The Age of Confusion (or: the more things change...)

Last year my parents downsized from the house in which I grew up to a condo, and in the process of moving gave away a lot of things including most of their music and book collections. Naturally, I ended up with a lot of records and CDs. I also picked a few books that looked interesting. I've recently been reading one of them, 28 Science Fiction Stories of H.G. Wells, and it's quite interesting indeed. I found the first story, a novel called Men Like Gods, so interesting - and timely - that I felt compelled to write something about it!

Men Like Gods, which Wells described as a "scientific fantasy," was published in 1923 and is set in 1921. The premise is that the protagonist, an Englishman named Mr. Barnstaple, is transported to an alternate dimension along with about a dozen other Earthlings. They find themselves on a strangely Earth-like world inhabited by humans but in a very different society than that they know, a futuristic society in which humanity has apparently used science to solve all its problems. A Utopia, as Mr. Barnstaple quickly comes to think of it.

There is a lot of commentary on the state of mankind and society in the 1920s - and I was struck by how relevant it all seemed to the 2020s. So I wanted to share some of the passages I found most striking along with my reactions to them.

The story begins thusly:

"They all cost money, with a cheerful disregard of the fact that everything had gone up except Mr. Barnstaple's earning power," I read, and chuckled, because apparently inflation was also a big concern a hundred years ago.

That was just the beginning.

Mr. Barnstaple is the sub-editor of a newspaper called the Liberal, "that well-known organ of the more depressing aspects of advanced thought." We learn that he is "obsessed by apprehensions of some sort of financial and economic smash that would make the great war seem a mere incidental catastrophe." The "great war," which we now, of course, know as World War I, was a recent event when this story was written. And of course, the Great Depression was not too far in the future, so Mr. Barnstaple and H.G. Wells seem prescient here.

We often like to think that we live in unusually tumultuous and terrifying times, and although there are certainly a lot of really bad and frightening things happening today, I don't know whether that's really true.

"Even in ordinary times Mr. Peeve [Mr. Barnstaple's boss] would have been hard enough to live with; but the times were not ordinary [emphasis mine], they were full of disagreeable occurrences that made his melancholy anticipations all too plausible. The great coal lock-out had been going on for a month, and seemed to foreshadow the commercial ruin of England; every morning brought intelligence of fresh outrages from Ireland... a prolonged drought threatened the harvests of the world; the League of Nations... was a melancholy and self-satisfied futility; everywhere there was conflict, everywhere unreason; seven eights of the world seemed to be sinking down towards chronic disorder and social dissolution."

"Mr. Barnstaple was, indeed, ceasing to secrete hope... His hope had always been in liberalism and generous liberal effort, but he was beginning to think that liberalism would never do anything more for ever than sit hunched up with its hands in its pockets grumbling and peeving at the activities of baser but more energetic men. Whose scrambling activities would inevitably wreck the world." That passage could have been written today, right? Have baser but more energetic men always been wrecking the world? Probably for as long as civilization has existed, and yet somehow the world has continued to go on, not entirely wrecked.

As stated in the opening sentence of the story, Mr. Barnstaple needs a holiday, and we learn that "the most hopeful thing about" his situation is that "he owned a small automobile of his very own." Of this automobile, we learn that "Mr. Barnstaple used it to come up to the office from Sydenham because it did thirty-three miles to the gallon and was ever so much cheaper than a season ticket." 33 miles per gallon. A hundred years ago. The best-selling cars in America today are Ford F-series pickup trucks; the popular F-150 gets about 23 miles per gallon. Good lord, what are we even doing? But I digress.

Mr. Barnstaple thinks due to all the turmoil in 1921 that "if anything it was a sillier year than 1913, the great tango year, which, in the light of subsequent events, Mr. Barnstaple had hitherto regarded as the silliest year in the world's history." From my perspective our current era seems a contender for silliest in history, but I'm undoubtedly very biased. Also, I have no idea why 1913 might have been "regarded as the silliest year in the world's history," and have no idea what even happened in that apparently very silly year. I wonder what people will think of our current era a hundred years from now?

After being transported to Utopia, Mr. Barnstaple and the other Earthlings learn about this strange world from some of its residents, the Utopians. They learn that Utopia seems to be essentially a parallel universe Earth but farther along in history. At some point in Utopia's past it was much like the Earth of 1921. That era is now known to the modern-day Utopians as "the last Age of Confusion."

The Utopians are interested in learning what it's like to live in such an age, and so one of the Earthlings, Mr. Burleigh, gives "a brief account of the world of men," including "states and empires," "wars and the Great War," "economic organization and disorganization," "the difficulties of finding honest statesmen and officials," "the unhelpfulness of newspapers," and "all the dark and troubled spectacle of human life."

I mean, sounds like a good summary of the world today, right? Replace "newspapers" with news sources in general - newspapers, TV, news websites, social media - all of which have failed to prevent and have indeed helped enable the lurching toward fascism that is currently happening in the United States. We bemoan this as a problem of our age, but perhaps it's always been a problem.

The Earthlings are then told of how things work in Utopia, and are astonished to learn that there is no central government; "Decisions in regard to any particular matter were made by the people who knew most about the matter."

One thing I find fascinating about this story is that when it was written, two terrible global events were both in recent memory: World War I, and the flu pandemic of 1918-1920. The Great War is mentioned multiple times in the story. The flu pandemic? Never mentioned explicitly, but a number of points in the story seem to have come out of the pandemic being on the author's mind. Here we get the first, when the Earthlings ask, "But suppose it is a decision that has to be generally observed? A rule affecting the public health, for example? Who would enforce it?"

The answer: "It would not need to be enforced. Why should it?"

At the beginning of COVID, many people were surprised to learn that there had been a deadly global pandemic a hundred years earlier, because they'd never heard of it. It killed more people than World War I, but whereas World War I is a major part of history classes and contributes to the setting of all sorts of notable literature, the same just isn't the case for the flu pandemic. But then once we'd lived through a pandemic for a while, people realized it made sense that after experiencing it, most people would just want to go back to normal life as if the pandemic hadn't happened. People wouldn't want to read or write a novel set during the pandemic.

And so the choice by Wells not to mention the pandemic when he lists all the recent problems of the world, but the clear influence of the pandemic on his story (an influence I wouldn't have recognized had I not lived through a pandemic myself), fascinates me.

Jumping forward in the story, the more prominent evidence of the flu pandemic's influence comes when, on the second day after the Earthlings arrive, the "great epidemic in Utopia" begins. Utopians had long ago eliminated all disease from their world and as a result their immune systems are not prepared for the infections the Earthlings are carrying. "Though not one of them was ailing at all, it became clear that someone among them had brought latent measles into the Utopian universe, and that three or four of them had liberated a long suppressed influenza."

(When I read the story earlier this year, I didn't realize how timely the measles reference would be. Oof.)

These diseases rapidly spread through the population, and our band of Earthlings is then approached by people in gas masks who tell them, "Quarantine. You have to go into quarantine. You Earthlings have started an epidemic and it is necessary to put you into quarantine."

Amusingly, some of the Earthlings think that their natural immunity makes them superior to the Utopians and will allow them to conquer the planet as its inhabitants all fall ill, but the Utopians' science quickly turns things around. Then, in one last pandemic reminder, the funniest moment of the story to me came when the Utopians mention that research is being undertaken to develop a method to send the Earthlings back to their own dimension. Father Amerton, the voice of organized religion among the motley crew from Earth, asks what the nature of the treatment will be - "Is it to be anything in the nature of vaccination?"

He then goes on, "I may say at once that I am a confirmed anti-vaccinationist. Absolutely. Vaccination is an outrage on nature. If I had any doubts before I came into this world of - of vitiation, I have no doubt now. Not a doubt! If God had meant us to have these serums and ferments in our bodies he would have provided more natural and dignified means of getting them there than a squirt."

Yep, these words were written in the early 1920s. Other than a few amusing anachronistic terms (like "anti-vaccinationist" and "squirt"), nearly the exact same words could have been spoken by countless people a hundred years later - and as a result of this, hundreds of thousands of people died preventable deaths.

So much for humanity becoming more enlightened as history progresses.

Mr. Barnstaple realizes that the more he hears about the last Age of Confusion in Utopia's past, "the more it seemed to resemble the present time on Earth." He forms an outline in his mind of the history of Utopia from that confused era onward. In this outline, a period of tremendous advancement in scientific inquiry occurred.

"The Utopians, who had hitherto crawled about their planet like sluggish ants or travelled parasitically on larger and swifter animals, found themselves able to fly rapidly or speak instantaneously to any other point on the planet." Note that powered flight and instantaneous communication to locations around the globe were both recent developments when Wells wrote this story!

"They found themselves, too, in possession of mechanical power on a scale beyond all previous experience, and not simply of mechanical power; physiological and then psychological science followed in the wake of physics and chemistry, and extraordinary possibilities of control over his own body and over his social life dawned upon the Utopian."

These developments did not lead to an instant transformation from Age of Confusion to Utopia, though. At first they were only appreciated by a small minority of people, while most people "spent the great gifts of science as rapidly as it got them in a mere insensate multiplication of the common life."

The next passage sounds very much like a description of the world of today: "The economic system... became more and more a cruel and impudent exploitation of the multitudinous congestion of the common man by the predatory and acquisitive few. That all too common common man was hustled through misery and subjection from his cradle to the grave; he was cajoled and lied to, he was bought, sold and dominated by an impudent minority, bolder and no doubt more energetic, but in all other respects no more intelligent than himself. It was difficult... for a Utopian nowadays to convey the monstrous stupidity, wastefulness and vulgarity to which these rich and powerful men of the Last Age of Confusion attained."

Gee, does that remind you of anyone?

"What plenty and pleasure was still possible in the world was filched all the more greedily by the adventurers of finances and speculative business."

Are we talking about Utopia in the Age of Confusion, Earth in the 1920s... or Earth in the 2020s?

Eventually, the people of Utopia's past came to realize that "the state could not do its work properly nor education produce its proper results, side by side with a class of irresponsible rich people. For, by their very nature, they assailed, they corrupted, they undermined every state undertaking; their flaunting existences distorted and disguised all the values of life." Again, does that remind you of anyone? And eventually, after centuries of struggle, the control of "greedy, passionate, prejudiced and self-seeking men" over society was wrested away, and a society in which science and education were held in paramount by all was established.

