Tales of dystopian futures offer an incomparable way to consider where our own society might end up. 1984 continues to sharpen our lens on the subtle creep of surveillance and the manipulation of truth. Brave New World has helped us see how comfort, pleasure, and distraction can pacify a population more effectively than force.

But for my money, there’s no narrative more prescient — and insight-generating — than a short story (really more of a novella) penned by E.M. Forster in 1909: “The Machine Stops.”

“The Machine Stops” paints a picture of a future society that, because the earth’s surface has become uninhabitable, lives in a honeycomb of “cells” beneath it. Technological advancements, controlled and mediated by an all-encompassing system called “the Machine,” allow individuals to summon food, medicine, entertainment, and worldwide communication channels at the flip of a switch. The citizens of this push-button civilization rarely have reason to leave their chairs — or their rooms.

A decade before radios became mainstream, “The Machine Stops” predicted the rise of on-demand music and broadcasts.

Fifty years before air travel became common, it foresaw a time when it would be easy to hopscotch the globe.

A century before Skype debuted, it envisioned the idea of video calls.

But it’s not its prescience around technological developments that makes “The Machine Stops” so striking. It’s the story’s discernment of what those developments would do to people that’s both disturbing, and illuminating.

What Forster imagined, we’ve begun to live out.

Today, I’ll dig into seven insights from his fiction that allow us to see our own reality afresh.

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I’ve been following David Coggins’ work for years, have had him on the AoM podcast three times, and have always appreciated his approach to life.

David is a Renaissance Man. Based in NYC and a world-traveler, he’s authored numerous books on style, etiquette, and fly fishing, including Men and Style, Men and Manners, and The Optimist. He publishes regularly at his Substack, The Contender, where he writes about style, fly fishing, travel, and enjoying life’s pleasures. He also co-hosts the podcast Central Division with Michael Williams, and recently launched a print newspaper called The Print Edition.

When I look at the whole body of his work, a big theme emerges: taking your leisure seriously (but not too seriously) is essential to the good life. As I discussed in my recent article about Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s conception of the flourishing life requires a certain amount of external goods like money, health, and friends. It also requires enjoyment of edifying leisure. Reading good books, enjoying good art, eating good food. External goods can also include stylish clothing and hobbies like fly fishing.

In this Dying Breed Dialogue, I talk to David about his approach to leisure and how it can add to your life and connect you with others. We also get into the fun nitty-gritty of some of his passions like style, fly fishing, and collecting art.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

First order of business: How often do you get confused for David Goggins, the Navy SEAL motivational guru guy?

Confused with Goggins all the time. People start following me expecting workout advice — they are quickly disappointed.

When I look at the body of your writing, a big theme in it is the idea of taking leisure seriously, but not too seriously. You write about fly fishing, art, traveling, style, food, and drinks. Why do you think leisure is an important part of the good life?

I think we’re talking about the art of living. That’s sort of a grand title, but we’re also talking about time. How do we want to spend our time? One of the great balances everyone’s going to have to decide is how much of their time they wanna spend doing work, and how much of their time they wanna spend playing, so to speak, whatever that is.

I think it’s worth considering how we spend our time, especially our free time, and not give it away or spend it unreflectively. I like people who learn things, even things I don’t do. If someone knows how to sail or they make a real point to go skiing with their brothers every year — I don’t do either of those things, but I understand that, and I like that. Maybe ritual has something to do with it. You do the same thing. You go to the Masters every year if you’re lucky, or you go on a fly fishing trip. I like those things. I like that you create that weekend with your friends, maybe go to a college football game, and tailgate. I like that, and I like people who make the time to do that. That seems fairly fundamental to enjoying yourself.

Yeah, the activities you described aren’t passive. It’s not just sitting on your phone scrolling. It’s intentional.

Completely. I went to a matinee to see this French film on a Monday afternoon at two at the Film Forum, and it was full, and it was so great. Everyone wanted to see this film. You felt close to the people around you who cared about this thing that you cared about. That’s very different than kind of reflexively scrolling through your phone and very different than watching even something you like for the 50th time.

