I'm not recommending reading these. I haven't clicked through. I'm just contemplating the meaning and the emptiness.
June 7, 2019
The quasi-religion of New York Magazine clickbait is making me uneasy and a little sad.
Just 2 things I'm seeing on the front page of New York Magazine right now...
I'm not recommending reading these. I haven't clicked through. I'm just contemplating the meaning and the emptiness.
I'm not recommending reading these. I haven't clicked through. I'm just contemplating the meaning and the emptiness.
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New York, New York--a place so nice they named it twice.
Don't be sad. You don't live there anymore. If you are uneasy, you have let them win.
The great thing about New York is that it lets people living other places feel so superior so easily.
I'm sad to see life look so hollow and to be reminded that Bourdain — with all the love for life he showed on the surface — committed suicide. But somehow if I click I'm supposed to be inspired. I'm sad that this is held out as a source of inspiration, and I'm creeped out by the use of the "Holy Grail" to enthuse about an acne remedy.
"I'm just contemplating the meaning and the emptiness."
I'm just contemplating the absurdity and the devastation: illustrations of the scorching of the culture.
And yet the progs pushing the stories, and the drugs, and the tea, presume to lecture us and to claim power over us and to control our lives.
Any substance that's purported to be the "holy grail" for something should automatically be doubted.
Unless it's graphene. Graphene is magic. Graphene cures all ills and solves all problems.
Anthony was not depressed. He knew too much.
Graphene cured me of my very rational fear of clowns but didn't cure me of not recalling who "Bourdain" is/was. It also repels elephants.
A year after his death, Bourdain's story of recovery can still inspire
I suspect Noa Pothoven found him quite inspirational...
Famous people Getting suicided is a calling card for the others to keep their mouths shut. There was an epidemic yesterday among witnesses of Clinton crimes.
This is right out heathers.
The most depressed, empty, searching-for-meaning people seem to be gathered in Manhattan and Brooklyn, for some reason. They thrive on these articles. Maybe there's a force gathering them all together for something.
Or maybe emptiness attracts more emptiness and tries to drown it out by having all-night donut shops available.
Maybe they should all move to Georgia. Lots of sunshine. Nice people. Tree-laden. Nice people. Growing. Although Spike Lee would not approve. But fuck Spike.
He recovered, but then he committed suicide.
His recovery is inspiring.
That Bourdain piece was pure vapor. And badly in need of a copy editor. "...because your dad is pissed you picked up somewhere unexpected on Halloween." Say what?
I had to go back to maker sure I'd read it all.
I never had even one pimple, and I never did anything to prevent pimples.
I think that is true also of my six siblings.
They need a link about learning to code.
Isn't Bourdain's suicide a marker of the profound denial running through upper middle class American society?
He was educated, sophisticated, rich, cosmopolitan, famous, and generally treated as far more important than what he actually did for a living, which was being a very erudite Yelp reviewer. Bourdain was exactly what all those Ivy League graduates and small town refugees to the big city hope to become. Yet he was also someone who was either mentally ill or profoundly unhappy and had a severe lack of coping skills.
There's something basically wrong with modern Western civilization. A culture which encourages people to NOT have children is mathematically bound for extinction. When you have everything the world can offer and you still kill yourself, the world must not be offering something you truly need.
Mike
Bourdain killed himself for a reason.
It does not seem like he had descended into some state of depression.
One day we might find out what it was all about.
I suspect it was not entirely his idea.
Hey, Althouse--anyone who reads this blog (and I realize that you choose how to present your ideas here) knows that your life is full and you are not looking for a Holy Grail. So New York Magazine and its essential emptiness has nothing to do with you.
What I find depressing is looking at any--and I mean any--Twitter chain. Now, THERE is emptiness, and human life drained of all meaning, inspiration, and hope. You can't read more than five responses to any tweet and not be uneasy about the state of the world in 2019.
Or maybe emptiness attracts more emptiness
The universe is expanding due to a mysterious force that physicists call "dark energy". It can be thought of as the energy of the void, nothingness, emptiness. It's pushing all the stuff away from all the stuff, like dots on an ever inflating balloon.
