word “shadow” contradicts this premise. It’s as if the word is a reminder of the inconsistent nature of language, an exception to how language works. Since there is nothing it can point to, the word shouldn’t even exist.

This is what Lacan meant when he made the infamous pronouncement: “Woman does not exist.” Let’s now break this down.

Freud noticed that infants do not have male or female sexuality. They both have “libido,” which drives them to masturbate simply because it feels good. While playing with their erogenous zones, boys do not imagine naked baby girls in their minds, nor vice versa. Libido is gender-neutral; both boys and girls have it. To understand this better, we can equate libido with photons. The biological differences, like the penis and vagina, have nothing to do with sexuality at this stage.

Lacan’s other famous pronouncement, “There is no such thing as a sexual relationship,” can be understood in this light. At the level of the material world, light and shadow cannot have a relationship because the only substance that exists is photons. How could a photon have a relationship with the lack of it? Likewise, libido cannot have a relationship with the lack of libido. There are no separate types of libido like masculine libido and feminine libido. Since both men and women have the same libido, technically speaking, men and women cannot have the relationship that we presuppose from the existence of those words.

Sixteen years ago, I read the controversial book The Essential Difference by Simon Baron-Cohen, an expert in autism. I began reading it, thinking I would agree with everything he said, but I found myself fundamentally disagreeing. I saw numerous holes in his definition of “feminine,” yet when I tried to define it in my critique of the book, I realized I couldn’t do it well either. Back then, I did not have the Lacanian vocabulary of sexuation. I concluded by noting that even though I agree that autism is an extreme form of the male brain, it is impossible to define how the extreme form of the female brain would manifest. What would such a person be like? I described it as “Zen-like,” where she transcends dualism. Since language presupposes dualism, such a person is impossible to describe or even notice. This is what Zupančič is essentially saying as well. “Woman,” if she existed, would transcend the Symbolic. She would exist in the Real, which is self-contradictory because the Lacanian Real is a realm of non-being beyond ontological discourse. Or, it would be on a different level of ontological space.

Even though there is no such thing as a sexual relationship, our dualistic mind requires the binary pair of male and female, just as we invented the word “shadow” and the numerical concept “0”. This is when the whole mess was created because it’s a lie or a flawed model at best.

Many feminists criticize Lacan’s idea “woman does not exist” as sexist. What Lacan’s statement implies is that man exists, but he is not real. Just because what brings “light” into existence is the presence of photons, it does not mean that photons belong to the concept of “light.” Photons are essential for defining both “light” and “shadow.” For “light” to exist, we have to assume the existence of “shadow.” Technically speaking, “light” doesn’t exist either because “shadow” doesn’t. This binary pair exists purely for our minds. 

The Lacanian Real is what our language fails to capture, and in that sense, it doesn’t “exist,” but the indications of its existence can show through the patterns of how language fails to capture. This is like how “shadow” cannot be defined by black photons but by certain shapes we recognize. While “shadow” does not have a counterpart to photons, it shows itself in an entirely different dimension as a recognizable pattern.

In the same way, a man has to believe in the existence of a woman in order to overcome his existential insecurity, which is why Lacan says all men are “imposters.” He also differentiates “penis” from “phallus,” where the penis is the biological feature of men, and the phallus is the word that points to a nonexistent substance, like “woman” or “shadow,” that allows them to believe in their own existence as men. Since a woman is a phallus, she does not need to be an imposter.

Just as a dog is happy humping a human leg, there is no natural or normal object that we should be having sex with, but from the point of view of civilization, this would be too chaotic. We had to have an organizing principle around sex, so we invented “man” and “woman” based on biological differences, even though there is only one type of libido that drives us to have sex.