In this utopian society, Mr. Barnstaple learns, there are "Five Principles of Liberty, without which civilization is impossible." The most striking of these is the fourth: "that Lying is the Blackest Crime."

As the young Utopian explaining this to Mr. Barnstaple states, "Where there are lies there cannot be freedom."

This, again, calls to mind events of our present era, and, apparently, of the era one hundred years' past. Mr. Barnstaple contends that "half the difference between Utopia and our world... lay in this, that our atmosphere was dense and poisonous with lies and shams... The fundamental assumptions of earthly associations were still largely lies, false assumptions of necessary and unavoidable difference in flags and nationality... impostures of organized learning, religious and moral dogma and shams."

Mr. Barnstaple gets especially worked up about "the suppression and falsifications of earthly newspapers," which is "a question very near his heart."

"The London newspapers had ceased to be impartial vehicles of news; they omitted, they mutilated, they misstated. They were no better than propaganda rags."

Don't we all today, people from all parts of the political spectrum, bemoan the state of the news media and how various parts of it (which parts depending on one's point of view) are no better than propaganda? And don't we, like Mr. Barnstaple, yearn for a past era in which this was not so much the case?

I do think that the collapse of any sort of commonly agreed upon objective reality is a striking problem of modern life. It's said that a tool of authoritarianism is constantly bombarding the public with lies, not so much to get people to believe the lies as to get people to stop believing that there is any sort of truth. As I look with anguish on what's happening in my country, I very much believe this, and from my perspective it seems like a relatively novel problem in the span of modern American life. But it's clearly not a novel problem in human history. And it's probably been a problem, to a greater or lesser extent, for as long as civilization has existed.

Of course, it could probably go without saying that the idea that humans could ever agree on an objective reality to the extent that it would be possible to outlaw lying - and to do so in service of the truth and not to an oppressive regime - is far-fetched.

Reading this story, I found myself wondering two things about H.G. Wells's thoughts on this imagined world of his. The first is, did Wells view Utopia, this world where all the problems of modern society had been solved and everyone could live a life of comfort and plenty, as good?

His protagonist, Mr. Barnstaple, becomes quite the Utopia stan (as the kids say), but all the other Earthlings are, to various degrees and for various reasons, quite critical. One interesting critique: "Life on earth was... full of pains and anxieties, full indeed of miseries and distresses and anguish, but also, and indeed by reason of these very things, it had moments of intensity, hopes, joyful surprises, escapes, attainments, such as the ordered life of Utopia could not possibly afford."

There's also the matter of Utopia having been achieved in part through heavy use of eugenics, something that today is generally regarded as a Bad Thing, but that may have been viewed more favorably by many in the past.

The second thing I wonder is whether Wells viewed it as plausible that at some point in the future humanity could progress to a society like that portrayed in the story. Or if not exactly like that, then at least a society where those familiar problems - constant conflict, ubiquitous unreason, unhelpful and dishonest newspapers, rich and powerful men laying waste to society - had largely been banished to the past.

When I was a kid, I got the impression of the story of humanity as one of continuous progress. In the future, things, in general, would be better than they were in the past. I certainly no longer feel that way. I'm not sure whether that change is simply due to me being older, or if it's also a reflection of a general change in how humans view the future. A lot of classic science fiction portrays futures in which technology has made life easier for all humans rather than just for the privileged. I don't think that's the case anymore.

When I read this story, the fact that so many of the problems a hundred years ago sound exactly the same as the problems today makes me skeptical that the problems will ever be solved. Mr. Barnstaple leaves Utopia feeling confident that one day, "Earth would tread the path Utopia had trod." What about H.G. Wells? Was he, from the vantage point of 1923, able to look to the past the way that I can from 2025 and see how all the problems he described echoed things that had already happened? Or did the "Age of Confusion" seem like a temporary state through which humanity was passing?

To be fair, he did describe the struggle to go from Age of Confusion to Utopia as having taken thousands of years. Even still, it's hard for me to imagine that transition ever occurring, because there are certain fundamental aspects of human nature.

Wouldn't it be nice, I've thought recently, if we could just live in a world where everyone had two basic character traits:

1. They cared about other people. Other people in a general sense, not just a certain subset of other people. There are, I think, a lot of people who do, but there are also a lot of people who don't.

2. They had decent critical thinking skills. That is, if presented with evidence for an argument, they could evaluate the evidence and come to a reasoned conclusion about the strength of the argument. And if presented with an argument that's obvious BS if examined carefully, they would be suspicious of it. They wouldn't just believe things for no sound reason and cling to those beliefs even in the face of an overwhelming amount of contradictory evidence. This, I think, is something that no one is perfect at, but some people are good at it, while some people are okay at it, and some people quite frankly aren't very good at it, at all.

It seems that the difference between Wells's Utopia and the real world, and the reason that the real world could never become like Utopia, could be summarized as that many, many people in the real world have neither or just one of those two character traits, and there's no reason to think that will ever change.

And it's interesting to me that that's true. It seems that that's how we evolved. Why is it that some people do have those traits, and others don't? (Perhaps the remarkable thing is that a lot of people do have those traits instead of no one having them?)

What would the world be like if everyone cared about humanity and could be swayed by evidence toward believing true things and disbelieving false things?

Granted, there are issues where, even working under that imagined framework, there aren't clear right and wrong answers. Take the aforementioned COVID pandemic. There were tradeoffs between trying to slow the spread of a deadly disease and trying to live as a social species for which being social is a basic need (especially for the developing minds of children, who conveniently were themselves at low risk from the disease!) and there was no way to avoid doing some measure of harm in some direction. The actual response to the pandemic was a disaster in a multitude of ways, but I don't think there's an ideal world where there's a clearly correct response with no downsides.

But there are also issues where there are very clear right answers, and the problem is that a lot of people just don't want to accept those answers as right, or reflexively oppose them because they don't like the people who are proposing the ideas.

To use a pet issue of mine as an example, it's inarguably true that improving bike and pedestrian infrastructure and public transit would benefit the health of individual people, of society, and of the planet. In a cost-benefit analysis, the benefits outweigh the costs by a mind-boggling amount. Operating under a Utopian framework, we would just do this and the only questions would be about the details, not about whether or not to do it. Sadly, the real world doesn't work that way.

But then, every form of progress does have unintended consequences (rip scribes). Perhaps in the imagined world full of compassionate and rational people, accelerated progress compared to the real world would have inadvertently brought about our premature demise.

Or perhaps we would be living in a utopia.

Either way, I find it simultaneously depressing and comforting to realize that so many of the problems that seem new or at least newly terrible to us today are the same problems that have been faced over and over again by other people in the past. Depressing, because it's sad to think about how no matter how hard people try to fix the world, in some ways it's probably unfixable. But comforting, because when you're in a bad situation there's comfort in knowing that you aren't alone, that not only are other people feeling the some things but other people have felt the same things in the past. Lots of people lived through times like the times we're living through now and were still able to find meaning and joy in their lives. Lots of people lived through far worse times and were still able to find meaning and joy.

It was really funny to me to read this story from a century ago and have the protagonist remark that "the times were not ordinary" for reasons that are in many ways the same as reasons that we, today, say that the times are not ordinary.

There's a joke I've seen a lot, where someone says that we're living in unprecedented times, and concludes, "I want to live in precedented times." But I think the truth is that, while some things about the times in which we live are unprecedented, other things have plenty of historical precedent. And I think this has been true for people everywhere for at least the last few centuries and perhaps for as long as civilization has existed. (Go far enough back in history, and I suspect the idea of "unprecedented times" wasn't so common, because the rate at which life changed was too slow to be noticeable in the lifetime of a typical human.)

The truly unprecedented elements of our lives relate mostly to the continuous and accelerating state of technological innovation. The things that merely seem unprecedented but actually do have precedent, I think, are often more fundamental things about human life that arise from fundamental aspects of human nature. Deep down, humans don't change nearly as rapidly as our technology does, and thus, the same themes play out over and over again, whether the main source of news (and propaganda) about the unfolding events is newspapers or television or social media. Yes, what's happening in the United States right now is unprecedented in this country in my lifetime, but it's far from unprecedented in human history.

Mr. Barnstaple leaves Utopia feeling invigorated by the hope that the efforts of people like him on Earth would not be in vain, and that one day in the future Earth would become a utopia as well. Reading his story a century later, that seems exceedingly unlikely, but I don't see that as a reason to despair or to give up the fight. Fighting to prevent a dystopia is perhaps even more important than fighting to achieve a utopia. As long as we're able to have those "moments of intensity, hopes, joyful surprises, escapes, attainments" that are provided to us by the privilege of living on this amazing, awful, yet wonderful world, the fighting isn't and wasn't in vain.

In a post I wrote a few months ago, I shared this quotation:
 

 

That was before I read Men Like Gods. After reading it, these words seem even more timely.

Life. It sure is something, isn't it?

Live through this and you won't look back

I've loved music for pretty much my whole life, but 2005 was the year I really became a Music Fan, the year that I started going to concerts all the time and music became one of my main obsessions. And I've loved many, many albums over the course of my life, some from before that era (that set being dominated by Pearl Jam) and countless in the years since, but there will always be a special place in my heart for albums that I fell in love with in the early days of me being a Music Fan. Albums like Rock and Roll Part Three by Ozma, Chutes Too Narrow by the Shins, Let Go by Nada Surf, and Picaresque by The Decemberists. Although not quite as significant in my life, Set Yourself on Fire by Montreal-based indie pop troupe Stars is definitely another such album, so I was very excited when I saw the album's twentieth anniversary tour would be hitting the Beachland Ballroom on February 13.

 

Erin and I went (shout-out to our friends who tag team babysat when our original babysitting plans fell through, making it possible for us to attend) and it was a great show! It was also a timely show, which I'll get to in a bit.

Making this show extra special for me was that, in my 19+ years of being a Stars fan, I'd only previously seen the band live once, also at the Beachland, and that was way back on March 31, 2008. Yes, someone who was born on the day I first saw Stars live would be able to drive by the second time I saw Stars live. Scary, huh? Fun fact (to me, at least), this was a new record for the longest gap between consecutive instances of me seeing a band live, eclipsing the previous record held by Ozma (July 2007 to December 2019, also a 20th anniversary album show).

