Living alone in a studio apartment. Walking treadmills and daily standups. Networking lunches with bottomless mimosas. Opening your daily Amazon box. Keeping a Google doc of your Tinder hookups. Adjusting your cat’s SSRI dosage. Revenge bedtime procrastination watching camping YouTube videos.
In the space of possible lives, this is the attractor. It’s what all modern lives are converging on.
What a bummer that it’s optimized for being maximally unfulfilling! But, you know, postmodern atomization. What are you going to do? It’s simply an unavoidable consequence of the death of god.
We proclaim this as we opt in as hard as possible. As we excitedly leave behind our hometown and everyone who would have loved us. As we move with all the other self-selected least-fullfillable people to the same place to see how much ennui we can fit per square foot. As we labor diligently to turn the coastal cities into loneliness neutron stars.
Hellacious equilibria like this are always the product of a pincer move. On one flank: compulsive market forces. On the other: myths that romanticize and apologize for them. Wielded against us, these myths are psychic warfare that convince us to act against our own best interest.
In this case, the myth being wielded against us is the big one — the modern American monomyth. The hero, called to greatness, escapes from their backwater town, discards the husk of their old life, and remakes themselves as an actor, consultant, or “founder”. In the default worldview that accompanies this mythos, the supreme value is instrumental power and the primary means of pursuing it is unbridled self-authorship. We’re injected with this serum from a young age, and even if you’re ensouled, it’s very difficult not to internalize it.
A prescription to self-authorship isn’t inherently bad, but the problem is that there’s no limiting function. More power is always better. If you’re a millionaire, you should be a billionaire. If you’re a billionaire, you should try to become the immortal god-emperor. And more violent self-authorship is always necessary. This inevitably and repeatedly means being willing to tear up the small story of your life, to perfect it, to make it closer to the Big Story.
If you’re anyone at all, at 18 you must leave behind your family and everything you’ve ever known to start over somewhere across the country. Make new friends and “figure out who you really are”. After you graduate, you’re supposed to do it again. And then again and again, forever. Everywhere we find ourselves unfulfilled, the prescription is the same. Self-author harder. Violently if necessary.
This often manifests as exit. If you’re not happy with your boyfriend, leave him. Scrub him from your Insta photos like a dead cosmonaut. Hold out for your ideal. Not happy with your job? Get a new one. Ghost your friends. Change your gender. Throw out your old clothes. Dump your grandparents in a vat of lye.
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As the world gets bigger and our horizons forever expand, we are increasingly braised in a diffuse but unrelenting fear of opportunity cost. Could I be going to a cooler party? Could I have a better job? Fundamentally: Am I in the right timeline?
If only someone would speak to this by making a movie about the fantasy of being able to traverse all possible timelines in some kind of multiverse!
You see this all around you, especially among those who are supposedly the most “self-actualized”. Most are single, lost, lonely, with nothing in their life that has compounded except money and status. They’re perpetually searching for the one romantic interest, friend, job, religion that will be good enough to write into the book of their life in pen. Of course, the big unnamemeable emptiness this produces is the very boogeyman they were running from to begin with. Alcohol sold to prevent alcoholism. All diseases self-propagate by convincing you their cause is their cure.
The deepest and most fucked up form of this anxiety is: Do I have the right values? We endlessly deconstruct ourselves, trying to find the one allegiance that will make us feel whole.
The modern disease is a divided heart.
And this of course creates a parasitic niche for every interest group and memeplex under the sun to convince you that they should be the target of your loyalty and also by the way the highest virtue is tithing. There’s a whole cottage industry around helping you purify your values.
Adam Ruins Everything Adam Tells You What to Think Adam Sandblasts Your Amygdala With Condescension Adam Shits In Your Mouth and Tells You It’s Toothpaste Adam Uses Hairgel as a Weapon of Weltanschauungskrieg Adam Tries to Turn You Against Your Loved Ones Adam Tells You to Forget the Irreducible Light in Your Soul
He’s so sassy!
My people’s limbic systems are successfully programmed by the time they’re in middle school. And so they leave home and move to the city.
Look, everyone knows all of this. The mantle of self-determination that was laid at the individual’s feet after the collapse of the old world was too heavy, yada yada. We’ve all read the coffee table book. But the myth that tells us how to respond to this continually morphs to evade the immunity of our conscious mind.
The default assumption should always be that the new cool ideas floating around are the same old wolves, now wearing fancy 3D-printed sheep’s clothing. For example, the latest branding iteration is all about agency and optimization. “You can just do things!”
Listen kids. There’s an optimal amount of agency and it’s medium.
Meaning is story-likeness. That is, something is meaningful to the extent that it resembles a story. Stories have two qualities: they’re teleological, and they’re parsimonious. And teleology requires compounding.