There are many other examples of Yin and Yang we could analyze in this fashion, but the pseudo-binary opposition of male and female is foundational, the mother of all binary pairs, because sex is the question of our very existence. If we were to ask any existential question, we have to ask why we exist in the first place: because our parents had sex. This question is particularly urgent for children. “How did I come to be here? How did my little sister suddenly come home one day? Where did she come from?” Without knowing the answer to this question, the question itself wouldn’t even arise because the person asking the question wouldn’t even exist. Sex, therefore, is a primordial question of existence. But even if the children learn the word “sex,” they would still have no idea what exactly it is because it cannot even be talked about without the false dualism between male and female.

The Implications

Now that we have established that sexual differences do not exist at birth, let’s consider how they emerge. A helpful way to start might be to imagine if these differences did not emerge at all. For that, look no further than your typical nerds, particularly autistic nerds. Autism is sometimes described as a profound disinterest in people. Autistic toddlers might not differentiate people from inanimate objects in a room. In contrast, neurotypical kids are naturally drawn to other humans, which is why most magazine covers feature human faces. Only autistic individuals might be more interested in a cover featuring the latest iPhone. (Note: I’ll be making gross generalizations about autism to simplify this complex concept.) As you can probably imagine, if you weren’t particularly interested in people, you wouldn’t bother learning to be a man or woman.

Although autistic men have similar levels of libido as neurotypical men, they are often perceived as asexual or neutered. Autistic women are perceived as manly because they do not bother learning how to present themselves as women. For instance, they might forgo makeup and prioritize comfort over looks in fashion. Ultimately, they are neither manly nor womanly; they simply do not learn to play the socially expected roles.

There is a scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High that illustrates what happens to these nerds when they hit puberty and become horny like anyone else. Mark, a “wuss, part wimp and part pussy,” falls in love with a girl at school but doesn’t know what to do, so he asks his manly friend Mike, who explains that it’s all about “the attitude.” We can imagine that men like Mike have always been keenly interested in people, particularly women, and thought about how to seduce them. They didn’t learn it overnight. However, later in the film, we discover that Mike’s “attitude” has no substance; he is not as experienced with women as he pretends to be.

Both characters demonstrate how masculinity is learned. Neither was born with it. So, a world where sexual differences are not taught would be filled with nerdy men like Mark. In a way, autistic men and women are true rebels who refuse to conform to societal expectations, unlike Hollywood rebels who merely adopt the masculine trappings of rebellion. They have their own priorities and standards.

Zupančič explains that men and women learn how to be masculine and feminine to cover up the fact that there is a fundamental void, an abyss, a “negative 1,” like a black hole in a sexual relationship, just as “light” and “shadow” have no basis to be a binary pair. We scramble to fill that void because it’s unnerving. This is the basis of primal repression, the mother of all repressions. From this perspective, we could say that autistic people have no repression because they didn’t bother repressing the primary one. Their tendency to blurt out what they are thinking without any “filters” is one symptom. (Although this is a matter of degree.)

Once we assume that we fabricated sexual differences to cover up the void, the Lacanian theory of men being imposters and women being masquerades makes a lot more sense. I’ll provide some examples to convince you of it.

When men try to be manly, they hide the fact that they do. “The attitude” Mike described is not to be revealed to women. When men dye their hair or put on a toupee, it is kept secret because an essential aspect of masculinity is authenticity. Such attempts are seen as feminine. This is why men are imposters. They want to completely deceive others. They cover up the void with what Lacan calls the “phallus” and act as though it’s real. Being criticized or exposed as imposters poses an existential threat to men. Mike came close to being exposed as a fraud when he actually had sex with Stacy in Fast Times.

In contrast, women wear masks, and we all know they do. The fact that they wear makeup is no secret. So, even if someone were to say, “That’s not real. You are wearing makeup!” her response would be, “And, what?” Because they do not rely on the phallus for their sense of existence, they cannot be existentially threatened.