A really great thing about being a music lover, and a thing that's really cool because you don't know it when you first become a music lover and then you become more and more aware of it the farther into life you get, is that listening to a certain beloved song or album can transport you to a time in your past when you were listening to the same music. Perhaps when you first heard it, or when you were listening to it a lot, or a particularly memorable instance of you hearing it. And the more music you accumulate in your brain over the years, the more opportunities there are for this to happen.

Set Yourself on Fire takes me back to my first year of grad school. Back to a time when I was working in the same lab where I now work, with the love of my life (sea slugs)*, but when my life was otherwise completely and staggeringly different, and there's no way the me of then could have imagined the events between then and now.

*this is an inside joke, the first of many (well, of several) in this post

Thursday's show started out with a lovely set by Toronto singer-songwriter Lydia Persaud, whose powerful voice filled the room. Her soulful songs seemed to command the attention of most of the audience; it's always nice when you don't encounter too much of a notoriously chatty concert crowd, especially during an opener's set.

Persaud was accompanied by guitarist Christine Bougie, who it turned out is her partner. Erin almost instantly recognized Bougie as having been part of the Weather Station's backing band at shows we saw in Toronto in December 2023. I'm frequently in awe of Erin's memory.

 

Not surprisingly, the musicians, both opener and headliner, commented on the horrifying events currently unfolding in the United States. This wasn't the first time I've seen a Canadian artist say something about how they really like Americans and really like playing here and express their sympathy and worry about what's happening to our country. It seems appropriate, so I'll just quote myself from when I wrote about another Weather Station show in September 2021:

There was another thing that [Tamara] Lindeman said during the show that really struck me, in a sad way. She said that it was good to be back in America. She noted that the news from here is "intense" (no kidding!), but whenever she actually comes here, it's really nice. It's a nice place, she said, "and it always will be."

The way she said "and it always will be"... it was one of those things where you say something and the words you use express certainty, but you don't actually feel certain, you actually are just hoping that it will be true.

These really are scary times. And as I drove home, I was thinking about how, when I was a kid, I was told all this stuff about the USA being the greatest country in the world, and a lot of it was BS, but I do think that back then, it was at least generally the case that this country was admired by people in other countries. Nowadays, people in other countries feel bad for us. And for very good reasons! I've been aware of this before, but Lindeman's words really drove it home for me. And it did make me feel sad.

Good lord, how I wish times now were merely as scary as they were in September 2021.

Persaud and Bougie were collecting donations at the merch table for TransOhio and I joined a lot of other audience members chipping in on our way out of the venue.

Set Yourself on Fire is an album that's catchy and beautiful and at times dark but more than that hopeful. Stars are a very earnest band, so much so that when I was a young Jeff, I think I probably felt a little self-conscious about liking some of their especially earnest-sounding songs. I think I'm past that now. Live, they came across as very endearing. The flower arrangement decorating the drumset definitely fit their vibe.

The album begins in a memorable way, the authoritatively declared spoken words "When there is nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire" seguing into the opening notes of "Your Ex-Lover is Dead." Stars' set started the same way, a recording of those familiar words playing, and then the music kicked in and we were off!

There were several points during the show with great audience sing-alongs, and the outro of the opening song was one, with Torquil Campbell urging the crowd to join in singing the repeating line "Live through this and you won't look back." The song is about a breakup, but the words "live through this" seemed to carry an extra sense of urgency in light of, well... *gestures in the general direction of everything* this.

The way the bouncy synth intro of third song "Ageless Beauty" enters on the heels of the dreamy ending of title and second track "Set Yourself on Fire" is one of those perfect moments in music. "Ageless Beauty" is such an infectious song. I was obsessed with the song for a while when I first got the album, and every time I hear it it's easy to understand that obsession. It was a thrill to see live. Amy Millan's vocals really shone. As co-lead vocalists, Campbell and Millan are each indispensable to the Stars sound, and the way their voices played off each other, sometimes within and sometimes between songs, was great to experience up close.

One thing about this album is that it's inextricably linked to an era of time not just in my own life but also in history. Several songs are directly about or seem at least partly inspired by the Iraq War, and it's unsettling to look back on the years of the George W. Bush administration and think about how it seemed like things couldn't get much worse in our country, and then contrast that with what's happening now.

(To be fair, I guess I should mention that the Bush administration was worse for the people of Iraq.)

The lines "Keep watching the sky/'Cause you might get lucky again" from "He Lied About Death" are an obvious 9/11 reference. Indeed, Bush did greatly benefit from the horrific events of that day. Hearing those lines today, though, I can't help but think about how the sky-high approval ratings he experienced in the aftermath of the attacks (peaking around 90%!) could never under any circumstances happen for any American president in our modern hyper-polarized political climate. And yeah, in retrospect I feel silly for having temporarily approved of the job Bush was doing, but the loss of even the possibility of having real national unity in the wake of immense tragedy (see, for example, the conspiracy theories that rapidly spread after the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Helene last year) is just so sad.

There were several small lyric alterations in response to current events. The line "We're gonna chase the demons out of town" in "Soft Revolution" became "We're gonna chase the Nazis out of town."

The liner notes of Set Yourself on Fire, now twenty years old, include the words, "by the time you hear this the world might be ending, or beginning... whatever happens, BURN... goodbye fascists everywhere..." Maybe it's worth reflecting on how the epithet "fascist" has so often been hurled at various people, many of whom were really bad in various ways, but who weren't really fascists. And now here we are, with actual fascists in charge. Like, Elon Musk was literally doing Sieg Heils at the inauguration.

This isn't fun material for a review of a mostly very fun concert, but this is the world in which we live!

The last song of the album, "Calendar Girl," is another one I really love, and it ends the album on a beautiful and hopeful note. Interestingly, I remember long, long ago really loving the lines, "But I can't live forever/I can't always be/One day I'll be sand on a beach by the sea." Interestingly, because that was many years before I felt a strong personal connection to songs grappling with mortality (see: most of Typhoon's discography). The live performance of the song was an acoustic audience sing-along with the band bringing out a trombone and French horn to add to the saxophone that had been nicely utilized through most of the concert. The band and audience together singing "I'm alive... I'm alive..." was really a lovely way to end the main set, another of those special moments that can only exist when you get a band in a room with a group of people who love their music.

I've been seeing more and more of these album anniversary shows in recent years. It seems to be a trend, and it's a trend I like! Seeing a band play a career highlight album front to back and then follow it up with a sort of abbreviated greatest hits selection from the rest of their catalog is a great way to spend an evening. After the thirteen songs of Set Yourself on Fire, Stars ended up playing nine additional songs, and while there are certainly other songs of theirs I wish had been included, every one of the songs was great to experience. I was especially glad to hear "Elevator Love Letter" and "Dead Hearts." At times, I marveled at Millan's ability to still hit the high notes in her songs. Campbell gave an amusing reaction when he, on the other hand, wasn't quite able to in "The Ghost of Genova Heights" and then settled for singing that section at a lower pitch.

Millan wasn't present on stage during that song, then reappeared for encore closer "No One is Lost" wearing a rad "Ageless Beauty" jacket - a fun way to close out the show.

 

Erin hadn't really been familiar with the music of Stars previously, but she "did her Stars homework" before the show and ended up really liking it. It was a great show, and it was great that we could enjoy it together. I feel more and more that music is a fundamental and nearly essential part of human life, and times like these make it all the more apparent.

Life continues to be a roller coaster

Note: I started writing this post about two years ago. Obviously, a lot has happened since then. Life has been very busy. I've been meaning to finish writing this the whole time but various things have gotten in the way. Now I'm finally taking the time to do it. I'm in a very different place in life now than I was when I started writing it, which I'm sure I'll reflect on at the end.

Now, picking up from where I started writing in early 2023...

2022 was, without a doubt, one of the strangest and most difficult years of my life.

When I was in seventh grade, I wrote an autobiography for a school assignment, and its title was Life is a Roller Coaster, a nod to my passionate enthusiasm for the amusement park thrill rides. I wrote a blog post about this several years ago, and near its conclusion, made this observation: "Life is a roller coaster. I'm struck by the fact that when I used that phrase as the title of my seventh grade autobiography, I had no real idea of what was signified by that comparison. I had no idea what a roller coaster my life would be."

Certainly, one could say that the phrase "life is a roller coaster" describes my life more than the average person's. Certainly, one could also say that that was not true during my childhood, when I gave that title to my autobiography. It was an eerie bit of foreshadowing, in retrospect.

In 2022, the Jeff's life as a roller coaster analogy reached new heights. (Heh. I couldn't resist.)

And oddly enough, on one of the most pivotal days of that year, roller coasters appeared in both the metaphorical sense and the literal sense.

On August 21, 2022, I was in New York City and as part of my trip I took the subway to Coney Island in Brooklyn, primarily to ride arguably the most famous roller coaster in the world, the Cyclone. Just as odd was that this was the second time in the last few years that I found myself at Coney Island and also at a major turning point in my life. In fact, thanks mainly to COVID, that previous Coney Island trip in May 2019 was the previous most recent time I'd ridden a roller coaster.

Before I describe the events of August 2022, though, I have to go back to August 2021.

Every year in August, my family takes a vacation to Lake Placid, New York, in the Adirondack Mountains. It's a tradition I cherish. I love it there. I love the scenery and the time with family and the chance to get away from normal life but perhaps most of all I love all the great outdoor activities - hiking and biking and kayaking and swimming. At the beginning of our August 2021 vacation I felt so exhilarated because I was at my best physical fitness level in over a decade.

Something that must be understood if you want to really understand who I am as a person is how central my athletic pursuits have been to my sense of self. Growing up, I probably stood out most to my peers for my academic achievements, but it was far more important to me to be a good cross country and track runner. That was what gave me real feelings of accomplishment. There's just something about pushing one's body to its physical limits and then experiencing the steady improvement as you do that continuously over a period of time that nothing else could match for me. If you asked me in high school or college how I identified myself, the biggest part of the answer would have been as a runner.

It's been many years since I've been able to do any substantial amount of running at all, due to injuries, and this has not been easy for me, but with time, I've been able to move on. Other athletic pursuits have continued to be very important to me.

Another thing that has been central to my life, unfortunately, is my struggles with chronic pain. I can happily say that in recent years I've been doing much better than I had been for most of my life going all the way back to high school. It's not something that I expect will ever completely go away, though.