I think the phone is always gonna make us passive. I’m infinitely happy that I grew up without one for many reasons. I think it’s good to kind of go out there and go to a museum or go hiking or whatever it is and have an experience yourself. You’re the one who’s understanding it. You’re the one who’s interpreting it. You’re the one who’s living and not just swiping on a screen.

One of the things I love about your writing is that the things you write about, someone might look at from a distance and think, “That’s kind of elitist, highfalutin stuff.” You’re talking about art, French film, and style. But the way you write about it, it’s very approachable, it’s very democratic. With the way you present it to people, it’s like, “Oh wow, I could do this too. I could enjoy French movies even though I might not be the kind of guy that you typically think would enjoy French movies.” How do you do that? What’s your approach?

Thanks for the kind words. I think in one sense I was very lucky. I grew up in an artistic household. My parents cared about the arts. We went to museums, and we went to Europe. It wasn’t fancy, but it felt very natural for us. We knew my parents were involved in a theater group. We knew actors, and these things were not uncommon for us — to go to a play, even to go to see classical music performed, or to see the opera.

I think in a perfect world people would be exposed to those things. Doesn’t mean they have to like them. But they’d be exposed to them.

I think the way I write is that I try to focus on the pleasure of these things. There’s a very specific male quality that many men have. If they don’t know about something, they’re a little bit suspicious of it. Or they might say, “I definitely don’t know enough about an opera to have an opinion.” And I’m like, well, let’s try to learn about it, but first let’s experience it.

If you can go to see an opera, it can have a very powerful effect on you, whether you know anything about it or not. It’s just an emotion. Same goes with great novels. People might be surprised, but if you read War and Peace, that thing has action. It’s much more alive than you think.

I think it’s a mistake for people to say, “Well, I don’t wanna see a movie with subtitles.” You might surprise yourself. I try to bring people along to say, “Think of it like this. You like Quentin Tarantino? Tarantino was obsessed with Jean-Luc Godard. Try it out.” And I think a lot of people would surprise themselves that they actually enjoy movies with subtitles. If I can help people expose themselves to new things in a very small way, I’m happy to do that.

Yeah, and the other thing you do is you talk about opera, art, great film, but then in the same newsletter, you might talk about going to a college football game. You don’t differentiate between the two too much. You can get the same sort of satisfaction going to an OU-Texas football game as you could going to the opera.

Completely. I’ve drunk as much Miller Lite as anybody outside the state of Wisconsin, probably. I like a person who’s open to a rarefied experience, but also the ordinary. I fish a lot, and that takes me to places that can be very rarefied and other places that are totally not that way. And I think you want to connect and be open to even those less rarefied experiences because there might be something there that brings you joy.

My family has a cabin on a lake in Wisconsin, and I go there every year. It’s a huge part of my life. I’m very far away from New York when I’m there. I like to be around people who maybe don’t care about the same things that my neighbors in New York care about. I think that grounds me, or at least provides some sort of balance that I try to bring through in my writing.

Let’s talk about style. Your approach to style is great. One thing you talk about a lot is the beauty of a suit, a jacket, a bag that’s a bit battered. Whenever I look at how you look, it looks good, but it doesn’t look stuffy. What’s your overall approach to style?

I love tailored clothing — sport coats, suits. I think it’s nice when you have something, and you wear it a lot. I feel like this is another issue that maybe guys have where they only have this suit, they kind of hate it, they only wear it when they’re forced to. I would say, well, let’s get something, find something that you like, and then maybe something you actually wear a lot.

I like a tweed jacket — that’s kind of a bulletproof thing. You can wear it forever. I just wear the same jacket every day, not for a week, but most days of the week. And it’s nice to have that. The jacket kind of becomes you in a way. I like clothes that serve the person, that explain who the person is.

I think when something is worn in, it shows a commitment to that thing. When you see someone with an old, really fancy leather bag, but he’s had it for so long, it’s kind of a little bit worn in or something, even patched or taped — I love that stuff. It could be a pair of cowboy boots, too. When you can tell that someone loves something, that’s pretty good.