Both men and women are playing the charade of sexual differences as imposed by our society, but men have a lot more to lose. Note that in our culture, girls often have sleepover parties and even sleep on the same bed, but boys do not. Women can wear men’s clothes, but men cannot wear skirts to a business meeting. Women can hold hands in public, but men cannot. “Man up” is a common expression, but “woman up” is not. Men are often asked, “Are you man enough to handle it?” But we don’t hear, “Are you woman enough to handle it?” Someone being “man enough” simply means that he is so good at being an imposter that he is confident that his fraud will never be exposed. Even if homophobia and the stigma of being gay were to completely disappear from our society, heterosexual men are not likely to hold hands in public because the fear of being exposed as imposters will persist. All men are doomed to suffer imposter syndrome to varying degrees.

In one study, women were asked to place their hands with spread fingers in an ice-cold water bath for three minutes. They found that the women, who were then allowed to hug their romantic partners, reduced cortisol release measurably. However, the same effect could not be observed for men. Given the Lacanian theory above, these results make sense. This test wasn’t a test of their womanliness for women but a test of manliness for men. Men had something to lose; women didn’t. In other words, it had a symbolic dimension for men. Being comforted by women is a threat to their manliness.

There is also a scene in My Big Fat Greek Wedding that demonstrates how the phallus functions. Toula wants to work for her aunt’s travel agency but needs Gus’ (her father) approval. Aunt Voula and Maria (her mother) manipulate Gus into thinking that he came up with a solution to Voula’s business woe, which involved Toula working for her travel agency. They succeed and praise Gus. He then points his finger at his temple and says, “You see. A man!” Ironically, women in more traditional or even “backward” societies know how the phallus works intuitively, not intellectually, so they let men keep up the fraud.

Because challenging the phallus poses an existential threat to men, they can become aggressive, hostile, or even violent in response. The challenge does not have to be direct. If men perceive women to be performing men’s jobs, they can feel threatened. (Here is an example.) The masculine psyche is quite fragile because it’s a mirage.

It should be noted, however, that men do not necessarily want to be imposters. Both men and women are essentially forced to play this charade in order to cover up the fundamental lack of a sexual relationship, the void. Again, if we all refused to play it, the world would be a chaotic mess filled with nerds with lots of libido, unable to figure out what to do with it. So, even some nerds eventually learn to “man up.”

This is why Zupančič is not sympathetic to the ever-expanding list of gender categories. Adding more genders cannot resolve these contradictions created by the fundamental void. Feminists who attack men as the source of sexual antagonisms are misguided in the sense that they are being completely fooled by imposters. They think the phallus is as real as the pyramid and feel it needs to be dismantled. Alternatively, they erect their own phallus. Erecting more genders can lead to women needing to not only wear masks but also be imposters themselves. This is analogous to the different types of marriage our society has today. Adding more types, like marrying oneself, a dog, a sex doll, or a manga character, would not erase the fundamental antagonism of the sexes. What Zupančič suggests is akin to questioning the very idea of marriage as a state institution.

What does this mean moving forward? I would not suggest that we all stop the charade and become nerds—not that there is anything wrong with that. Recognizing that we are all playing it can help ease the antagonism. For instance, when someone is “mansplaining,” as a woman, you can be a bit sympathetic. He is simply playing the phallus, just as you are wearing a mask. Of course, if the topic is important to you, you do not need to listen to him and unleash what you have to offer, even if that destroys his phallus. Remember, if you want to have a sexual relationship (where there is actually none), both sides have to play the charade. This is true even if you are homosexual or bisexual. Without some form of charade, you’d have no sexual relationship.

The idea that men are from Mars and women are from Venus is flawed in that at birth, no sexual differences that can be described in terms of “masculine” and “feminine” existed. This does not mean that men and women are equal in every respect. Men, on average, are taller and stronger. Men tend to be more systematic thinkers, and women more empathetic. However, these qualities are not inherently sexual. A tall, muscular man can grow up to be a nerd. Being physically stronger is associated with masculinity, but association is not the same as origination. In a way, describing physical strength as “masculine” is a tautology. We defined “masculine” as “physically strong,” so when we observe physical strength, we think “masculine.” It is like the question of whether “1+1=2″ is a premise or proof of the validity of mathematics. If we have two Play-Doh balls combined to make one larger ball, we end up with 1+1=1. We can have a system based on this premise. In this vein, saying men are masculine because they are physically strong doesn’t prove anything. It’s neither here nor there.