Maybe something analogous happens to affluent urbanites? Devoid of the normal concerns that most people have, maybe they can only fill their emptiness with more emptiness at an ever accelerating rate? It makes you wonder what the end state of such an expansion of emptiness would be. What's the equivilant of heat death or a big rip for a liberal elite?
I'm not inspired by a guy who committed suicide.
"There's something basically wrong with modern Western civilization. A culture which encourages people to NOT have children is mathematically bound for extinction. When you have everything the world can offer and you still kill yourself, the world must not be offering something you truly need."
I think "modern" and "Western civilization" is oxymoronic. I am not even sure about "Western" and "civilization" in the last one or two hundred years.
Uh, it is not a new idea that the "world" does not offer us what we truly need.
And thinking of "recovery" as something one does and finishes and not something that continues for the rest of one's life is simply delusional, at best.
Ban Nar-Can. Let nature take its course.
"The universe is expanding due to a mysterious force that physicists call "dark energy"."
Sorry, energy is not a force. A "force" was a concept invented to explain the relationship of material bodies in Creation. The "universe" is the concept of all Creation going ("versa") toward the one ("uni"). So, conflating the term "universe" with expansion doesn't work.
It is the concept of universe that is important here, though, in the analogy to the expansion of contemporary societal "emptiness". A better explanation is that of Hell by C.S. Lewis in the "Great Divorce", where people are forever moving away from others to protect themselves from the pain of relationship. A society based on hedonism leaves people isolated because the practice of hedonism, including using other people for pleasurable stimulation, and engaging in relationship with others are opposite behaviors. A hedonistic society is a lonely society.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ has lost none of its power to give men and women hope going through the Valley of Death.It worked for the Pilgrims coming ashore in a wilderness in the winter of 1620 and it worked for Les Soldats Americaine coming ashore on Omaha Beach 324 years later.
The tragedy is the higher education Professors that took pride in teaching doubt and replaced Christian hope with the hint that man's new sciences would now keep us safe and happy. They lied.
Used to be that people filled their life with god and family. Now it seems like they fill their lives with existential concern. They've traded long term contentment for short term dopamine fixes. They fuss over the unsolvable and irrelevant problems while ignoring the fixable problems.
What would his "recovery" inspire? To off oneself?
Sorry, energy is not a force.
In the strictist terms that's true, if we're being pedantic. But it's possible that Dark Energy could in fact be a "force", as in a fifth fundemental force.
Sorry, it's not pedantic to say "energy is not a force" but simply accurate. That does not stop one from postulating "dark energy" nor a "fifth fundamental force", just in conflating the two concepts. The point that is germane to this post is the idea of "expansion" socially, though. One could postulate that there is some "force" that leads to societal "expansion" into small, isolated units, the result of which is experienced as isolation and loneliness. Whether this connected to Mr. Bourdain's suicide (an always sad event) is problematical as I doubt any of us will know his motivation (even if it is Clintoncide).
"Not a professional. Just crazy."
That header could be placed on every clickbait article ever.
And 99.99% of the "real" articles they're trying to clickbait you away from.
Or maybe emptiness attracts more emptiness...
Dante noticed that, too.
The most depressed, empty, searching-for-meaning people seem to be gathered in Manhattan and Brooklyn, for some reason.
No, There is Los Angeles.
@joshbraid - Since we're being pedentic, I never actually said energy was a force. I called "dark energy" a "force", which may or may not be the case. "Dark energy" is just a term physicists to describe a observed but not understood phenomena.
...and I'm creeped out by the use of the "Holy Grail" to enthuse about an acne remedy.
Parsifal's chums called him "Pizzaface" behind his back.
The search for meaning is a fundamental cause of human misery.
I was watching the great, can’t recommend it highly enough, version of Henry IV with Jeremy Irons on Amazon yesterday, and it seemed like a lot of people found “meaning” in their miserable lives in those days. Humans have a brain evolved around a spot where “meaning” should go and we are happiest when we make something up to go there, as human animals, I mean. As a society, it’s a riot of pain, violence, and warfare.