You mentioned finding something that’s you, that you wear all the time. This goes to an idea we talked about on the AoM podcast— the personal uniform. Tell us about that.

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Usually, the question comes from people who are interested in making a go at being a full-time creative or curious friends with traditional 9-to-5 jobs who find it hard to believe you can make enough money putting stuff up on the internet (for free even!) to pay for a mortgage.

It’s an understandable question. The online economy is still so new in the sweep of human history that people wonder how it works.

And it has to work not only for Kate and me to support ourselves and our family, and to make each of us investing 60 hours a week in our jobs worthwhile, but also simply to keep our endeavors — the Art of Manliness, The Strenuous Life, and Dying Breed — going. Each of the prongs in that ecosystem — what you could call McKay Inc. — costs money just to keep running. With AoM, we have to pay for a server to host the website, a service to send out our free newsletter, an audio engineer to fine-tune the podcast episodes, and more. TSL has been pretty expensive to run, with costs for web development, shipping and fulfillment, and so on. And for work across our platforms, we pay Ted Slampyak for his illustrations and Jeremy Anderberg as our lone part-time employee. It all adds up.

So the revenue-generating side of things has to work for our endeavors to continue, and how that’s worked has changed a lot over our almost 20-year publishing career.

In a new series, I’m going to unpack the history of those changes and explain how we make money online, while also endeavoring to keep the creative passion and value-imparting mission central — and not selling our souls. My aim is not only to satisfy people’s curiosity as to how the online economy has and does hum, but also to offer what I think is a fascinating window into how and why the internet looks the way it does today. Changes in how online content generates revenue don’t just affect the finances of its creators, but also alter the internet as a whole — and how the average user experiences it. The history of revenue models on the internet is the history of the internet itself.

So consider this an in-depth insider’s look at the online publishing biz. From the perspective of a completely bootstrapped, mom-and-pop operation running out of a house in Tulsa, OK (not exactly a hotbed of online publishing!).

To kick things off, I’m going to walk you through how we first started generating revenue with AoM — the granddaddy of online monetization and what some have even called the original sin of the internet.

I’m talking, of course, about the humble website banner ad.

Banner Ads and AoM

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Welcome back to Ex Libris, a series where I highlight books from my library that mean a lot to me. These are the ones I’ve re-read multiple times, continue to influence my life, and have shaped how I think about the world. Each entry focuses on a single book: my personal history with it and three specific takeaways that have stuck with me over the years. Maybe it will inspire you to pick one up and give it a read — or a re-read.

Today’s edition, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

The Synopsis

The Nicomachean Ethics is Aristotle’s attempt to answer a perennial question: what does it mean to live a good life?

Written around 350 BC and compiled from his lecture notes (his son Nicomachus likely edited them into their current form — hence the name), the book is Aristotle’s systematic account of what he calls eudaimonia. The word gets translated as “happiness” or “flourishing,” but neither quite captures it; there isn’t an English word with direct correspondence.

Eudaimonia isn’t a feeling. It’s not the warm fuzzies you get from a good meal with friends or achieving a long-term goal. You can definitely experience those feelings in a eudaimonic state, but they’re not eudaimonia. Rather, eudaimonia is an activity. Aristotle defines it as “the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue” over a complete life. To flourish is to live and act well, not merely to feel good.

The book ranges across everything from the nature of courage and generosity to the role of friendship, the mechanics of moral development, and why you can’t really judge whether a man’s life went well until it’s over. It’s sprawling and occasionally dense. It also happens to be the most useful book about how to be a human being I’ve ever encountered.

How the Book Came Into My Life

I first read the Nicomachean Ethics in high school. It might have been my senior year. Around that time, I discovered Mortimer Adler’s book How to Think About the Great Ideas at the public library in Edmond, OK. Adler is famous for popularizing the Great Books, and he was big on Aristotle. Real big. So Aristotle got a lot of mentions in that book. Intrigued, I picked up a copy of the Nicomachean Ethics and started reading it. I marked that bad boy up and have been hooked ever since.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve re-read the Nicomachean Ethics since then. I read it a few times in college philosophy classes and in book groups I’ve belonged to. I’ve also re-read it on my own several times just for fun. The book keeps pulling me back, and I’m always rewarded with a new insight about living life well.