Something about those myriad chronic pain issues is that they can generally be divided into two bins: pain issues that are caused by anything other than sports injuries, and pain issues that are caused by sports injuries. And the thing is, at any given time there have generally been one or two out of a big grab bag of pain issues that are mainly bothering me, and if what's mainly bothering me is pain not caused by sports injuries, then one of the best remedies for the pain is invariably doing a whole lot of physical activity. But then if I switch to being mainly bothered by pain caused by sports injuries (which might, of course, be brought on by, well, doing a whole lot of physical activity), suddenly doing all that activity makes me feel worse instead of better.

This has led to repeated cycling between times when I was super physically active for a while and times when I wasn't very active, not because I didn't want to be but because of how my body was feeling. Another way my life has been like a roller coaster.

From the spring of 2020 to the summer of 2021 something remarkable happened. For the first time since, really, I was 20 years old, I had a long stretch of time where I felt basically not limited by pain from doing all the physical activity I wanted. Well, with a caveat, I still couldn't run much at all. But cycling, riding my road and mountain bikes, had long ago replaced running as my main form of exercise. Although cycling is easier on my hip and ankles than running is, for most of my post-running career I still felt my body was placing limitations on how much I could do. And then, somehow, it just no longer felt that way.

2020 was such a weird time. I don't have to remind anyone of that. I was so worried about the pandemic and about so much else. But I was also very lucky to suddenly be working from home and able to make my own schedule and there were so many times that summer I just took off on one of my bikes in the afternoon and enjoyed being alive and being outdoors and being healthy and feeling the wind in my face and the air going in and out of my lungs.

As I rode more and more, I got stronger and stronger. I tracked my results on Strava and it started to feel like my old running days. I was doubtful at first that it would last. Always in the past, going back to age 20, there would be some setback and I would have to take time off and lose that fitness. So I tried not to push too hard. But that setback kept not coming. I don't know when exactly it happened, but at some point I started to think, maybe this time was different? Maybe a setback wasn't going to come? Maybe I'd be able to keep getting better at cycling for years and years to come?

It almost seems like a dream now. But it was real and it was amazing.

By the middle of summer 2021 I found that I was in the best shape I had been since I fractured my pelvis in a cycling accident in May 2010. Age 38, and able to ride my bike faster and farther than at any time since before I turned 27. It was so exhilarating.

Taking into account both my fitness and that I was able to do all those rides with a remarkably low level of pain by my standards, I genuinely think that in the summer of 2021 I felt the best physically that I had in 18 years. It's staggering to think about, now that I'm writing it out like this.

(That finishes what I had written in early 2023. Huh, I thought I had gotten farther than that. Oh well.)

But then, that August, as the trip to Lake Placid approached, I started to feel a weird pain in my feet. It felt like a pretty minor issue at first. An unfortunate thing about pain is that there are all sorts of things that feel like minor issues and really are minor issues and will go away on their own, and then there are things that will become major issues, and there's no way to tell them apart at first. As usual, going to Lake Placid, I didn't want to miss out on all the great cycling and hiking I could do there (there's just so much to do, and so little time for it!), so I pushed through the pain. This was probably a mistake in retrospect, but I also suspect that it was already too late, and I was already in for a bad time.

On one of my first days in Lake Placid that year, I set out on a ride on my road bike. It was a ride I'd done once before, in 2009. 2009 was the year when I reached the best physical fitness of my entire life. Thanks to the double whammy of horrible, long-lasting ankle tendinitis brought on by training for a marathon that fall and then the pelvic fracture when I crashed my bike the following spring, I had never since reached anywhere near that level of fitness.

This ride was a 36.7 mile loop with over 2600 feet of climbing within it, easily the hilliest ride I've done in my life. I titled my August 10, 2021 activity on Strava "The 2009 loop." On August 10, 2009, exactly 12 years earlier, I'd averaged 18.7 mph on the ride (two months and one day later, incidentally, I would come in second place in the first and only marathon I've ever run). In 2021 I averaged 18.2 mph. I was tantalizingly close to being in the best shape - on a bike, at least - that I'd ever been in.

I remember well how I felt upon completing that ride. Exhausted, but also exhilarated, and full of endorphins, and so powerful. It was an incredible feeling. It felt like I was on top of the world.

It wasn't long after that I felt like everything was falling apart.

(An odd thing about the life as a roller coaster metaphor is that on an actual roller coaster, the downhill parts are the most fun.)

I had a great time on the 2021 Lake Placid trip and when I returned home I kept up with my busy training schedule, getting out on one or the other of my bikes most days and continuing to set numerous Strava segment PRs. But it was starting to feel like that pain in my feet was not just a minor issue. It was sticking around and growing worse and then in mid-September it kind of suddenly got really bad and I realized, damn, this is a problem, I have to take things easy for a while.

This didn't lead to an immediate improvement. In fact, at first the pain just seemed to get worse. I recognized what was happening because I'd experienced it before. Being in a lot of pain feels really bad. Not being able to ride my bike very much when riding my bike had become my favorite thing to do? Also a really bad feeling. That added up to me being depressed. If I was struggling with my mental health for other reasons, riding my bike would be the best treatment. Now riding my bike made my pain worse. Maybe just going for a nice walk? That also seemed to make my pain worse.

All in all, a recipe for deepening depression.

Just as this was happening, my at-the-time girlfriend was falling into a bad period of mental health herself - and as a result, was withdrawing into herself and largely pushing other people away from her. This meant that suddenly, just when I really needed a lot of emotional support, I was hardly ever seeing the one person I had regularly spent time with since the pandemic started.

I don't know if I really blame her for it even now. She was in a very bad place and I don't know how much control she had over how she reacted. But it was definitely a sign that a relationship that had at first seemed great actually had serious compatibility issues.

Anyway, the whole thing really sucked.

And then, in the ensuing months, a bunch of really, really crazy stuff happened. I don't feel like spending time on it in this post. If you know, you know.

Fast forward to August 2022. At the start of the Lake Placid trip, in contrast to the previous year, I was in a horrible place. I think it was obvious to my parents when I showed up at the house they always rent. I'd spent the summer trying to salvage a relationship that should have been left for dead and it was really one of the bleakest periods of time in my life because something that had once made me so happy now only made me incredibly sad. I was also still not feeling great physically - the pain that started the previous summer had improved, but was still very much present, and I continued to feel limited in what I could do.

My spirits did rise considerably over the course of the two weeks on vacation. It was nice to spend time with my family, and I did enjoy a lot of outdoor activities, albeit on a limited basis compared to the previous year. At the end of the trip, rather than driving back to Cleveland as I normally would, I drove to New York City for a two-night stay (at a hotel in Jersey City) centered around seeing Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen, and Julien Baker at the last stop of their Wild Hearts tour, at SummerStage in Central Park.

Although the two weeks in Lake Placid had helped my mood considerably, it plummeted again when I got to Jersey City. Spending time with my family and especially my parents (the last few days in Lake Placid, after both my siblings had departed, was the longest period of Jeff and parents with no one else around that had happened since I became a big brother at age 2) had helped me feel better, but now I was alone again. Alone, again, for a trip to a concert that I'd originally planned to attend with someone else. Alone, thinking about all the previous times I'd been in similar situations - on trips to see concerts for which I'd purchased two tickets and then, for one reason or another, had ended up going alone. Toronto in September 2013 to see Ohbijou. Denver in June 2015 to see Belle and Sebastian. Portland, Maine in December 2021 to see Weakened Friends. Denver again in June 2022 to see Andrew Bird. And now New York.

I actually often really enjoy going on trips like that by myself. Sometimes I plan them as solo trips. But I was getting tired of having planned trips for two turn into solo trips.

I was getting tired of being alone, and being alone that evening left me with little to distract me from contemplating the horrible trainwreck my love life had turned into, and feeling miserable about it.

I did go to Liberty State Park along the water in Jersey City and it was a lovely evening with a beautiful sunset and great views of the NYC skyline. One thing I saw while there was a public wedding proposal. Actually, I noticed that some props were being set up for a public wedding proposal, and I hung around for quite a while (along with some other curious onlookers) to see the proposal take place. This was an interesting decision on my part, looking back. It was a cute thing to witness, but it was also very much a reminder of my own problems.

The next day, August 21, 2022, was a day like no other I've lived. In the roller coaster of life, there are some dramatic ups and downs. Perhaps never before have I experienced such dramatic ups and downs in a single day as I did on that day.

That evening was the concert in Central Park. My plan for the day was to travel by train from Jersey City to Coney Island, spend some time there, and then get on the train again and head to Central Park to get to the concert close to when the gates opened.

That morning I felt just as glum as the previous evening. In addition to being alone, another thing that was getting me down was that, thanks to me (predictably) pushing perhaps harder than I should have on outdoor activities in Lake Placid, my feet and ankles were again really bothering me a lot, and with my planned day including spending a lot of time on my feet, I was very worried that this would make it hard to enjoy myself - especially at the concert! Which would really suck, if that did happen.

Something I've realized about pain is that if you are thinking about and worrying about something hurting in a particular situation, there's a good chance that just thinking about it will make it hurt more.

It was about an hour and a half train ride from Jersey City to Coney Island including one transfer. On the train, I was listening to music, looking out the windows at the city scenery, and worrying about whether I'd be able to enjoy what should by all rights have been a very exciting day ahead of me.

And then something remarkable happened.

The Cyclone roller coaster came into view through the train windows, and my mood instantly transformed.

I've loved roller coasters since childhood. I remember how incredibly excited I felt about going to Cedar Point as a kid, looking out the car window at the coasters looming in the distance. As an adult, riding roller coasters stopped being something I do frequently... but that feeling of excitement never went away. An anticipatory feeling that can also be stirred in me by going to see one of my very favorite bands in concert, but by few other things in my adult life. "Like a kid on Christmas morning" is a common descriptor for the feeling.

And yes, sitting in that train car, where moments before I'd felt worried and sad, upon seeing the Cyclone out the window I suddenly felt like a kid on Christmas morning.

Minutes later I departed the train, walked the short walk to the famous Coney Island amusement park, and quickly obtained a card to pay for rides and made my way to the queue for the Cyclone.

As a young roller coaster fanatic in the 1990s, I'd read on the Internet about how this ride, built in 1927, remained one of the most thrilling in the world, and was a destination for any diehard coaster enthusiast. I'd always wanted to ride it but never got around to it until 2019, and it had lived up to the expectations that I'd carried with me (dormant and not thought of for many of those years) since childhood. There's just something about these old wooden roller coasters that exhilarates me in a way that few fancy modern rides can quite match. Far too few of them remain with us, and thank goodness that the Cyclone, regarded since its debut nearly a century ago as one of the best, is one.

