getting tired of talking: January 2026 braindump
It's not mean if I don't care about your opinion, right?
This year, I’m trying to be a bit more streamlined with these end-of-month braindumps. Less verbosity from me overall. Less rabbit-holing. These aren’t supposed to be essay-length deals. It’s fitting that some of what I recommend below gets after that.
enough already!
We live in a commentary-obsessed culture—and I’m getting tired of it. I don’t want to talk about things anymore. I genuinely get exhausted when the analysis conversations and theo-philosophical debates extend past 45 minutes. Get it over with, my guy. (Maybe this is just a phase.)
From news to entertainment, the story is often not the story, but what people are saying about the story. We’ve normalized skipping to the comments. “I wonder what so-and-so says about x.” Not me! I don’t wanna know.
Josh Nadeau angles in on this in his essay, we talk ABOUT stories instead of LIVING them. We’ve traded in the “secret work, the indirect revelation of a story” for “forced, extracted messaging.” We’ve lost the ability to live an “unexplained life.”
I want to read all the books and watch all the movies and go to all the plays and listen to all the albums. And if I hate a few along the way, that’s okay. At least, I fully experienced them without the framework of dozens of analysis videos and hundreds of comments on whether or not a thing is good before I’ve even participated in the art itself.
You will probably catch me being hypocritical on this front. At times, I will indeed talk about things or analyze a story to death—even on this very substack. But that’s because I’m human and messy, inscrutable and inconsistent. Which is the whole point of experiencing and living life as a story instead of feeling the need to form an opinion about it or participate in an aesthetic or play a role. Sometimes I just need to rant about a thing I loved or hated, figure out why I loved or hated it, or convince you to love or hate it as well.
And speaking of opinions, I think we’d be a better people overall if we just shut up a little more often than we do. This is what Joy Clarkson says in her essay, Not everyone is everything—but in much nicer terms.
People don’t seem to trust the media, the government, government agencies, or social media. Everyone needs to see and make a judgement themselves. Everyone is an expert…
Now, I don’t mean to imply that people can’t have views or profound reactions to what seems to be a sort of lightning bolt moment in American society. But there’s something odd to me in the way that people suddenly take on the office of forensics investigator, judge, jury, and even executioner…
I’m not sure the solution to loss of trust in society is for everyone to become self-appointed ministers, police officers, economists, doctors, judges and executors. It’s not effective and I’m not sure it’s good for us.
We can’t be everything, and if we could, it would not be good for us.
The loss of trust in society (and in institutions) seems to have given us an outsize sense of trust in our own ability to form accurate judgments based on whatever data is available to us. Information saturation has tricked us into thinking that because we can see everything, find any tidbit of information, and essentially have become omniscient, that we also have the wisdom to be the arbiters of right and wrong about everything from in vitro fertilization to space exploration. And that’s just not true. It’s critical that we understand that and stress that to our peers.
My rule of thumb: if I haven’t lived through it, have no experience in it, or have some adjacence to it, it’s probably best for me to listen and learn from those with actual experience or education. I think there’s something to the idea of earning the right to an opinion. Maybe we should all be a lot more humble about our ideas.
But I’m getting long-winded again. Here are some other high notes.
I enjoyed Divine’s video, How Pride Ruined the Cinephile Community. It is somewhat related to the above discussion but specifically aimed at the snobby, insular movie critic. She makes the point that stories are not about you. The receiver’s reaction or level of identification with the story (or characters in the story) should not supersede one’s ability to experience and learn from the world presented in the story. In my own consumption of stories, I am trying, deliberately, to interact with more things that I am not sure I would like. The aim is to avoid making my personal level of comfort the measure by which I decide the stories with which I engage.
It’s the end of the first month of the new year, but there’s never a wrong time to read Sherry Ning’s essay, The devil’s in the distractions » overcome the “dizziness of freedom” » lock in » and choose action over ‘a thousand visions of perfect success.’
I want to see the new romanticism that Ted Gioia talks about take root — and I think this is a stronger anchoring movement than the mere pursuit of beauty as avenue to restoration.
Which, if you haven’t read my earlier piece on whether beauty will save the world, you should. The pursuit of beauty alone is not strong enough to fight AI and the evils of technocracy and industrialism.
Not quite sure how I feel about Davey Peppers’s article, Prestige TV Is Built By Liars. I have always been of the opinion that you can tell a TV series that met with early success but didn’t know where to end because they kind of ramble their way into incoherence and can’t figure out quite how to close things out. But maybe not? Maybe having no plan for one’s TV series is better.
Finally, the analog trend. I am not quite sure I can agree with Mr. Michael Shindler on this…
On a more serious note, I’m recommending two pieces that sum up some of my unsettlement around the idea that we all ought to return to 1960s tech.
(more) asides + signal boosts
📖 Reading
My big, big read right now is The Story of Christianity, Volume 1, by Justo L. Gonzalez!
One of my goals for this year is to read all of C.S. Lewis’ essays. As such, this post by my friend Brenton D who runs the Pilgrim in Narnia site has been helpful — How to Read All of C.S. Lewis’ Essays.
Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman continues to entertain.
🎞️ Watching
Watchmen + Lovecraft Country — both limited series and super-cool additions to my superhero + scifi taste palette.
Also enjoyed finishing Firefly with my wife.
🎧 Listening
Found myself enjoying F1 The Movie album between shuffling my extensive Liked Songs list.
Here’s to a February without distractions?
I appreciate the section criticizing the loss of trust of experts in society. They don't always get it right, but after seeing the amount of idiots, cranks, and liars who garner the most trust among the masses, I'd rather have the much-maligned "elites" in charge.
thank you for mentioning my article ! :)