While Stoicism gets all the attention in the modern day, and Aristotle, who didn’t write in pithy maxims, doesn’t get as much play, I’ve always felt like Aristotelianism is a more complete philosophy — one that best understands, and works within, the human condition.

If you’re a longtime reader of AoM, you’ve likely noticed that Aristotle shows up regularly in our articles and podcast episodes.

If you’re a member of The Strenuous Life, you know that developing your phronesis — or practical wisdom — is baked into the program as a core principle. That idea was cribbed directly from the Nicomachean Ethics.

I bring Aristotle up with my kids at the dinner table. They roll their eyes at me when I do, but I hope some of it is sticking. I brought Aristotle up with the boys I coached in flag football. I bring him up with the teenagers I lead at church. There really is no bad time, as far as I’m concerned, to pull out Aristotle and his Ethics on the question of how to live life well.

3 Key Takeaways

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One evening when I was a senior in high school, one of my best friends invited me over to her house. When I got there, Emily told me to come up to her room. She then had me sit down in a chair and take off my shoes and socks. She brought over a basin and had me stick my feet in it.

Then, using a pitcher of water and a cloth, she washed my feet.

Em told me that she had been reading the chapter in John where Jesus washes his disciples’ feet and tells them to do likewise, had simply been thinking about how cool I was, and wanted to wash my feet as a gesture of humility, service, friendship, and love.

Desiring to convey the same things, I decided to wash her feet in return.

This is one of my favorite memories, not only because it was a special moment with a good friend, but because it was archetypal of my very weird high school experience.

At the time the foot-washing happened, I certainly thought it was unexpected and out of the ordinary, but it didn’t strike me as that strange.

Em was a passionate Christian who was the president of Trojans for Christ, a club hundreds of students strong at our public high school; I was a Catholic who was thinking about joining the Church of Jesus of Christ of Latter-Day Saints; and she and I were constantly talking about God.

We weren’t the only ones having those kinds of conversations. Discussions and debates about faith pervaded the talk amongst my peers. Trojans for Christ was only one of three large Christian clubs at our school. You could often find students singing praise and worship songs in the classrooms before the start of the school day, and many carried Bibles around campus. The cool kids were also the very Christian kids.

Students were regularly trying to get their friends “saved,” or becoming saved. Students shared their faith with each other, and even with their teachers.

I was surrounded by teenagers who debated, sometimes heatedly, the nature of God and salvation. Mormons argued with Baptists about the relationship between grace and works. People debated which was the right church to join. They made different choices. We attended their respective baptisms.

We prayed together as friends. We prayed together as sports teams. We prayed together around the flagpole in front of our (again) public school.

That there was a strong current of Christianity in the air is not unusual in Oklahoma, especially thirty years ago; OK was considered the buckle of the “Bible Belt.” But the religious fervency afoot at Jenks High School in the late ‘90s was unmatched, even by the public high school Brett attended just an hour and a half away. It was like there was a little revival, a kind of mini “Great Awakening” going on during my high school years.

Since it was the only high school experience I had known, I didn’t realize how unusual the atmosphere had been until I graduated and started comparing notes with peers who’d grown up elsewhere and outside the state. Folks I met at college who hailed from back East listened to my stories about high school with especially blank stares.

Over the intervening years, I have often wondered: What exactly was going on there?

Why did something that intense arise in one particular place, at one particular moment?

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When you’re learning to play American football, one of the first things you’re taught is how to set your stance.

Whether you’re a lineman, linebacker, or cornerback, it’s important to adopt what coaches call an “athletic stance”: feet a little wider than shoulder-width apart, right foot slightly staggered behind your left, knees bent, and your weight distributed on the balls of your feet. From there, if you’re an offensive lineman, you can place a hand on the ground to assume the traditional three-point stance. But before you get there, you need a good athletic stance.