Secular faith.
Agree with Althouse and n.n. 12:03 — secular faith is depressing beyond belief.
People need meaning in their lives, a sense of higher purpose, and will go to any length to fill that need, including celebrity worship and mystical curative of the month” silliness. Plus Progressive politics of course, the biggest secular faith in world history.
Good luck with that plan. That way madness lies.
“I'm not recommending reading these. I haven't clicked through. I'm just contemplating the meaning and the emptiness.“
No. You are contemplating the emptiness of your worldview.
You are stuck in a bubble. The news seems empty to you because you have a small scope of sources. Your sources have proven to be dishonest liars and their false narrative is being born out.
The “trashy” media that is simultaneously beneath you and infinitely more honest and correct about what is going on in the world is vibrant and informative.
But people who put themselves on a pedestal above others have a tough time coming down on their own.
@Ann Althouse: Bourdain didn't show a love for life. He grasped at what pleasures he could find and scoffed at the rest. He was willing to be honest about everyone except himself. Or maybe too honest, who knows. Either way, never happy and not exactly inspiring.
As I understand it, Gaia wants her planet earth back from the vast unwashed human rabble that are polluting it. And the wealthy environmentalist High Priests want to be in charge among the half a billion that will be allowed to live with many slaves to care for them...for awhile, maybe. It's her property. And all Gaia wants from humans is a regular sacrificial murder of their babies.
We don’t want ‘em Temujin.
crime think is unacceptable:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2019/06/democrats-once-again-trot-out-yale-psychiatrist-to-declare-trump-mentally-unfit/
I had severe acne. It passed, but at the time of my life that I was most self conscious about my looks and most eager to appear attractive to girls, I was ugly and alienated from my own skin. My problems were only skin deep but that was sufficient to cause much misery......Here's the plus side: Although, by and large, my life has sucked in all its phases, I have never since been as miserable as I was in those years. Maybe I was vaccinated against misery. If too many things go right too early in life, you're perhaps more apt to fall apart after the first biopsy.....I don't know what was Bourdain's problem, but apparently wealth, fame, and good food offered insufficient solace. Perhaps if he had had acne, he would have had more inclination to look on the bright side.
Secular faith.
Superstitious projection.
"Secular faith"
Superstitious projection.
Observable, reproducible, deducible outcomes in the near-domain will characterize its identity.
"Bourdain's story of recovery can still inspire"
Probably have to click through to find out the answer to the question: inspire what? I'm not going to click through so will just speculate:
Inspire recovery
Inspire determination to change one's life arc
He committed suicide so a case can be made that he didn't complete his recovery.
Sad, indeed.
"Unless it's graphene. Graphene is magic. Graphene cures all ills and solves all problems."
And it's guaranteed not to rust, bust, collect dust or bite the baby!
"Bourdain's story of recovery can still inspire"
"inspire what?"
Inspire one to make a pile of money.
He did do that at least.
William said...
I don't know what was Bourdain's problem, but apparently... good food offered insufficient solace.
Do we really know that the food was good*? I mean really, it's not like he could tell us if it was, in fact, crap. Who would watch a show about a guy to travels the world, eat a exotic food, and confides in us that it all tastes like crap?
*I have this question about all cooking shows**, especially the competition ones.
**Also porn. Are we really sure the women are enjoying it as much as they seem? Sometimes I wonder...
I would guess you've got to do a tremendous amount of logic warping to find inspiration from someone's suicide. I will not be making that investment.
You don't recover from rope burns like that, but you can always sell the next version of snake oil.
**Also porn. Are we really sure the women are enjoying it as much as they seem? Sometimes I wonder...
Watch Japanese porn then. You can be sure the women are enjoying it just as much as they seem..
Ie: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/ai-3 (sfw)
"He committed suicide so a case can be made that he didn't complete his recovery."
He aborted his recovery.