Once your life story has been scarred by excessive revision, it’s very hard to fix it. The more disparate and incoherent the datapoints of your life, the harder it becomes to assemble them into a coherent narrative pointed at a worthwhile end. The average life change is entropic.
If you want your life to be meaningful, your default orientation must be commitment. Don’t try to optimize. Double down. On the people around you. On where you live. But most importantly, on the story of your life.
No one will debate that loyalty is a good thing. This is self-evident. The main pushback will be around its primacy. What if I’m loyal to something bad, like Hitler! Or cancer!
At face value, this is a concern about other people’s beliefs. My beliefs are fine, but what about the bad people! What’s the implied solution? That everyone be an ineffectual quivering loser so we don’t get a confident tyrant? That people rationally deliberate over and choose their values from some magical place outside themselves? This is obviously retarded.
But beliefs that are obviously retarded are usually just a fig leaf. And in this case, it’s over the aforementioned anxiety. You’re scared of committing your life to the wrong thing. Of pledging yourself to an unworthy king. Of ending up in the wrong timeline.
I want to cure you of this.
If your loyalty is a second-order process, you never get to have it. It will always have to justify itself in terms of your first-order considerations, which entirely defeats the point. If you’re only loyal when it makes sense to be, that is exactly not loyalty. Meaning and beauty are definitionally irrational.
But what if I end up being loyal to something that’s — GASP — suboptimal?? You will. You will not marry your globally optimal spouse. You will not attend the globally optimal party this Friday. And you will not live the globally optimal life. But if you try to, you will end up with a cat in an empty studio in LA at 43. And worse: you’ll be there as a person with a disloyal soul.
But I didn’t choose my hometown/shitty parents/childhood friends, why would I be loyal to things I didn’t choose??
We all start life en media res. You can’t meaningfully consent to anything, as you have only become the person you are just now.
When you grow up you realize you actually only get a handful of friends, and don’t really get to choose them. Most likely, they’re just whoever happened to be in your elementary school grade with you. Many are tempted to resist this — to convince themselves they can and will make closer friends in later stages of life. People who align with their values now.
Making new friends is fine. But they will never be your best friends. Those are the ones you grow up with. Who you become with. Which by definition means who you cannot choose.
If you only build long-term relationships with people who live up to your highest current standards, you will never build long-term relationships with anyone, because by the time it becomes a long-term relationship, your understanding of them, the world, and your values will have shifted. And don’t you want to have lifelong friends at 50. The same is true for every part of your life story.
Ultimately though, this isn’t practical, it’s metaphysical.
You didn’t cause the past, but you are responsible for it. Saying “I’m not responsible for what happened before I was born” is like the tail of the ouroboros turning to camera and going “get a load of this guy, amirite?” The present is the past folded up, and you are the culmination of everything that came before, perfectly shaped by those forces to fit in exactly the circumstances you do. If there’s a problem with those circumstances, you can bet the same problem is in you.
If you cut someone out of your life, you’re abnegating a responsibility to them, to the fabric of their story, to the way your stories interconnect, and to your corner of the universe. Working this out with them was your destiny.
If not that destiny, then what? Cutting them out of your life is cutting part of yourself away. If you cut every part of yourself away, then what are you? When you destroy everything you are, what’s left, except hedonism?
“They’re holding me back!” You say. “From where?” Probably the place you need to go is wherever dealing with them takes you.
When you chain yourself to the mast, something magic happens. Not only does it force you to deal with the circumstances you otherwise would have run from, and thereby grow, it turns the mast into a place worth being. There’s a spookiness to the cosmos that makes causal mechanisms seem to work in reverse.
Marry your girlfriend, even if she’s imperfect. When you treat her as if she’s wife material, you create the conditions for her to become wife material.
All the better if it’s imperfect. That’s what makes it beautiful. You made this woman your wife and lived your whole life with her despite her imperfections. You acted out the perfect even though it wasn’t there. This is the closest we can get to bringing the Platonic realm into the real one.
And when you make a habit of doubling down, you become the type of person who is loyal. And this will inspire the loyalty of other loyal people. Don’t you want to be surrounded by loyal people?
Loyalty is the first component in how you operationalize a systems-based orientation toward meaning. The meaning of your life will come from the things that compounded before you were informed enough to consent.
Commit. To your values. To your dysfunctional family. To your stupid friends. To your highschool girlfriend who is not as hot as the girl you know you’ll be able to get when you’re rich. To the definition of yourself you had when you were ten.
Unless, you know, you don’t want a meaningful life. Then just be a psychopath or whatever.
For the meaning-oriented person, loyalty is the first virtue.
