2026
Bibliothèque
The technology of the book remains, even in our denuded and denatured era, the best tool for smuggling ideas across time.
In oral cultures, narratives- while powerful- begin to shift and change within the span of a lifetime, as stories move from mouth to ear and then across time. They transform into myths and legends faster than they can be remembered as such.
In a culture of the book, ideas of all kinds remain powerful even after their original progenitors have long since passed into the grave. Which means, of course, they can be argued with, expropriated, repudiated, and resurrected. Which leads to the idea–not a natural one by any stretch of the imagination–that ideas are fungible and impermanent.
The most successful book in the history of the world, that began with an oral narrative written down by one man and continued through multiple authors gamboling across time and space, continues to be the Bible. A book consisting of other books–a library, if you will–containing, in between its covers, almost every idea about the composition and meaning of reality itself.
And I’m not talking in narrow terms as defined by naturalism, scientific materialism, postmodern skepticism, or even ever-expanding existential dread. That’s all in the pages of that book as well. If you have the discernment to see it.
Any culture that has the Book of Books as its foundation can stumble for sure, waver most definitely, and crumble at the edges moving toward the center for sure, but the culture that builds on the cornerstone of the ideas smuggled across time in that Book of Books will not fall.
And the gates of Hell–whether that be a spiritually made, psychologically made, or materially made Hell–will not prevail against it.
Bet on the Bible, and the ideas inherent in it, and you’ll never fail.
The Depth of Human Resistance
The fact of human resistance is rarely accurately discussed or addressed by marketers, policy makers, and even educators. But the fact of the matter is that it takes twenty years for a genuine innovation of any kind–from an idea to a physical object–to change people’s actual lived behavior.
Whether that change is in a positive direction or a negative one.
If you’re building, whether in public or in private, not only should you bet on ten years to get to mastery in any discipline, but you should also bet on people accepting, using, and acknowledging what you’re building taking twenty years.
Human resistance is a deep abyss. Never bet against depth.
Listening to Yourself
The hardest signal to detect through the noise, both inside your head and outside in the world around you, is the signal of your own voice.
Many of us leave this Earthly existence without ever hearing, much less following, that voice. Which is why we both admire and are afraid of those people who can hear their own voice and then ruthlessly follow it.
Hearing your own voice starts with knowing yourself, continues through determining intentionally what voice you will follow, and then testing all the external noise against those metrics.
Going against the flow, the crowd, or the yammering mob, this takes courage. And courage has always been in short supply.
The Demands of Cowardice
The investor Peter Thiel, in his great book, Zero to One, states the following: “Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.”
When we think about the preservation of the status quo, we should think about the nature of cowardice. Cowardice is driven by the old sins of fear, greed, vanity and, of course, institutional submission. And while critics of a leader’s actions have an idea, from the outside, of what principled courage looks like, we fail to understand deeply that the fallen nature of human beings is going to lead to cowardice.
Courage indeed may be fear disciplined by principle. But in order for that to be true, people need to observe principles acted out in real life. They must observe people bucking the institutional structures that bind them, and they must observe people experiencing the consequences–good, bad, or ugly–of such principled behavior. They must see leaders going ahead first.
If people don’t see this. If instead they are exposed to smooth ideas, smoothed paths, and vanilla outcomes that preserve the status quo, they not only won’t recognize when courage is missing, they will actively resist those who are principled and have a desire to engage in principled decision-making. Courage has always been in short supply, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
Literal Context
In a communications world where we are transitioning slowly back to more of an oral tradition, literalism becomes the bridge between ideas we want to discuss with strangers and concepts we can’t discern from those same strangers because we lack enough context clues.
Literalism means, of course, that “gray areas” in conversation become less and less valuable for people. Which makes sense. Think about it: Social media videos can show everything. Social media text posts can explain everything. And social media memes can substitute for deeper understanding of messages that used to rely on the presence of shared context clues–and a shared communication culture–to survive.
But we’re long past that now.