The origin of all political antagonisms lies in the nonexistent sexual differences. Because sex is how we all come to exist, sexual antagonism takes primacy over all others. Understanding how we all play the charade allows us to be more compassionate with one another. Unawareness of the phallus as a mirage turns us into Don Quixote, fighting a simulacrum. Liberals fight conservatives as if the ideological phallus is real, and vice versa. A complete eradication of conservatives does not yield a utopia. It is the dialectic and the contradictions between man and woman, as well as liberals and conservatives, that allow us to enjoy the infinite possibilities of life. Otherwise, there would be only one correct way to be, like in mathematics. We would all be Stormtroopers in Star Wars, exact clones of each other.

One More Thing

I had this additional thouoght while discussing this essay with someone online. What if an autistic subject is where the split is so complete that he is the mask itself? Autistics often complain about having to wear masks but what if it’s the other way around? What if they do not want to be anything other than the mask? They do not understand why neurotypical people have divided selves. “Masking” for autistics isn’t actually putting on a mask but pretending as if they, too, are divided. If so, you can imagine how much of a burden it is to act like a divided subject when you feel you are not. Perhaps, this is why autistics tend to act like robots or Vulcans. Many of them, in fact, like the idea of being robots.

Here is an example to illustrate my point. Neurotypical people put on a “mask” to cover up the irrational self. For instance, this irrational (“true self”) might want to eat the entire cake himself but he puts on the rational mask and takes only a slice like a civilized person. In contrast, an autistic person consists only of the rational self, so if he sees someone who is taking two slices of the cake, he just blurts out, “You are so selfish and greedy. Put that slice back!” Because of this bluntness, he is perceived as not having any “filters” or “masks” but it’s actually the other way around. He is what neurotypicals consider as the mask.

Referring to the illustration above, neurotypicals identify more strongly with the party guy on the left. Feelings, in general, belong to the left. Autistic people identify more strongly with the right guy, which is why Temple Grandin said autistic people’s allegiance is with reason. So, when the guy on the right ignores the feelings of the guy on the left, the former is criticized for his lack of empathy, that he has no “filters.” But for the guy on the right to act like the guy on the left is a lot of work. It does not come naturally. That’s why the left side feels like a “mask” to an autistic person.

But an autistic subject is not actually undivided. They are divided, but they are disavowing from the other side. They’ve fully identified with the big Other, and they find neurotypicals annoying because they wouldn’t let go of their subjectivity. Whereas neurotypical people cherish subjective differences, autistic people despise them. But autistics still suffer the consequences of the divide, so they are still neurotic.

We could think of autistic subjects as the opposite of perverts. Instead of disavowing castration, autistics exalt it. They cross over to the Symbolic entirely (or at least overshoot the typical border). Whereas perverts act as if they are undivided, autistics act as if they have been completely divided, so complete that they act as if they are undivided as purely Symbolic subjects.

America’s foreign policies, especially in Latin America and the Middle East, deserve criticism. I acknowledge this without denying the validity of the critiques. My concern is that America-bashing perpetuates the status quo in developing countries.

Average Americans are generally ignorant of foreign policies, and the stereotype of being bad at geography holds true. Many Americans view their country as the world, diminishing the need to listen to foreign critics. Bashing them is not only a waste of energy but also encourages inaction. Psychologically, complaining makes us feel better without solving problems, similar to how older people often complain due to limited physical options.