Seeing the Cyclone had a profound effect on how I felt that day. Riding the Cyclone had an even more profound effect.

The wait for the ride was short. This is kind of amazing. One of the most important roller coasters in history, and still arguably one of the best in the world, on a hot summer weekend day. The Millennium Force at Cedar Point, one of the only roller coasters I like at least as much as I like the Cyclone, surely had hour-long waits that day. I think most people don't appreciate what they have with these classic wooden coasters, but hey, I'm not complaining about the short queues that result from this lack of appreciation.

I boarded the train, we exited the station and started up the lift hill, and that kid on Christmas morning feeling intensified.

As I mentioned, I'd been experiencing a lot of pain in my lower extremities, and was very worried about how I'd hold up in a day that would include a lot of time on my feet, something that invariably made such pain worse. I was especially worried about the concert that evening.

The train crested the lift hill, I let out a whoop of delight as we plunged downward, and I forgot about the pain.

This is normal. Pain has a huge mental component, and one of the best ways to reduce pain is to be distracted from it. A physical therapist of mine once used the example that if you were crossing the street and stepped on something sharp that went into your foot, you'd be in a lot of pain. But if a large truck were bearing down on you when this happened and you had to scramble to avoid being run over, in that moment you wouldn't even notice the pain from stepping on something sharp.

The ride was just as intense and fun as I remembered - so many sudden drops and turns and exhilarating g-forces and "headchopper" moments where you feel like you have to duck to avoid the coaster's structure (of course you don't really need to, but it looks this way) and for those two minutes I wasn't aware of that physical pain that had been bothering me so much earlier that morning, and that wasn't surprising, but what was surprising was this: for the entire rest of the day, the pain was at a dramatically lower level than it had been before I stepped into that roller coaster train.

It really felt like a magic spell had been cast over me!

My mood, naturally, was also much improved from where it had been earlier that morning and especially how it had been the previous evening. As you can see, I felt quite exuberant on the ride, and this feeling lingered:

(I'm wearing my beloved Julien Baker t-shirt in this picture, by the way.)

I spent a couple hours at Coney Island, enjoying a few more rides on the Cyclone, a couple of rides on newer and far inferior but still enjoyable coasters, a little walk on the beach, and a chili cheese dog and fries from Nathan's.

The last thing I did at Coney Island, of course, was one last ride on the Cyclone, and then I walked back to the train station and boarded the train for another nearly hour and a half ride to Central Park. My spirits were much higher than they'd been when I'd boarded the train that morning.

I arrived at the Park with plenty of time to spare, and spent a little time walking around, and also grabbed a (mediocre) pretzel to eat before heading to the venue. I'd heard about SummerStage at Central Park before but had never been there. I was surprised when I got in because I'd been expecting something bigger. It was a really nice setting for an outdoor concert on a good day for one. Before finding a spot close to the stage, I went to the merch table and bought this tote bag, not knowing at the time just how accurate it would be:

The show started early in the evening with a short set by opener Quinn Christopherson, which I enjoyed but which was basically a distraction before the three performers who I could hardly believe I'd all get to see in one night: Julien Baker, Angel Olsen, and Sharon Van Etten. Three women who have all made music I love and cherish and three women who had each previously played live shows tied to significant moments and memories in my life.

Baker was the first of the three to play. She's blown me away with her live performances every time I've gotten the privilege to see her (this was the fifth in person, plus one of my favorite streamed shows of the pandemic era), going back to the first time in July 2016 when this tiny young woman whose music I'd never heard before stepped onto the stage of Mr. Smalls in Millvale, PA to play an opening set for Daughter and left me utterly in awe with her heartwrenchingly beautiful music. The only thing I wished were different about this show would have been longer sets, and Baker's was especially short, but she made the most of the limited time. The set mostly consisted of songs from 2021 album Little Oblivions, one of my favorite albums of the 2020s.

 

Baker always brings such intensity to her performances and it's a marvel to see and hear. It's hard to believe that that voice emerges from the lungs of such a physically small person.

This was the final show of the Wild Hearts tour. Near the end of Baker's last song "Ziptie," numerous members of the tour crew and other bands (including Sharon Van Etten herself) emerged onto the stage to rock out to the extended outro, and it was a delight to see - especially because Baker herself seemed so delighted!

It was a joyous moment. I'd been riding an emotional high for much of the day, pretty much since I'd arrived at Coney Island, a gigantic contrast to how I'd felt the previous evening. But now the emotional roller coaster continued. After Julien Baker came the performance by Angel Olsen.

Angel Olsen's music was inextricably linked for me to the failing relationship that was the cause of most of my emotional distress that summer. When the relationship had been good, I'd liked listening to Olsen's music. When things went downhill and I started to really doubt the relationship would work, I mostly stopped listening to Olsen's music because it just made me feel sad.

After what had been a great day to that point, when Angel Olsen stepped onto the stage to begin her set, I found myself awash in the same melancholy feeling that had consumed me for much of that summer.

Olsen had released her new album Big Time in June, but I still hadn't been able to bring myself to listen to it, which was pretty telling considering how much I'd loved her previous two albums. I'd merely watched, once, the video for title track "Big Time." The song is a really sweet love song, a happy song, which is pretty unusual in Olsen's catalog. Since it was the title track, and it was a happy love song, I had the impression that this album would be much less sad in lyrical content than most of Olsen's work.

Because I hadn't listened to her new album other than that one song, this concert was my introduction to most of the songs Olsen played that evening. She opened her set with "Dream Thing" from the new album and I stood there and watched and felt miserable. She played "Big Time" next and my misery deepened because I was absolutely not in a place where I wanted to hear Angel Olsen play a happy love song.

But then something funny happened.

The third song in the set was another new song, "Ghost On." The opening lines of the song go thusly:

Tell me how I should feel
How can this heart learn how to heal?
When should I believe the things you say?
You change your mind from day to day

And those words shot straight into my heart because they matched so well with the thoughts and feelings I'd been having about that relationship.

No, Angel Olsen's new album was not an album of happy love songs. The title track, it turned out, was an outlier.

The funny thing that happened was, I started to feel better.

It's interesting how when you're feeling sad, sometimes hearing happy music can make you feel more sad, and hearing sad music can make you feel less sad.

The haunting performance of "Ghost On" had already shaken me from my melancholy. The next song in the setlist was another I'd never heard before, "Right Now." The first line of that song?

It's time to let it go

I think I probably laughed a little to myself at that point. Okay, I see what's happening here, I thought.

 

 

The next two songs were the only songs not from Olsen's new album, "Shut Up Kiss Me" from 2016's My Woman and the title track from 2019's All Mirrors. These were songs that I loved and that I hadn't much felt like listening to for quite some time, but now I was getting into the music. Next up was another new song, "Go Home." Choice lyric?

We watched it all burn down and did nothing, nothing

Yeah, pretty much! I thought.

Olsen closed her set with yet another song I'd never heard before, "All the Good Times." She introduced the song by saying, "Y'all ever been mad before? Me too, and when I do, it's kind of funny!"

 

(This is a direct quote. There are several YouTube videos people have posted from that concert that I've repeatedly gone back to and watched.)

It's probably one of the best breakup songs I've ever heard. And whereas in earlier songs from the set, there was a line here or there that stuck out to me, in this song pretty much every single line was relatable.

 

And I guess that was exactly what I needed to hear at that moment in time.

 

After Olsen sang the lines, "Was it always so broken? If these thoughts were spoken/Would it bring us together again?", she sardonically interjected the spoken "Definitely not" and I sardonically smiled, laughed and nodded.

My mood had been completely transformed over the course of that set. And looking back on it, it's really interesting to think about what exactly happened in my mind over the course of those 45 or so minutes.

Sharon Van Etten closed out the night, and whereas Angel Olsen's set had me working through all sorts of complicated feelings, Van Etten's was just a delight. It had been eight years since I'd seen one of her concerts, so I'd been eagerly anticipating getting to finally see her again, and she did not disappoint.

Van Etten emerged on the stage dressed in a sequined top and leather pants and along with her hair and makeup, as she began her performance I couldn't help but think how simply badass she looked.

This is a screenshot from a YouTube video posted by joelrchan.

 

She just had this aura about her that felt thrilling to be near. Julien Baker's performance had been in broad daylight; the sun had gone down during Angel Olsen's. It was now fully night and the light show illuminating Sharon Van Etten's shiny outfit gave her such rock star vibes.

A highlight of her fantastic set was "Mistakes" from 2022 album We've Been Going About This All Wrong. Van Etten introduced the song by talking about how she had always felt very self conscious about dancing, until she had a child, and when she danced with her child, she no longer felt self conscious, because it didn't matter what she looked like; she loved dancing with her child!

When I make a mistake
Turns out it's great, it's great, it's great

I loved this story and I love this song. Throughout the more up tempo songs in her set, Van Etten danced exuberantly, confidently, sometimes in a silly way but always in a joyful way that was delightful to witness. Dancing is such a great thing and I sometimes think about how people who are too self conscious to do it - at a wedding, at a rock or pop concert, even in the privacy of their homes - are really missing out on a great part of the human experience.

The show, and the Wild Hearts Tour, ended with Baker and Olsen joining Van Etten on stage to play "Like I Used To," a Van Etten/Olsen collaboration that was easily one of the best songs of 2022 and that I can't believe still hasn't been released in any physical format. It was such a joy to experience and you could see the joy on the faces of all those on stage as well, which was wonderful. I marvel again and again at the power of music and the wondrous effects it has both on those performing and on those listening to it, especially in a live setting. 

Another screenshot from a joelrchan YouTube video.

As the trio soaked up the raucous applause and I enthusiastically contributed to it, I found myself thinking, Wow, that was one of the best concerts I've ever seen. Pretty remarkable that that morning I had been worried about whether I'd be able to enjoy the concert. Also pretty remarkable that partway through the concert I'd been plunged back into a deep melancholy and had again emerged from it and now felt on top of the world. It had been a roller coaster of a day and it was a day I didn't want to end!

I joined the crowds walking out of Central Park and went to a nearby subway station, but instead of heading directly back to Jersey City I first made a stop for a late dinner (having not yet actually eaten dinner that day) at one of my favorite restaurants in the world, Coppelia.