Athletic stances aren’t just limited to football. Baseball infielders assume an athletic stance before a pitch. Wrestlers take an athletic stance. Basketball players on defense take an athletic stance.

What does the athletic stance do? Well, a lot.

Placing your feet shoulder-width apart gives you lateral stability. You’re able to move in any direction without crossing them. The staggered right foot lets you take a quick first step while still maintaining your stable base. Your slightly bent knees make your body like a spring coiled for action. It creates potential energy that can be converted to kinetic energy. Keeping your weight slightly on the balls of your feet allows quick, unhesitant movement in any direction.

An athletic stance also works on your mind. It puts you in a flexible mental state. An athletic stance nudges you to take in the entire field of play so that you can orient yourself to what might be coming your way, but it also allows you to quickly shift your focus to just a single player or the ball. An athletic stance allows a player to quickly shift between a wide and a narrow focus.

There’s also a mood or an attitude to an athletic stance. When you adopt that position, you feel more alert and engaged. You feel proactive rather than passive. The athletic stance makes you feel agentic.

I think about the athletic stance a lot because I see the idea of a “stance” as powerful and applicable across all domains of life.

A Stance Is a Way You Orient Yourself to Your World

When most people use “stance” outside of sports, they usually mean a set of beliefs about a political or moral issue.

What’s your stance on immigration? On smartphones in schools? On the death penalty? On abortion?

But when philosophers in the existentialist and pragmatist traditions talk about a stance, they mean something a bit different. It’s more like an athletic stance.

The philosopher of science Bas van Fraassen offers a helpful way to explain what a stance is. In a series of lectures on empiricism (later published as The Empirical Stance), he made a distinction between doctrines and stances. A doctrine is a set of propositions you believe to be true or false. A doctrine can be falsified, confirmed, and argued with. A doctrine is basically the typical way we use the word “stance.” “My stance on immigration is ____.”

But van Fraassen doesn’t think that’s what a stance is. For him, a stance is a cluster of attitudes, values, and commitments that orient you in a certain way. It’s a way of engaging with the world. For him, an “empirical stance” is a way of understanding the world through experience and science. An empirical stance leaves you open to changing your mind based on new data. When you take an empirical stance, you question and observe instead of making final judgments and conclusions.

Other philosophers define a stance similarly: a stance is a way you orient yourself to your world.

This idea of a stance is much the same as an “attitude.” The etymology of the word “attitude” basically means stance. It started off as the Italian word attitudine. In the 1660s, attitudine was used to describe the pose or posture of a figure in a painting or sculpture, in other words, its stance. Over the centuries, the word attitude morphed into what it means for us today: a way of thinking and feeling.

Philosophers will often use the words stance and attitude interchangeably. But I like the word stance better. Why? It viscerally captures something fuller about how we orient ourselves in the world. It feels more action-oriented and embodied, and I like that.

The Elements of a Stance

So a stance is a way you orient yourself to your world.

But what makes up a stance?

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I’m not Catholic, but ever since I visited Clear Creek Abbey here in Oklahoma for a weekend retreat, I’ve been fascinated by the life of a monk or nun. What is it like to dedicate your life to work and prayer? What draws people to that path? What insights can regular folks get from people who have made religious vows? (Kate’s series last year on A New Kind of Monasticism dug into that; I highly recommend reading it.)

To help me understand more about this world, I talked to Zena Hitz, a philosopher who spent three years in religious life at Madonna House, a lay apostolate in Ontario. Before she joined the community, she was a successful research academic specializing in classical philosophy. But something nudged her toward a more monastic path. She had a restlessness, a hunger for wholeheartedness that her conventional academic career couldn’t satisfy. She eventually left Madonna House, but the experience transformed her.

Today, Zena is a Tutor at St. John’s College who helps lead and facilitate their unique Great Books-focused curriculum. I had her on the AoM podcast several years ago to discuss her book Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. Her latest book, A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life, tries to explain to a secular and lay audience what draws people to “the religious life”— the life of a monk, nun, or friar — and what the spiritual disciplines of the religious life do to a person.