In a communication world where every little detail must be explained, teased out, and made obvious for a reader, a viewer, or a speaker who doesn’t–and can’t possibly– share context clues, nuance becomes an annoyance, shared understanding evaporates, and we all start to talk and eventually think in the ways that the algorithms like. Humans, of course, are not algorithms. Nor are humans large language models. Humans need nuance, subtlety, and even a bit of mystery to communicate well.
But in the journey we are on right now, it’s tough to be in the middle space between the end of all that nuance, subtlety, and mystery, and whatever comes after the tribes of literal people have won the day.
The Gerontocracy We All Will Have to Live With
The fact is, the old have always ruled the young. And much to the dismay of the youth.
There are two major cultural differences between the past fact of a gerontocracy and the current era of intergenerational conflict dynamics. The first is that the generation that pioneered the idea of “never trust anyone over the age of 30” is now well into their twilight years. The second dynamic is that communications technology has made it so that resentment, envy, jealousy, vanity, and greed can be expressed and disseminated at a scale and speed that radio, television, and newspapers of the past could not even hope to get to.
In principle, this means that the current youth can spread their resentment about the old folks ruling them a lot faster. In spite of the fact that it was the old folks that created the culture of youth worship we all currently inhabit. And just like any other form of idolatry, youth is a brutal and unforgiving judge of everything no longer youthful. Or old.
To return to a place where the wisdom of the old is genuinely sought, and where they have genuine wisdom to provide based on the fruits of their own youth, is going to be almost impossible in the current communications environment in which we live. How that will play out over the course of time- let’s say over the course of the next saeculum cycle of 80 years in the West, roughly 2030 to 2110- is anyone’s guess. And I really do mean anyone, because very few of us reading this now will be alive to see it all play out.
I think we’re stuck with a gerontocracy. It’s built into human reality. But I don’t think we need to continue to surrender to the idolatry of youth and the smooth-headed machinations and arguments of ill-informed communications culture.
Performative Professionalism
The performance of seriousness is one of the most telling markers of cultural business decline in our deeply unserious era.
When critical thinking about an issue, of any kind or type, is devalued and instead what is rewarded is low friction, intellectual ease, emotional comfort, and avoidance of pain, arriving at the point of saying serious words without serious meaning behind them is inevitable.
Because when words sound serious but are really performative, flattering, deceitful, or just misapplied malapropisms, a person can gain all kinds of social and cultural brownie points without really having to be serious in the first place.
And from there, it’s a short fall to performing professionalism, rather than doing the hard work of preparing with excellence, to be a professional in the first place. Performative seriousness leads to performative professionalism. All of which confuses the uninitiated, drives the serious professional crazy, and effectively demoralizes the amateur.
Social media and the algorithmic reward system built into the Internet have gotten us here to this space, in real life, and there is no going back. And I’m not sure what the solution to this metastasizing problem is.
The Anchoring of Responsibility
We, meaning people in the West, are desperately seeking leaders at all levels who will take responsibility.
Take responsibility when failures of trust occur. Take responsibility when moral failures occur. Take responsibility when private failures occur.
As the Christian ethic in the West that used to ground the impetus to take responsibility in the hearts of people has eroded away, what remains is the tragedy of human failures. As well as the human tendency towards narcissism and hubristic arrogance. And the shame and guilt even materially sophisticated Western people can’t seem to shake, no matter how much any transcendent belief is materially dismissed.
I’m not naive. Humans have been failing into tragedy since the beginning of deep history.
But what the Judeo-Christian grounding provided for leaders in the West–as imperfect as it was–was an anchor to keep Western humans in leadership at least somewhat humble enough to know when–and how–to ‘fall on their swords’ when violations of public trust and even private failures occurred. This is the anchor we are sorely missing. Without the anchor, all that is left is bad behaviors, individual feelings, and collective anger and indignation at an amorphous “lack of responsibility” seemingly everywhere, among everybody, all at once.
In a morally and ethically shameless time, the leaders who can acknowledge they failed, describe where the failure was and who it impacted, and what material steps they will immediately take to correct the failure, win the responsibility “game.” By the way, without shame, either.