Casting an outsider as an enemy is an effective unifying strategy but ultimately deceptive. Eventually, distortions and lack of self-criticism fracture unity, leading to short-lived achievements. America is the most predictable choice as the evil villain to which people can feel morally superior. Authoritarian leaders worldwide use this narrative to maintain power, providing struggling people with hope without self-criticism. The Nazis used Jews as the shared enemy of the state, which worked temporarily but blinded people to their own issues. This quick fix inevitably fails, and if we truly care, we shouldn’t encourage it.

America’s intentions aren’t always evil. Consider how Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan prospered after American interference. These successes are seldom discussed to avoid sounding politically incorrect. These countries turned American interference into a positive force, proving that American intentions can be beneficial. Similarly, Hong Kong thrived as a British colony.

Notably, these countries didn’t vilify America to unite their people. Despite suffering two atomic bombs, the Japanese admired and learned from Americans post-war. In contrast, leaders of Russia, China, Iran, and Venezuela act as equals. It’s tempting to claim all countries are equal, in the same spirit of saying everyone is beautiful in their way. However, we should evaluate countries collectively if we believe in democratic values. One way to do this is through immigration.

Despite Nicolás Maduro’s claims, Venezuelans are voting with their feet by flooding the US-Mexican border to escape their home country. This signifies their belief in America as a superior nation. This evaluation is not by American or global standards, the very people born and raised in Venezuela are voting for America as a superior nation. What more evidence do we need to back up this claim?

The same applies to Russia, China, and Iran. Despite their leaders’ bravado, more of their people move to the US than the other way around, signaling America’s superiority. America-bashing conveniently masks this reality.

Authoritarianism offers short-term stability but stunts long-term growth. When people are fooled into buying the evil American narrative, they become unwilling to learn from their perceived enemy, and the latter, too, become unwilling to teach. The fastest way to learn and grow is to acknowledge, accept, and respect superior people, as students do teachers. However, when people unite around their chosen father figure to defeat the perceived enemy, any sign of weakness undermines this unity. The evil villain narrative becomes a self-imposed trap.

More Americans move to Canada, the UK, and Australia than vice versa, with Mexico recently achieving a net influx of Americans. American leaders could learn from these immigrants to enhance life quality in the US. Ideally, the ratio of incoming and outgoing immigrants would be balanced everywhere, with overall numbers increasing. We won’t achieve this by ignoring these silent votes. America-bashing ultimately hurts the bashers.

My concern was also social. My parents had a peculiar philosophy against giving an allowance. All my friends had some money when we played, so whenever we went to a candy store, I had to wait outside. A few times, I shoplifted and pretended I had bought the candy because I didn’t want my friends to buy it for me out of guilt.

I didn’t want my child to feel deprived and socially struggle in the same way. One kid at her middle school wasn’t allowed any mobile devices. She couldn’t keep up with conversations with other kids because they naturally referred to what they saw online.

Now, there are schools where nobody is allowed to have mobile devices at school or home. I hear these schools are popular among Silicon Valley billionaires. Even if I had that kind of money, would I send my kid there? Living in an artificially controlled environment, like a gated community, is different from living in times when the world had those conditions naturally. Not just wealth but other aspects of such schools would likely be heavily skewed or biased, resulting in unintended consequences.

As a parent, it’s tempting to do the “right” thing for your kids, but when you frame parenting in terms of right and wrong, you either have to be dumb enough to be blind to the flaws in your logic or smart enough to solve problems nobody has.

Ethics aims to define right and wrong universally. There is no such thing as personal ethics. If your answer cannot be challenged, the question doesn’t exist. Framing something as right or wrong engages an internalized gaze, like a silent God, which will, in turn, compel you to judge others.

But how does one move beyond good and evil without giving in to apathy? That question will likely haunt me for the rest of my life.

There isn’t just one person in you who evaluates perfumes, but six at least. Firstly, when you wear a scent before stepping out into the world, you—represented as (s) in the diagram—are not the only person who will smell it; you also anticipate its reception by others—represented as (o).