We talked about the origins of religious orders, what “wholeheartedness” means, why asceticism brings freedom rather than misery, and how ordinary people can integrate monastic practices into everyday life.

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Every time my fifteen-year-old son Gus comes home from a school or church dance, I ask him the same question: “So, did you slow dance with any girls?”

His answer is typically a version of the same thing: “They didn’t play any slow songs.”

At first, I figured maybe he was just wussing out when slow songs came on and was just giving me an excuse as to why he didn’t slow dance. But he insists: no slow songs! He’d like to slow dance, but the tunes just aren’t there to do it.

So I started polling other parents I know across the country. Every single one of them reported the same thing. There are fewer dances than there used to be, and at the ones that do happen, there’s often no slow dancing.

This is crazy to me. Genuinely weird. Not “isn’t that interesting” weird, but rather bothers-me-more-than-it-probably-should weird.

Because “back in my day, by golly!” I danced. A lot. Dances were a big part of my social calendar. I was at one at least once a month.

Why did I dance a lot?

Well, in part because I’m Mormon, and Mormons are a dancing people. Ever since its founding, dancing has been part of the culture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. When Mormon pioneers were schlepping handcarts across the plains from Illinois to the Western desert and burying their dead in shallow graves, Brigham Young made sure camps hosted regular dances because they were medicine for the soul and community glue.

When the Saints settled in Utah, some of the first buildings they erected (besides chapels) were dance halls. Today, LDS church buildings have a “cultural hall” that serves as a basketball gym and place to have potlucks, but also as a dance hall. During the 20th century, most LDS congregations hosted monthly dances for their young people. Our dancing culture is probably why many of the Dancing With the Stars pro dancers have a Mormon background. It may also explain how the whitest of white brothers, the Osmonds, could give the Jackson 5 a run for their money.

And it helps explain why I danced a lot as a teenager.

At these dances, I learned to swing dance, two-step, and do the Electric Slide and the Cotton-Eyed Joe. But I also did a lot of slow dancing. At a typical dance, I’d slow dance with maybe four or five different girls over the course of the evening — some I knew well, some I didn’t know at all. I made sure to ask the girls who weren’t getting asked to dance because that’s what my mom told me to do on my way out the door, and I love and respect my momma. I’d ask a girl, she’d say yes (usually), I’d put my hand on her waist, she’d put her hand on my shoulder, and for three minutes we’d shuffle around and make conversation, interspersed with some obligatory twirling and dipping. I had style, guys; I was smooth.

I also danced a lot outside of church.

At school, I was on the student council, which meant I helped plan dances. We’d do them every two months or so. They were casual. Nothing fancy. Just the gym, some black lights, and a local DJ. With the fast songs, we’d dance in groups and inevitably form a circle where someone would go in the middle and do some silly dance move: the lawn mower, the running man, the Roger Rabbit, or that thing where you pretend you’re holding a magic, invisible orb and waving it around (I was very proud of my magic orb abilities). Slow songs? You’d grab a partner and sway back and forth to “All for Love” by Bryan Adams. The whole thing was good old-fashioned sweaty fun, with zero pretension to it. I always felt a bit more alive and human after a dance.

There would also be impromptu dances at weekend parties with my friends. We’d go over to some kid’s house and inevitably someone would start the music, and we’d roll up the rug and start dancing with each other.

Dancing was central to the youth culture I experienced growing up, as it was for young adults for centuries. But it seems to be going away. The church in our area still does dances, but they’re not as frequent, and at some, including those at summer youth conferences (FSY, for those who are familiar), there’s no slow dancing. Same thing at a freshman dance Gus went to last week at his public high school; no slow dancing.

Dance culture seems to be on the wane, and I gotta say, it really bums me out.

What the Dance Floor Taught Me

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In the heat of the afternoon, a stag stopped at a pool in the woods to drink. Seeing his reflection in its still waters, he paused to survey himself from head to foot. He admiringly appraised the shape and size of his noble, wide-spreading antlers. Yet he looked with disapproval upon his legs, which to him seemed shamefully spindly and weak — an altogether unbefitting base to bear such a glorious crown.