200 Podcasts
It takes ten years to become an “overnight” success. It also takes 100 episodes to become a “professional” podcaster.
The metrics are brutal:
78% to 92% of podcasts fail to make it past their first seven to ten episodes. By episode 3: Roughly 44% to 90% of all shows are abandoned. By Episode 7 to 8: Around 78% of podcasts stop publishing entirely. By Episode 10: Only about 8% to 22% of podcasts are still active.
These stats are from an AI search on Google, but that doesn’t mean the stats are wrong.
The fact is that while there may be around 8 million or so shows on the Internet calling themselves podcasts, the number that make it to the top of the popularity mountain that you’ve heard of is infinitesimally small. And that’s even before we get to the Rogans, the “Call Me Daddy” -ies, and the podcasts hosted by ex-Presidents.
This week, I dropped a panel discussion with the help of my podcast guest hosts, friends all, discussing the state of affairs for leaders in the post-literate world we are all about to inhabit in the West. It was a lively and wide-ranging discussion and, while we all didn’t agree on the conclusions, the conversation itself was the juice. Without gaslighting, strawman arguments, or social media flame-warring.
Imagine that. Twelve adults having a conversation without vitriol or personal attacks. I’m telling you, it can be done.
But even more so, the medium of podcasting allows for the space to do this. Outside of the marketing and corporate shows brought to you so long ago by NPR and its ilk, and now with a zone flooded by marketers and brands, the space of podcasting stands as the lone bulwark against the tide of polarization and seeing people, not as people, but as mere avatars that dance and move across the stage, signifying nothing more than a canvas for us to work out our psychological traumas on. Podcasting, podcasters, and the entire idea of podcast creation contains worlds that have a need to be explored.
Writing, recording, producing, and distributing two hundred regular episodes (in addition to another two hundred and fifty bonus episodes) has taught me many things. Chief among them is perspective. Leadership Lessons from the Great Books is a podcast designed for the leader who is a reader. And it’s designed for the leader who isn’t a reader but has the curiosity to know that there are ideas hidden in books that they may not know about. And it’s designed for the leader who is afraid of reading and just wants to dip their toes into the water a little bit at a time, with a host and a series of rotating co-hosts who won’t disrespect their intellect, insult their intelligence, and converse with about challenging ideas like the adults we know we all are.
And all of that inside an hour-and-a-half to two-hour-long conversation.
Very few people have the perseverance, self-control, discipline, or desire to do two hundred of anything. Particularly where it’s hard to get paid, the expense of time and attention is high, and the accolades are few and far between. The writer and gadfly Wendell Berry, who just died, would understand, though. And he’s one of the many authors we’ll be bringing to our listeners in the future.
I’ll close with these five lessons I’ve gleaned from the last 200+ conversations I’ve had and books I’ve read with people I respect deeply:
Reading is fundamental.
Leaders are readers.
Books are the best technology humans have invented for smuggling ideas across time to each other.
The novel might be on its last legs, but books are not.
And we all owe it to the future to remember that literacy, like freedom itself, is only ever one generation away from being snuffed out.
Thanks to the following guests for their contributions, insights, and sparring over the last three and a half years. In podcasting as in jiu-jitsu, you’re only as good as your training partners:
David Baumrucker, John Hill, Christen B. Horne, Richard Messing, Dorollo Nixon, Jr., Brian Bagley, Hana Kabele Gala, Moumin Quazi, Neal Kalechofsky, Zac Stucki, Tom Libby, Claire Chandler, Ryan J. Stout, Josh Poland, Atlas Aultman, Katie Mestres, Libby Unger, and Harvey Seifter.
…and all of the various authors, thinkers, consultants, educators, and more who have joined me over the last two hundred-plus bonus episodes.
Excelsior!
[Listen to the 200th episode by clicking on the link here.]