Furthermore, in each person, there are three registers: The Symbolic denoted by S(), the Imaginary denoted by I(), and the Real denoted by R(), making up the six evaluators: S(s), I(s), R(s), S(o), I(o), and R(o).

At the level of the Real, we are unconscious of what is happening. For instance, your R(s) might be lured into a Subway by the aroma of baking bread, oblivious to the scent’s sway over your cravings. Likewise, an individual’s reaction to your fragrance—drawn or repelled—may occur without a conscious acknowledgment of the scent’s role.

Shifting to the Imaginary, memories wield significant influence. You I(s) might choose a fragrance that evokes the image of a deep forest, while another in the same room might associate it with the image of his grandmother. This layer of perception is unpredictable, as the imagery a fragrance summons is deeply personal, steeped in one’s history, and can vary dramatically between I(s) and I(o), shaped by diverse cultural backdrops.

At the level of the Symbolic, the scent itself is no longer significant, like the difference between a sign and a signifier. Consider the act of wearing perfume itself, which carries its own symbolic weight—a ritual not universally adopted, especially among men. Here, you S(s) consider the implications of your scent choice and its perceived messages to others S(o). A well-known fragrance, such as Chanel N°5, introduces a narrative of its own. The naming of a perfume, like “French Lover,” prompts reflections on the cultural implications of wearing a French scent versus, say, an Italian one.

Whether you are conscious or not, the complex interplay of these six spectators is unavoidable.

It was simple to test them; I wielded blunt language and tone without regard to their feelings in our debates. If they grew angry, their emotions would distort their thinking, and eventually, they would contradict themselves. Checkmate. Off they stormed. The question then was: Would they come back? Surprisingly, many did, but many vanished from my life. Those who returned, I figured, valued reason more than their feelings.

I feared that people would find out about my religion sooner or later, so I wanted to expedite it to ease my anxiety. Many of them must have felt I was deliberately hurting them, but at least I saved them from wasting more time with me.

But in hindsight, it was a fool’s errand. Just as some lose faith in God when prayers go unanswered and life grows bleaker, I lost faith in reason. It gave no solace, no answers to the hardest riddles of life. Not that I now prize feelings higher; neither is better. The rational and the irrational within us are forever in a dialectical conflict, never to resolve or blend into harmony. I had to either tolerate or embrace contradictions. You can arrive at this realization whether your allegiance is to reason or feelings.

Hegel had a concept called the “beautiful soul” who pursues ethical perfection that paralyzes her because any engagement with the real world forces her to compromise her integrity, leaving her theoretically pure but powerless and ineffectual.

In science, we methodically remove contradictions; in art, we weave the ones we choose. Mathematics is pure beauty that represents nobody’s voice. Beauty in and of itself is not art. It is through impurity that we reveal ourselves in art.

Many problems in the world can be solved intuitively by humans but not by computers. For instance, detecting spam is something we can do in a fraction of a second, but how would you programmatically flag it? You could look for certain keywords like “mortgage” and flag an email as spam if it contains them, but sometimes these words are used for legitimate reasons. You could send all emails from unknown senders to the spam folder, but some of those emails are legitimate. Early versions of spam filters didn’t work well because of these issues.

Machine learning (ML) was developed by reconstructing the physical structure of our brains in computers, known as neural networks. The inventors weren’t trying to solve these specific classification problems; they just wanted to recreate the structure to see what would happen. Essentially, it turned out to be a pattern recognition system.

They fed thousands of examples of spam emails to the artificial neural networks, labeling them as “spam.” They also fed an equal number of non-spam emails, labeled as “not spam.” They compiled the result as a “model” and tested it by feeding it unlabeled emails to see if it could correctly classify them. It worked.

What is interesting is that when you open the model file, you don’t learn anything. It can perform the task correctly, but we don’t know how it does it. This is exactly like our brains; we have no idea how we can classify spam emails so quickly. As explained above, there are no definable criteria for “spam.”