There I sat at the bar and enjoyed a drink, an appetizer, an entree, another drink, and dessert (an especially delicious tres leches cake), and also just kind of enjoyed the feeling of being alive and being unreservedly happy. On my many solo travels I've come to find there's great pleasure in going out to eat alone and consuming some really good food and drink while also just sitting there and taking it all in, the other people in the restaurant, all the interesting little things that people say or do in the little moments of life. I think my appreciation of such experiences has greatly heightened since the pandemic.

Coppelia was a great nightcap to a great day. I then returned to the train and eventually to Jersey City, where I ended up walking some ways on a very lonely path next to the water before reaching my hotel. It was a little eerie. It was also beautiful.

I was in a still exhilarated yet also contemplative mood as I stared back across the water at the city. I marveled at it all. The sky. The buildings. The amazing day I'd just had. My crazy life.

Emotions are funny things. If you're in a really bad emotional state, it can feel like you'll feel that way forever and it can be hard to imagine feeling better. Then when you do feel better, it can seem like there's no reason why you shouldn't just stay feeling better and it can be hard to imagine you'll ever feel that bad again. But emotions are transient.

At the end of that magical day, I felt like I was so ready to just put all the bad stuff behind me and that my life was simply going to be better going forward.

Of course, it wasn't that simple in reality.

The emotional roller coaster wasn't over.

Once I got into a relationship with Erin, a relationship that (unlike my previous few) had basically no real reason it shouldn't work, things seemed perfect at first but then it was like my brain couldn't accept it and had to make up obstacles to the relationship succeeding.

I was wracked with horrendous anxiety, something that had been a long-running theme of my dating and relationship experiences ever since my first relationship as a widowed person traumatically ended. The relationship before Erin was one in which I frequently experienced dramatic mood swings as I cycled between feeling good and bad about the relationship, and now it seemed like somehow my brain had become entrained to those cycles and I would go back and forth between feeling totally at ease and happy with Erin and feeling deeply, viscerally uncomfortable - a pretty horrible way to feel when you know intellectually that the person you're with is a really good match for you.

It's been suggested to me by others that the feelings I was getting might be some form of PTSD or panic disorder. It was very hard to predict when, how intensely, and for how long these feelings would strike. The only predictable thing was that if I was feeling good, at some point I would start to feel a lot worse, and conversely, if I was feeling bad, at some point I would start to feel better.

"No feeling is final." These words from Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Go to the Limits of Your Longing," which Erin shared with me when I was having a bad anxiety episode, became a mantra. (Extended quote: "Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final." Words to live by for sure.) When I was feeling really bad, and it was hard to imagine not feeling that way, I'd repeat the words to myself, "No feeling is final."

I think it helped.

Erin was very patient and helpful. She also got me to do at-home yoga with her. For a while we did it (either together, or separately on days we didn't see each other) almost every day. This also helped.

It was a long journey. There were a number of times when some significant experience or event happened and then I felt like I was all the way better and the feeling persisted for some time and I imagined concluding this post by saying something to the effect of, "and then [x] happened, and after that, the emotional roller coaster was finally over." Examples: Erin and I moving in together and then going on a great camping trip to Ohiopyle, Erin and I eloping in Yosemite... also several really good concerts. That's something really interesting I noticed. There were multiple occasions when I had been feeling pretty troubled emotionally and then I went to a really good concert and after that I just felt so much better and my head felt so clear, and not just in the immediate aftermath of the concert but for weeks. I'd love to understand the neural basis for that effect!

But over and over again, I'd go from feeling better to once more feeling very unsettled with life. For no rational reason, which I was perfectly aware of, and that made it all the more frustrating.

Gradually, though, the bad times became less frequent and usually less severe, and I started being more and more able to just enjoy finally having, well, I guess something like a normal life. Which I guess was what I was striving for all along, but I was also so used to having a crazy and traumatic life that it was difficult for my brain to accept at first.

Maybe those weird, anxious feelings won't ever be 100% banished 100% of the time, but for the last few months I'm finally at a point where I feel at least almost all the way better, almost all the time. There were a lot of things I did to help me get there, but I think two things were really the most important:

1. The passage of time. Time may not actually heal all wounds, but I think almost all wounds do become less painful given enough time.
2. Getting married to a great partner, and then having an amazing baby with her!

It's funny how events of the past are continuously recontextualized by our feelings in the present. All those difficult times in the early days of my relationship with Erin, that seemed so big and hard to overcome at the time, are collapsing more and more into a minor hiccup in our lives. And August 21, 2022? It was a tumultuous and thrilling and beautiful day when it happened. Looking back now, it feels like something more: a portal between the chaotic life I had leading up to that day, and the mostly happy and contented life I now enjoy.

The next time I got to ride a roller coaster after that day was in October 2023 at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, days after Erin and I got married. About nine and a half months later (people will be doing the math!), Erin gave birth to our daughter. Life is a roller coaster, indeed! And I'm sure it will continue to be a wild ride - but I also feel like, for the first time in most of my adult years, the emotional roller coaster aspect of my life has, well, pulled into the station and I've exited it for a while.

I wonder what little 12-year-old Jeff would think of all this.

How did it come to this?

The day after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, I said that the only other events that were comparable in how they'd made me feel were 9/11 and my first wife Cara's death. Looking back eight years later, there was absolutely no hyperbole in that statement.

It's a little unsettling how Donald Trump's second election to the presidency, while still extremely upsetting, isn't eliciting nearly as strong an emotional reaction in me - this despite his second election being a much worse event than his first. I don't think it would be out of line to suggest that this is the worst thing that has happened in our country in my lifetime. But Trump's first term in office and the COVID pandemic made me more than a little numb to bad things happening in the news. And, of course, this election result wasn't a shock in the way the 2016 result was. We were more prepared for the possibility.

On the bright side, another reason 2016 was so hard on me was that I was alone. Now I'm married to a wonderful partner in Erin and we have a beautiful three month old daughter. A daughter whose future I worry about deeply, but whose presence is an incredible source of comfort and joy.

A man who has been described as a fascist by people who worked in his first administration, who incited a violent insurrection and attempted to install himself as a dictator after losing the 2020 election, and who is a thoroughly reprehensible person in every way has just been elected to be the most powerful person in the world. It's a really bad situation! It leaves us to wonder, how is this possible? How did this happen to our country?

I have a lot of thoughts on that, but I'll just briefly summarize what I think are the three most important points:

1. Our country was founded on the idea of "all men" being "created equal" but on the reality of Black people being enslaved, and much of our country was originally built on slave labor. The Civil War ended slavery, but the whole history of the country since then has been a struggle between people fighting for the principles of equality on which the country was ostensibly founded, and people fighting to keep the racial hierarchy in place. Whenever there's major progress toward equality, there's a backlash. Reconstruction happened after the Civil War, and the backlash led to Jim Crow. A Black man was elected president, and the backlash spawned the MAGA movement.

2. For the last thirty or so years, Fox News and other right-wing media outlets have been waging a propaganda campaign that has now caused a large segment of the population to be thoroughly detached from reality on most of the issues affecting their votes. Perhaps even worse, whereas 20 years ago most of the leading GOP politicians were probably in on the scam and just using their duped audience to get more tax cuts for the rich, now many of the important figures have grown up on this propaganda diet and are themselves true believers in the cult. The ease of spread of misinformation on the Internet, of course, makes this all worse.

3. Specific to the 2024 election, the economy and inflation since the end of the pandemic led to an incredibly strong anti-incumbency voting environment worldwide. No incumbent party won a national election this year (which had never happened before), and Democrats in the U.S. did better than most. That's likely the main reason Republicans won this particular election, whereas points 1 and 2 are my postulated reasons for the emergence of the insane Trumpist cult and its takeover of one of our two major parties.

Those are my thoughts on how our country got into its current terrible condition. But that's not really what this post is about.

What I find really remarkable, looking at it all, is not that this catastrophe happened in the country I was taught as a child was the greatest on Earth. What I find really remarkable is, well, everything.

Everything about human society. Everything that human beings have accomplished. How? How did it all happen?

Collective human achievement

There are so many amazing things that humanity has achieved. We often take it for granted, but if you take a moment to think about it, it's really quite staggering. We've risen from primitive hunter-gatherer ancestors to create a world-spanning civilization. We've sent humans to the moon and sent space probes to the farthest reaches of our solar system, where we can still communicate with them from Earth many decades after they were launched. We've cracked the genetic code underlying life. We've created vaccines that have saved hundreds of millions of human lives. We've created tremendous and awe-inspiring works of art and culture and music. We've created various modes of transit enabling individuals to cover distances unimaginable on foot, from the airplane to the bicycle (the most efficient form of transportation there is). We've created a global communications network on which we can almost instantaneously look up almost any piece of human knowledge. The list goes on and on and on.

What's really awe-inspiring about all this is that none of these things could ever have been accomplished by a single person starting from scratch. In fact, the distance from what a single person starting from scratch could accomplish to what humanity has accomplished is so vast that it seems absurd. Everything we take for granted in life is the result of the cumulative work of countless other humans over tens and hundreds and thousands of years. It's all been built up over those years on scaffolding built by the people who came before. And for that scaffolding to hold, a functional society, in one form or another, had to exist.

Human beings did not evolve to live in a society like the one in which we live. We evolved to live in small groups of people without any of the technology that makes modern society possible and without any knowledge of what was happening in the rest of the world. Over the last few millennia and especially the last few centuries, the pace of evolution of human society has vastly outstripped the pace of our biological evolution. Biologically, a human today isn't tremendously different from a human ten thousand years ago. Take a newborn from today and transport them to ten thousand years in the past, or take a newborn from ten thousands years in the past and transport them to today, and they'd not be aware of anything amiss and would grow up a totally normal member of the society to which they'd been transported. But do the same time travel with an adult, and they'd be utterly befuddled by the strange world they found.

I don't think there's any other species for which this would be true, certainly not to nearly the same extent as it would be for humans.

I'm of the firm belief that the human brain is the most amazing thing in the known universe. A biological supercomputer in an organism that evolved over billions of years from primitive single-celled ancestors and can perform so many incredible computations and feats, the underlying mechanisms of which we're only beginning to understand. One of my favorite things about my brain is that in its neural networks are stored tens of thousands of different songs (some stored with higher fidelity than others). How do our brains do that? Why do our brains do that? And that's far from the most amazing thing about the brain.