The Cost of Rebellion
There is a cost to everything: every act, every decision, every passive avoidance, every active conflict. All of it comes with a cost. That cost might be hidden, it might be delayed, or it might be obvious and show up immediately as feedback, but nothing is free.
A sign of maturity and wisdom is not only having enough practical knowledge to count up the cost in material and immediate terms, but also to have enough lived experience to recognize whether or not the cost is worth bearing–emotionally, psychologically, or spiritually.
Books are tools that help readers attain practical knowledge. But they also help readers count the cost of decisions not yet made. To posses the curiosity about the world and the people in it; to have the desire to pick up the book that might answer such curiosity; then to read, absorb, and apply the lessons from that book to the accounting of the cost of an action in the world outside the book’s timeframe, purview, and even context. These acts collectively guided us down the path toward and through counting the cost of individual and collective decisions. And our guides used to be wise sherpas, teachers, and leaders.
We may indeed be on the cusp–if not already entering–a post-literate West. But we long ago dismissed, minimized, or abandoned the voices and wisdom of the sherpas, teachers, leaders, and guides who had the authority–based in deep lived experience and practical assessment of consequences and results–to guide us through counting the cost of our decisions. In our rebellious and individualistic age, we arrogantly forgot to count the cost of leaving them behind.
Soon, the piper is coming to collect his payment. And there is always a payment due.
Clowns in Cars on the Information Superhighway
The act of driving our cars, in the real world, whether in Europe, North America, South America, Asia, or anywhere else, is a collaborative act. Whether we are driving in straight lines, on curved roads, or even negotiating roundabouts. Which, before I go much further, are not my personal favorite.
But I digress.
The infrastructure of roads is simple, from the paving to the stoplights to the sidewalks for pedestrians. The problems really come with the cars and other vehicles on the road. And, of course, the drivers. Every driver in every vehicle is doing their own thing: Some are driving attentively. Some are distracted by their phones, or the radio, or the conversations with other passengers in the vehicle. And some are driving angry. In a rage about a circumstance that happened before they decided to pilot a 2,000 + pound vehicle collaboratively on the road with other people.
Why am I building up talking about driving, the roads, and vehicles?
Well, because on the Internet, what we used to euphemistically call the Information Superhighway, we have drivers with vehicles. Their vehicles might be social media accounts, email accounts, business accounts, blogs, or other services, but the users are driving their vehicles with a variety of mindsets, attitudes, and approaches. And while it is appropriate to urge people to behave better and drive their vehicles more conscientiously, the fact of the matter is that there are many cars on the information superhighway that are full of clowns.
Those of us who aren’t clowns shouldn’t be surprised when we get into a fender-bender on the Information Superhighway with one of these clown cars, which are usually garishly outfitted, and that when we angrily jerk open the door, clowns inevitably fall out.
Clowns aren’t ever there to help another person.
They may be there to entertain, to gaslight, to troll, or to creep an observer out, but they aren’t there to help. And, as humanity approaches fifty years of this glorious communication infrastructure known as the Internet, people would do well to modify their expectations of clowns' behaviors. And get better at spotting–and avoiding–both the clown cars and the wrecks they create.
Honestly Seeking Truth
We are over two thousand years on the other side of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and the question that Pontius Pilate asked Jesus in His sham trial still echoes down to our time: “What is Truth?” This ironic question, of course, is a variation of the deceptive question posed by the serpent in the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis to the woman, Eve, “Did God really say…”
Are we honestly interested in Truth, or are we comfortable with making assertions that sound as if they have the weight of argument behind them, but are really a million miles wide and about an inch deep?
This is a question worth pondering the answer to before communicating–whether online, offline, in real life, or even just with ourselves. If we are not interested in discovering, refuting, examining, or advocating for the Truth, then we are probably wasting everyone’s time with publishing our thoughts.
A marketer once pointed out years ago in his blog that, “When everyone can publish, everyone will,” and a blogger more recently made the point in her blog that, “Some thoughts should die indoors.”
Choose wisely after you’ve decided if you’re honestly seeking the Truth.