At that very moment, the stag heard a hunter coming up behind him. He took off at a run, his nimble legs quickly carrying him safely away from his pursuer.

The moral of this modified spin on an old Aesop’s fable?

Despise not the thing that would save you.

We often bemoan the seeming weaknesses of our personal make-up, contrasting them unfavorably with our best, most winning qualities. What we fail to realize is that the obviously advantageous and the seemingly not come as a package deal.

Assertive/callous. Bold/rash. Tenacious/stubborn. Perceptive/oversensitive. Loyal/demanding. Patient/passive. Conscientious/worried. Carefree/forgetful.

Antlers/legs.

You don’t get one personal trait without the other; they’re two poles of the same wavelength of energy, two sides of the same coin — two parts of the same inner stag.

Your flaws are merely the flip sides of your virtues.

Thus, it’s no use celebrating your more admirable qualities and rueing the less. Each — the beautiful and ungainly alike — possesses salvific power: the things we like least about ourselves are often the very things that preserve us.

Note: This Sunday Fireside was first published on AoM. From time to time, we’ll be reposting previously published firesides to introduce new readers to gems from the SF archives.

Whenever it comes out in the news that a public figure — a politician, podcaster, author, influencer — is enmeshed in some scandal or guilty of questionable behavior, there are inevitably comments on their social media pages, from their own followers/fans, to the effect of:

“I always felt like there was something off about that guy.”

Which has always made me wonder: If you got a bad vibe from someone, should you have been listening to them, following them, taking their advice?

I’m a big believer in the idea that you can discern things about a person’s character from the aura they give off — at least if you’re sensitive to it and paying attention. I know in my own life, when someone’s evinced bad juju, there almost invariably turns out to be a hidden reason for it. That’s true both of the people I’ve encountered in real life, and the media personalities I observe from afar. And when someone emits an off-putting “moral atmosphere,” I find I can’t listen to them; doing so gives me a subtly unsettled feeling — even if I agree with and find the things they say generally sound.

It’s clear that not everyone has the same response. To be honest, I would say I get a not-so-good vibe from the majority of influencers and public personalities out there; it feels like many of them have got some secret vice, or a skeleton in their closet, or just some kind of sickness in the soul. But they still enjoy widespread popularity. So most people either don’t notice an off-putting vibe, or do, but don’t care. Even when a figure’s misdeeds come to light, some continue to follow the person if they like what they have to say.

Am I too circumscribed in my media consumption habits, or are others too porous? Should people care about the character of the figures they allow to influence them? Is what someone says the only thing that matters, or is who says it also important?

Various philosophers have postulated opinions on this issue, and it’s possible to synthesize their counsel into a set of criteria for what advice to take, and from whom.

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I used to be a religious journaler. I started when I was in middle school and kept the practice up through my 30s. I stopped journaling a while back and explained why over on AoM.

When I turned 40 a few years ago, I decided to rent a hotel room for the night and take all the journals that I had and read through them to do an accounting of my life as I entered midlife. It was a fun exercise.

I definitely picked up on themes that I regularly wrote about during the first 20 years of my adult life. A lot of my entries were about my Eeyoreness and making resolutions to quit being a mope.

Another theme that popped up in my entries was my relationship with technology and distraction.

From March 2, 2002, when I was a 20-year-old freshman in college:

I fear that the confusion of memory is occurring all over our country and will only increase as the number of people raised surrounded by mass media increases . . . What happens when a culture’s collective memory begins to fade? Our minds are so distracted by the spectacle and constant bombardment of stimulus. It is hard for anything to sink in and burn a lasting impression in our minds.

I went on:

One of the challenges of today’s individual is sorting out what is useful, what is substance, and what is garbage. Perhaps we aren’t capable, or maybe some are, but I feel the majority of us aren’t. The answer to the problem is reducing the flow of information. Be it TV, internet, movies, or magazines. These things distract the mind from the more noble pursuits of wisdom and knowledge.