This isn't the first time in history that people have felt spiritual emptiness where the world promised glittering prizes. Let's take Matthew Arnold for example:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Satisfaction and joy, and everything worth having, come from within.
Watch Japanese porn then. You can be sure the women are enjoying it just as much as they seem..
I just thought they were a nation of great actresses!
The quasi-religion of New York Magazine clickbait is making me uneasy and a little sad.
Oops, missed that; that sentence must be what got the myrmidons all wee-weed-up about their own "spiritual emptiness" which they project onto other people.
I failed to see any religious or spiritual significance at all in a puff-piece on a very minor celebrity presented next to a unserious article about zits which used a fairly common colloquial expression for humorous effect.
The correct internet meme for this thread is: "LOL wut?"
Have you heard? Gwenyth hath foundith a mens version of Goop and she's calling it Jizz
Mike Sylwester said...
He recovered, but then he committed suicide.
His recovery is inspiring.
Maybe what its saying is "Urbane, world traveling bon vivant Anthony Bourdain killed himself. You're NOT Anthony Bourdain. Be happy about that"
Anthony Bourdain - I tried to read a book of his, but was put off by the cursing. Really. Cursing in a food book. Amazing. I'm paying $$$ for some good writing, not for you to pad out the book with "Fuck" and "Shit" 10 times every page.
His TV stuff was just as bad. Just another dull liberal hack. Is there anyone on TV who's fun and not a liberal NYC/LA/SJW cookie-cutter type?
Anyway, he touched something deep in the liberal soul. He was an inspiration - before he killed himself. At least he wasn't Dutch - then he would've required a permission slip.
At least his suicide isn't glamorized. I don't think many people will kill themselves because of his example.
The most depressed, empty, searching-for-meaning people seem to be gathered in Manhattan and Brooklyn, for some reason.
No, There is Los Angeles.
Wifey has a theory that Blue City State hives are forcing evolutionary changes on their residents. I counter with Japanese subway culture, how societies simply adapt to the crowding by being more courteous and tightening up their personal space. But she thinks it goes beyond that, that they are changing, becoming more hive like and communal, like ants.
For them, socialism is a natural step in their (d)evolution. Not sure I agree, but working out of DC and Baltimore has convinced me something is wrong. I used to wonder if it was the radon that made the natives so... divergent?
Ha. Good. Gibsons sustained me through college with glazed donuts. Good store. In the meantime the college is crazy leftists now.
Dear Members of the Oberlin Community:
I am writing to update you on the lawsuit that Gibson Bros., Inc. filed against Oberlin College and Vice President and Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo in the Lorain County Court of Common Pleas in November 2017.
Following a trial that spanned almost a full month, the jury found for the plaintiffs earlier today.
We are disappointed with the verdict and regret that the jury did not agree with the clear evidence our team presented.
Neither Oberlin College nor Dean Meredith Raimondo defamed a local business or its owners, and they never endorsed statements made by others. Rather, the College and Dr. Raimondo worked to ensure that students’ freedom of speech was protected and that the student demonstrations were safe and lawful, and they attempted to help the plaintiffs repair any harm caused by the student protests.
As we have stated, colleges cannot be held liable for the independent actions of their students. Institutions of higher education are obligated to protect freedom of speech on their campuses and respect their students’ decision to peacefully exercise their First Amendment rights. Oberlin College acted in accordance with these obligations.
While we are disappointed with the outcome, Oberlin College wishes to thank the members of the jury for their attention and dedication during this lengthy trial. They contributed a great deal of time and effort to this case, and we appreciate their commitment.
Our team will review the jury’s verdict and determine how to move forward.
Donica Thomas Varner
Vice President, General Counsel & Secretary
See Also https://legalinsurrection.com/2019/06/verdict-jury-awards-gibsons-bakery-11-million-against-oberlin-college/
The college valued the business as worth $35,000. Presumably that means that after costs the profit stream is worth $35,000 to an investor. But it generates salaries for everybody working there, and that counts as costs, not profit. Seems like the wrong number to tell a jury that might see through it and deliver a fuck you.