The Tone Police
The communication patterns between people in real life have gradually come to resemble more and more the ways in which we communicate online, mostly via social media platforms. From ghosting behavior all the way to trolling, people are transforming themselves to resemble more and more the digital platforms they use on a daily basis.
One of the more pernicious habits is the policing of tone. Tone, of course, comes across in how you as a reader–or a listener–either read or hear the words I and others write, or say. Tone itself is a weird combination of word choice, affect, and volume. Tone attendance combines all of those ingredients with the tendency of humans to make other people into avatars in their own brains. And then to proceed to project themselves and their reactions onto the avatars they have made in their own heads.
Avatars, of course, that resemble the people who are writing or talking, not even a little bit. Sure, in a personal, intimate relationship, tone policing probably makes a lot of sense as a way to keep the peace and prevent small issues from becoming larger conflicts. But in the impersonal, distant, and unknowable interactions we have with the avatars of people in online communication, tone policing makes little sense. Because you don’t know the person on the other end of the interaction. As a matter of fact, it might not even be a person. That interlocutor might be a bot, an AI, or even a hired hand from another country.
This method of communication behavior monitoring is now spilling over increasingly into the real world, in real interactions, between real people. Of course, the difference is that, in the real world, if people attempt to monitor and correct the tones of other people with whom they are not in a relationship, or in the thinnest of relationships, conflict is sure to result. Particularly when those who will not be policed meet those who do the policing.
Projection should only happen in a movie theater. Assumptions of motives without sufficient understanding of the other person in a communication interaction will inevitably lead to attempts to police the tones of others, while resisting policing of their own tones. The solution to all of this lies in putting away social media and cleaving to real relationships with real people in real life.
The Joy of Persisting
When do you finally quit?
The number of people who start a project, relationship, or journey is always more than the number of people who persist to see the end. Because quitting projects, relationships, and journeys is easier now than at any other time in human history. And because the sacrifice to persist to the end is a higher emotional, psychological, and spiritual price than many are willing to pay.
But many of the people you’ve heard of persisted in spite of a low percentage of success. Consider the stats below:
Frank Sinatra: 1,200 songs, 209 hits, 17 percent success rate. Elvis Presley: 710 songs, 40 hits, 5.6 percent success rate. Babe Ruth: 8,399 at-bats, 714 home runs, 8.5 percent success rate. Pablo Picasso: 147,800 pieces, 30 masterpieces, 0.02 percent success rate.
Quitting is the default setting for many people when the process involved in mastering the project, the journey, or the relationship gets hard; when the first attempt doesn’t work, and even when the 500th attempt isn’t what the crowd claps for and declares a “hit.”
The comic book artist and dyspeptic entrepreneur, Dave Sim, once opined in his comic book Cerebus that, “Every artist has 200 bad pages of comic book art in him. Draw those 200 pages. Get them out of your system. But remember that by the time you get to drawing that 200th page, you won’t care what other people think about those pages. And more importantly, you won’t care about what YOU think of those pages either.”
Not quitting means not caring about the opinions of others about what you’re doing. Persisting means not caring about the critiques you have of what you are doing as well.
Thinking About William Gibson
One of the most obvious facts about the entire science-fiction genre is that its ideas, presuppositions, assumptions, and more rest on an analysis, not of the future, but of the present conditions projected forward into a fantastic future.
Which is why both dystopian science fiction (Blade Runner, most notably) and utopian science fiction (anything written by Isaac Asimov) miss the mark in describing the future we all now live in, from their perspective in the mid-20th century.
The unremarked upon challenge for science fiction writers in our time is that we need stories about the future of our present era, with its cell phones, social media, surveillance and data tracking, rising large-language models, and skepticism and mistrust of institutions and authority figures. Oh, and rockets from Elon, Bezos, and Lockheed Martin.
But we can’t get those stories–just as we can’t get tragic stories, just more reporting on tragic circumstances–because writers and artists today lack the creative vision to imagine the future and project forward, from this point today into an unknown future, in the way that Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and William Gibson did.