All the amazing feats of humanity I listed are the accomplishments of the human brain, but not just one human brain, thousands upon thousands of human brains collaborating across both space and time.

But something that takes millennia to build can be destroyed in an instant.

The human brain is an amazing thing, but it has many failure modes, and it wasn't designed to deal with the complexities of the modern world. Given the right (or wrong) circumstances, a whole bunch of human brains might collectively decide that electing someone like Donald Trump to be their leader is a good idea.

Democracy

Our country was founded nearly 250 years ago as a representative democracy. It wasn't the first attempt at a democratic system of government in history, but at the time, it was a big divergence from how nations were typically run. The founders of our country were embarking on a grand experiment, one they feared wouldn't last. Benjamin Franklin was famously quoted as answering, when asked if our government would be a republic or a monarchy, "a republic, if you can keep it."

And to quote a timely and unsettling recent Atlantic article by Tom Nichols:

[George] Washington feared that, amid constant political warfare, some citizens would come to “seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual,” and that eventually a demagogue would exploit that sentiment.

Clearly, Donald Trump is the sort of demagogue that Washington feared. Trump frequently expresses admiration for dictators, would enjoy being one himself, and already tried to make himself one four years ago. (Note: if you disagree with these statements despite the mountains upon mountains of evidence, no amount of evidence will ever convince you, and this post probably isn't for you.)

It seems remarkable, given that Trump has now been voted into office not just once but twice, that in the previous nearly two and a half centuries no one of that nature had ever been elected to the presidency. Quite a few previous presidents did despicable things, some assaulted democratic norms in certain ways, but none ever tried to keep their hold on power when their time in office was up. All respected the founding principle of our country that power lies with the people and not with any one man. All until Trump.

Why did this happen now and never before? Is there something special about our present era, or was it a fluke occurrence? The sample size is just too small (n = 1 would-be despots among 45 men who have held the presidency) to draw any conclusion.

It is important to note that America didn't truly become a full-fledged representative democracy until less than 60 years ago with the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It's possible that democracy will both have been achieved and ended in this country within my parents' lifetimes. Will we still have free and fair elections in four years? I'm hopeful, but I wouldn't place a bet in either direction.

Democracy, it seems, is a fragile thing. Every time there's an election and the ruling party loses, for democracy to continue, they have to cede power. Every time. If just one time, those in charge decide not to respect the results of an election, they get their followers on board, and they have their hands firmly enough on the levers of power to succeed in their scheme, then bam, no more democracy. After the 2020 election Trump decided not to respect the results and got a lot of his followers on board but he didn't have enough control of the levers of power and there were still enough safeguards in place. Will that still be true if Trump or another MAGA Republican tries the same thing in the future?

Going from democracy to authoritarianism seems much simpler than the reverse. In the 1930s, Germany went from democracy to authoritarianism. Going back to democracy only happened after the fascist regime lost a horrifically bloody World War. That's not a typical course of events and not one that anyone would hope to see happen! The 1930s also saw a fascist movement in America. Perhaps it was because we fought the Nazis in WWII that the idea "fascism is bad" became strongly enough ingrained in the American identity for it to take most of a century before the resurgence of such a movement. Long enough for memories of that devastating war to have faded.

Anyway, I guess one aspect of "how did it come to this?" is "how has democracy even persisted for this long?"

Trying to understand a complex world

As I already stated, the human brain was not meant to understand a world as big and complex as ours. The decisions that voters make depend in part on how they understand the world. But do most voters, in any meaningful sense, understand the world?

In our modern world, we have access to just such an overwhelming amount of information. How can the average person filter out the good information from the bad? Honestly, in many cases, I doubt it's even possible. And once someone starts down the path of a given system of beliefs, algorithms just provide more and more information to reinforce those beliefs, regardless of the accuracy of that information.

It's no wonder that so many people believe so many untrue things. But was it any different in the past?

People today have access to far more information than people in any previous era of history. And a huge amount of that information is bad information. But it's not like people in the past were getting only good information.

Think about someone 50 years ago. 100 years ago. 200 years ago. How was their understanding of the world formed? They didn't have the Internet. They could get information from things like school, newspapers, books, people they knew, or authority figures in religion, business, politics, etc. There's no guarantee that most of that information was accurate, and undoubtedly, a lot of it wasn't. And today it's at least possible for an ordinary person to find accurate information on just about any given topic. In the early years of our nation's existence, there was no way to do this!

So yes, the explosion of misinformation today makes it hard for people to correctly understand what's going on in the world. But were most people in the past any better able to understand the world than most people today are? I doubt it.

Another important point is that whether people were getting their information from newspapers and authority figures in their community or whether they're getting it from the Internet and cable TV, people who already have money and power have a baked in advantage at getting their views out and influencing people's beliefs. Propaganda is effective.

Although I doubt that average people's understanding of the world has gotten significantly worse over time, I do have some speculation on how the changing information environment might contribute to the mess we find ourselves in today.

One, although propaganda has always existed and has always been effective, I think that cable TV, the Internet, and the consolidation of media from many independent sources to largely being controlled by a handful of corporations have together made it much easier for certain bad actors to capture a large portion of the population with the same coordinated propaganda messages. A century ago, a rich businessman who wanted to control what people thought of him might have purchased a newspaper that served one city, or maybe even a few newspapers for a few cities. Today, someone like that might buy, oh, Twitter? That is, one of the major means of disseminating and discussing news for the entire world.

Two, I think that the fact that we have access to so much information might give people misplaced confidence in their own understanding of the world. Maybe in the past, most people accepted that they didn't really understand the bigger picture of how the world works because they didn't have access to much information on how it works. So maybe they placed more confidence in authority figures, who often did understand things at least better than the average person did. Today a lot of people are very confident in beliefs about how the world works that are totally detached from reality, and think they know better than authority figures (on topics such as, for example, vaccines) when they really don't.

Three, I think the Internet has a big reinforcing effect on extreme beliefs. Before the Internet, people's views were more influenced by other people in their physical communities. If you started getting into a really crazy belief system, it wouldn't be likely that everyone around you would have those same crazy beliefs. The information you got from people around you could pull you back toward reality. Today, if you believe something crazy, you can find a community of like-minded individuals online and get most of your information from that online bubble, and then your crazy beliefs will just be pulled more and more toward craziness.

That's just speculation, though, and the general statement that most people have never had a good understanding of how the world works and have never made truly well-informed decisions when selecting their leaders is one I feel pretty confident about!

Evidence

I'm a scientist. From childhood, I've been passionate about learning things, acquiring knowledge about the amazing world in which we live. As a child, I did this mainly by reading books. Acquiring knowledge through reading continues to be something I love, but an exciting aspect of my career is acquiring new knowledge - knowledge that not only I didn't have before, but no one had before.

To make a claim of a new piece of knowledge, one should have strong evidence for that claim. I inhabit a world where arguments are made by accumulating evidence for the argument and presenting it in an organized, logical way. To me, if you want to convince someone to your point of view, that's the best way to do it. So I've spent a lot of time in my life, especially on the Internet, presenting a pile of evidence, data and graphs and explanations, to try to persuade people to my perspective on various issues. I'm not saying that my perspective has always been right, but that's how I operate.

I've come to realize that most of the time, this doesn't actually work.

If someone strongly believes in something, most of the time you can present all the evidence in the world to them and even if their belief is utterly wrong and the evidence shows it's wrong, their mind isn't going to be changed.

In the case of the 2024 election, the deciding issue, the reason Democrats were in an almost impossible position as the incumbent party, was the state of the economy and inflation. And you could show people graphs that illustrate how inflation has been a worldwide problem and how since the pandemic ended it's dropped more in the U.S. than it has in peer nations, so it makes no sense to blame inflation on the Biden administration. You could show people articles about how basically all credible experts say Trump's proposed policies would be terrible for the economy. A reasoned, evidence-based argument would show that voting for Trump because of the economy and inflation is at best horribly misguided. But this literally doesn't matter to most voters.

Something that I've noticed about myself and that I've come to feel is fairly unusual is that if I believe something and then come across solid evidence that seems to contradict that belief, I get excited and want to learn more so I can better understand the topic and update my beliefs. In my first ever research project, I set out to find evidence supporting a hypothesis that I was initially led to believe was probably correct, but I eventually discovered that the hypothesis was probably incorrect, and I very enthusiastically pursued and laid out the evidence.

Most people, it seem, just don't function in that way. If they already believe something, showing them evidence to the contrary doesn't seem to make much difference. This is often true even with scientists, I've found. Other scientists I've worked with have been very tied to certain pet hypotheses and are very resistant to accepting evidence that those hypotheses are wrong. I'm not saying I'm immune to this - we all have our biases - but I honestly do feel a certain glee in accumulating evidence to dismantle a belief that I previously held! I can think of multiple times I've done this!

I think that no belief should be held too strongly unless the evidence for it is overwhelming, and I think that's a philosophy that more people should follow, but that's not the reality of how people form beliefs. People come to very strongly believe things based on scant or misleading evidence, and after that happens, showing them that the evidence against their belief is overwhelming is usually (not always, but usually) a pointless exercise.

Everyone believes lots of things that aren't true. Most people very strongly believe in some things that aren't true, to the extent that trying to change their minds using evidence and logic is pointless. Some of those beliefs are more harmful than others. And some of those beliefs are more widespread than others. Some very widespread and very harmful incorrect beliefs have basically formed the basis for the existence of the MAGA cult, with consequences such as (among many others) a violent insurrection attempt and hundreds of thousands of preventable COVID deaths among people who didn't get vaccinated. But people from all parts of the political spectrum also strongly hold various other incorrect beliefs.

This has undoubtedly always been true, and I think it's really interesting to consider this when we think about not only the problems we face, but also about all the great things humans have achieved.

Discovery 

So much of what we take for granted about modern life could not exist without scientific discovery. Doing good science is hard work. It's not for everyone. It requires inquisitiveness, sharp observation skills, critical thinking, an ability to evaluate the strength of evidence with both an open mind and skepticism - skepticism being especially important, and this is one of the hardest parts for most, when evaluating your own ideas - and more. Most people don't have all these qualities. (Whether most people inherently don't have all these qualities or if they could develop them under the right circumstances is something I'm not sure about.) Based on my own personal experience, even many people who do science for a living seem to not have the right skill set to do truly good and rigorous science.