Apparently a cultural misunderstanding was behind it all. Some cultures steal.
more reassuring fallacies for the left
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/06/president-trump-and-race.php
anyone can become an unperson:
https://www.scotsman.com/news/crime/feminist-speaker-julie-bindel-attacked-by-transgender-person-at-edinburgh-university-after-talk-1-4942260
The most depressed, empty, searching-for-meaning people seem to be gathered in Manhattan and Brooklyn (who try) to drown it out by having all-night donut shops available.
To be fair, those are pretty good donuts.
We are disappointed with the verdict and regret that the jury did not agree with the clear evidence our team presented.
Be careful! According to Mueller a statement like that is obstruction of justice!
"The great thing about New York is that it lets people living other places feel so superior so easily."
Hahaha! Envy.
I'm confused...the lede refers to Korean tea tree (Camelia Sinensis) the most northern-grown tea plant in the world, but the plant in the photo is a native of subtropical Moorea commonly known as a pothos (Epipremnum aureum), and colloquially as the Devil's Ivy.
Do these people know anything about what they publish?
Cities are still as they have always been, population sinks, where peoples go to die.
These days more through extreme sub-replacement rates of reproduction than elevated morbidity, but its still the case that they cannot exist without drawing a constant stream of immigrants from the hinterlands to provide replacements for those who die without issue.
What demographic-biological effect this has had on humanity is still TBD, but I have my suspicions. There is more than one reason for the recently noted decline in IQ. Some blame immigration, some blame dysgenic rates of reproduction by the lesser breeds, but its worth considering that attracting your best and brightest to live what amount to human fly traps is a poor move.
The entire concept of the city is a continuing error with respect to human survival.
And I am a city boy, born and bred. The best and brightest should probably aspire to live well as of old, as a squirearchy, as country gentlemen.
It’s just possible that a high IQ is not all that adaptive, evolutionarily, anyway. It’s just way to easy to deconstruct any system of values that promotes a culture.
Emptiness among the elites of our nation. Who coulda thunk it?
"It’s just possible that a high IQ is not all that adaptive, evolutionarily, anyway. "
Arguably it has been, historically anyway.
Until modernity got too modern and messed with human social structures.
Wow!! I've never read the New Yorker, but it seems to validate cognitive dissonance under the mantel of everyone-else-just-too-stupid-to-understand-me.
oh....it's New York magazine.
Yeah, I've never read that one either, but I can do calculus.
Cities incubate both disease and progress. It apparently takes a critical mass of humans to really open up the possibilities for human accomplishment, with a tradeoff in greater mortality from crowding. At least up until recent modern times, and it's still true in the poorer places.
Steven Johnson's "Ghost Map" is good on one case; Sir Peter Hall studies multiple places and their importance in "Cities in Civilization."
I got nothing on Bourdain. I knew he had his schtick, but not on a stage I cared about.
Narr
Living is my substitute religion
"New York is looking for a religion which gives meaning to the world and, more importantly, to ME but, in terms of morality, merely requires of ME, that I eat good food and point out what others are doing wrong," I told the mirror this morning. The mirror said: "And I thank God I am not as these New Yorkers. You gonna finish that smoked salmon for breakfast?"
The population-sink effect of cities comes in several parts.
For a long time it was thought that the enhanced morbidity due to crowding explained it, but that factor has long since been eliminated by technology.
It is clear that there is another more subtle effect at work, long masked by the depradations of microbes, as the crowding, or something related to that, also causes a sort of social failure, a significant reduction in the ability to mate and reproduce.
The obvious hypothesis is that humans are not intended to live this way, and their instincts, or possibly also their evolved social systems, cannot cope.
I thought part of it was being in love with a POS girlfriend.
Cities are still as they have always been, population sinks, where peoples go to die.
There's some reason to think (one of two competing theories) that early dense urban conglomerations — early cities — might not have been the breeding grounds for epidemic disease that they were later to became — due to the lack of serious epidemic diseases having evolved yet to thrive within that environment.