And those guys had typewriters, railroads, rocket missions to the Moon, and computers that still ran on reel-to-reel tape.
We don’t need more narrative rehashes of classic science fiction describing the world we live in now. We need narrative imagination describing and providing a narrative structure for the “gee-whiz” world to come.
Fever Dreams
When the human body is sick and fighting a foreign disease element or injury, and body temperature increases as the fight for survival commences, the likelihood of a person experiencing fever dreams increases. In the past, fever dreams were tied to hallucinations, bizarre or surreal experiences, and, of course, divine visions. All of this is easy for us ontological materialists to dismiss in our time as the meaningless speculations of the uneducated and the backward, particularly because post-modern science attaches no more meaning to the occurrence of fever dreams than it does to the presence of gravity.
Which is to say, “Sure, you’ll dream when you’re ill, and those dreams will seem weird and crazy, but they possess no deeper meaning.”
And yet.
At the individual level, humans insist not only on getting fevers, but also on dreaming. And at scale in society and culture, systems get fevers and systems dream.
Such as it were.
There is meaning to these phenomena and connections to be explained and explored, particularly as we are currently in a several-trillion-dollar fever dream with new tools–a new disease element against which we have not been inoculated–being introduced by the wizards and soothsayers of Silicon Valley into our cultural, technological, economic, and even psychological systems.
Our current societal fever dreams possess significance up and down the meaning hierarchy that goes beyond the banal or the easily dismissed. It’s up to leaders to have the wisdom of the sages and the ages, to explain the significance of our societal fever dreams to us. And when they can’t, we all wake up collectively confused and mistrusting the next time another disease element is introduced into the larger body politic.
Leading in the Post-Literate West
Much of my career, such as it has been, has consisted of teaching, writing, training, researching, and thinking about what makes people leaders, why we follow people in the first place, and once we become leaders, how we can become better. It’s not exactly the sexiest career, but it pays (some) of the bills.
For me, thinking, reading, and writing sit at the bottom of every act a person who leads commits to. Decisions can’t be made, and choices can’t move from idea to practicality without those three acts. Followers can’t be ethically guided, and enemies can’t be accurately identified, confronted, and, in some cases, defeated. Without a robust practice of thinking, reading, and writing, leadership becomes a buzzword and a marketing term rather than an act that changes people and can change the world.
However, in America, and the West overall, I suspect, we have either entered, or are entering, a post-literate world, as defined by Rose Horowitz of_ The Atlantic_ in the long excerpt below:
“For the August issue of The Atlantic, I investigated what our society will look like as reading vanishes for all but the smallest sliver of Americans. The share of Americans who read a book or an article on any given day has fallen by 40 percent over the past two decades. In 2022, fewer than half of all adults had read a book of any kind in the prior year. Only 38 percent had read a novel or a short story. One historian I spoke with described reading as a ‘niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids.’ And its disappearance shows no signs of slowing down.
“Humans spent millennia communicating only by voice. The advent of reading and writing transformed society. It altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of. The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect how we think, how our elected leaders campaign and govern, what skills our culture values, and even how we tell the history of our civilization. If we look closely, we can see that these changes have already begun.
“This shift is often referred to as a literacy crisis. But that’s not quite right. Americans can still read. Paradoxically, they might be reading more words than ever before. People’s lives are filled with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, and Instagram captions. But these snippets of text have crowded out the time necessary for sustained reading of complex texts. And over time, people have lost the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.”
Here’s my harsh prediction: In a post-literate America, both leaders and followers will struggle not only with comprehension of hard ideas, but also with being unable even to ask the types of questions that lead to formulating the initial hard ideas in the first place. Combine this fact with evidence of the Iron Triangle of Arrogance–where people not only genuinely believe wrong information and facts, but also shout them at louder and louder decibels via every channel they can broadcast them, because correction would require a change in identity, rather than just a change of mind–and a post-literate, American electorate will be fooled often and taken for a ride frequently.