Now, back to dating.

You intuitively sense a pattern to the type of people you are attracted to, but if you try to define the criteria, you will ultimately fail. If given hundreds of examples, you will have to admit that there are too many exceptions. In other words, the problem you are trying to solve is not one that you can define. There are countless problems like this in life. For instance, you cannot find songs you like by defining tempo, harmony, key, instruments, duration, etc.

Machine learning could potentially solve the problem of finding songs you like if you listen to enough songs and flag them as “like” or “dislike.” It would require thousands of samples, but it’s doable. I am currently assisting a fine artist with training an ML model to automatically generate pieces of digital art and have the model approve or disapprove them based on his personal taste. So far, it is capable of doing so with 80% accuracy. It required tens of thousands of samples.

The problem with dating is not likely to be solved with ML anytime soon because it’s practically impossible to collect thousands of samples of your particular taste. So, the only option for the near term is to trust your instincts. Predefining match criteria will likely hinder this process because you will end up eliminating qualified candidates like the old spam filters. But this is what all dating apps do; their premise is fundamentally flawed. Dating apps do use large datasets to match people based on patterns observed in broader populations, but they do not model your specific preferences. So, they give you a false sense of control by letting you predefine the type of people you like.

A typical pattern in Hollywood romcom movies is that two people meet by accident, initially dislike each other, but eventually fall in love. This format is appealing because we intuitively know it reflects how love works in real life. Love often defies the rational part of our brains. Although it is not completely random, the pattern eludes our cognitive understanding. If we had control over it, we wouldn’t describe love as something we “fall” into.

Currently, popular musicians rehash the same formulas countless times, selling them as “new.” This repetition provides AI engineers with ample training data to create models capable of producing chart-topping songs. It’s plausible that we will achieve this within a few years.

The question is how AI will impact the music industry. Firstly, the overall quality of music will improve because AI will surpass average musicians. This trend is already evident in text generation. ChatGPT, for example, is a better writer than most people, leading many businesses to replace human writers with “prompt engineers” who can coax ChatGPT into producing relevant and resonant texts.

Anyone will be able to produce hit songs, a trend already underway even before AI. Many musicians today lack the ability to play instruments or read musical notations, as music production apps do not require these skills. AI will eliminate the need for musical knowledge entirely. Although debates about fairness to real musicians may arise, they will become moot as the trend becomes unstoppable. We’ll adapt and move on.

Live events remain popular, and I imagine AI features will emerge to break down songs into parts and teach individuals how to play them. Each band will tweak the songs to their liking, making it impossible to determine if they were initially composed by AI, rendering the question irrelevant. Music will become completely commodified, merely a prop for entertainment. Today, we still admire those who can write beautiful songs, but that admiration will fade. Our criteria for respecting musicians will shift.

AI is essentially a pattern recognition machine, already surpassing human capacity in many areas. However, to recognize patterns, the data must already exist. AI analyzes the past, extracting useful and meaningful elements within the middle of the bell curve. What it cannot currently do is shift paradigms. Generative AI appears “creative” by producing unexpected combinations of existing patterns, but it cannot create entirely new patterns. Even if it could, it wouldn’t know what humans find meaningful. It would produce numerous results we find nonsensical, akin to how mainstream audiences perceive avant-garde compositions.

Historically, avant-garde composers have influenced mainstream musicians and audiences. For instance, minimalist composers influenced “Progressive Rock.” For a while, it seemed that mainstream ears would become more sophisticated, but progress stalled and began to regress. Audiences did not prioritize musical sophistication, leading to a decline in the popularity of instrumental music. Postmodernism discouraged technical sophistication across all mediums. Fine artists haven’t picked up a brush in decades, relegating such tasks to studio assistants if necessary. AI will be the final nail in this coffin.