Here's what archaeologist Stuart J. Fiedel had to say about this question in his intriguing Prehistory of the Americas: [quoting…]
[D]isease [— smallpox, measles, typhus —] had wiped out 90% of the population of the nuclear zone (Mesoamerica, Peru, and the Intermediate area) by 1568; in other words, more than 39 million people had perished in less than 50 years following the initial outbreak of smallpox.
Why were there no American diseases to afflict the European invaders with equally terrible virulence? It has long been thought that syphilis was such a disease, because the first well-reported outbreak in Europe occurred shortly after Columbus's return from the New World. However, it now appears more likely that a nonvenereal strain of syphilis had always been present in Europe. When Europeans, reacting to the colder weather of the Little Ice Age, began to wear more clothing indoors, thus hindering the usual skin-to-skin transmission of the spirochete bacillus, the microbe responded by taking the venereal route (McNeill 1976). The virulence of the European outbreak might also have been caused by hybridization of Old and New World viral strains following contact.
Syphilis is the only disease for which an American origin is even arguable. There are two possible explanations for the absence of endemic diseases in the New World. The first is that microbes like the smallpox virus can only become established in human populations that are dense enough to permit frequent transmission from one human host to another, and numerous enough for there always to be disease-resistant survivors in which the virus can reside until the next outbreak — in other words, these germs can only flourish in urban situations.
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Densely occupied cities appeared in the New World 3,000 years later than they did in the Old World; nevertheless, the first probable smallpox epidemic struck the Mediterranean region as late as the third century A.D. Evidently, even in a hospitable urban environment, a human virus may take a long time to evolve. Perhaps the 1,500 or 2,000 years of urban life in the Americas were not enough time for this process to occur. However, early references to pestilence in the literature of both Mesopotamia and Egypt show that some form of contagious disease was already present in the Near East by 2000 B.C., only 1,000 years after the beginnings of urbanism. So lack of time in the New World does not seem to be an adequate explanation of the absence of endemic diseases in such dense settled areas as the Valley of Mexico.
The near absence of diseases in pre-Columbian America can be more convincingly attributed to the paucity of domesticated mammals. Most of the microbes that caused the Old World diseases seem to have originally infected animals, and then shifted to human hosts. Thus, smallpox was evidently derived from cowpox, measles from rinderpest, and influenza from a disease that affects pigs (McNeill 1976). For the same reasons that endemic human diseases require large, dense populations, microbes more often afflict herd animals than the more solitary species. As we have seen, the people of Mesoamerica never domesticated any herd animals. They did, of course, have the dog; but the dog, which lived in small packs in the wild, was not the primary host for diseases that would attack humans.
This explanation therefore seems to be valid for Mexico, but it does not account very well for the Peruvian case. In Peru, llama herding seems to have been practiced by 2000 B.C., and possibly began as early as 4000 B.C.; the raising of guinea pigs may be of comparable antiquity. So not only was there a long period during which the ancient Peruvians maintained close contact with large camelid herds, but they also kept domesticated rodents in their dwellings. In the Old World, of course, the dreaded bubonic plague was transmitted by fleas from rodents to humans. If we hope to explain the absence of infectious disease in the native human population of Peru, we must first ask why the domesticated animals did not suffer from diseases similar to those that afflicted their Old World counterparts. Unfortunately, no one has come up with a very good answer to this question.
[/unQuote]
____
(Stuart J. Fiedel, Prehistory of the Americas, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 364-365)
I think that the increased cost of living space created by population density makes having children too expensive. But I also think that almost all evolutionary trends have multiple explanations.
Articles like these are part--and only part of the reason--why New York magazine is going out of business. It's off its weekly publication schedule. Its long-time brilliant editor has stepped down, no doubt seeing the writing on the wall. Esquire, reports Drudge yesterday, has fired its staff and is rumored to be moving to an 8x yearly publication schedule. Entertainment Weekly is becoming a monthly, and it a few years it will vanish. Everyone is reading on-line now. You can publish junk like the above on-line and get away with it. Space is too limited in print. And the bigger problem is that no one has figured out how to make on-line publishing profitable.
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