Future leaders will not only be literate–they will be able to read the words on the page of those hoary old relics called books–but they will also know what the words mean, what the author meant, and what those words mean for their post-literate followers. Followers who will have a lot of text in their brains, but very little comprehension or wisdom in their hearts.
Behold, what a brave new world we are entering, folks, and behold all the people in it.
When The Hurly-Burly's Done, When The Battle's Lost and Won
One of the more interesting facts of our age is the lack of tragic stories being told via books and film.
Now, don’t get me wrong, plenty of tragic circumstances are constantly splashed across our collective social media feeds; from people we know, people we don’t, people experiencing tragic circumstances across the globe, and much more. Circumstances imposed upon them by fate, identity, chance (both random and purposeful), and nature. And we observers of this stream of tragedies are tacitly rewarded by the algorithm for engaging through clicks, scrolls, and eye movements, for “engaging” with the stories of these circumstances.
While it may initially appear as though there are more tragedies in the world, the actual fact of the matter is that there aren’t more tragedies now than there ever were before in human history. From the burning of a random village in the Amazon in 1500 B.C. to a person soliciting funds for cancer treatments on a GoFundMe page in 2026 A.D., tragic circumstances are a regrettable and pervasive human constant.
What is missing in our tragic circumstances-soaked social media feeds is fictionalized stories of real people overcoming those tragedies to become heroic and succeed in the end. It’s almost as if we have wound up in a place in our social media feeds that is a full realization of the frustrated, nihilistic fictional lament of the Hollywood writer and director, Charlie Kaufman, in the film Adaptation (2002): “What if the writer is attempting to create a story where nothing much happens? Where people don’t change, they don’t have any epiphanies, they struggle and are frustrated, and nothing is resolved. More a reflection of the real world.”
This is where the tragic plays of William Shakespeare can help us sophisticated, nihilistic, deconstructionist, and social media addicted post-moderns navigate how to put tragic circumstances into a narrative form to extract meaning, significance, and even closure from them. It turns out that the tragedies of Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello aren’t just “…tales told by an idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing (Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5). They remain the best method humans have of coping with the brute facts of the natural world and both random–and purposeful–circumstances that happen to us.
And the ones we love.
Let’s bring back the telling of tragic tales, for the hurly-burly will never be done, and the never-ending tragic battles are ever to be lost or won.
The Sandlot Problem
There is a moment in the 1993 film, The Sandlot, where one of the characters declares a pause in the shenanigans the young men are embarking upon in order to retrieve a baseball that has landed in the yard opposite the sandlot where they play pickup baseball every day.
He declares, with all the weight of an exasperated grown-up, “I think we’ve gone off the rails here. I really blame myself.”
And of course, the reason the line works as a joke is that no adult ever says that, much less thinks it about themselves when a project “goes off the rails.” The other reason it works is that every adult thinks this about another adult and blames them when a project “goes off the rails.”
It takes the innocence of a child to call a pause, take on some accountability, and return to the drawing board.
In every project you’ve ever been on, there have been opportunities to engage in the way that Tommy Timmons did in that iconic film, and there will be more in the future.
All you have to be is brave enough to say the words out loud.
Pursuing Happiness
We used to understand that the pursuit of happiness entailed the possibility that you very well might not get happiness.
You might be disappointed, frustrated, discouraged, defeated, or wind up rejected by the very system in which you were attempting to pursue happiness. And that system could be a family, a church, a neighborhood, or any community.
Most of the systems were known to be flawed. This was accepted. The people inside the systems were known to be flawed. This was also accepted. We used to call this the “tragedy of human existence.”
In our time, though, abundant material prosperity has fooled us into believing that we have defeated the fallen nature of the world, the systems in it, and the people operating in those systems. This belief leads to frustration, disappointment, discouragement, and feelings of defeat because material prosperity doesn’t equate to psychological and spiritual happiness.
That’s still something we will most likely not achieve perfectly, on this side of reality.
By all means, continue to pursue happiness. But acknowledge the ceiling.