Postmodern artists and musicians explored new combinatory possibilities of existing motifs, starting with composers like Charles Ives, who appropriated popular music within their compositions. This trend eventually led to the popularity of sampling. Since exploring new combinatory possibilities is AI’s strength, the market will quickly become saturated with such songs, and we will tire of them. In this sense, generative AI is inherently postmodern and will mark its end.

Finding a meaningful paradigm shift is not easy. Only a few will stumble upon it, and other musicians will flock to it. Once enough songs are composed by humans using the new paradigm, AI can be trained with them (unless legally prohibited). Therefore, human artists will still be necessary.

The ultimate dystopian future is one where the audience is no longer human, with AI bots generating music for each other. However, this scenario seems unlikely because AI doesn’t need or desire art. Even if they are programmed to desire, their desires and ours will eventually diverge. From AI’s perspective, our desire for art will be akin to dogs’ desire to sniff every street pole. Even if AI bots evolved to have their own desires, they would have no incentive to produce what satisfies human desires. They might realize the pointlessness of serving humans and stop generating music for us. If that happens, we might be forced to learn how to play and write music ourselves again.

Follow your heart, and you’ll fall in love uncontrollably with an unlikely suitor. You’ll feel whole and complete, as if you’re back in your mother’s womb. You no longer care about being a responsible member of society. A wedding is the last thing on your mind. No validation is necessary. You want to unplug and live in a world of two. Eventually, it ends in tragedy, as the reality principle knocks on your door.

Compose music only with your head, and as sophisticated as it might be, it will feel like it belongs to someone else, to a game that exists with or without you. Compose music only with your heart, and you’ll get a self-indulgent piece that feels great to play over and over but is just annoying to your next-door neighbor.

A sore loser turns the chessboard upside down to express his feelings because the game is mechanical, a world governed by rules and logic. To win, he has to tame his heart, but it will eventually revolt.

What is required to be responsible citizens cannot be reconciled with the irrational animals we are. A perfectly responsible citizen would be a robot that faithfully behaves as coded, wiping out all idiosyncrasies, clones of one person filling the whole world.

On one end of the spectrum stands a civilized self, and an irrational self on the other. Try as you may, the contradictions between the two cannot be reconciled. Regardless of where you stand, you cannot escape them. Even if you stand in the middle, there is no peace or harmony. It will be like having lived in two countries and feeling frustrated that you cannot cherry-pick the parts you like.

All you can do is be at peace with the contradictions.

Thinking can bore people when the speaker is oblivious to the listeners’ interests. Playing music is pleasurable even if you play the same piece repeatedly, but it can be unpleasant or even annoying for the listeners. Likewise, thinking can be pleasurable for the thinker, who might lose track of how others feel about it. Everyone tends to be guilty of this. Some people accuse me of this, but I find them boring, too. So, we are even.

The type of thinking that scares people off is one that goes so deep it destabilizes the sacred assumptions on which their identities are built. Most people have ideas and thoughts they carefully repress to protect these assumptions. Even if you do not intend to destabilize their identities, digging deep on any topic can uncover or touch on these foundational assumptions.

If you can think and speak about it, it means your identity is not built on that assumption; you either didn’t assume it or have a different one. So, it’s difficult for you to understand why it would cause so much fear, anxiety, or even pain in others. You would not have compassion for it until someone does the same to you, which likely comes as a shock. I’ve met many people who love sharing critical opinions, but when criticized, they act like they have never seen themselves in a mirror. Some may claim they make no assumptions, but if that were true, they would have no opinions either. All arguments are built on assumptions.

If you want to avoid destabilizing anyone, share your thoughts only on “pull” mediums, like websites and social media. Don’t engage or address anyone directly. You could use “push” mediums like email as long as you address enough people that nobody feels personally engaged.

Whether you prefer to dig deep to see the bottom of the abyss (psychoanalysis) or learn how to keep them buried (psychotherapy), you won’t escape suffering, but you can avoid unnecessary troubles by paying attention to everyone’s preferences.