Multiple people whose opinions I value highly have said that I'm a very good scientist, and it's something I take a lot of pride in. Discovering new things about how the natural world works and doing so in a rigorous way so that we can feel confident we're describing something real is an awe-inspiring experience. And maybe being able to do it well is a rare gift. That doesn't mean scientists are better or more important than other people, of course. There are all sorts of talents people have which they use to contribute to society in all sorts of valuable ways. Taking care of other people. Creating beautiful art. Producing food and turning that food into delicious meals. Etc., etc., etc.

Without there being some people with the ability to discover true things about how the world works, though, society wouldn't have progressed very far.

(How can we know for sure that we're discovering true things? Well, we can never be 100% sure, but if we build models of reality that make predictions and our models approximate the truth, then the predictions should come true. For example, our understanding of how diseases and immunity work led to predictions about the effects of giving vaccines - and those predictions were validated when vaccinated people had much lower rates of getting sick and dying.)

This doesn't always have to be via strict application of scientific methods. People have discovered things about the world in many ways. But a common element of these discoveries is that people make predictions based on their understanding of the world, and then collect and evaluate evidence to see whether those predictions come true. This could apply to anything from the development of agricultural methods to the development of gravitational theory.

This is kind of meandering but the point I'm getting to is that, based on the culture of a society and the priorities of its leaders, scientific discovery and the resulting progress might be encouraged or might be discouraged. In the United States, in the last century a high priority was placed on promoting and funding scientific research, and it helped us become the most powerful and prosperous nation in the world. (That's not to say that scientific discovery hasn't also led to bad things, but it's worth noting that before the development of modern medicine and sanitation/hygiene methods, average human life expectancy was less than 40.) Societies led by religious extremists, on the other hand, have generally not valued science and have often acted to prevent it from being freely undertaken (see, for example, Galileo being called a heretic for his correct claim that the Earth orbits the Sun).

Donald Trump is very clearly someone who does not value a correct understanding of how the world works. Listening to him speak on a variety of subjects from climate change to economic policy, he doesn't even seem capable of understanding complex issues. What he seems good at understanding (perhaps intuitively) is how to con people and get gullible people to like him. But another thing he surely does know is that scientists and educated people in general tend not to like him. (This is probably because being educated makes it easier to recognize that Donald Trump is a crazy idiot and a fraudster.) Hence, a society run by someone like Donald Trump is not going to be a society that values or encourages discovery and knowledge. In Donald Trump's world, the truth has no value. The only value any belief has is whether that belief helps Trump. And because an understanding of how the world works leads to the inevitable recognition that Trump's ideas are incoherent and harmful, people who honestly strive to understand how the world works must be shunned.

A society entirely controlled by people with such values would be a society in which scientific discovery would rarely happen and even more rarely have any lasting influence. And because scientific discovery is a process that builds on itself over centuries, if people like Donald Trump had been in charge of human society for all of history, none of the amazing things we have as a result of that science would exist. Modern medicine? Gone. Modern transportation methods? Gone. Weather prediction? Gone. Television and radio and the Internet? Gone.

None of it would ever have existed.

What makes humanity great

Humans individually and the human race collectively have done so many great and good things. The most staggering achievements to me are (1) the discoveries we've made about the world and universe from the inner workings of the atom to the evolution of life to the wonders of the cosmos and (2) the indescribably beautiful works of art and music and literature and architecture that in their own way also say so much about the nature of reality and of our existence. But there's also, I think, a basic goodness to most human beings in the compassion that we have for other people and animals. I've witnessed it so many times and it's so sad when it gets pushed into hiding by the hateful rhetoric and propaganda that so often dominate our politics. But I think it's still there. Cara, when she was sick with the lung cancer that eventually took her life, once wrote, "I cry, but most times it's out of gratitude and awe. I am moved every single day by the kindness of friends, family and total strangers." Those words still ring true to me most of the time, even if kindness does seem to be in shorter supply these days in segments of our society.

To me, those are the biggest things that make humanity great. Sadly, Donald Trump is the antithesis of all those things.

He has no intellectual curiosity and shuns any attempt to understand the world if it would undermine him. He's never shown, to my knowledge, any meaningful appreciation for arts and culture, and people like him in general tend to value such pursuits for their use as propaganda rather than for trying to gain any insight into the human condition. And lastly and most importantly, he is entirely self-centered and seems functionally unable to understand concepts like empathy or working for a greater good (see, for example, his many disparaging comments about soldiers).

If human society had always had people like Donald Trump in charge, most of the amazing discoveries humans have made about the world would never have happened and society would never have progressed anywhere. But beyond that: if the human race was entirely made up of people like Donald Trump, people that self-centered and amoral, our species would likely have gone extinct long ago.

Gratitude and awe

When I really take a step back and think about all the things I've gotten to do in my life, I'd have to consider myself very lucky. A lot of people talk about what a horrible place the world has become. In some ways, I suppose that's true, although in some ways, things have always been horrible. But then there's the good. The things I've gotten to do that most people in human history never could have dreamed of.

I've traveled by airplane to take amazing vacations in Costa Rica and Spain and fantastic destinations throughout our country. Only possible within the last century.

I've seen so many incredible concerts. A part of human life for who knows how long, but the diversity of genres and sounds we have today has only existed for decades. And I can carry my entire music collection (over 16,000 songs) in my pocket. Only possible within the last two decades. (Yes, of course, it's possible to access even far more music than that on a device you carry in your pocket, but fuck Spotify, musicians deserve a living wage, rant over.)

I've gotten to experience the joy and exhilaration and sense of freedom that come from riding a bicycle. Only in wide use since the late 19th century. And mountain biking? That's only taken off in the last few decades.

I've discovered a previously unknown function of a specific motor neuron in the feeding system of the sea slug Aplysia californica. Every member of the species has this neuron (one of many neurons that have been identified through decades of painstaking work by many researchers) and the neuron does this specific thing in this specific behavior and before me, no one ever knew this, and now we do. That might sound interesting or it might just sound really weird, I don't know, but to me it's so incredibly cool to be able to discover real things about how the world works and about how life works and about how animal behavior works. Animal behavior is so fascinating (humans, of course, are animals, and our behavior is some of the most fascinating of all). The ability to do research of this sort on the functions of single neurons is something that has also only existed for a matter of decades.

Think of all the amazing and cool things you've gotten to do in your life that depend on the ingenuity and hard work and creativity of human beings, past and present. I'm sure there are a lot.

I have an immense amount of gratitude for all the collective achievements of humanity that have made all those incredible experiences possible.

Simultaneously, I'm in awe that all those things were collectively achieved by the same species that, collectively, could also do something as indescribably fucking stupid as elect Donald Trump president.

Not just once, but twice. And the second time more convincingly! Which might make one wonder whether our species, which has such an incredible capacity for learning by individuals and small groups of people, is even capable of learning at an overall collective level.

One day in May 2019, I was walking through New York City and on a sidewalk near the main branch of the public library, I saw this:

I was so struck by these words. I think there's so much truth in them.

I think that deep down, we humans haven't changed much over the whole course of recorded human history. We're still pretty nearly the same, as biological entities, as we were when our country was founded, or in ancient Rome, or 10,000 years ago. But the world has changed so much and society has changed so much and the human race has accomplished so many staggering feats, all through the actions of people building on the actions of people before them building on the actions of people before them.

Think about it. All the tasks we do in our day to day lives that seem so normal, like driving a car or going on the Internet or cooking dinner, we weren't designed to do and we didn't evolve to do any of those things. Our brains simply evolved to have the flexibility and adaptability to be able to do many things, and then cultural and technological evolution far outstripped the pace of biological evolution, and now all those things seem like second nature even though there's nothing innate in us when we're born that instructs us on how to do them.

And everything we as a species have accomplished, we've accomplished despite what I believe is very likely to be the case (although I might, of course, be wrong) that the majority of things believed by the majority of people about how the world works are basically wrong.

I'm not saying this as a call out of Trump voters, by the way; I think this is true of people in general.

At best, any single person can understand a few specific things really well, understand a much broader range of things moderately well, and have the humility to recognize that there are far more things that they don't understand. Most people, I think, don't reach that bar. The world is so much bigger and more complicated than what our brains evolved to comprehend that I don't think it's even realistic for most people to reach it.

A common refrain I've heard about the election is "voters are idiots." It's tempting to agree, but let's examine this statement. If we say "voters are idiots," we're really saying "human beings are idiots." Human beings are a species of animal. It's common to say we're the most intelligent animal on this planet. Certainly, we seem to have the most cognitive capacity. If human beings are idiots, what does that make all the other animals? Would we say, for instance, "crows are idiots"? What would that even mean?

Humans have the greatest capacity to understand the world we inhabit and how it works... but perhaps this also means we have the greatest capacity to misunderstand the world.

Perhaps humans are simultaneously the smartest animals and the stupidest animals.

Perhaps that's just the duality of mankind and the duality of life. Both wonderful and terrible. We couldn't have one without the other. We're just a bunch of hairless apes living in a world we weren't mean to live in and that none of us could ever hope to really understand, just trying to do the best we can in our own little lives, in a society built on layers upon layers of scaffolding erected by long dead people who similarly didn't really understand the world around them and were just trying to do the best they could in their own little lives, and somehow it all still works (often not very well but well enough to keep going) and we keep innovating and discovering and creating the most astonishing and fantastic and beautiful things while also doing the most stupid and cruel and pointless things, and...

And I don't know how much of this will even make sense to anyone, but everything I've written in this post is what I've been spending a lot of time thinking about for the last nine days. In November 2016 I learned that my expectations of humanity had been too high and I became horribly depressed as a result. In November 2024 I've learned that my expectations should be ratcheted down yet another notch, but instead of being depressed, I find myself in awe of all the good and wonderful things that such a flawed species has achieved.

Maybe it's just that my brain is constantly bathing in oxytocin thanks to spending time with my beautiful daughter.

I know it's not easy in times like this. I know that I'm lucky to not be directly threatened the way a lot of people are. But in a world with so much horror and so much beauty, we do have a choice in what gets our attention. And so much of how we feel and our mental and emotional states can be determined by where our attention is directed. This is something I know well from experience.

We shouldn't ignore the horror. But constantly immersing ourselves in it isn't helpful either. Focusing on the beauty can help us to just get through the day and have the energy and motivation to fight the horror. Try it, if you haven't.

It's even supported by science.