And then, with the earnest resolve that only a 20-year-old can muster:

Today I’ll begin a TV and internet fast for one week. I will call it an experiment, and as is proper with experiments, I’ll record data (qualitative, of course) on how my mind and even body react to the lack of constant bombardment.

Five days into that 2002 experiment, I wrote that I was experiencing “more mental clarity” and that “my overall mood has been uplifted. It is as though a fog has lifted from me, and the sun is shining brightly.” The experiment worked.

But I fell off the wagon. In November 2004 (when I was approaching my 22nd birthday), I wrote this:

I’ve become everything I never wanted to become. I sit and watch TV, or play video games, or surf the web. I’m a tech addict. I’m consumed by all the gadgets and gizmos and by being on the cutting edge of knowledge. As Thoreau said, I’ve become a tool of my tools.

The melodrama is hilarious. “I’ve become everything I never wanted to become!” Oh, Brett.

But I appreciate the sincerity of my 22-year-old self. I admire how he dropped Henry David Thoreau quotes in his journaling. I can also see the beginning of my thinking about technology as being deterministic and not merely instrumental.

I even wrote a terrible poem about my struggle with digital distraction:

I am connected to wires; they chain me down.
They promise me freedom; I am let down by battery failure.

A month later, December 2004: “I got rid of cable. I’m going to get rid of my DVDs, and I’m not going to buy a book ever again. [I planned on only checking them out from the library.] I’m also going to cut down on the amount of time I spend online. I want my life to be simple.”

I did get rid of cable. That part stuck. But “never buy a book ever again”? I like owning books, and I’ve got a ton of them in my personal library. And the time I spend online has increased dramatically since 2004. Heck, I make my living online.

Getting On and Falling Off the Digital Abstinence Wagon

This cycle of getting fed up with being overly distracted by digital technology and resolving to cut down on my screen time, only to find myself returning to the cold glow of my devices, has gone on for the past two decades. I can describe it with embarrassing precision:

I notice that I’m spending too much time on distracting websites, Reddit, The Daily Mail (I’m a sucker for yellow journalism), and Twitter (yes, I still call it Twitter). I feel the brain fog rolling in. I can’t focus on work. I compulsively reach for my phone. I feel dumb, flat, and numb.

So I resolve to change. By jove, this time it will be different!

I install some kind of blocker or limiter on my desktop browser and phone. And it works! My screentime plummets. I experience the same mental clarity and mood uplift that I encountered during my first digital fast as a 20-year-old. This digital-distraction-free high lasts for a few weeks. Maybe a few months.

And then something happens. Maybe I need to check a specific subreddit for an answer to a question. Maybe I really want to read a comment thread on Twitter.

So I uninstall the blocker, override the parental controls, or breeze through the “wait 10 seconds before proceeding” screen that apps like Clear Space put up.

“Just this once,” I tell myself.

But it’s never just this once. After consuming the info that I overrode my screen blockers for, I begin a digital binge. “Well, while I got Reddit unblocked, might as well stop by r/utahinfluencerdrama to see what those cringey Mormon housewife influencers have been up to.” I don’t stop there. I check the Daily Mail and see another article about some healthy 30-something getting colon cancer, and then I’m checking out Colorguard’s website, and contemplating taking a dump in a box like a cat and mailing it to get it checked out. I’m right back on the treadmill of mindless surfing.

Then the spiritual and mental fog returns. I reach a point where I feel like garbage, and then vow to stop being a tool of my tools. I reinstall the blocker apps. The cycle begins again.

I’ve got a graveyard of digital tools I’ve tried over the years — Freedom, HeyFocus, FocusMe, and half a dozen others whose names I can’t even remember.

I even tried a Light Phone. It’s a minimalist e-ink phone that can only make calls and send texts. I had high hopes for it, but the reception was lousy, and the texting painful. That only lasted a few months.

I’m not proud of any of this. I’ve been stuck on a wheel for a quarter of a century, and it’s not flattering: resolve, install, comply, rationalize, override, binge, regret, repeat. I’ve been running this exact loop since before Facebook existed.

My name is Brett. And I’m a digital backslider.

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